Urine-soaked

In the eighth grade all we did was call each other faggots or fags. Being called a faggot was the worst thing. Calling someone a faggot tended to escalate things, because if you were called a faggot, you pretty much had to respond, by like throwing a piece of food at the person who called you a faggot or kicking his backpack across the room or calling him a faggot. Being called a fag wasn’t as bad. You got called a fag when you were being kind of annoying. You were meant to take it as a sort of wake-up call, “look, man, you know I don’t think you’re a faggot or anything, but you’re kind of acting like a fag right now.” The correct response to being called a fag was to say something like “shut up, fag,” and then calm down and not get called a fag again. You could recover from fag, but you were a faggot forever.

There was one kid who really didn’t get the distinction, so he got called a faggot a lot. His name was Brian and he had some lung thing so he pronounced a lot of his words funny and so people were always calling him a faggot and talking about his faggy lungs. We used to just call him a fag but that got him so mad he’d like turn red and huffing and puffing and his eyes would mist over and he’d start going around the table firing off faggots at everyone and totally losing his composure, so of course we started calling him a faggot, he hardly left us a choice. One day I kicked his backpack across the cafeteria so hard it ended up at the feet of this huge kid named Andrew who we called Bulldozer behind his back because he was huge and had a weird flat face and he picked it up and punted it across the cafeteria back to us and when Brian finally got it back his graphing calculator was totally destroyed, it had a huge crack in the screen and a bunch of buttons popped off. He got pretty misty and all upset about how he was going to make me pay for a new one, and I said no way it was definitely Bulldozer who broke it (even though it was just as likely me) and there was no way Brian was asking Andrew because he was the kind of kid who drove drunk at 15 and slapped around his girlfriend and he was in a higher social tier than the rest of us, so he pestered me about it for a few weeks until I called him a faggot enough that he stopped. And everyone else was on my side because Brian was a faggot and I was only a fag.

I remember that day they’d found this waterlogged corpse in the creek in the woods behind the school. They cordoned off like two-thirds of the parking lot with police tape so police or whoever could drag the thing out of there. I actually don’t remember who actually fished it out. I remember there was an ambulance there, which was dumb because the last thing the corpse needed was an ambulance. The EMTs just stood around. I remember we were in earth science trying to learn about rocks or something and we all crushed up against the window when they dragged the thing up the hill. The corpse was stiff and gray and it was winter like four days after a couple inches of snow so the hill was stiff and gray too. The corpse was of this kid a couple years older than us who’d just dropped out of school to become a heroin addict. The teacher called us vultures and told us she was knocking us all down half a letter grade, though I don’t know if she actually did it or not.

I remember there was this kid Marc who grew his hair out real long in a ponytail. This was freshman year when the rest of us cut our hair real short and wore baseball caps all the time because high school was the first time you could wear baseball caps in school, so we all wore baseball caps and made fun of Marc’s faggy ponytail a lot even though like four of us would grow ponytails in the next two or three years. He got a job at a gas station at one point — I guess this was a couple years later, I remember it was in the summer — and on his first day his manager said he had to cut his ponytail and Marc said he wouldn’t cut it and so he got fired. His dad kicked him out of the house because Marc showed no interest in getting another job and Marc’s dad was kind of a hardass so Marc spent the summer sleeping on people’s couches. He spent days shooting hoops at the rec center. The rec center during the day was pretty much overrun by day camp kids but Marc always had a hoop to himself, I think because he looked pretty grimy with his filthy ponytail and he always played with no shirt so no kids wanted to get near him. We’d meet him there and shoot hoops with him and the half of us who weren’t fags would sneak off into the woods and smoke weed Marc bought off these kids Jared and Chad whose couches he was sleeping on and the half of us who were fags played knockout if we had two balls.

One time this other kid David threw gum in Marc’s hair. David was a real piece of shit we all hated, but you couldn’t just say you hated him. He did things like throw gum in people’s hair. We all laughed when he did it to Marc, and it was pretty funny. Marc had to cut it out with a pair of crimping shears because we were in study hall in the home ec room and that was all they had, somehow.

I remember that summer — the summer Marc got fired from the gas station, which was before or after David threw the gum in his hair, I don’t remember — we hung around a lot with these girls Jess and Janet and Kathryn. They were a year younger than us, which is how these things work. They used to sit on the swing set and watch us shoot hoops, and if there weren’t even teams the one person who was resting would sit on the swings with them and flirt. Everyone wanted to rest. People were always saying they were tired and needed to rest. You’d never seen people so rested as we were. I remember everyone wanted to get with Jess, but she was a cut above us and got with the kids two grades above her if she wanted to get with anyone — she only hung around with us because she liked us. Janet wanted to get with pretty much all of us and pretty much all of us obliged. Kathryn was kind of loud and chubby and we exaggerated her faults because it was fun. I remember one time we drove to a Friendly’s and it was packed so we sent her in to check on how long it would take to get a table and as soon as she got to the front door we took off. I wasn’t driving, I was in the back. I think Nick was driving. We pulled the same trick on Nick a couple times, that was probably where he got the idea. She saw us drive off and threw her arms up and shouted at us but we couldn’t hear her. We had two cars, actually, I think Jesse was driving the other car and he drove off too. It wasn’t even coordinated, as far as I knew, it just came off perfectly. I don’t remember who eventually picked her up. The other girls were with us and they said it was horrible but only to cover themselves — they thought it was funny too.

The summer after that, I think, our friend Jake started going around with this girl Mary. Her family was incredibly rich, they had this huge estate on a farm. They had a whole building — I don’t know what it was, but it was finished and it was one big room that was about as big as like half my house and she let us get drunk there. Everyone hated her. I never quite knew why. She was kind of a bitch, I do remember that, but in kind of a funny way. She was always cool to me, but I deferred to everyone else when they complained about her behind Jake’s back, because I didn’t spend a ton of time with them that summer, I only saw everyone like once a week whereas they saw each other pretty much every day and Mary was always around, so I figured they knew better than I did. She was always running Jake down, calling him an idiot, I remember we used to talk about that, “she treats him like shit,” even though we treated him a lot worse and he was an idiot. There are different ways to call someone an idiot, though, and we always did it with affection. Anyway everyone was thrilled when Jake broke up with her at our urging mostly, I think, and she went to a private school so we literally never saw her again.

I remember there was this kid Eloy who went to our school. He hung out with us like once a year, I don’t really know how he did it so infrequently or so frequently, one would think he would have eventually had to either hang out with us more or not at all, but it was pretty consistently once a year from like eighth grade on. I remember one time at a party at Mary’s place — Mary had a ping pong table which she’d only let people use for ping pong and it was weirdly right up against the wall, which was horrible for ping pong but that’s where it always was. One night this kid Bryant and this girl Kelly were playing strip ping pong and Bryant was getting destroyed and all the guys were screaming at him and wanted to wring his neck and Kelly was just standing there all smug. I left because I was sick of standing there. Eloy was on the back porch and we talked for a little while about how much we hated our lives. Eloy said he had to go and walked off — he just lived down the street, I think. I told him he should hang out with us more and he said yeah but nothing came of it. I went back inside and Bryant was still losing. We used to call Bryant U, because we’d heard of a Bryant University in New Hampshire or somewhere, so he was University and then U which we found funny because he was a dumb guy. Someone shouted at me when I walked in. I stood at the table for a while watching the game but then I got sick of it and I sat down and slid under the table and leaned up against the wall, which was cold and cement, and with the ping pong sounds on the table over my head it was kind of comforting. This girl Ashley found me under there and sat next to me. She said she didn’t really like anyone there all that much and I said yeah because I thought I had a shot with her, and we talked about how much we hated our lives for a while. At one point — Mary had this brother Jason who’d printed up a bunch of signs for something, some protest in town — and we were going to dump the signs in one of the barns to make him mad. I asked Ashley if she wanted to come and she said no. Last I saw her she was still sitting there under the ping pong table. We never ended up throwing the signs in the barn. I remember Mary slipped in some mud on the way and got mad and sent us all home. I think we hung around in the parking lot at the plaza in the center of town for a while after that. It was across from the gas station and we saw our math teacher gassing up his car. It was summer and after midnight at this point but he was wearing a shirt and tie and khakis like he’d just come from school. He had a big rip in the back of his shirt — he knew it was there, he kept tugging at it. We talked about tailing him to see where he lived, but I went home.