Page 29 of How to Hide in Plain Sight
Speedy lifts me from his lap and places me on the spotter’s bench. He looks me squarely in the face. His eyes are withdrawn, as if expecting pain. “What are you talking about, Eliot?”
I swallow. Try not to look away. “Two years ago…um…” Admitting to past wrongdoing is humiliating, but for some reason, admitting tolong-past wrongdoing, the likes of which you already got away with, is worse. “Two years ago, you dropped me off at soccer practice.”
He blinks. “Yes…which time? I did that three times a week.”
“I don’t remember. Just…one time. One time, you dropped me off at soccer practice, and then you picked me up afterward.”
“Okay…”
“And I acted like it was just any other day, like I’d gone out to the field and practiced and come back and met you in the parking lot. And then we went home and had dinner and I never said anything—to you or to Mom. When you asked me how practice was, I said good, or something. But that wasn’t the truth.” I’m speaking too much. Babbling, really. But they’re comforting, the extra words. Like a cushion for the coming fall. I stuff my sentences with as many as I can—a technique I’ll use thousands of times in the future. “The truth is that I never went to practice at all. I skipped. You know the lounge in the rec center, the one with the TV and the couches and the vending machines? Well, I sat in that lounge, and Ibought myself a bunch of Snickers bars, and I ate Snickers bars and watchedJohnny Bravofor two hours. Then I went out to the parking lot and got in your car and pretended I went to practice.”
I catch my breath. Dad stares at me, his mouth slightly agape.
I’ve never gotten in serious trouble with my parents. There were little things, of course. White lies and childish mistakes. But nothing close to the drop-everything-and-scream fights I’d witnessed between them and my other siblings. I saw it when Karma came home three hours past curfew. I saw it when Clarence drank too much at Thanksgiving and called Mom anignorant child. Even Taz—perfect Taz—I saw it when he threw a baseball into the family portrait that hangs over the fireplace, sending it to the floor in a great spray of glass and metal. I saw all of it, and let me tell you—an angry Speedy is a terrifying Speedy. And I have officially thrown myself before the fire.
I look down. I wait. The flames, when they come, will be painful. I can only pray their heat will be strong enough to burn my guilt away.
Then, from the driver’s seat, my father starts to laugh.
—
SPEEDY BECOMES MY JUDGE ANDjury. In the course of just a few weeks, I confess no less than twenty or thirty crimes to him. Each time, he ruffles my hair awkwardly and tells me not to worry. “You’re a good kid, Eliot. A good kid.”
A good kid?I want to scream.Haven’t you been listening?
—
AS HARD AS IT ISto believe, although I’ve gone to pieces on the inside, on the outside, life continues as normal. I eat eggs in the breakfast nook. I watchHannah Montanaon the Big Blue Couch. I puzzle out the nuances of algebra with Manuel, who has turned out to bealmost embarrassingly brilliant. Every day, I crane my neck to catch a glimpse of his worksheets and find he’s five or six problems ahead of me.
“Oye,” I whisper. “How the hell do you do that?”
—
ONCE I EXHAUST THE LISTof past lies to apologize for, you’d think the Worries would go away. But they don’t. They just change shape.
It’s Mile Day in gym class, a weekly event in which the entire fifth grade class is forced to run four times around cones spaced eight hundred meters in circumference. I’m behind Caroline Whittler, a girl I’ve known since kindergarten who once told me that a blow job is when a boy sticks his penis into an air duct. But I’m not thinking about that story as I follow her around the cones. I’m just spacing out, staring at her back. Staring at her butt. It’s a nice butt, I think. All bouncy and round.
Then I stop.
Not running—I stop my train of thought.
Oh my God, I realize.You just admired Caroline Whittler’s butt. Are you a lesbian?
No, I tell myself. I don’tthinkso…I mean—no. Of course not.
But are you sure?
No. Look. I’ll prove it. I’ll just check a few parts of my body to make sure I don’t feel any attraction to her. I’ll check my gut…feels a little tight, like it does when I have a crush, but it’s not the same kind of tight. It’s not all deep and fuzzy. Now I’ll check downthere, the naughty place, the one thattrulydictates to whom you are attracted, and surely I’ll find nothing, only emptiness, only calm…
But then…
Oh God.
What was that?
Was that a…pulse? An unbidden clench of the muscles, like the kind that happens inside me when I rub my pelvis against a pillow in just the right way for just the right amount of time?
Yes. Yes, it was. That was a pulse.
