TRENTON
The truth: that’s all Trenton wanted. For someone in his family to tell the truth.
It was seven o’clock and he was lying in his old bedroom, which looked almost exactly the same as he remembered it except for the piles of junk everywhere, listening to the murmur of his sister’s and his mother’s voices. They were arguing about what to do for dinner. And it occurred to him that since the last time he’d been to Coral River, he probably hadn’t heard a single word from either one of them that wasn’t some kind of lie.
He didn’t know why it still mattered to him. Maybe it was because he’d been hoping for integrity. He liked that word, integrity, had picked it up in Brit Lit II, which among the guys at Andover was known as Boner Lit. The teacher, Ms. Patterson, was hot. Most of the teachers at Andover were really old, past forty, and strapped into their clothes like psychos into straitjackets, as though their fat might attempt an escape.
But Ms. Patterson wasn’t. She was twenty-eight—she’d told them so—which wasn’t that old. And she looked even younger. She wore her hair loose. It was soft and brown and kind of fuzzy, and all the girls made fun of her because they said it was frizzy and she didn’t know how to blow-dry it right. They made fun of her clothes, too, because she wore sneakers sometimes with her skirts and dark old-lady tights; and other times, loose black pants and a shapeless fleece on top.
But Trenton liked that. He found he couldn’t even jerk off thinking about the girls at Andover, even the girls younger than him. They were all out of his reach. Their jeans were suctioned to their butts and their hair was slick as an oily river, and their mouths were always curled up and laughing at a joke he was never a part of, and on weekends they took planes and cars down to New York and came back, triumphant and smirking, with a new story: they’d gone down on so-and-so in a cab. They’d done ecstasy and taken over the DJ booth at Butter.
Plus they were smart. He, Trenton, slouchy and barely hanging on to his grades, had nothing to offer them.
Integrity. Integrity was showing up with your hair fuzzy, in a fleece. Integrity was doing your best in school because you liked it, even if people called you a fag and elbowed you into the walls, when they weren’t busy pretending you didn’t exist.
Everyone in his family lacked integrity. They were corrupt (antonym). His mom, Caroline, was the worst. She had lied to everyone for so long, Trenton wasn’t even sure she knew the difference anymore. He thought probably she’d always been fake, and he had only noticed recently. Now he knew he couldn’t trust anything she said, especially things about his father. “He loved you, Trenton, very much . . .”
Bullshit.
He had believed for a long time that Minna had integrity, but he’d been wrong. He could hardly look at her, ever, without noticing her additions, which seemed to point at the world like an accusation. And he knew, from his mom, there had been other stuff: tugs and pulls, needles and pills, all things she didn’t need. He might have been prepared to forgive her if it hadn’t been for what had happened during Family Weekend in the spring.
And Minna hadn’t even apologized. She avoided the subject neatly, the way she avoided everything, because she lacked integrity, because she was corrupt, because she was full of shit.
Amy was all right. But Amy didn’t count because she was six and didn’t know better. She would probably grow up to be as full of shit as the rest of them.
He’d hardly seen his dad since his parents divorced, and Trenton had never been back to Coral River. Instead, Richard came to New York. He took Trenton to shows he didn’t care about seeing and dragged him to restaurants where everything on the menu had some disgusting ingredient, when Trenton would have preferred to get a burger. But in a weird way, Trenton had been closest to his father. Trenton knew his dad was impossible—particular, obsessive, pompous (another word from Ms. Patterson), a complete egomaniac and kind of a dick.
But he’d also been honest. Brutally, totally honest. Trenton still remembered the time they’d been at Boulud, and Trenton had been trying to conceal the fact that he had a hard-on (why the fuck did he have a hard-on? The waitress, who wasn’t even that hot, touched his shoulder with her breasts for one second, as she leaned down to take away his wineglass), and his dad had suddenly said to him: “Look, you’ll hear a lot of bullshit from your mother. And I was a shit husband. I was. But the woman is batshit crazy and I did my best. Remember that, Trenton. It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault.” And later, after half a glass of wine, Trenton had found himself in the back of a taxi, blinking away tears and feeling grateful.
“Dinner, Trenton!” His sister’s voice came through the floorboards, and he thought he heard a slight sigh.
Integrity. That word was still there, like a small staircase in his mind, leading up to the inevitable.
Trenton wanted to die with integrity. There was one reason—and one reason only—that he had agreed to come back to this place that was no longer a home: to die.
As he passed into the dark hallway, and felt his way to the stairs and the light down below, he turned that idea over inside of him, and it brought him comfort.
And he ignored the wisp of a whisper that seemed to say, from very far away, “I wish they’d let the whole place burn.”