Life Is Funny Read online

  I go to the same classes almost every period with the same thirty kids. Most of them are white, even though the hallway seems pretty mixed.

  “I hope you’re smart,” some girl tells me during second period. “Because you’re in one of the smart classes.”

  “Shut up, Marcy,” this freckly kid tells her. “Who’re you?” he goes to me.

  His name is Josh. He’s okay. He’s got some friend he keeps talking about in another smart class named Daniel and a girlfriend in that other class, too. His father owns an electronics store, and his mother’s an office manager, whatever that means, and he’s got a younger brother named Carl.

  “What’s your dad do?” he asks me, fourth period.

  “Computer programmer,” I go.

  “What about your mom?”

  “When’s lunch?” I ask, because I’m not in the mood to explain “wedding consultant.”

  Lunch is at eleven fifty-three, and it lasts until twelve thirty-seven. I sit with Josh, his friend Daniel, and Josh’s girlfriend, whose name is Katy. They ask a lot of questions. When they find out my parents bought a house in the Hamptons, along with our Brooklyn brownstone, they get stupid.

  “So you’re rich, right?” Daniel goes.

  “Don’t be rude,” the girlfriend says. She swats his arm.

  “Why aren’t you at Garfield Union?” Josh goes.

  That’s some private school that wouldn’t let me in so late in the year but already charged my dad for next September. Only I don’t let Josh know that. I just shrug, like I’m not even really listening.

  When the bell rings, I spot the kid from the garage heading toward Daniel’s and Katy’s classroom. He’s not greasy at all anymore, and he’s surrounded by girls. You can tell he’s used to it. He doesn’t act all loud and idiotic, the way most guys would. He acts the way I’d like to if girls noticed me. Kind of calm. Kind of like he’s older or something.

  “You’re the Jag kid, right?” he says as we pass in the hallway.

  “With the asshole father,” I tell him.

  He waits a second, looking at me the way his father looked at the Jag the other day, and then he goes, “Nice car.”

  * * *

  I see him again in gym.

  All the smart classes and one special ed class have gym at the same time. The smart kids are definitely mostly white. The special ed kids are mostly black or Spanish. Everyone in my ethics class back in Connecticut would go nuts over that. They’d talk about racism and injustice and everything. Even though there was only about one poor kid and three blacks in that whole district, and no Spanish students at all.

  “Sam,” this garage kid goes, nodding at me. We’ve landed in roll call lines next to each other. Josh and Daniel and Katy are behind us somewhere. We have to stand in a certain formation, so now the girls can’t crowd around Sam, the way they did during lunch.

  “Drew,” I go, nodding back.

  “Anybody jump you yet?” he asks.

  I’ve never been in a fight in my life. I guess he can tell. I guess everybody can.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he goes. “You’re big. There’s only a month left. They’ll probably leave you alone.”

  He’s wrong. Some kid who looks white but has dreadlocks starts with me before fifth period.

  “Yo, Gap,” he goes, shoving me hard. “Watch where the fuck you’re going.”

  I wasn’t anywhere near him. I look around for Josh, who was right there a second ago, but now he’s acting like he doesn’t know me. I try to keep moving, but Dreadlocks blocks my way.

  “Yo, Gap,” he goes again, getting real close in my face. “You want to fight?” He jabs me hard with the heel of his palm. It makes me stumble backward a little. I know my face is red as anything. I know I look like a total dork.

  “Banana Republic,” I mumble.

  “Fight,” someone yells. “Fight!”

  “I said,” he goes, jabbing me again, “you want to fight?”

  “Not really,” I tell him.

  A bunch of kids start laughing like maniacs and going, “Ooohhh.”

  “You a fag?” the kid goes. “You talking like a fag. You a fag?”

  “Are you?” I go.

  “You calling me a fag!” he screams. If I weren’t scared so shitless, I’d laugh. He knocks me with both hands, and my books fall all over the place.

  “Just leave him alone, Dean,” I hear someone say. It’s Josh’s girlfriend, Katy. She’s standing with Josh, whose freckles look orange now for some reason.

  “Shut up, bitch,” Dreadlocks Dean goes.

  Katy blushes and looks like a dork, too. I can tell she’s scared. I guess the kids in the smart classes don’t fight very much.

  “Don’t call her a bitch,” I go.

  “Yo, cunt,” he goes, to Katy. “Pick up your man’s books, cunt.”

  I’m pretty sure that’s the last thing that happens before I nail him.

  * * *

  Seeing a fight in real life is different from seeing a fight on TV. On TV it looks cool. Everything happens in an order you can follow. Everything looks smooth, even for the guy who’s losing. There’s a punch, and then a kick, and then a headlock, and then maybe another punch. There’s thuds and shouts that match what you see. Even when things get gory, even when somebody’s nose starts to gush or someone’s getting drowned in a toilet bowl, it all sort of looks organized. Set, in a way. Like a dance.

  But in real life there’s no rhythm. In real life nobody’s graceful. Nobody’s smooth. There’s just clumsiness and mostly quiet. Nobody makes much noise at all. People slip and miss their punch and lose their balance and look like idiots. Like those old, silent movies, with a bunch of grown adults skidding on banana peels, acting like fools.

  What surprises me is that when you’re in the fight, you don’t see anything. Not the graceful TV kind of thing or the clumsy real-life thing. What surprises me is that when you’re in the fight, you lose track of time and space, almost like you’re asleep or maybe even dead, and you just feel this weird ache in your arms while you use them to bash the other guy’s head on the ground, and then this relief when someone finally makes you stop and you can rest again.

  * * *

  “Your mother says she’s sick,” the principal’s secretary tells me. I’ve got an ice pack on my eye. I don’t remember when Dreadlocks Dean punched it, but it’s killing me now, so I guess he got a good one in. “She says she’s sending your father.”

  “Will Dean be okay?” I ask.

  “Paramedics said it was probably a mild concussion.”

  When I saw the ambulance, I freaked out. I thought I’d killed him.

  “I’m really sorry,” I say, even though I didn’t do anything to her. “I’ve never been in a fight before.”

  “That’s a laugh,” she goes.

  “I swear.”

  * * *

  My father stays quiet until I’m getting out of the Range Rover, in front of our house. The goofy-faced neighbor kid stares at us from his stoop.

  “So what happened?” my dad finally asks.

  “Some kid called you an asshole,” I tell him, slamming the door.

  “Seems like you could have gotten out of that one,” he yells through the window, but I can tell from his smirk that he’s psyched. A UPS truck behind him starts to honk, and he honks back and then drives away.

  The neighbor kid stares at me while I jiggle our lock. He’s passing a basketball fast around his middle, hands making little slapping noises each time they hit.

  “Hi.” He smiles. He’s always smiling.

  “Hi, Gingerbread,” I say.

  “What are you doing home?” Slap, slap, slap.

  “I kind of got into a fight,” I say. “What are you?”

  “I’m kind of sick,” he tells me. He’s got that ball moving so fast it blurs in with his hands.

  “You don’t look sick,” I say.

  “Your eye is puffed up,” he goes. Slap, slap, slap.

&
nbsp; * * *

  My mother coats a cucumber slice in baking soda and makes me hold it over my eye. Hers are matching colors now. Sort of a yellowish gray.

  “Is this what you use?” I ask her.

  “Don’t be fresh,” she says.

  I wasn’t trying to be.

  * * *

  Josh acts like he never left my ass out to dry. “That Dean kid is such a dick,” he tells me. “He’s in a million fights. He’s always getting suspended.”

  “Why don’t they just kick him out?”

  “Then they’d have to kick out about a hundred kids. You only get kicked out if you have a weapon.”

  “A weapon?” I want to go back to Connecticut.

  “Yeah. You know. Like a box cutter.”

  “You mean I could have gotten slashed?”

  “How many fights have you been in?” he asks.

  “None,” I tell him.

  “Very funny,” he goes.

  “I swear.”

  Later I take a long time in the bathroom until I’m pretty sure he and Daniel won’t wait for me anymore. I jog out the boys’ room door and nearly mow over Sam.

  “Sorry,” I say.

  “Yo. You want to fight?” he goes, imitating Dreadlocks. I guess everyone knows about yesterday.

  I don’t answer, and we both keep walking.

  “Lunch is the other way,” he tells me.

  “So where are you going?” I ask.

  We don’t say a word until we’re sitting down on the back school steps.

  “I’d give anything to drive your dad’s car,” he says after a while.

  “Me, too.”

  We get quiet again. Sam is cool to be around, especially after Josh, who never shuts up. In Connecticut I only hung out with this one guy, Shep. I liked him because he was quiet, too. He was sort of not-too-bright quiet, where Sam seems pretty smart, but I liked Shep. He never invited me over, so I never had to bring him to my house.

  “I guess you miss wherever you came from,” Sam goes.

  I shrug.

  “I miss Pennsylvania sometimes,” he says.

  “You lived in Pennsylvania?” I ask.

  “Live. In the summers. With my great-aunt and uncle. And my mom, if she can swing it.”

  “Why? Where is she the rest of the time?”

  “Europe, mostly. She’s an artist.”

  I never knew anybody whose mother was an artist. I never knew anybody who only sees his mom just sometimes either. Never, or on weekends maybe, but not just sometimes.

  “How’d an artist end up with a mechanic?” I ask, before I even think about how that sounds. I know I turn red as anything again. Talk about rude.

  But Sam doesn’t seem fazed. “My dad was her slumming fling,” he goes.

  I don’t know what a slumming fling is, so I stay quiet and pretend that I do. But I guess Sam figures it out.

  “My mom’s white,” he explains. “She liked my dad a lot, but mostly she just thought he was interesting. You know. An exhibit from the other side.”

  “Oh,” I go. I still don’t really get it, so I change the subject. “Why aren’t you eating?”

  “Why aren’t you?”

  I shrug, and then we sit awhile without saying anything. Then he goes, “Where’d you learn to fight like that anyway?”

  I start to shrug again, but then I stop. “I guess from my dad,” I say, which, really, is the truth.

  * * *

  I help my mother put away the dishes that go on the highest shelves.

  While she’s handing me the champagne glasses, she goes, “You’re taller than I am now.”

  It’s true. Her nose is only as high as my chin. I stare at her messed-up face, and she turns away fast.

  “Why do you put up with it?” I ask.

  “I don’t want to talk about that.”

  I set the champagne glasses on the counter. They’re rimmed in gold, and they used to belong to her grandmother. Big deal.

  “I want to talk about it,” I go. The last time I did this was three years ago. I was eleven, and she slapped me.

  “Stop it, Drew,” she says.

  “Why don’t you just divorce him or something?”

  “I don’t want to divorce him,” she tells me. “It’s none of your business.”

  “How come you never call the cops?”

  “I don’t need the police,” she goes, getting loud. “Just leave it alone!”

  “People are going to notice it here,” I tell her. “It’s not like Connecticut, where you can hide out all the time. Where people pretend everything’s fine all the time.”

  “I said stop it, Drew!”

  “What are you going to do?” I ask her, mean. “Hit me?”

  * * *

  My dad finds me in our new family room with the TV on fuzz. “What’s the matter with you?” he goes.

  I feel like shit, that’s what, I could tell him. For the way I made Mom look today. For being a dick to her. For never knowing the right thing to do.

  “What time is it?” I ask him.

  “Late. Shouldn’t you be asleep?” He takes the remote and zaps the TV off.

  I shrug. He leans in to examine my eye.

  “Does it hurt?” His tie dangles near my mouth. I have this urge to bite it.

  “Not really,” I tell him.

  “Wait here,” he goes, and he disappears into the kitchen.

  I hear him banging around in there, and when he comes back, his shoes and tie are off, and he’s got two mugs. At first I think he’s brought me a beer, but mine is just soda. He flops down on the couch and stuffs a pillow behind his head.

  “Look,” he goes, “I’m sorry about your school situation.”

  I take a sip of my soda, which is flat. My mother likes it that way, so she always leaves the tops off the bottles.

  “I wouldn’t care if you just missed the last month, but they tell me that’s against the law.”

  So’s beating up your wife, I think.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I tell him instead.

  “I’m not worried,” he goes. Then he sighs. “Changes can be hard,” he says. “We moved at a bad time. I know that. I’m sorry.”

  I stay quiet and stare at his feet. There’s a little hole in his sock under the big toe. A hair is sticking out of it.

  “You know what I was thinking about today?” he asks me after a while.

  “What?”

  “I was thinking about that time we went camping. Just me and you. Remember the swing?”

  It was Fourth of July weekend. I was about eight. We had a two-man tent and trail mix with M&M’s in it. We each had a canteen and a sleeping bag. We used my mom’s Skin-So-Soft oil to keep away the bugs and smelled like a couple of fifteen-year-old girls, according to my dad.

  There was this lake, and a hill by the lake with a rope swing hanging from a branch higher than the roof of our house. There were about a million kids climbing up that muddy bank, waiting on line to fly off the rope. When you ran with it, the pebbly muck under your feet cut up your toes, but then you’d be sailing through the air, flying, floating, and you’d let go at the scariest, highest minute, and you’d fall about a zillion miles, and the water would suck you down in this freezing gulp, and you’d swallow a little of it from your Tarzan scream, or maybe from laughing, and it tasted like leftover Popsicle stick after the ice cream’s been licked off.

  My dad was the only grown-up in that line. He was the only father racing up the slope and throwing himself over the lake, letting out Tarzan calls and making huge splashes. The only adult who’d take me, and any other kids who weren’t too scared, tucked under his arm like a football, for a two-at-a-time leap and drop.

  His skin was slippery with lake water and sweat, and he smelled like old, clean undershirts, and he held you rough, his fingers gripping you tight enough to leave marks up and down your side by the end of the day. At the last minute, your nose squished into his chest, your ears sloshing with water and s
peed, glimmers of light flashing through the cracks between your head and his body, he’d lift and shove you away from him hard, so you wouldn’t smash into each other on the way down, and you’d fall, screaming bloody murder and flailing to find the right way up before you hit the water.

  “We had a great time, didn’t we?” he goes.

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “I was thinking, here you are about to start tenth grade, and we haven’t done anything just you and me since then. Just father and son.”

  “Uh huh,” I go.

  “That’s important,” he tells me. “That father and son stuff.”

  “Uh huh,” I go.

  He wiggles his toes and then lifts his head up a little to get a better look at me.

  “What I’m trying to say to you,” he says, “is that I remember being your age like it was yesterday, and it sucked. And I didn’t have anyone to talk to, and I could have used someone.” He sits up now and takes a long swig from his mug. Then he burps. “So I just want you to know, you can come to me. I want you to come to me.”

  The reason why it was just us alone that July Fourth was that he’d beaten her up a few days before. She had bruises all over, so she couldn’t go out.

  I remember wanting so bad for him never to come out of the water after a drop. Wanting him to be drowned and dead, down deep in the swampy bottom, so he’d never hit her again. And I remember feeling unbelievably guilty for being so happy when he’d pop up, spitting and whipping his wet hair out of his eyes, the coolest, best, most fun dad ever to fly me out in space higher and faster than I ever could have gone on my own.

  * * *

  Sam shows me around his dad’s shop.

  “Cálmate, Papi,” he says to his father, who doesn’t look so psyched to see me at first. “El es cool. No es como su padre.”

  They fix about twelve cars at once. Sam tells me his dad does a lot of it, but they have three mechanics—two Puerto Ricans and one guy from Albania who was a college math professor back home but can’t find work here. Sam mostly does body repairs, not engine work. But I think he knows more than he’s letting on.

  “When it’s fixed, let’s drive it,” I tell him, while we stand around the Jag. The wheels are off, and it’s hiked up on one of those poles.

  “Yeah, right,” Sam goes.