Adam (3 page)

Brad went nuts. “No fuckin' way! No fuckin' way!”

Sam reached over and shut off the light.

“Fuck!” said Brad.

Adam felt a gush of relief, or maybe disappointment—he couldn't tell.

“Dude, you're a straight-up freak,” said Brad. He grinned at Adam through the dark. “Watching your
sister?
What's wrong with you?”

And Adam pushed him, and they both rolled down the hill.

***

Needless to say, Adam felt he could speak with authority when he said that two girls sharing a pussy-soaked lollipop were
not
real lesbians. He found a video he liked, did his thing, and cleaned up with some dirty boxers off the floor.

***

It was 1:00
A.M.
and Adam was still awake, lying in bed. His government book lay on the floor in the same spot, now illuminated by a patch of streetlight from the window. Like God was trying to remind him. He also had a five-page essay on
The Sun Also Rises
due yesterday. He had finished the book the day it was assigned, but writing essays depressed him and he'd put it off for weeks. He always felt forced to find a “point,” one he often didn't even completely believe in but corralled the book into proving anyway. When he was done, he'd end up hating the book he had loved.

Adam stared around the dark, shadowy room. The lights from cars ran across his wall, soft sounds in the distance. The objects in his room were distorted, anonymous fuzzy gray blobs that looked alien and out of place. He liked finding the weirdest blob, usually two things melded together, and concentrating on it hard, feeling his brain working as it figured out what it actually was (a desk lamp and an old soccer trophy, a broken PlayStation
2
console and a pile of clothes). Sometimes he'd fall asleep doing this.

When he was little, he had these elaborate games he would play when he couldn't sleep. His favorite was “orphan.” He would get out of bed in the middle of the night and lie on the cold hardwood floor in his pajamas and pretend he'd been abandoned in the middle of the woods. A small child left to die. He would grow colder and colder, huddling into himself, imagining the dark, towering trees above him, the open black sky, and the crack of mysterious noises. He would lie like this for as long as he could, eyes clenched in the forest, until his brain started to believe that it was true. Then he would hear the footsteps, the people coming to his rescue.
“We've found a child! There's a near-dead boy!”
And his brain would fast-forward—the ride in the back of the car, the nice big house in the neighboring town—the story would run through his mind as he almost sleepwalked back to bed. Then he would snuggle into the soft, clean pillow, imagining that his hands pulling the thick covers over his shivering body belonged to a warm, loving woman. He'd sometimes repeat this action, the pulling of the covers, the nestling into the pillow, three or four times. Warm and safe at last.

A few months ago, when he was having a particularly rough night, he tried the game again, even though it had been years. He got out of bed, lay on the floor, closed his eyes, and opened them about five seconds later, feeling like a complete retard. His body felt huge and lanky and, like, if he were in a fucking forest, he should get up and try to walk the hell out of it. He got back in bed and counted sheep.

Adam halfheartedly tried sheep-counting now, but he was too frustrated to stay focused. He fucking hated his mom. It was always, “Casey never acts this way; your sister always manages to stay pleasant around family.”

“Casey is fucking lying to you about her entire life!”
Adam imagined himself screaming back.
“You don't know the first fucking thing about her!”

“Casey's at Columbia,”
his mom's voice rang on.
“Yes, we're all very proud . 
.
 . Adam's been struggling lately.”

“At least I'm not being fucked by a giant rubber dick five feet from your bedroom!”

“Adam?! What are you talking about?”

“Nothing, Mom, it's just my Tourette's.”

“Adam's been struggling with Tourette's syndrome lately.”

The way Brad talked to his own parents blew Adam's mind. It was as if they were
his
children. “The folks are staying in, catchin' the late show,” Brad would say, cocking his head toward his mom and dad, seated on the couch with a blanket spread over their knees, as Brad and Adam passed through the living room. “Ya gotta love 'em.” And his parents would smile sheepishly, anxious for his approval. Brad was the perfect son. Good grades, played baseball. But when you got him alone, he was fucking foul. “Her pussy tasted like cat food.” Adam didn't get how Brad could switch back and forth so seamlessly. He was also an entirely different person for the girls. Smooth Brad. Cocky Brad. “I know what you want and I can give it to you” Brad. “My dick is the most precious object on this planet Earth and you would be blessed to touch it” Brad. Like Kelsey said, girls go for aggressive guys.
“You want aggressive?”
Adam imagined himself back in Kelsey's room, standing in front of her, his dick still hard.
“Suck on this, then, bitch.”
He unzipped his pants and pulled his dick out, massive and throbbing. Kelsey dropped to her knees, falling on it with her mouth.

“No teeth, bitch!”
Adam gave a quick swat to the side of her face.

“I'm thorry,”
Kelsey said, mouth half full, looking up at him.

“Just be sure to swallow,”
said Adam.

Adam reached under the covers to jerk off, but he wasn't even hard. He rolled over, squeezed his eyes shut, put the pillow over his head, pulled the covers over the pillow, and finally, finally fell asleep.

THE SCHOOL LUNCH BELL
rang, and kids rushed out of their classrooms, bursting through the front doors to the concrete courtyard, where everyone ate lunch.

Adam went to East Bay Prep, a small private school in the Oakland hills. He'd begged his parents to let him go to Berkeley High, the public school that a bunch of his friends from middle school went on to, but his mom had refused: “I've walked by that school, and kids were smoking right outside the gate along with the teachers! The teachers were loaning them lighters!” “EBP has a ninety-seven percent top-college placement record,” and of course the inevitable, “Your sister loves EBP!” Adam knew that Casey had
not
loved EBP. That she would in fact drive down to Berkeley High the minute school was over to hang out with Sam and her friends in the park.

It wasn't that Adam hated his school. He actually liked some of his teachers and was frankly (though he would never admit it) kind of scared by some of the stories Sam had told about Berkeley High. “This kid totally got jumped today; he's, like, in the hospital . . . No, no reason. Just looked like a nerd.” What he hated was how small his school was. Only 152 students in all four grades. At a school like Berkeley High, with more than four thousand students, it seemed as if there were an endless supply of groups to hang out with. You get in a fight with some friends, just go hang around another group.

Adam's cousin Mark went to Berkeley High, and every time Adam saw him at some family holiday gathering, Mark had a new identity complete with a new pack of friends. It had started two years ago at their cousin Sammy's bar mitzvah, when Mark showed up with his hair (and hands and ears and back of his neck) dyed green, wearing dress pants twenty sizes too big and carrying a skateboard. “I'll probably go pro before I graduate high school,” Adam overheard Mark telling Aunt Susan. Then, last year at Thanksgiving, to Adam's mom's horror, Mark had been wearing skintight black jeans, white makeup, and a T-shirt that read:
HYMEN HOLOCAUST
.

“I think I'm making people uncomfortable. Do I make you uncomfortable?” Mark had said, hovering so close to Adam's face that Adam could see the outline of Mark's lavender-colored contacts. According to Casey, Mark was now a self-proclaimed “thug” who wore designer sweatpants, dealt weed, and only hung out with black people. “I just know Islam is around the corner,” Casey had said, snorting.

Adam didn't want to follow in Mark's path, but the range of possibility seemed liberating. At Adam's school there were only two groups: Popular and Nerd. And he felt like he spent most of his time struggling to hold on to his place in Popular.

Casey had complained about the same thing. “The only thing worse than spending all my time with EBP brats is knowing I'm one of them.” But then she had met Sam at a joint school field trip organized by all the gay-straight alliance groups from different high schools in the East Bay. Casey's membership in such a club had been, of course, a total secret, but the teacher sponsor who “totally ‘gets it'” had drafted an elusive permission slip for an “exploration of San Francisco for students interested in local culture.” That culture being the rainbow flag–adorned, gay-men-with-their-balls-hanging-out street called Castro. Adam had occasionally seen the strip through the windows of their family car, always wishing they would drive slower so he could take it all in. For the field trip, Casey and fifteen other gay teens from the Bay Area, along with some teachers, had spent the entire afternoon walking up and down the street. With no other purpose than to, as Casey had put it, “You know, be gay.” “Retardedly gay,” is what she called it when she came back. “They bought us little rainbow flags to wave around, and one kid, this fag from Kensington, even tried to convince everyone to get rainbow sherbet ice cream.” Adam had been surprised to hear his sister use the word
fag
so casually. “I'm allowed to,” she had said, “'cause I'm gay. You're not allowed to use it.” Then Casey had launched into a description of Sam, the girl from Berkeley High who was “so fucking hot I want to fucking kill myself.” The rest was history. Or “Herstory,” as Casey had written on her history binder.

Since Adam wasn't gay, this sort of life-changing field trip wasn't exactly an option for him. He'd given up soccer after middle school, and the groups at his school (Chess Club, Environmental Action, Junior Classical League) were hardly appealing. Also, his mom was always bugging him to join one (“Extracurriculars, Adam, have you even thought about your extracurriculars?”), and that in itself was reason not to.

Adam often felt like he was teetering on the edge of Popular, a pit full of Nerds waiting to catch him below, shrieking and giggling with outstretched arms and drooling smiles. Being best friends with Brad had been his ticket into the right crowd. The problem was that Adam felt totally dependent on Brad, and if Brad decided he didn't want him around anymore, the rest of the group would eagerly kick him to the Nerds. They knew he was faking it. He could see them see through him.

It was the usual at lunch that day. The group: Brad, Colin, Colin's girlfriend Andrea, Stephen and Stephanie, who'd been dating since the fifth grade (barf), Fletcher, Fletcher's girlfriend Alice, and Kelsey Winslow. Fletcher was busting everyone up imitating teachers and various Nerds.

“So, Mr. Stewart is all, ‘
Fletcher
, you need to pull yer pants up! I can almost see yer
bare ass!
'”

“It's true! He totally said that!” Colin chimed in. Colin was always trying to insert himself into Fletcher's jokes. Fletcher ignored him and continued.

“And I was like, ‘Um, excuse me, Mr. Stewart, you have a little chalk . . .' Because you know his entire dick area is caked in the shit. So he starts brushing away furiously at his crotch. Dude totally looks like he's beating off, and just at that moment,
Talitha
walks into the room and is all,
‘Oh!'
”—Fletcher put his hand up to his O-shaped mouth in a perfect prude imitation. “Shit was hilarious.”

Everyone in the group doubled over laughing, Alice louder than everyone, though her laugh struck Adam as painfully fake. He couldn't believe someone with a name like Fletcher was so popular. Weren't people named Fletcher supposed to be Nerds? Like how fat people were supposed to be named Bertha or stupid people, Dewey? In Fletcher's case, his dork name just made him cooler.

Colin, attempting to ride out the rest of Fletcher's wave, started his own joke.

“That totally reminds me of that time in Eleanor Meyerhoff's hot tub? You guys know what I'm talking about?”

Brad burst out laughing, but everyone else looked kind of vacant. Adam felt a prickle up the back of his neck.

“So it's me, Brad, Andrea, Eleanor, and Adam.” Colin swallowed some Coke and then cough-snorted it out, laughing preemptively at his own joke.

“We were all stoned, just chillin' in the tub, and Adam starts telling some long-ass story . . .” Colin's eyes shifted quickly over to Adam and then back. Not long enough to actually make contact but a kind of token gesture like,
I looked at you and you didn't stop me, so I'm allowed to go on.

“So, Adam's talking and talking—I don't even know about what—and he's, like, leaning back in the water, kind of floating as he goes on. And we're all staring at him, kind of laughing, but trying to act like we're
really
interested in what he's saying, when what we're all staring at are his boxers, which are, like, billowing up from the water jets, and his fucking schlong and balls”—Colin leaned over to try to catch his breath—“like, hanging out, all wafting back and forth in the water!”

The entire lunch group exploded. Adam could tell that this time Alice's laugh wasn't fake.

“Finally, we just had to tell him,” finished Colin.

Adam tried to cover his red face with his hands and laugh a little too, like he didn't give a shit, like, you know, it was funny to him too or whatever. The worst part hadn't even been his exposed dick. It was what he'd been saying when it happened. Some stupid joke about his mom that had gone on way too long because he thought everyone was super into it, the way they were all staring at him so intently. The moment they all cracked up, right before they told him about his boxers, he thought they were laughing at the climax of his joke. He remembered how cocky and pleased with himself he'd felt for those few seconds.