Chapter 32

Chapter 32

“Do you think she’s a real witch?” Squeegy asked.

“Hmmmm, I guess, I’m not exactly sure what a real witch is.” We were talking slow again. It was the kind of conversations we’d have more often as the days passed. He’d ask a question, sit patiently as he studied my face, and I would think of the right answer. I felt an increasing responsibility during those talks. It was the weight of his trust. He could ask a question with such earnestness in his eyes that I felt compelled to answer very carefully. Often my first instinct would be to respond with a quick joke. He would laugh, but then I saw the emptiness in that. He’d laugh because it was funny, and because he was kind. But a shadow of sadness moved across his face. I saw that shadow a few times before I realized what had produced it.

I lay back as my high settled onto a plain of sameness, the steady buzz of grainy noise in my head that ran like a machine in the corner. I began to worry about Squeegy and the fact that he’d missed most of the last year of school. I remembered how upset he got when he thought that I’d implied that he was dumb.

“Squeegy, when was the last time you were in school?” I asked him.

“Hmmmm,” he thought as he looked up at the ceiling. “Welllll, I think it was the beginning of last year, like just after the summer when school started,” he answered.

I thought about that for a few minutes. “What grade were you in?”

“Seventh grade,” he said.

“Did you like school?”

“Hmmm, not really I guess.”

“What class did you like the best?”

“Hmmm,” he thought, “two of them!” he said with a smile. I knew I was in for something.

“Which ones?”

“Reading and P.E.!” he answered. He was close to laughing by then. He couldn’t wait until I asked him why he liked those two classes.

“Why those two classes?” I asked, trying to hide my own smile.

“Ha! Stories and boys!” he cried as he fell backward giggling.

“You’re too young to know whether you like girls or boys!” I said.

“I am not!” he retorted. When I didn’t argue with him, he felt he needed to prove it to me. “I always knew I liked boys,” he claimed.

“How?”

He sat up and went into his memory mode. He put his chin in his hands and thought carefully. “Welllll, when I was in first grade there was a girl who lived down my block, right?”

“Right”

“Wellll, her mom and my mom were best friends, right?”

“Right.”

“Soooo, we had to walk to school together. Her name was Cecilia, but everyone called her Celia, so that’s what I called her.”

“OK.”

“Her mom made us hold hands and everything, but as soon as we got down the block, I wouldn’t hold her hand anymore.”

“OK.”

“Thennnn, she told her mom that I wouldn’t hold her hand, and her mom told my mom, and my mom got mad, right?”

“Right.”

“Thennnn it was Valentine’s Day, and we had to give little candies and a card to the one we wanted to be our Valentine. We had to make a card at home, and in the morning we went and put the candy and the card on the desk of the kid we liked, right?”

He paused there. He was thinking hard. They were pieces of the past. They seemed to be scattered around inside him. They didn’t seem to be stitched together by anything. It was like watching him build a cabin with Lincoln Logs. After you’d built a few things with those shaped, brown sticks, you knew where to start, you knew at what height to leave room for a window. The long sticks went on the bottom, and you saved the shorter logs for the top, where you then had to make design decisions. Squeegy had all the pieces, but he hadn’t built a cabin, or a story, out of them often enough to be good at where to start and what comes next. Then it hit me. The reason was that no one had bothered to ask him. He simply hadn’t had any practice. His story was scattered around because it hadn’t been told. No one had cared.

“And thennnn, I took the card home and colored on it with crayons, right?”

“Right.”

“But see, I didn’t like Celia. I liked a boy named Marc.” He sat looking at me as if I would argue that point with him. “Thennn,” he said when I didn’t question him, “I colored the card with a drawing of Marc on his bike and made a heart on it.”

“I see.”

“And then my mom saw it!”

“Uh oh!”

Squeegy’s eyes got big, and he said, “Yup!”

“So, what happened?”

“Welllll, she said…um…she said the card has to be for a girl and not a boy. So I said that I didn’t like a girl, I liked a boy.”

“Oh man.”

“Yup! So she said I had to make a different card for Celia.”

“Jeez.”

“Yup! So I said I didn’t want to make a card for Celia. I liked Marc and he liked me, and I wanted to give him the card and the candy, even after I already ate some of the candy.” He sat and thought for a minute, his eyes searching the ceiling for the memory that fit on top of the last one, just below where the window should be.

“Soooo, my mom threw Marc’s card in the trash can and made me make a new one for Celia.”

“Ouch!”

“Yup, but guess what?”

“What?”

“OK, I drew a picture of Celia on the new card with a pile of dog shit on her head, haha!”

“No way!”

“Yup, and when my mom saw it, she thought it was a crown for the princess, haha! But it was really dog shit, haha!”

“Squeegy, you’re nuts!”

“Yup,” he agreed giggling, “and then I took Marc’s card from the trash, and on Valentine’s Day I gave them each a card: Marc on his bike and Celia with a pile of dog shit on her head! Oh,” he continued, “and Marc got the rest of the candy!”

We lay there laughing for a while. I’m not sure if it was the weed, but I could clearly picture Squeegy’s mom in her horror, and the two cards with their first graders drawings on them.

“Why did you like Marc so much?” I asked when all had gone quiet again.

“Hmmmm,” he answered, “because he was nice, and cute, and he had blue eyes like yours. And cuz when we played at recess, he kissed me, and held my hand when no one could see. And in class he looked at me and smiled. And when we took naps, he wanted to be next to me, and I wanted to be next to him.”

He sat looking at me as if that was all the reason he needed. He was waiting for a debate, and I didn’t have one to give him. In the first grade, that was pretty much all you needed to have a crush on someone. How could anyone argue with that?

He yawned and it was contagious. I sat and watched him as his eyes teared and he wobbled a little from side to side. I knew he wanted to take a nap, and I also knew that it was somehow my job to suggest it. There was more responsibility…he was trusting me for knowledge, and increasingly waiting for me to take the lead. I thought of what Joe had said about him longing for a big brother, or a daddy, someone who would take care of him.

“Let’s lie down,” I suggested.

He smiled and said, “OK.”

I got up and pulled my shirt off as he arranged the blankets just how he liked them. “Do you need to pee?” I asked.

“Yeah, I suppose,” he said as he scampered off. I took off my shoes and jeans and crawled under the blanket.

He flushed, returned, and stood looking down at me. “James?” he asked.

“Yeah?”

“After we take a nap, do you think…um…we can…you can read me some stories?”

“We’ll see, Squeegy. We’ll sure try, alright?”

He smiled and stripped in seconds. He found his comfort against me. Again we fit, like the notches in the Lincoln Logs, we were made for each other. As his skin became mine and my lips found the wonder of his neck, his scent filled my lungs. His fingers laced between mine, my hand tracing his memories across his belly, and I guessed at why he was so eager to give himself to someone, to me.

Maybe he didn’t yet realize what he had lost with how he had grown up. He had no real family, no parents, no brothers, no sisters, no consistency, not even a Grandpa like mine. But I thought that somehow, beneath all the scattered memories, he somehow figured out that he didn’t have much childhood time left. It had to be instinctual. Maybe he, if he found the right person to trust, could salvage what childhood there was left for him. Maybe he could push against and test reality. Maybe he could be there, in the now, when it was needed, but also be free to fade away into a boy’s world, as he looked back now and then to make sure someone was there watching out for him. Maybe if I worked really hard at looking out for him, he could dip his feet in the cool waters of that blissful, sing-song world, a world which was supple and forgiving and full of wonder. I pulled him into me and stroked his hand with my thumb as he took deep breaths of the space between then and now.

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© 2003, 2012 Tristan Strangebrew