I sat on the wooden bench and swirled the black dial back and forth, and behind me, in the center aisle, the five and Brent erupted in laughter. The sound bounced around the cement room. That laughter had been in that place forever; it was something that those boys had found when they got to high school.
You looked, motherfucker! Faggot looked!
Cecil looked! Faggot looked!
No I dinn, said Cecils voice, but it was drowned in laughter and the sounds of bodies moving around.
I changed as fast as I could, my shirt first and then quickly off with my shorts and on with my jeans.
Then I realized that the locker room was very quiet, and when I looked over my shoulder the six of them were standing in their underwear and they were all still muddy and dirty and covered in grass, and I saw Bauchers chest in a tight white tank, hair sprouting everywhere, and then I noticed something that made my mind jump; they each had one testicle sticking out of the pee hole in the front of their underpants; endless balls, pulled tight against scrotum skin; pink, brown, and paste. For a flash of a second, I saw Brents: large, kidney shaped, blue veined, and hairy.
I looked up and saw their faces and I knew I was not supposed to
his eyes.
He looked at me like he was trying to determine something, but I doubt that he could.
Then he said, You coming to Battle of the Bands?
Yeah, I said.
At lunch that day I sat with some people, but I didnt listen to them talk. I kept feeling the crumpled paper in my pocket.
In math class I sat in the back. It was AP Calculus, and I was the youngest in the class. Mr. Case was large and dark and bald. He was the assistant football coach under Coach Peterson, the cock. He looked so thick, like hardened tree sap; his eyes were a little crossed and he had a lazier left eyelid than Brent Baucher. He lived three hours away in a place called Angels Camp, on the way to Lake Tahoe.
Mr. Case drove three hours each morning to be at school, and then drove back after football practice to be with the angels.
I was good at math, but not as good as others. My dad forced me into it, so I had no love for it. I tried to think of the equations on the blackboard like little winking eyes and explosions the way Stephen Dedalus did, but it all just looked like a bunch of work that I didnt want to do.
I fingered the paper in my pocket, and then I pulled it out. I unfolded it and it was the ripped corner of Barrys English handout. The typed homework part of it said, . . . what does George do after Lenny dies? Write a different ending that , but the rest was ripped off, and underneath that, Barry had written T for Teague, but the T was slanted and it looked like an X . Underneath the T was the phone number, written in a scraggly and uneven hand.
There were three nines in Teagues number and two twos.
After school I sat at a picnic bench and read some Faulkner until about five. Benjy was so retarded, and I loved Quentin. I wanted to stick a knife in my throat, or fuck my sister if I had one, and then jump off a bridge at Harvard. I thought about it for a while, then I called Teagues number from the pay phone at school.
The number went to a pager, so I paged it to the pay phone. I stood there and waited. Cars drove by on El Camino. No one in those cars knew what was going on over here, on the school campus. A little ways away, in the locker room on the other side of campus, Brent was probably changing, or playing Faggot Looked. Funny that he had no idea what I was doing so close to him.
The pay phone rang after five minutes.
Hello? the voice said. The voice was nasal, and it sounded angry, but like a teenagers.
Hey, its Teddy, I said. Barry C. gave me this number.
The voice changed a little. Hey. Yeah, he told me. So you need that thing?
Uh, yeah.
Yeah, I can help you. The voice was really relaxed now. It sounded like he was doing something on the other end, like rolling marbles on a table, one by one. Then he said, Can you meet me Saturday night?
I told him that was okay. Ordering a gun was like ordering anything, it turned out.
He said we should meet at Cubberley, this closed high school, at midnight on Saturday. I said okay, and then we hung up.
I took my sweatshirt sleeve and rubbed the fingerprints off the phone receiver. And then I ran.
I couldnt sleep that night. It was like Christmas Eve, but not. It was something dark. I wasnt going to get or give anything; I was just going to take something away.
The next day was Friday. I was very tired, and I felt like everyone could see the gun shining in my mind, and there were bright flashing words above it that read BRENT BAUCHER.
I sat in Biology and thought about Brent. Protozoa had cilia like the hairs on Brents legs. Brents cells had all his information coiled into DNA, in every one of those dirty nuclei. I wanted to destroy those cells. Break em up like billiard balls and have all that info obliterated. His mitochondrial forehead and his Golgi vesicle pimples, and his dead, void mind, shut down and gone.