Of course, that wouldn’t be the truth. Not by a long shot.
Fast-forward to my junior year. Griffin’s senior year. I was sixteen and a half then. My hair was such an unruly mess I had to finally prune it back just enough to see where I was going. I could tell that the girls in school were looking at me differently now. I was allegedly a decent-looking guy, although at the time it would have been news to me. But hell, if you add in the mysteriousness factor, I guess I could see how I’d be worth a look, at least. I even thought about the possibility of going out on a date. There was this new girl in our art class. Nadine. She was blond and pretty and was apparently on the tennis team. Not like the other girls in art class at all. She’d give me a shy smile whenever I saw her in the hallway.
“She wants you, dude.” Griffin’s voice in my ear one day. “Go ask her out. I mean, hell, I’ll do it for you. I’ll be your messenger.”
I had a car now. Uncle Lito’s old two-toned Grand Marquis. We could have gone and seen a movie or something. It was just… I don’t know, the thought of sitting there in a restaurant before the movie. Or driving her home afterward. I’d listen to her, of course. I’d listen to whatever she’d have to say. Then what? She couldn’t talk forever. Nobody can, not even an American high school girl. When the silence finally came, what would I do? Start writing her notes?
So maybe I wasn’t ready for that scene yet. Still, I hadn’t ruled it out. Nadine wasn’t going anywhere. In the meantime, a few people were actually saying hello to me when I walked past them in the hallway. They were showing my artwork in the big display case at the front of the school now. I was still doing a lot of pencil and charcoal then. Griffin had a big painting out there, too, with his outrageous splashes of color. I wasn’t sure what I’d do the next year, when I was a senior and Griffin was long gone to art school, but I wasn’t worried about that yet.
We ended up in gym class that semester. Of all the places in the world for my whole life to start turning… it was that very first day, when we were opening the padlocks on our little gym lockers. I couldn’t help noticing that if I pulled down while I was spinning, the dial seemed to catch in twelve different spots, and one of those spots just so happened to be the last number in the combination. Was it my imagination or did that spot feel a little different from the other eleven?
When I went home that night, I was still spinning the dial on that padlock in my mind and thinking about what was going on inside. By then I had already gone about as far as I could go with key locks. I mean, I was pretty sure I could open just about anything. But this was a new challenge that made me remember why I had been so drawn to locks in the first place. As I worked the dial one direction, then the other, I could feel how it made the separate cams turn underneath it. It made me wonder how hard it would be to open the damned thing if I didn’t know the combination.
So I went back to that same old antique store, I bought a few combination locks, and I took them apart. That’s how I learned.
It was that same semester. In November, the week of the big game against Lakeland. You see, Lakeland was the newer high school in the district, a few miles to the east. Milford was usually pretty good at football, and they’d been dominating the big game ever since Lakeland got built. I suppose because we still had our shabby old dump of a school, it must have felt pretty good to kick Lakeland’s ass in anything. That had changed the year before, when Lakeland finally won for the first time ever. Because the varsity players usually only played for two years, that meant that the Milford seniors had just one more chance.
Our best player was a senior man named Brian Hauser, a.k.a. “the House.” We didn’t exactly move in the same social circles, Brian and I, but even I could see that he was bouncing off the walls in school that week, getting himself psyched up for the last game of his high school career. Griffin and I were still getting through our semester of gym, and our class happened to be last period, so by the time we were getting dressed, the football players were usually getting ready for practice. That always got Griffin going, hearing the whole team making a racket on the other side of the locker room. He’d always have a running commentary for me on what the football players were saying, how sophisticated their conversation was, how much sensitivity they showed to the opposite sex, and so on. He kept his voice down, because he didn’t actually want to end up stuffed in a locker. But today, we could really hear the football team going at it. Brian Hauser, in particular, was making a hell of a racket and banging on his locker like a madman.
“Motherfucking son of a bitch! Stupid whorebag fagbiscuit!”
Then more voices from his teammates.
“Fagbiscuit! What the hell is a fagbiscuit?”
“That’s a new one, House.”
“I know what a fagbiscuit is-”
“No, man. Don’t even go there. I don’t want to know what a fagbiscuit is.”
“When I think they can’t get any wittier,” Griffin said to me, “they surpass even their own high standards.”
There was more banging, followed by laughter. I don’t know what possessed Griffin to go check it out at that point, but he went around to the end of the row of lockers, still buttoning his shirt. I followed him.
As soon as we both peeked around the corner, we saw Brian slamming his fist on the locker. There was already a fair dent in it. The rest of the team was almost dressed, but Brian was still in his street clothes.
“What’s the problem?” one of his teammates asked him. “Did you forget the combination?”
“It’s three whole numbers,” someone else said. “I can see how that would be a challenge.”
“Yeah, fuck all of you,” Brian said. “I didn’t forget the combination. It’s a new lock, all right?”
“Did you check the little sticker on the back? That’s how you learn it the first time.”
Someone else reached for the lock to verify exactly that, but Brian knocked his hand away.
“It’s not there, genius. I left it at home, all right? I bought a new lock because the old one was a piece of shit. I had the combination in my head this morning, but now I’m just… Fuck.”
“What are you gonna do, get a hacksaw?”
“Why don’t you call your mother? Maybe she can find the piece of paper with the combination.”
“There was a seventeen in it,” Brian said. “God damn it. Then it was… Wait.”
“Think, man. Think.”
“Will you guys shut the fuck up? I can’t concentrate.”
Now, I knew that Griffin would do some crazy things now and then, but I had no idea he’d actually step around the corner and walk right into the middle of the football team. What was going through his head, I couldn’t possibly imagine… until he opened his mouth and dragged me right into it.
“Hey, Brian,” he said. “You need some help?”
Brian Hauser was about six-four, and he had to weigh at least 250 pounds. They didn’t call him “the House” for nothing. He was a little soft around the edges, one of those fat kids who manage to sprout up and become athletic for a few years, before losing the battle for good by the time they’re thirty.
“What do you want?”
“My associate here can open your lock, if you’d like,” Griffin said.
“Your associate?”
As you can probably guess… yes, once I had opened up those padlocks from the antique store and saw how they worked, I had to show off to somebody. So I had grabbed Griffin’s lock one day and opened it for him. It had taken me about two minutes.
That was obviously a mistake. Which, as I stood there and watched him offer my lock-opening skills to Brian Hauser, I was about to pay for.