Character, Driven Page 7

  I decided there was no better way to tell her, and the world, about our twined destinies than to offer her something of mine to wear. And no, I don’t mean clothing. I mean a significant token. I’d seen high school guys do that in old movies. It looked classy and irresistible. I had a pin I’d been given when I played on the chess team in fifth grade. It was a chess knight slapped over the letter C, enameled in the school colors of maroon and white. The C, of course, stood for “Calvin Coolidge Elementary.” But it could very well stand for “Cliff.” Or “Clueless.”

  I brought the pin with me on a Friday, shoved deeply into my right front pants pocket. I clutched it often throughout the day. My plan was simple: I would offer Maddie the pin, and my heart, when I caught up with her after school.

  We had different schedules that year and shared no classes, but I spotted her on her way out of the building. I followed, closing the gap like a slow-motion replay of Cupid’s arrow in flight.

  I was about to call her name when she ducked into a classroom. Her home base.

  I waited by the door. My heart sped up as the door opened. But it wasn’t Maddie. Sandra Warner, another girl from our class, came out.

  “Maddie’s in there, right?” I asked. As if, somehow, Maddie could vanish.

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “Nothing,” I said. My voice somehow moved five octaves north between the first and second syllables of that word.

  Sandra fixed me with a penetrating gaze. “You planning to ask her something?”

  “Maybe.” It was alarming how much girls seemed to know about the plans of random guys, just by looking at them.

  “Whatever.” She took three steps away, then snapped her fingers, spun around, and said, “Forgot my journal.”

  She dashed inside. Thinking back, which I do far too often, I believe she was empty-handed when she emerged. But I wasn’t paying much attention to her. I was rehearsing my words and enjoying a mental preview of the envious looks of my loner classmates as Maddie and I strolled arm in arm along the hallways.

  I’ll spare you those carefully chosen words, or the broad and diverse range of fantasies they spawned. But I knew for sure the next kiss would involve tongues. And maybe hands. Maddie’s first seductive yawn played through my memory, filling the IMAX of my mind.

  I waited.

  Three more kids came out of the room. No Maddie. No sounds from within.

  She has to be there.

  I went in. The room was empty. One window was wide open. The half-drawn pull-down shade twisted in the breeze like a corpse on a gallows.

  I walked over to the window and leaned out. There was no sign of Maddie on the street. She was long gone. She’d probably fled the room the moment Sandra told her I was hovering in the hallway. We were on the second floor, but the school was built on a hill. The drop to the ground from here wasn’t far.

  But still, Maddie Murough had chosen to leap from a second-story window—okay, make that dangle and drop—rather than face whatever I was planning to ask her.

  How hideous was I? How undesirable?

  The next day, Maddie avoided me with the subtlety of a young lady evading an unwelcome suitor. Or a plague carrier.

  After no more than two or three weeks of watching Maddie dodge my approach and avoid my eyes, I finally started to take the hint and stop thinking of her as my girlfriend. It wasn’t until years later that I realized she had, at least, given me the courtesy of not sharing the story of her escape with the whole school. Nobody ever brought it up or mocked me for it. I guess that was sort of classy. There are some girls who would have relished the telling, no matter what the consequences.

  Yeah, I know. That was a huge side trip through my deformative years. But I wanted you to understand I didn’t just sit on the sidelines. I really tried to get a girlfriend. And I really got crushed.

  The rest of eighth grade, along with my freshman and sophomore years in high school, passed without any more wooing on my part. My fingers had been singed. Or amputated. And, honestly, even had I not been gun-shy, I lacked a sign that anyone would welcome my advances, or covet an opportunity to wear my Calvin Coolidge chess pin.

  I courted again in my junior year. But that story is too painful to reveal so soon after the tale of Maddie and the open window. Maybe later, if I have a burning desire to feel like crap, and prove I am pathetic beyond redemption, I’ll recount my junior-year trauma.

  At the moment, my burning desire was to find a date for the Mack and Mary concert.

  Acting in Concert

  SO, WHO TO ask?

  Nola came to mind immediately. But she had a boyfriend. I sorted through the various available classmates I’d interacted with at some social level in the past, and decided it would be safe to ask Patricia Klymer. She was sort of a friend. We’d gone through elementary school together, and had worked on several group projects in middle school. Her mom and my mom knew each other. And I’d seen her wearing a Ricky and the Rickettes T-shirt last month. They played the same kind of music as Mack and Mary, though they were nowhere near as awesome.

  Basically, I was pretty sure I could talk to her without her shooting me down. Or leaping out a window.

  I guess, since I’m telling you about Patricia here, for the first time, I should go back and show her in a couple earlier scenes. That’s how they do it in most of the novels I’ve read. But that seems like a lot of unnecessary effort, and I’m not sure I’ll want to rewrite any of this. It’s already a lot more work than I expected. Though it did feel good to get all that stuff about Maddie out of my system. Not to be crude, but if you’ve ever been really super constipated for two or three days, you know how wonderful it feels when you finally get that dense mass of discomfort out of your system.

  Besides, if you’re adaptable enough to tolerate my digressions, you’re adaptable enough to accept Patricia’s existence on first mention. And Nicky’s. But we’ll get to him later.

  Sort-of-friend or not, it took me a while to build up the courage to ask Patricia to the concert. Okay, more than a while. The rest of the week slipped by, and then the weekend. I finally gave it a shot on Monday, after Calculus, and after giving myself a pep talk.

  What’s the worst that could happen?

  She could say no.

  But she’s not going to whip out a sword and decapitate you. If she says no, she says no. Big deal. Then you move on and ask someone else.

  All right. I’m going for it.

  “Hey,” I said, catching up with her in the hallway. “I got two tickets for the Mack and Mary concert at the college. It’s the Saturday after next. Want to go?” Just past her, I saw Butch give me a thumbs-up and a Cheshire cat grin.

  Patricia flinched like I’d offered her a bite of a raw rat sandwich. “I can’t.”

  Man, that was fast. The speed of her reply was even more disturbing than the contents. I was too surprised to say anything in response before she walked off. I’d have at least expected some sort of hesitation on her part, or maybe an explanation to reinforce the “I can’t.”

  I have to take my cat to the orthodontist.

  I promised my parents I’d stay home and watch them argue.

  I’m knitting flame-resistant pot holders for orphans in Hell.

  Something. Just a scrap. I can’t, all by itself, seemed too cold. Not unlike an unexpected decapitation.

  “From a distance, that didn’t appear to go very well,” Butch said when I caught up with her.

  “She can’t go,” I said.

  “She’s just playing hard to get,” Butch said.

  “I can ask her for you,” Robert said. “Women find me irresistible.”

  “You mean irritable,” Butch said. “Like a bowel.”

  I wandered ahead as they argued about semantic and digestive issues.

  The next day, after Calculus, having managed to become a believer in Butch’s playing-hard-to-get theory, I gave myself another pep talk and took another shot at inviting Patricia to the concert. “Serious
ly, it wouldn’t be a date or anything. I just have an extra ticket. For a friend. Robert couldn’t make it,” I said, trying to emphasize to Patricia that the position of concert companion wasn’t based on the sex of the applicant. Or the supplicant.

  “No, thanks.”

  If words had temperatures, those she’d just released from between her lips wouldn’t even register on any scale. Again, no explanation. No sugarcoating. Was I being arrogant when I felt I deserved one? I didn’t know.

  “Perhaps she’s playing impossible to get,” Butch said. “Maybe it’s time to move on.”

  “That’s only strike two,” Robert said.

  “This isn’t baseball.” As I spoke those words, I saw myself hurling baseballs at miniature stuffed Patricias. I consistently missed.

  * * *

  THIRD TIME’S THE charm.

  Sayings suck. But after talking myself in and out of it a thousand times in the intervening twenty-four hours, I gave it one last shot on Wednesday, which happened to be May 1, but might as well have been exactly one month earlier, given Patricia’s lack of encouragement. I’d even put the tickets in the front pocket of my shirt, peeking out ever so slightly, like I was about to perform some sort of magic trick with them. I had the wild idea that if I showed them to Patricia, she would be unable to resist the invitation. Tickets—real tickets you hold in your hand—possess a tantalizing aura.

  As I headed after Patricia, Butch put a hand on my shoulder.

  “What?” I asked.

  She lifted her pants leg to reveal a tattoo in tiny letters just above her ankle: QUIT WHILE YOU STILL HAVE YOUR HEAD.

  “Marie Antoinette,” Butch said. “It seemed appropriate.”

  “Thanks. But I have to give it one more shot,” I said.

  Patricia had stopped by her locker. I took that as a sign from the universe that I was making the right decision. “You sure you don’t want to go see Mack and Mary?” I clipped the top corner of the tickets between my right thumb and forefinger, and started to ease them out of my pocket.

  “For Christ’s sake, Cliff, stop bothering me! I don’t want to go to that stupid concert with you. Leave me alone.” She slammed the locker door shut so hard, it flew back open, slammed it again, then sped down the hall. Around me, heads turned toward the shout. Eyes quickly lost interest after spotting the recipient. Except for two pairs that looked on in horror from the doorway of Calculus class.

  I should have dropped it. If I understood Patricia correctly, it was highly likely she did not want to go to the concert with me. Nor, with me, to the concert, did she want to go. I’d even go so far as to suspect that she, to the concert, with me to go, did not want. But my burning desire to find a companion for the evening had been replaced with a hotter, deeper burn to make some sort of sense out of this inexplicable rejection. I wasn’t a troll. I wasn’t hideously ugly or smelly. But I’d had one girl leap from a window to avoid me, and another reject a chance to hear an awesome concert for free.

  I followed Patricia down the hall. “Bothering you?” I asked the back of her head when I got within earshot. “Come on, I have an extra ticket. They’re great seats for an amazing group. We’re sort of like friends. Right? I don’t see what the big deal is. It’s going to be an awesome concert.”

  She spun back to confront me, her face throwing off heat and waves of anger like a nuclear weapon in mid explosion. “Cliff, I’m already a loser. If people see me on a date with you, I’m a big loser. Please. You’re not a bad guy. But you’re just so far from cool in every way, I can’t get sucked into anything social with you. It would never wash off.”

  Her eyes looked dangerously close to filling with tears. I’d rather not describe my own eyes at that moment.

  So, I wasn’t just a loser. I was a carrier, too. Or an oil stain. I tainted everything I touched with a patina of uncoolness. All I’d wanted was to go to a concert. I wanted to hear some live music from a great band. I didn’t want to go alone, like a pathetic loser.

  Was that too much to ask? Too much to hope for? Was that really just too fucking huge a desire for someone like me to have?

  What’s the worst that could happen?

  I sure got smacked hard in the nuts with the answer to that one.

  Robert and Butch were waiting for me down the hall, but I walked right past them. I couldn’t talk right now. They were good enough friends to pretend, during lunch, that nothing had happened. I pretended that, too, though I had a hard time swallowing my food.

  After school, I left the pair of tickets on Ms. Ryder’s desk with a note, saying, For you and a friend. From a friend. I disguised my handwriting. I hope she liked music. Maybe I could have sold the tickets and given the money back to Mom. But I really didn’t want to have to explain all this to her. She seemed to assume I led a normal, reasonably happy social life.

  I felt too wretched to go right home. I wanted to kick a wall. I knew that would be a bad idea. Dad kicked walls sometimes, and it always looked like it hurt. It sure didn’t calm him down. But I had to burn off some of the anger that was surging through me. I headed for the perfect place to exorcise my rage.

  When You Need a Lift

  THERE WASN’T ANYBODY in the weight room. That was good. I had no idea what I was doing, and I really didn’t want to share that news with an audience, or have Clovis bounce a dumbbell off my skull.

  I wandered around among the free weights, workout benches, and dangerous-looking devices rigged with cables and pulleys, trying to decide where to start. I knew enough to figure out how much weight was on a barbell. I found one already loaded with one hundred pounds. That sounded like a good place to start. Round numbers are nice. I bent over and grabbed the bar with both hands, then remembered the ten million times Mom, or some other adult, had warned me, Lift with your legs, not your back.

  So, why did so many old people I know have bad knees?

  I squatted, made sure my back was relatively straight, tightened my grip, and stood.

  The barbell was heavy enough to make me appreciate the power of gravity, but not bad enough to make me fear a spontaneous double amputation of my arms. I decided to do a press. Picturing how they did it in the Olympics, I started to lift the weight up to shoulder height.

  Oh, hell. No way. Apparently, lifting a hundred pounds to thigh level with your whole body is a lot easier than raising the weight higher with just your arms.

  I lowered the barbell back down to where it belonged and went to look at the dumbbells.

  Yeah. Apt term for them and me.

  I grabbed a twenty-five-pounder, came to my senses pretty much immediately, put it back down, picked up a ten-pounder in each hand, and stood there, wondering what my next step should be. On TV shows, the guys in prison were always doing curls. Of course, they already had enormous muscles, and a whole lot of free time. As I was trying to figure out what to do with the weights in my hands, I heard someone walk in. There were enough mirrors in the room that I didn’t need to look over my shoulder to see who it was.

  Nicky Foster.

  That was a relief. He wasn’t a threat. I didn’t really know him. I just knew he kept to himself and had never been connected with any random acts of violence. I think he’d tossed the shot put, freshman or sophomore year. But then he’d quit the team.

  Nicky went to a barbell resting chest-high on a rack. Each end of the bar held a stack of weights that was bigger than a small car.

  He ducked under the bar, lifted it across his shoulders, and stepped away from the rack.

  Then he squatted and stood.

  I stared. He squatted nine more times, letting out a measured exhale with each lift, slowing somewhat on each new repetition, but he never looked like he was in any sort of distress. Then he set the weight back on the rack. He repeated the sequence two more times, for a total of thirty reps. If you added it all up, I think he’d just lifted a large bus, or a small airplane.

  I was still standing where I was, captivated by the unexpected sideshow.
Nicky caught me staring as he turned toward a rack of larger-than-necessary dumbbells.

  “What are you looking at?” he asked.

  I pointed at the barbell. “How much was that?”

  “Two twenty. Why?”

  I had no response. He pulled off his shirt, tossed it in the corner, grabbed a couple large dumbbells from the rack, and went to a bench by the front mirror.

  Holy crap, he had muscles on top of his muscles. We’d never been in the same gym class, and he always wore loose shirts in school, so I had no idea he was that strong. He had the sort of long, carelessly groomed hair that screamed “slacker.” Until now, I could have pictured him on a surfboard, or hanging out at the skate park. Standing here, bare chested, he struck me as more of a gladiator.

  He did some sort of lifty thingees. I chose that phrase carefully to show off my technical knowledge of weight training and bodybuilding (which I suspect might not be exactly the same thing). Then he stared into the mirror, right at me staring at him. By this point, he’d worked up a thin sheen of sweat across his back that darkened the band at the top of his gray sweat shorts.

  “What?” he asked. “Do you like my body? You seem a bit obsessed with it.”

  “I’m not gay,” I said.

  “You make it sound like some sort of disease,” he said.

  Crap. This was like boxing. Except instead of ducking and weaving, I was throwing my face at his verbal fists. “That’s not what I meant. I just didn’t want you to think I was staring at you for the wrong reason.”

  He turned around and faced me. “Maybe I’d consider it the right reason.”

  “I … I mean…” Oh man. I loved to argue with Robert and Butch, or my fellow food burners at Moo Fish, but this was an entirely different sort of skirmish. The best option seemed to be an unconditional surrender. I took a deep breath and gathered my thoughts. “I don’t care who gets hot over what. I just want to get in better shape so I can get laid myself. Okay? There’s this girl I’m trying to impress. It’s not going well. Actually, it’s not going at all. I tried to do some lifting, but apparently it’s a lot harder than I thought it would be. And you look like you know what you’re doing. Hell, you look like you’ve known what you were doing for most of your life. So, could you maybe stop screwing with my head and show me some basic stuff before I hurt myself?”