Everyday People Read online

  Meanwhile, after the Assassin incident had made me the wrong kind of famous at school and the administration canceled all future games because of it, it was as if I’d gotten caught drunk in the fields around the town, where we all went to drink at night from spring through fall. Except much worse. I’d been considered an upstanding young citizen prior to that, the good Korean kid, the getter of good grades, if antisocial.

  That was, of course, the right kind of famous at the school. But if there was anyone who knew about the wrong kind of famous, it was Katie. Or, she would. Just not yet.

  • • •

  After she was photographed with her baby for the yearbook, speculation as to the father of Katie’s child settled on one of three different guys. There was her boyfriend at the time, Derrick. There was an ex of hers, Bob. And then there was Geoff, Derrick’s best friend. She was, as I’ve said, not a notorious girl before this. She neither participated in the anorexia/bulimia weight-loss races the popular girls played with each other, which had them arriving at school looking a little like a line drawing, nor was she known as the sort of girl who would do anything for a ride home, a twelve-pack, or a handle of vodka. She was well-liked in part because she was so normal—not a prude, could roll a decent joint, would give you a cigarette and say hi.

  Derrick, her boyfriend, loved her like it was a star-crossed romance, even though it had worked out. He seemed afraid of losing her even while in her arms. I think at first it seemed like passion to her, like this had to be love, it was so strong. But she grew tired of this intensity.

  I know because we talked about it—a lot.

  “I mean, when is he just going to get it?” she said. We were outside the CVS, having just finished a shift, smoking her cigarettes. It was Friday, and I’d made it, lasted out the week. The thing that matters to this story hadn’t happened to her yet. She always smoked with her left arm across her chest, her right elbow balanced on her left hand so her arm went up at a right angle like a cigarette salute. Her hand gestures happened up there. She would swing her hand in, take a drag, and swing it back out, and the words would be full of smoke as she talked. “I love him. I really do. I’m not going anywhere. But it feels like all the love I have wouldn’t make a difference to him. He’d still be there believing I was going to leave at any second.”

  I had no experience with this; I nodded, fascinated by the idea of how Derrick might lose her because he couldn’t feel the love he said he wanted from her, and that she was offering. I wanted to hear more. It seemed like the worst thing in the world, too, if it happened. My only relationships were fantasies. Even being desired, much less loved, was a fantasy. I knew well enough to know I was “the gay” at the school, and that there might be others. I just didn’t know them. Anytime I thought a boy liked me, I quickly decided it was just wishful thinking and pushed the thought out of my mind. And, of course, created extended fantasies that involved many of the boys in the high school, with each other but never me.

  My fantasies back then never included me.

  The lights were off inside the CVS, and the early summer dark was slow in coming down. Her hair in the sunlight seemed extra gold contrasted against the oak forest across the street behind her. She was my goddess right then.

  A brown Camaro pulled up. “Geoff,” she said to the driver. “Did Derrick send you?”

  He grinned. “Yeah.”

  “So he’s too shit-faced to come get me?” She said this with her voice rising on the “me.” “And you’re not?”

  He nodded. “That’s about the shape of it.”

  She tossed her cigarette down into the parking lot. “Well isn’t that romantic.” She crushed it out with her sneaker. “Good night,” she said to me as she walked around the car, not looking, fishing in her purse. “See you tomorrow.”

  • • •

  At work the next day she was quiet. When I asked her about how her night was, she just shrugged. Geoff didn’t drink much, while Derrick drank more and more. And the more Derrick drank, the more Geoff seemed to like being Derrick’s go-to guy. Katie’s boyfriend was soon sending his best friend to pick her up most of the time. Katie, I think, at first felt special in a way, like Derrick had sent a car for her. Even if it was Geoff’s pickup. Soon it was nothing unusual to see Geoff’s truck in front of the CVS at closing time, waiting for her.

  One night after work, Derrick had neither sent Geoff nor called. Katie and I were outside the closed CVS, smoking as the sun set.

  “Fuck this,” she said. “Stanley, your mother still let you drive?”

  I laughed. “She does now. She doesn’t want to have to drive me.” The repaired station wagon sat outside a little glumly but looking fine. And I did feel better about driving it, knowing I could take it over a stone wall and live.

  We went by her house, picked up some beers, and, with a few joints she had in her cigarette pack, drove out to the places we thought the boys would be. It was the eighties, before cell phones and texting. You had to drive around to look for someone. In our town, Cape Elizabeth, there were just a few known places: there was the cove, there was the Rock, there was a field, another field. The kids knew them and the cops knew them. It was a small town. The cove was starting to fill up with people—it was really the parking lot for the cove—and heads turned as I drove by with Katie looking stonily through the crowd for a sign of Derrick, her hair extra pale in the headlights of the other cars. The Rock, when we looked, was empty and it was a pain to check out: you had to park off the road and take a short hike up to the Rock, and when we got there, no one was around. By the time we stood in the first of the fields for drinking, as we thought about heading to the second one, she said, “You know what? He should be looking for me.” She tapped a joint out of her cigarette pack and lit it swiftly, inhaling deeply. “Ain’t that right?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You got a man?”

  I blinked.

  “I know what’s up. I’ve seen you checking out Derrick’s ass when he comes in to see me. Hell, I don’t blame you. It’s a good ass, for now. Though if he keeps drinking like that, it won’t be.”

  “No,” I said. “I . . .”

  “Besides the whole school, who knows you’re gay?” She laughed and handed me the joint. Around us, fireflies had started up in the field. The tip of the joint glowed orange and then went gray as the ash covered it.

  I lifted the joint to my mouth, and as I pulled in a deep draw, she said, “You do know you’re gay, right?”

  I just smiled. If I said nothing, I could wait a bit longer. Wait until I was really, really, really sure. I had never said anything to anyone. I didn’t know how else to explain what I felt, though, and here she was, making it feel sort of easy and okay but also possibly not true.

  “For all I know, Derrick could very well be your man next. He and Geoff certainly spend enough time together.” She looked out into the distance to her left, back across the field toward the car, as if she could see through time and space to where they were. “You’d have to get him away from Geoff, though. God knows I can’t.”

  “Next” was the operative word here. I felt a vague thrill at the idea of Derrick and Geoff intertwined somewhere in Geoff’s truck.

  “Do you really think—”

  She cut me off. “I don’t know what I think. I’m just not drunk and high enough, I guess, after a good day at the CVS.” She rubbed out the roach of the joint on the bottom of her sneaker and stuck it back in her cigarettes. “So that’s what I think. Not drunk enough, not high enough. Waste not, want not,” she said merrily, tucking the pack away. “What do you think?”

  “I think he ought to treat you better,” I said.

  “That’s an easy thing to say,” she said. “Come on, now, Stanley. I’ve taught you better than that, haven’t I?” She pulled a beer up from where we’d set them on the ground and cracked the flip top as she balanced it against her hip. “It takes one to know one, right? Do you think Derrick is gay?
”

  I didn’t want to answer this. Because the answer was yes, I did think what she did. Derrick and Geoff, seemed, well . . . Geoff had no reason to be Derrick’s apparent servant. He had no reason to just drive her around like he was Derrick’s slave. No reason, that is, unless he was desperately in love with Derrick. And it made sense, too, that maybe the reason Derrick drank so much was that, despite being with Katie, he was in love with Geoff also. That perhaps he feared losing her while he was in front of her because he couldn’t feel anything for her, despite wanting to, or knew that if she knew he was gay, she’d leave him and he’d have to face being gay.

  Yes, they could just be best buds. But there was something terrifically sad about it that made it seem like it wasn’t just that. And a year later, after graduation, I would be back in the field for a party, overhearing Derrick drunkenly telling Geoff about two girls he had lined up for them, and Geoff balking. Which caused Derrick to say, “Tell me you’re not gay, Geoff. Tell me you’re not gay.”

  And then silence. And then: “Tell me you’re not gay. Tell me you’re not gay.”

  But for now I was here and that hadn’t happened, not where I could hear it. “It’s okay, you’ve been through enough,” Katie said. “Don’t answer that. Where the fuck is he?”

  “Why do you think I’m gay?” I asked.

  “Did I offend you?” she said, more of an assertion than a question.

  “No,” I said. “I just want to know.”

  “You’re an awfully good-looking guy to just not have anyone around doing anything about it,” she said. “I mean, you could be asexual. I understand that’s a thing now in the wild eighties. But I think you’re sexual. I just think you don’t like the answer to the question yet.”

  I thought about this, but she was right.

  “I bet there’s people who like the answer, though,” she said, after watching me say nothing for a little bit.

  I have never been one to notice quickly when someone was interested in me.

  I can tell you, after that night, I could no longer avoid that I was gay. Katie had, it’s true, turned me on sufficiently that I did the deed, and, in my defense, I was seventeen. A lot could, then. I was already turned on by the thought of Geoff and Derrick. Also, I knew that it did mean something; it wasn’t that it didn’t mean anything, her and I. Quite the opposite. I did want to love her as I felt she deserved to be loved, and even had a fantasy about what that meant, her in the arms of a handsome fantasy lover that was not, of course, me. But I thought I could impersonate him.

  After the deed was done, I was incredibly embarrassed, like I’d told the most incredible, well-received lie, thinking I’d performed admirably as a heterosexual. I hadn’t, though, I understood, as Katie looked up at me with laughter.

  “Well . . . now we know,” Katie said. “Let’s never do that again.” I was so relieved, we just started to laugh, shaking until we stopped, there in the field, on the blanket I had pulled out from the back of the car.

  Happier laughing than we had been during sex.

  We left and went home. Geoff and Derrick were never found that night, and on the next shift I listened as Katie filled me in on the fight she had had with Derrick. As she did, I noticed we were closer now, but it was the closeness of a shared hurt, not the intimacy of love. But also, I had never had a friend who talked to me the way she did. Most of the kids in the town didn’t treat me like a person, for being the one Korean kid. She was the only one there who had ever made this much time for me, and now, knowing I was gay, and accepting it, made her the only person who really knew me in the entire world.

  We continued this way for the rest of my time there, and there was a lot to think about besides us, like just where Geoff and Derrick had been that night. Or how, a few days later, she and Derrick were fine. And then she wasn’t feeling well, and then she was slipping the pregnancy test over the counter at me and I rang it up for her, and when she came in to work the next day, the answer was in her eyes.

  By what I thought was an unspoken agreement, we put it out of our minds, what had happened between us. Or at least one of us did.

  I always meant to write to her but I never did. This was true in regard to all my friends from back then. I was off at college in San Francisco, the California College of the Arts. I was finally meeting guys who would look me in the eye and ask me out while they twinkled at me. My ethnicity was not weird there and I had many friends who shared it. I was even at times really ordinary. I grew less bitter in the company of people I could be myself with, and writing home . . . well, it felt as if to reach back meant letting even a little of what I had left behind through the wall I had put up between my old life and my new one. And so I never did.

  • • •

  Later, when people thought it was maybe Geoff’s baby, she rolled her eyes. “They would,” Katie said. “They fucking would.”

  She looked at me for a minute. “Just because he let Geoff do the driving doesn’t mean he let him do the driving.” We laughed about that one pretty hard, and then harder, and then even harder, until soon we hid behind the counter, because we could not stop laughing.

  “This is your fault,” she said when she eventually ran to the bathroom to change her pants. It turns out when you are pregnant it is easy to have a little accident while laughing. By then we were like old friends. I was five months into the job. My checks were tiny, but I knew my mother felt better every time she watched me come in from work and put my blue and white CVS vest on the barstool in the kitchen. And I, I felt a different kind of pride for being on the inside of the biggest scandal at school, which was no longer me. Katie’s pregnancy was interesting to me, a scandal partly because she not only announced it, she had no apparent shame about it: “What?” she said, of her decision to share the news. “Like you all weren’t gonna know?” And then she said, “I’m keeping it, too.” In her junior year photo for the yearbook, she even fought for the right to show how far along she was, though she lost. Derrick offered to marry her, but she turned him down and broke up with him.

  I thought it was wrong of her to do, but I also thought it was beautiful. This confused me but also made it seem important. I was young, and it was my first time having that experience. I soon regretted thinking it was wrong. But I also graduated, and I never checked the next year’s yearbook except after hearing she’d gotten her son into the photo. I opened it up to look at it once. She looked happy and proud, I remember. Her baby boy was cute, but also just a bump with hair, the smallest part of a small photo. That was about it.

  • • •

  Her brother didn’t seem to know much about this at all. At the bar we found near Shaw’s, we sat and talked amid several awkward silences. I worried that his sister was dead at one point—that I would find out in some way I couldn’t bear. But instead he pulled out his wallet and showed me the picture she’d sent recently of her and her son.

  “He’s cute,” I said.

  “Yeah. He is. He looks like he’s not quite white, right?”

  I squinted. “Native American, maybe,” I said.

  “That’s what I was thinking! But she won’t say who the dad is, and honestly, my sister is like the Olympics: open to countries from around the world!” he said, making a welcoming gesture and then laughing like a maniac. I let it go for a moment and then, in a move that surprised both me and him, I sucker punched him, and it sent him flying off his stool.

  I don’t know if you know about how a sucker punch feels to set up and throw. It takes a certain kind of grudging anger and pretense. You have to act like you don’t care, because if you flinch, if you emit the slightest signal, it is off. It’s a cruel thing to do, though, as the victim never sees it coming, though usually the recipient deserves it. But again, to be clear, I lie to myself a lot so as to feel better about my life. I had waited for him and said nothing during his little joke, because out of something like scientific curiosity I wanted to hear what he would say next, and when he said it, my c
ourse of action was clear.

  He shook his head, whipping blood from his nose around him, blinking in surprise. I was shaking my hand, because, well, it hurts to punch someone.

  So, yes, her brother was a dick, but that wasn’t why I punched him. I punched him because I suddenly knew something, looking at the photo, something I hadn’t let myself believe, not even once, not ever, this whole time. Maybe it was even what she meant when she said “This is your fault” as she ran to the back of the CVS, holding her belly, running to the bathroom. The boy in that photo, he looked like my dad. Like me. The kid was mine.

  • • •

  “You could have said something,” I said.

  “You could have asked,” Katie said. She still held her cigarettes the same way. She noticed me noticing and said of it, “I only smoke while he’s at school.” We were waiting for him to come home. She smiled. She still worked at the CVS, but she was the pharmacist now. She’d done well for herself.

  “And what was I to do, marry the town gay? No. No. It was never going to be like that.” She flicked her ash. “You’re high if you think otherwise.”

  I laughed at that against my will. Punching out Katie’s brother hadn’t been the greatest way to get her address, but once he understood, he’d given it to me and apologized. “You got a mean sucker punch for a faggot, I’ll give you that,” he said as we shook hands on it.

  Now I was still trying to be mad at her, for not telling me, but I was also too happy to see her and too guilty, knowing what I knew.

  “You were never going to stay here,” she said. “And I wasn’t going to make you. I’m glad you’re here now, but understand, after what I learned about Derrick and Geoff, I never wanted to see any of you again.” She pushed her cigarette out into an ashtray, then turned and walked into the house to run it under the sink and throw it away. I followed her.