I stand there for a minute and locate my invisible roll of plastic wrap and cover myself in it again—the barrier that keeps me from them. The armor that protects me from the whole f**king world. The polyethylene that keeps the tears in.
Register #1 Girl looks at me as I walk in the door and she has that look on her face like she wants to cry, too. I ignore her and go back to register #7. I make a pact with myself to never let anyone hug me again.
9
I’M STILL WEARING my brand-new hockey jersey when I get in the house. I bought it so I don’t have to take any shit, just like the hug woman. I never got her name. I will never be able to see ketchup again without thinking about her.
Dinner is long over, but the house still smells of roast chicken and homemade gravy. Dad is in his man cave, doing whatever he does in there. Probably drinking. Tasha and her rat boy are downstairs blasting some awful country-and-western song and singing along.
Mom is at the kitchen table sawing off the bottoms of moisturizer bottles to use the inch and a half that never gets pumped up by the too-short pump straws.
She’s wearing safety glasses, wielding an electric knife—like the kind you slice turkey with. There are eight moisturizer bottles on the table, and next to them is a tub. She’s filling it with the lotion she gets out of the bottles that she’s sawing.
This is the shit she cares about. Not what Real Nanny told her about being fair and equal to all of her children. Not the twenty-one-year-old daughter getting planked in her basement and becoming more dependent by the day. I admit, part of me wants to take the electric knife and, well, you know.
She waves. I wave back and go upstairs to my room, where I can unsee what I just saw.
GERALD’S HAPPY PLACE. That’s what the sign on my door says. GERALD’S HAPPY PLACE. I’ve had that there since I was thirteen and got suspended the first time for fighting. I mauled this kid’s face. Tom something.
Tom had it coming.
Back then, Tasha was still off pretending she was in college and Lisi was in high school while I was stuck in middle school with no one to protect me from all the ass**les who called me the Crapper all day.
So I took a bite out of Tom What’s-His-Name’s face. Scarred forever. Mauled by a crazy, untamed warrior.
I mauled him so bad they sent me straight to Roger, the anger management guru. That first day, he asked me where I was happiest. I didn’t tell him about Gersday. I just said, “My room.” So we made this sign and I hung it on my door.
I guess I am happier here. I have my own bathroom with a shower. I have a loud stereo. A computer. An Internet connection. Everything you need to separate yourself from everyone else.
Except: Tasha still lives in the basement. And Mom still never wanted me as much as she wanted that inch of moisturizer at the bottom of those bottles.
10
HERE’S HOW I handle Monday mornings. I put on my headphones and listen to a crazy playlist of tribal drumming from Native American powwows. Lisi got it for me at a powwow she went to with her stoner boyfriend last year.
I listen to it from the minute I pack my backpack to the minute I park in the school parking lot. If I’m early, I even sit there and listen until the very last minute. Then I put on imaginary war paint. Three red lines under my eyes. One black stripe across my face. The same red stripes down my arms. One red stripe from my bottom lip down my chin. I have already decided that if I ever graduate from this shithole, I will wear the real paint on graduation day.
When I go into school, I am a warrior. I’m noble. Fair. I’m the chief of my own tribe. I could scalp you. I could be dangerous. But I choose not to, which is why I’m the chief.
Up until this year, things were different. I wasn’t choosing anything. I still had all Roger’s bad anger words in my vocabulary—should, have to, deserve. I was still out of control.
It wasn’t just Tom. There were others, too. The broken arm in freshman year. And nose. And that time I tried to crush a kid’s neck last year. I memorized the walls of the middle school principal’s office. I memorized every inch of the high school’s in-school suspension room. I memorized every time they told me I had one more chance. That was five chances ago.
Roger was never impressed. Now he is, though. Because now I know about my triggers and how to block them all out. I put on my war paint and my feathers and I walk into high school and play chief.
“Hey, Gerald. I heard we won yesterday.” That’s the kid whose locker is next to mine. He’s a cool kid, pretty much. Plays in the jazz band and smokes a lot of pot.
“Three to one,” I say.
“Nice jersey,” he says.
I look down at my jersey and remember the hockey lady and how this is my not-taking-any-shit jersey. It’s like I’ve got a double layer of chief on today.
“Thanks.”
He nods and goes to his homeroom. I get my books and head to Mr. Fletcher’s room. That’s the SPED room to everyone else.
“Hey, Gerald!”
“Hi, Gerald!”
I wave and look at the floor.
“Nice shirt, Gerald!”
All you dipshits who think the SPED room is full of half-wits are wrong. This is the best room in school because no one gives a shit about how bad you are or how dumb you are or how you limp or stutter or how you can’t think right because you spent most of your childhood crying in your bedroom because you were dubbed the Crapper before you ever even got to first grade.
No one cares what clothes you wear, what brand name your shoes are, how rich your family is, or how many songs you’ve uploaded to your iPod. No one cares about my car. No one cares about my gated community. No one cares about my past. They know, I’m sure, but no one has ever mentioned it, and if someone did, I think Mr. Fletcher would probably shut them up faster than they could even say it.
Mr. Fletcher is a real chief. Compared to him, I’m like a chief in training, because he has patience that I will never have—dealing with violent little ass**les like me, who don’t need to be in his classroom, and then helping Deirdre do everything because she’s got cerebral palsy. And some days Jenny starts having a fit and throwing shit around and he has to calm her and get her to the nurse for whatever the nurse does to make her normal again.
“Gerald, are you still working out in that gym?” Jenny asks me. “Because you’re getting bigger every time I see you.”
“Yeah. Man, you’re buff,” Karen says.
“Oh my god, you guys. Shut up!” That’s Kelly—he’s a guy but he’s named Kelly, which is just messed up, considering he’s been slow since birth. Seriously. If you have a slow kid, don’t give him a girl’s name. Right?