me.”
Justin cocked his head to the side. “Follow me,” he said.
Flattered by the invitation, I went with him to the art room, shut up for the evening. Justin calmly unlocked the door. How did he have the key? “Ms. Hunter likes football players. My buddy Marlin made us all copies.”
Inside, we sat there with the lights out, swiveling on the metal stools and staring at the paint-speckled floor, like a Jackson Pollock painting. “Just hide out here until your karate class is over,” said Justin.
“Don’t you have to be somewhere?” I asked, but I didn’t want him to go.
“It can wait.” He had a lean, hungry look that I liked. I felt uncomfortable on my hard stool, but I didn’t dare move, or do anything that might disturb the moment.
“Want to listen to something?” he asked and pulled out a tape out of his briefcase. The tape was marked on the front: MIX. “This is Nirvana,” he said.
The band’s name, Nirvana, made me think the music would be soothing, New Agey, like Enya. But the song announced itself with a brief guitar snarl, followed by a fury of driving drumbeats and metal. I didn’t usually like loud metal music—it sounded too much like violence—but this song didn’t seem to qualify exactly as heavy metal, with all the sounds fitting together in a pattern. It was more like separate noises, each with its own direction, like the paint splatters on the art room floor.
Just as I got used to it, the noisy part died down, and Kurt Cobain began to sing.
What first caught my attention was the ache in his voice. First he’d mumble, even growl for an unintelligible line or two, then he’d fling out the next few words in a trembling, cracked yelp edged with a nervous resentment, or draw out words with a strange sarcasm. He held a sarcastic yowl for several strained seconds that felt more like ages, giving them a mysterious, eerie emphasis. His voice sounded both tired and anxious, as if he’d been ignored all his life and was finally sick of it. Why will no one listen?
Justin drummed his silver pen against one of the tables along with the song. I wanted to tell him to stop so I could hear everything. I didn’t want to miss a note of it.
The chorus was a storm of guitars, drums, and Kurt Cobain’s ragged yowl. I made out a few words in flashes, like “contagious” and “stupid.” But I didn’t need the words to know what Kurt was feeling, an emotion I too had felt, though I couldn’t name it just then. Yes, I too have been as desperate as you. I was thinking of how I felt right after Mark, when my mother found out and she folded me in her arms, and I grabbed her tightly, rubbed my cheek against her warm sweater, yet it didn’t help.
When Justin shut off the tape, I was perched on the edge of my chair, my brain tingling. I’d never heard a pop song like this, complex like a work of art, with a deep emotional pull like a novel or a movie. By comparison, everything else on the radio sounded candy-coated and fake.
I realized what that feeling was, the one Kurt was singing about. It was anger.
Justin was staring at me, waiting for me to speak. He must have felt as I did about the song, and I wanted so desperately to say something meaningful, important.
“Uh, are they British?” I asked.
“No, they’re American. But not commercial.” He said the word “commercial” with a pained look on his face.
All I could think of was, “Neat.”
“Neat?” he said.
My stomach sank. I’d messed this up. “Why? Was that wrong?”
“No. You never get anything wrong. You’re an intelligent young man.” He ejected the tape from the stereo.
“Why?” I asked. “Wait, what did I do?”
“That’s all I got. I didn’t bring any Julie Andrews to play you,” he said, and left.
I sat alone and replayed the conversation. What else could I have said? Cool. Cool beans? No, just cool. And “cool” was supposed to be my new word! Why couldn’t I have remembered it? I could even have said nice, good, great, anything but neat.
Maybe I could run after him, or find him tomorrow and say I’d been taking some kind of medication that had messed with my head. “Neat,” I’d say. “Can you believe I said that?” And then we’d laugh together about it. Yes, that might work.
I got off the stool and went to the parking lot to find my mother, who was livid.
My punishment and reward were the same: I was grounded for a week, which wasn’t much of a punishment since I never went anywhere anyway. But first, I had to go to the United Studios of Self-Defense and apologize to Brad for dropping out. While my mother waited in the car, Brad stood in front of his dojo, dressed in his black uniform. “I never pegged you for a quitter,” he said, arms folded. The other boys were laughing on the mat behind him, tumbling all over each other, digging elbows and knees into ribs.
“I guess you’re right, that’s what I am,” I said.
“They still picking on you in school?” he said.
“No,” I said, then added, “I have a friend there.”
“Sorry I couldn’t help you more.” As he shook my hand goodbye, he said, “You’ve got nice soft hands. A real gentleman. Anyone can see that.”
On the way home, Mom said that Brad was disappointed to lose me.
“He probably didn’t want to lose a paying customer,” I said.
“That’s a terrible thing to say,” she said. “He really liked you. Didn’t you know?”
What she was saying didn’t seem possible. I hadn’t even made yellow belt. Still, now that I thought about it, Brad had been nice about my leaving. Maybe there was more to the guy than I’d given him credit for. Maybe I’d dropped out of karate too soon.
Oh, well. I was free now, and I wasn’t going back.
TWO
A COUPLE OF HOURS BEFORE THE basketball game, Ari goes for an extra run. He hates running, but he tells himself that if he runs for half an hour four times a week before trooping off to campus to teach Special Topics in Medieval History or Women of the Middle Ages: Feminism’s First Wave?, then he’s allowed the occasional doughnut for breakfast. As a result, he has knee trouble and a small potbelly.
What the hell is he going to do about M? He has to make some kind of decision, the right one, the ethical one. But how can he ruin the man he once believed he’d be spending the rest of his life with? E. M. Forster used to say if forced to choose between betraying my friend or my country, I hope I have the guts to betray my country. Yet this doesn’t seem to be the same kind of situation. So what is he going to do? For the time being, he keeps on running.
Ari’s neighborhood, called “the Park,” is a pleasant enough area northeast of DC that was once working class but is now the kind of place where residents recycle and buy raw water at Whole Foods. The sidewalks are marked with children’s chalk drawings of hearts, moons, and stars that wash out with
