Due to the tuna incident, the whole day was a slow-motion nightmare. Only dread pierced my walking coma—constant, banal, barely-worth-mentioning dread.
Of the boys outside on the rusty benches before school started, of the boys in the halls, of the boys in my classrooms. The boys I desired; the boys I feared.
In my tuna-befuddled state, I could no longer navigate safely, and at any moment an attack could come. Verbal or physical, there’s no real difference. Sticks and stones, etc.—anyone who’s ever had a human body knows that’s bullshit.
I kind of prefer the physical. The fear of a physical assault is almost worse than the thing itself, so once I’ve actually had my head slammed into a locker or my arm turned into a punching bag, I don’t have to worry anymore about whether it’ll happen. It’s over. And plus, there’s something about a verbal assault, even from the crude and inarticulate toad-boys of Hudson High, that echoes for days inside my head. That invades my thoughts in quiet moments. That makes my heart hammer and my brain balk, like, What is the point of living when I am so clearly less than human?
Suicidal ideation, folks. Keep moving—nothing to see here.
The day passed at an excruciating pace. I heard every watch tick, felt the massive hands of the ugly 1950s clocks in every single classroom thud through my torpor like distant drumming. My lunch was skim milk, and even that felt so thick and gross. I drank it with tenth-grade biology echoing in my head, milk is an emulsion of fat globules suspended in a water-based fluid. Disgusting. So I threw it away half-full.
By now you are perhaps thinking: wait, Matt, are you really so friendless? Surely you must have someone.
And, yes, I do. Or rather, I did. I had Darryl Staffkey. Youngest son of a sprawling trailer-park family down the street from us; fellow comic-book-and-video-game-obsessed nerd. Hopeless as me. We spent every second of every summer together, mostly in my basement, moving between my PlayStation and my laptop. Arguing online, well into the night, over Who Would Win in increasingly absurd fictional character matchups.
And in June, as soon as the school year ended, his father got laid off from the slaughterhouse, and his family packed up and moved to Canajoharie. Which is only an hour and a half away, but might as well be the planet Krypton.
Because Darryl doesn’t call; Darryl doesn’t write. He doesn’t respond to my messages, which are sometimes very long and sometimes very short, beyond the occasional LOL or SMH. Once in a while he’ll Like a photo of mine. The bare minimum. He doesn’t want to be a total jerk who’s turned his back on his best friend.
But I see his pictures. I know what’s going on. Darryl is different in his new town. He’s varsity now. Busy with baseball, parties, beer, girls.
Darryl stopped being, well, him. People do that all the time. I’m not mad at him for abandoning me. More, I’m mad at him for abandoning himself.
With Darryl gone, I had friends, sort of. I guess you’d call them acquaintances. People, mostly girls, who laugh at my jokes. Who I exchange notes with, in class. Whose jokes I laugh at. For whom I ceased to exist, as soon as we left the building. Which is fine. They ceased to exist for me, too.
Somehow, I made it through the day without a major incident. Donnie Bell punched me in the side in math class; someone else coughed fairy behind me in the hall. It barely registered on the Grand Scale of High School Hate. Slowly, dimly, the tuna-fish dullness started to fade as my hunger returned.
Then, late in the afternoon, I heard thunder clapping in the distance, and I knew I was in trouble. Ten minutes later it was a full-on downpour.
Heavy rain meant I couldn’t walk home. Which meant the bus. Which meant waiting for the bus. Which meant standing in the packed lunchroom, watching buses pull up and depart, waiting thirty or forty minutes for mine to come.
Ott at least did me the favor of not making me wait, sitting and trembling and wondering when the attack would come. As soon as I arrived at the cafeteria he crowed:
“Holy shit, Bastien, did you see that?”
“No, what?”
“Matt was totally checking out your ass, dude.”
“No way,” Bastien gasped, doing his best impression of a scandalized prude. Fear thickened in my stomach.
“For real, dude! Are you going to let him get away with that?”
They let it sink in, let me squirm. Bounced back and forth some pretty standard pieces of macho chest-thumping.
In my mind I was Magneto, reaching out my arms to feel the steel skeleton of the cafeteria, lifting the whole thing into the air, smashing two metal tables together, into Ott, popping him like a pink grape. Or I was Ripley, standing with a machine-gun grenade launcher, staring down the Queen Alien, utterly unafraid.
But really, I was afraid. And I stood there, in my fear. Let myself marinate. Felt it ooze through me. Fear cut the last threads of tuna-fish stupor. Fear was good.
I don’t know where it came from, the sudden insight that saved me from that moment. My brain cast about blindly for a weapon, any weapon, to use against these boys. And found one.
Hunger, I thought, remembering the almost-supernatural intuition that had helped me insult Ott the morning before.
Focus on the sharp emptiness. Embrace it.
I made eye contact with Ott. I stared. Hunger was an animal, crying out in my gut. It heightened my senses, and I felt the potential to push it further. I breathed in. I could smell him. Not just the stink of his overapplied deodorant or the reek of his three-days-in-a-row underpants. Him.
He expects me to break, I realized. To run or to cry.
If I did nothing, I could unnerve him.
And then, under that, I noticed something else. Something in his eyes that couldn’t quite hold contact with mine.
Just like Tariq.
Which led me to Maya. Anger boosted the signal of my hunger, and I took one step closer to him.
“Don’t take it personally, Ott,” I said. “I’m sure there’s somebody out there desperate enough to check out your ass.”
He punched me. This wasn’t like before, when I’d insulted him too intelligently for him to pick up on it right away. This, he knew for the dig that it was. His fist flew out slow, and in the instant before he swung I seemed to see in his face the precise trajectory of the blow.
I could have dodged. That’s how sharp the image was. I didn’t. Knuckle hit lip, hard, splitting it.
The pain felt right. I laughed.
I tasted blood. I spat it out, aiming right for his shoes. Even my aim was suddenly significantly better. Ott drew back his fist again, and Bastien grabbed it. Held his arm in place until Ott lowered it.
“Bro,” he said, his voice managerial and used to being obeyed. “Let it go.”
Throughout it all, Tariq’s attention had stayed riveted on his phone. I thought I saw something like a smile cross his face, but whether it was my blood or my insult of Ott that had amused him I couldn’t say.
RULE #5