A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me (43 page)

“No weapons in here,” Brandon would say, if a kid looked like he was packing.

“Sure,” the kid would answer. “I know the rule.”

Then the teenager would pull a hunting knife or a cut-down baseball bat or something out of his pants and hand it over the counter to Brandon, who would store it in back until the kid wanted to leave. Once I saw a full-size machete. Another time it was a fiberglass club that could be unscrewed to form a pair of nunchucks. I saw hatchets, baseball bats, motorcycle chains, and saps. Some of the more exotic stuff was interesting, but none of it was surprising. That was just the world we lived in. Not a lot of guns yet, but pretty much everyone on the street carried a melee weapon of some kind to give them an edge if they got jumped. My tool kit included a couple of shivs, a good knife I could open one-handed, and my cheap-ass folding club. Brandon let me keep them when I came to visit.

One night, right before the start of our senior year, Brandon's cousin Ian came into the shop with a girl named Maria. I recognized her from Brandon's Guardian Angels crew. She was nineteen, but she looked younger. She was dressed in a gray wool overcoat, a skirt, and a sweater that were all too big for her. Her hair was dyed bright orange, and she had a sort of feral look to her face: up-slanting eyes, high forehead, and a heart-shaped face. Bad teeth. Not trailer-park bad, but it was obvious she'd never had braces growing up.

Ian and Brandon were family, but the relationship was pretty attenuated; second cousin three times removed or something. They certainly looked nothing alike. Where Brandon was short, round-featured, and fair, Ian was tall, skinny, and had dark brown hair. He wore an army field jacket, a T-shirt, and jeans; had kind of a
Taxi Driver
thing going on. I'd met him a few times before. He was interested in doing patrols with the Angels, but it didn't work out for some reason.

“Hey, Brandon,” Ian said as he and Maria came into the store. “How's it going?”

“Ian,” Brandon said. “How're you. You remember Jason?”

“Sure,” Ian said. “Hey.”

“And Maria,” Brandon said, reintroducing me to Maria as she came in behind Ian. Maria and I waved at each other.

“We're just out on our date,” Ian said. “And we thought we'd stop in and say hi.”

Something about that wording seemed weird. Like Ian was overreaching. The sour look on Maria's face when Ian used the word “date” confirmed it.

“Have a seat,” Brandon said. “You want some coffee?”

“Sure,” Ian said.

Brandon plied Ian and Maria with coffee and donuts, and they ended up hanging around for more than an hour, until the end of Brandon's shift. Then all four of us went down to Brandon's place. Brandon's parents had split up the year before. His dad still had the house next door to mine, but his mom had moved into an apartment building at the end of the block and Ethan had moved out on his own. The building Brandon lived in with his mom had an activity room in the basement where we set up camp that night, with leftover donuts and a couple of two-liter bottles of soda.

It was one of those weird endless nights, like the time Eddie and I went downtown with Bobby and Barb and stayed out until dawn; just three guys and a girl sitting in a dark basement, talking and telling jokes between long silences. All three of us were flirting with Maria, but she wasn't giving much away. At some point Ian decided the way to get ahead in that game would be to challenge me to a wrestling match, and because we were all just that young and stupid, I took him up on it.

He had a lot of anger, but not much power. After I pinned him three times he took a swing at me, but I'd been practicing with Brandon, and on my own, for a couple of years. I slipped the punch and stepped back out of range.

“You try that again, you're gonna get hurt,” I said.

“Sure,” he sneered.

“Ian,” Brandon said from where he was watching the bout. “He means it.”

“Whatever,” Ian said.

When we went back at it, he tried to punch me in the face again.

I stepped in and let the punch glance off my shoulder, then wrestled him to the ground and twisted his arm behind his back.

“We done?” I asked, applying pressure.

“Not yet,” he said.

I pushed a little harder. Something made a grinding noise in his shoulder and he hissed. But he didn't cry or scream.

“We done?” I asked again.

“Yeah,” he said. “We're done.”

I let him go and stepped back. He stood up, holding his left arm up against his body with his right hand.

“Think that might have been it for my shoulder,” he said.

“Sorry,” I said, obviously not meaning it.

“Maybe we'd better call it a night,” Brandon said. “The buses aren't running this late. Ian, Maria—you guys need a cab?”

I'd been holding off all night, waiting for Brandon to make some kind of move on Maria. But when we were all sitting in the lobby upstairs waiting for the cab to show up and Brandon still hadn't made any kind of gesture, I asked Maria for her phone number. I'd never done anything like that before—it was all based on stuff Brandon had told me about proper dating technique. Ian wasn't even on my radar. He'd clearly blown the whole thing when he decided to get physical with me.

Maria gave me her number and said she was free that Friday if I wanted to catch a movie or something.

*   *   *

Maria and I dated for about two months. She was a good girlfriend, but the fact that she was an actual legal adult with a job and an apartment and cats started to feel weird to me pretty quickly. I told Brandon I was worried that she was getting too attached, in view of how ambivalent I was about the relationship. Brandon repeated the advice he'd been giving me since before Alexis: when a girl tells you she's in love with you, break up with her. This time I followed his advice. When Maria accidently used the l-word around the two-month mark, I told her that was more commitment than I was looking for and ended it.

 

67

I joined the debate team in my senior year, for reasons that were beyond me. Brandon and Jane had both quit the team—probably to avoid Meadow—and I really had no interest in public speaking. Or public anything else, for that matter. But I wanted to get more involved with the school that I loved so much, and there was just no way I was going to try out for an athletic team.

I was surprised to learn that the term “speech and debate” encompassed a huge range of events, from expository speaking and editorial commentary to something called dramatic interpretation, which consisted of actors reading monologues or pairs of actors reading dialogues. Debates of the sort I'd imagined when I was thinking about joining the debate team were called Lincoln-Douglas debates, and they were so comparatively unusual that most tournaments didn't even offer them.

With so many events to choose from, I naturally went for the one that required the least preparation: impromptu speaking. There were usually three rounds per tournament, scored first through third, with everyone else being ranked fourth, no matter how many people were in the tournament. For impromptu speaking, each round had a topic list; each speaker would go up to the podium, look at the topic list, and take seven minutes to talk about one of the topics on the list. The usual approach was to take three minutes to think about it, and four minutes to talk.

I was terrible at it.

It may have been because of how I dressed, in jeans and T-shirts, with my leather jacket, sneakers, and my hair tied back in a ponytail. Speech and debate was a very conservative sport. I once overheard a couple of judges saying they gave an automatic four to any boy who didn't wear a tie. But I was pretty sure that wasn't the real problem; I just didn't care very much. And I lacked aptitude. It amounted to the same thing.

I didn't mind. The tournaments happened all over the state, so I got to go on weekend trips with the eight or nine other nerds on my team, and the dramatic interpretation event attracted a lot of actresses, who seemed disproportionately to be hot nerdy girls who craved attention.

Meadow, the object of Brandon's infidelity against Jane, was one of those. She was tall and thin, with the kind of features that I imagined would work for her if there was ever a movie camera pointed at her: large eyes, small nose, big lips, small chin, long neck. She dressed kind of like a hippie, in natural fibers and earth tones, with a lot of big jewelry, but there was nothing random or casual about her. She coordinated her outfits very carefully. Her diction was downright obnoxious, and she had virtually no sense of humor on any subject. She was the first person I ever heard use the word “eclectic” in a sentence.

My initial thought about her was that she was clearly way more trouble than she was worth, but something about the way she looked at me suggested she might have a thing for bad boys, so I decided to keep the possibility open.

*   *   *

While there was a tournament almost every week and most of the tournaments were huge, not every tournament offered a full range of events to compete in. I went with my team to a tournament early in the season, only to find out when I got there that impromptu speaking wasn't available. Of course, the nature of impromptu speaking meant that I wasn't prepared for any other event either, but I signed up for editorial commentary on a whim.

“Hey,” I said to Meadow, as our team gathered in the gym of the Podunk high school that was hosting the tournament. “You got a quarter I can borrow?”

“Why?” she asked, like I was going to spend it on drugs or something.

“I signed up for editorial commentary. I gotta run outside and get a newspaper.”

“It's against the rules to just quote the paper,” she said. “You have to write your own material.”

“I will,” I said. “But first I have to know what's happening in the world, right?”

She sighed and rummaged around in her shoulder bag until she came up with an embroidered change purse, and forked over the quarter.

“How long until they call the first event?” I asked.

She glanced up at the clock. “Half an hour.”

“Great,” I said. “Thanks.”

I went out to the front of the school and found a newspaper vending machine with the
Seattle Times
in it. We were a hundred miles from the city, but I guessed not every small town in Washington could field its own daily. I put my hand on the change return button and yanked on the door handle as hard as I could. It was an old gag that didn't work with most of the machines in the city anymore, but this one popped right open. I grabbed a paper and ran back into the gym.

“Here,” I said, handing Meadow back her quarter.

She looked at the paper, then at me.

“They were giving them away,” I said.

I flipped through the A section until I found a story about a change in the gun laws in Florida. Evidently the law had recently been rewritten down there so anyone with a driver's license could get a concealed carry permit for a handgun, with no additional review. That one seemed pretty ripe.

“You got a notepad or something?” I asked Meadow.

She stared at me for a long time, then reached into her bag and handed over a spiral-bound pad.

“Thanks,” I said.

I opened to a blank page and just started writing. I started out with a gag about a senile old lady blowing some panhandler's head off with a .44 because he tried to rob her. “He asked me for a quarter!” she screamed as the police took her away. Then I jumped into a description of the new law, and finished up with a little rap about how someone getting licensed to drive a car had to at least know what the traffic laws are, and that giving someone a gun without making them learn anything about when and how it was legal to use one was patently irresponsible. Then I tore the page out and handed the notepad back to Meadow.

“Thanks,” I said again.

She tucked the corner of her mouth in disapprovingly.

They called the first event a few minutes later, and I went to the first classroom on my scorecard. I sat through a couple of other people's readings, then got up and did mine. When the round was over I walked past the judge's desk and glanced down at my card. It was my usual score—a four.

That was fine, I told myself. No biggie.

But when I went back out to the gym, two of the guys who'd been competing in my round walked up to me by the vending machines. They were both wearing blue button-down shirts, striped ties, and slacks. Tall skinny guys with bad haircuts—one blond, the other dark. They walked up to me like they were aping some kind of bad 1940s prison drama, and the dark-haired kid talked to me out of the side of his mouth while he pretended to look over the selection in the vending machine.

“Hey,” he said. “I saw your round just now.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I recognize you.”

“How do you think you did?”

“I looked at my card on the way out. I got creamed.”

“Yeah,” he said. “You get kinda nervous when you read, it looked like to me.”

“Every time,” I said.

“So here's what I was wondering,” he said. “I was wondering if you might like to sit the rest of the tournament out.”

“Huh?” I said.

“No offense, I think you probably know—your reading was … not so good.”

“Yeah. So?”

“Well, the thing is, your reading wasn't great. But your piece—your piece was fucking awesome. Me and my buddy here were laughing our asses off. If you'd looked up from your sheet even once, you would have seen us. But this clearly isn't your event. So what I was thinking is, I'd buy your piece off you for, say, five bucks. But only one of us can run it, so if I buy it off you, you got no piece anymore.”

“You wanna buy this?” I said, holding up my story. “For five bucks?”

“Shhh!” he said. “We're supposed to do our own work, man.”