TWENTY-EIGHT
My target suddenly makes an appearance in Mrs. Beal Makes Her Perverted Son His Last Meal—there he is on the kitchen’s bay-window drive-in movie screen.
I start to sweat.
Enemy collateral target known as “Asher’s mother” gives the primary target a kiss on the cheek.
Primary target says something before disappearing.
Primary target looks like the all-American next-door boy in the movie—like the kid you’d pick to take your daughter to the prom. The dutiful-son lie plastered all over that drive-in movie screen gets my heart pumping machine-gun blood drops that race through my veins as I turn the P-38 safety off with my thumb and finger the trigger.62
Every inch of my skin is slick with sweat, even though it’s probably less than forty degrees out. A minute ago I was shivering, but now I fight an urge to take off my shirt—that’s how hot I feel. It’s like I swallowed the sun.
Primary target’s bedroom light comes on a second later, which is supposed to be my cue to move and put the plan into action, but my feet remain rooted to the ground.
Primary target flicks on his computer and his face glows like an alien.
Kill the alien, I think.
Remember what he did to you.
You have every right.
He’s not human.
He’s a thing.
A target.
Remember to use your military training—what you gleaned from the Internet.
I leave my body and my essence floats up maybe fifteen feet above my head so that I am looking down on the flesh and bones and blood—the matter—I used to inhabit.
I can’t see my expression because of the Bogart hat, but my right arm is outstretched and the P-38 is pointed at the primary target.
My legs don’t walk, but I start to glide across the backyard, through the darkness, light as a ghost.
I look like a rigid lowercase r being pulled across ice.
What’s pulling me? I think as I hover through the stiff winter air looking down, which is when I realize my essence is being pulled too—I’m sort of following my flesh like a helium birthday balloon tied to a little kid’s wrist.63
I’m standing in the target’s window now, remembering what he did to me in that very bedroom so many times.
How confused I felt.
How I wanted it to stop.
How he intimidated me.
How he psychologically tricked me.
How he said if I stopped doing what we were doing he’d tell people in great detail all about what we had done together and then everyone would call me a faggot and maybe even beat the shit out of me.
People would believe him and not me, when he said I made him do it.
And how if I stopped doing what he wanted me to do he’d post the video he secretly made of us with his computer camera that I didn’t know was on.
The first time, he said his uncle had shown him how to feel good in a way I wouldn’t believe.
I wanted to feel good.
Who doesn’t?
We were almost twelve.
We were wrestling WWE-style.
Just messing around.
I had this ski mask I’d wear and pretend I was Rey Mysterio.
He was always John Cena.
And then we weren’t wrestling.
We were doing something I didn’t understand—something exciting, dangerous.
Something I wasn’t ready for—something I didn’t really want.
We were pretending—or were we?
Then Asher wanted to wrestle all the time.
I started asking questions—trying to figure out what was happening.
Asher told me not to ask questions—to keep what happened between us, not to think about it too much—and he looked mean when he said it, like someone I didn’t know, not like a friend at all.
The more it happened, the less friendly he got.
It went on for two years.
I didn’t want to lose my friend.
Haven’t you ever done things you didn’t want to do just to keep a friend?
I tried to avoid Asher’s bedroom—being alone with Asher period—but he was persistent, always asking me to wrestle, which became the code word.
Then I just started making up excuses—telling Asher I couldn’t hang out because I had homework, or my mom had grounded me, or whatever. He got the hint quick, which is when he started to threaten me.
It ended with a fistfight—Asher beating the shit out of me because I refused to “keep wrestling.”
He was always stronger, bigger.
I didn’t care about the beating.
And my not caring freed me.
When I made it clear that he’d have to give me regular black eyes—wounds that would get people asking a lot of questions—to keep it going, that’s when it stopped.
Maybe that’s when I became a man.
When my parents asked about the bruises, I told them Asher and I had another fight.
They didn’t ask any follow-up questions.
Maybe because they suspected I was gay.
I think I tried to tell Linda once, but she refused to believe it and changed the subject. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I was probably indirect, because how can you be direct about shit like that when you’re just going through puberty? Sometimes I remember her laughing, like I had told a joke. Sometimes I remember laughing too, just because it felt safer to laugh, although maybe I made that part up. The memory of that attempt to communicate is all fucking blurry, so I don’t really know.
No one ever found out the truth and that seems wrong—dangerous even.
I became a freak, while Asher somehow went on to become popular and well-adjusted and what most people would call normal, at least on the outside.
The bullies are always popular.
Why?
People love power.
Will I become temporarily powerful if I shoot Asher?64 I’ve been wondering.
But—standing there outside his window—I become that scared little kid again whose parents are oblivious and gone; whose mother doesn’t even say a word when she walks in on her son and his best friend naked one day, but simply shuts the door and pretends it never happened.65
But for some reason—regardless of all that—I start thinking about this one summer day, before all of the weirdness started, back when we were just two kids.
It’s the last good memory I have of my old friend.
For no reason at all, Asher and I decided to ride our bikes as far as we could before we were due home for dinner.
We left at nine AM and had to return by five PM.