Sometimes I’d swear Burke is from a different planet. He’s normal if you talk to him, but besides me, nobody ever talks to him, because they can’t get past the way he looks. It’s not just the ink and the piercings and the hair, which he dyes a different color every other week. It’s his clothes, which are weird at best and embarrassing at worst. Last Friday, he strolled into school wearing neon-yellow skinny jeans and platform shoes. Today, he has on a green peacoat, jean leggings, and a kilt. It looks like a Goodwill threw up on him.
He wears makeup, too. Not standard emo-kid guyliner, either. Like, bright blue lipstick, the other week, and orange eye shadow, the day before yesterday. Today he’s clean-faced, but back in freshman year, he didn’t go a day without it. His whole persona, this whole thing he does with the way he looks—it happened so suddenly, right out of middle school, I wondered if it was performance art, maybe. Some big stunt I wasn’t part of. Now, though, I’m so used to it, I hardly notice when he goes crazy with winged eyeliner and purple eyebrows.
At first I thought he’d get beat up, but it turns out that people are terrified to talk shit about Burke because he’s six foot five and built like a Mack truck, and sometimes when he’s dressed down he looks as if he’d knife you without thinking about it. But Jesus, if he were my size, he’d get laughed out of Kansas.
I take his book and squint at the title. It’s called The Gay Science, written by some foreign dude whose name looks like a sneeze. How can he read this stuff for fun?
“What?” he says, looking hard at me, and I’m like, “Nothing, man, you do you.” I drop the book into his backpack and pass him the blunt. He takes a hit.
“So Dan got with Olivia Scott,” I say, and Burke’s like, “Yeah, I heard him talking about it. Apparently she was great,” and I stare up at the sky, and he’s like, “What?” and I’m like, “I didn’t say anything,” and he’s like, “Your silence is more silent than usual silence,” and I’m like, “Shut up,” and he’s like, “So I’m right.”
I shrug. “Fine. Olivia’s awesome, and Dan sucks, and why does he get to have sex with her, is all I’m saying.”
“Hey, why you gotta shit on Dan? Just ’cause you’re jealous doesn’t mean—”
I chuckle. “Dude, I couldn’t be jealous of Dan if I tried.” And that part, at least, is true, because it’s hard to describe the soul-sucking blandness that is Daniel Silverstein. He has no personality anymore; he just wants to stick his dick in things. Sometimes you look at people, and you can see every second that’s going to make up their lives, and it depresses you, because they’re clearly fated to do nothing that’ll last even a decade after their death, and it’s like, why are you sitting all cushy in this suburb when a million disadvantaged kids out there could do so much more with your place in this world? That’s Dan these days. It blows seeing him turn into that, too, since he used to be different.
Back in middle school, Dan and Burke and I used to hang out all the time. Middle-school Dan loved dubstep and Mario Kart and late-night walks, where the three of us would talk about everything from what aliens might look like to the meaning of life. But the second we hit freshman year, high-school Dan took over. He stopped talking to us and found new friends, and now every time we pass each other in the hall, he doesn’t even nod. Burke and I try not to take it personally, but getting friend-dumped is kind of personal by definition.
Burke taps my shoulder and passes the blunt back to me. I take a long hit—too long—and sit up, my eyes watering, and Burke says, “So why’re you mad at Dan, huh?” and I sigh, because I feel he should get it by now. “Because,” I say, “I’ve had a thing for Olivia Scott for, like, thirty years,” and Burke says, “But you haven’t ever spoken to her,” and I’m like, “Yeah, but . . .”
I trail off, floundering to find actual justification for being upset. After a minute, I give up. “Forget it,” I mumble. We watch sports teams walking by, red-faced and sweaty from practice. Guys’ tennis. Girls’ cross-country. Lacrosse. Football . . .
Eventually, Burke says, “If you want to meet up with Olivia, why don’t you go to the thing at Dan’s this weekend, huh? Maybe she’ll be there.”
I make a grumbling sound. I’d rather chug cyanide than show up to Dan’s sister’s birthday party. It’s sad, the thought that everyone I know is so repressed, they have to get, like, oh my God, totally wasted to have an excuse to act the way they want to act. “Thanks, man, but I’m good,” I say. “Like she’d talk to me, anyway.”
“Bro, don’t be so fucking defeatist,” Burke says, and that’s a Burke phrase if ever I’ve heard one, so fucking defeatist, but before I can tell him he’s ridiculous, an overloud voice butts in:
“Hey. Are you Matt? Matt Jackson?”