There were three nines in Teague’s number and two twos.
After school I sat at a picnic bench and read some Faulkner until about five. Benjy was so retarded, and I loved Quentin. I wanted to stick a knife in my throat, or fuck my sister if I had one, and then jump off a bridge at Harvard. I thought about it for a while, then I called Teague’s number from the pay phone at school.
The number went to a pager, so I paged it to the pay phone. I stood there and waited. Cars drove by on El Camino. No one in those cars knew what was going on over here, on the school campus. A little ways away, in the locker room on the other side of campus, Brent was probably changing, or playing Faggot Looked. Funny that he had no idea what I was doing so close to him.
The pay phone rang after five minutes.
“Hello?” the voice said. The voice was nasal, and it sounded angry, but like a teenager’s.
“Hey, it’s Teddy,” I said. “Barry C. gave me this number.”
The voice changed a little. “Hey. Yeah, he told me. So you need that thing?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“Yeah, I can help you.” The voice was really relaxed now. It sounded like he was doing something on the other end, like rolling marbles on a table, one by one. Then he said, “Can you meet me Saturday night?”
I told him that was okay. Ordering a gun was like ordering anything, it turned out.
He said we should meet at Cubberley, this closed high school, at midnight on Saturday. I said okay, and then we hung up.
I took my sweatshirt sleeve and rubbed the fingerprints off the phone receiver. And then I ran.
I couldn’t sleep that night. It was like Christmas Eve, but not. It was something dark. I wasn’t going to get or give anything; I was just going to take something away.
The next day was Friday. I was very tired, and I felt like everyone could see the gun shining in my mind, and there were bright flashing words above it that read BRENT BAUCHER.
I sat in Biology and thought about Brent. Protozoa had cilia like the hairs on Brent’s legs. Brent’s cells had all his information coiled into DNA, in every one of those dirty nuclei. I wanted to destroy those cells. Break ’em up like billiard balls and have all that info obliterated. His mitochondrial forehead and his Golgi vesicle pimples, and his dead, void mind, shut down and gone.
Then, after Biology and before English, I passed Brent in the outdoor breezeway.
It was a shock because I had been thinking about him so intensely right before, but it was also a shock because I usually didn’t pass him in the halls. I was usually sure to take routes that kept me away from him.
“What’s up, little bitch?” he said.
I wasn’t smaller than him, I was just weaker. “Fuck you, little bitch,” I said back. But I said it quietly into my shoulder, and after he passed.
But then, behind me, he said, “Did you say something?”
I stopped and turned, and he was walking right at me. I started backing away.
“Did you say something, faggot?” he said.
Then I put my hands in front of my face, but he got through them with his fist, and hit me. I felt his knuckle connect with my cheekbone, sharp. And then I fell, because I was surprised, and because I tripped over a bush.
I was on the ground, and there were a few people watching from far away, but no one came over.
“You are going to be dead before you know it,” I said.
I was surprised I had said that, but I didn’t show that I was surprised.
Brent looked surprised too; his droopy eye opened a little more, and then it went down again and he got evil.
“Are you fucking high right now, faggot?” he said, leaning over me. I was holding my cheek, and maybe even crying a little. I had fallen in an area for plants; there was sharp tanbark under my hand and some shitty juniper bushes.
The people in the distance were just standing and watching.
Then I got loud through my tears. “I’m high on how fucking stupid you are!” I said. “I mean, you are soooo dumb, Too $hort! Brent too short, too dumb, too many pimples, shitface! What a fucking idiot!” I started laughing up at his face. The gun was giving me power, even though I didn’t have it yet. “Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha,” I laughed. “It’s, like, why aren’t you dead yet?”
Brent’s dumb face just looked so stupid at that point, and it looked like he was trying to straighten his left eyeball, under the lazy lid, but that he just couldn’t, and I laughed even more because it was twitching. “Hey, twitchy eye, why don’t you just die of being a fucking shitbag?”
I thought this was a pretty good line.
Brent reached down for the front of my shirt, but I curled up into a ball, so he couldn’t grab me. He roared like a boar, long and angry, and then he started stomping on my ribs. Quick, hard stomps. My ribs bent, and my lungs were jolted, and there was a sucking-in sound. I stayed rolled up and he stomped me. Then there were some shouts from afar, and Brent was gone.
On Saturday night I went to get the gun.
Cubberley was a high school that had been shut down two decades before. It was famous because some of the Grateful Dead had gone there forty years ago, but now it was a big empty campus where adult classes met and where children’s sports teams played on the weekends. There were weeds in all the cracks of the arcade floors, and dead vines on the walls. I had been forced to play a lot of sports there when I was younger, so I knew the place well.
I rode my bike there because I was too young to drive. It was about four miles from my house. Teague and I were supposed to meet at the outdoor auditorium. I rode fast and the cold air on my face felt like I was riding through ghosts.
When I got to the school, I walked my bike down the hallway. On the walls, there were light fixtures every so often, which shone faint orange behind thick rippled plastic. They still kept the lights on every night, lighting nothing, for no one.
I walked past the gym, where I had played basketball when I was ten. The double doors had a chain through the handles, and there was a padlock hanging in the center. I had a memory flash of being small, in an oversized jersey, playing badly and hating myself. Then I was at the outdoor theater.
It had a stone stage and a grassy area for the audience. I was at the lip of the grassy part, at the far end from the stage. The moon lit up the place.
I left my bike at the edge of the grass and walked down the small declination toward the stage. The grass came up in uneven patches, and the dew soaked through the top of my black Converses, and through my socks to my feet.
* * *
I couldn’t see anyone.
I thought about Brent coming out from the dark and shooting me.
If he knew I wanted to kill him, he would kill me first.
In the old days, you could duel.
Emotions have been around forever.
I wish I had a girlfriend. Or someone.
There was no one. I was in the middle of the grassy area. The stage was there, with its jagged lip of broken stone, looking spiritual in the moonlight.
I felt that weight on me, the weight of stone, and it was familiar. I was weak, and stupid, and wimpy, and I had no opinions, and I was a bad talker, and I didn’t know how to make friends, and I had big ears, and an ugly nose, and my hair was ’fro-y, and my dick, and my stomach, and my mind were all bad.
But then a weird thing happened. While I stood there and waited for my gun, Brent changed a little in my mind. For a second, it seemed like he was just another guy. Brent was ugly, and he had human needs, and he probably had a bunch of disappointments in life. I suppose being so close to the gun, almost having it, made me think about things in a new way. Brent had problems, and he had skin, and he had a mom, and one day he would die too.