“Full of surprises tonight, Matt,” he said, pulling a pack from his back pants pocket. Then he reached past me to open the glove compartment. Out came a book of matches and the Hudson High School library’s copy of On the Road.
“You?” I asked. “I was waiting for that book—you checked it out?”
Tariq nodded, looked out his window. “Jack Kerouac. I saw you reading that book by him,” he said. “It looked interesting.”
I read the first sentence of the book, then shivered. The whole thing was just too weird. I put the book back.
He handed me a cigarette, stuck one in his own mouth, lit a match, then lit the cigarette, then held the lit match out to me. In a haze of mesmerized self-hate, I watched his hands fly gracefully through these motions. I lit the cigarette. Then we turned and walked toward the sound of screaming.
“Tariq!” came a booming shout as we drew near a house with pale-blue vinyl siding and expensive landscaping. The whole soccer team was out front, and for a moment I panicked, convinced that Tariq had led me like a lamb to the slaughter. They were waiting to jump me, bash me, break my arms, kick my face to pulp. But one sniff and I knew they were harmless: drunk, jolly, their attention and energy scattered across a dozen things—getting more beer, banging some chick, a couple of them thinking about a beef they had with someone else that might blossom into violence if that jerk showed up tonight.
Cigarette smoke scraped me raw, scorched my throat, and filled my lungs. This new pain distracted from the pain in my stomach. I grinned, slightly, to myself.
Tariq shared bro-hugs and handshakes and hellos with his fellow teammates. “You all know Matt, yeah?” he said, and some nodded and some looked down and some raised their plastic beer cups in an intoxicated magnanimous show of welcome.
I smelled them. And I listened. And I could go deeper now. Drunk people don’t guard their thinking. I focused on my senses, and then, I could hear scraps of words. Phrases that might have been their thoughts.
This faggot. Why’s he here?
Does he even go to our school?
I need more beer, but I don’t want to go inside.
Could this be real? Could I actually read people’s minds?
If I could, I was going to put it to good use. I zeroed in on Bastien and Ott, but both looked away as soon as they saw me. Bastien at least had the sinister intelligence to blink away his discomfort and smile. “What’s good, Matt?”
“Not much.”
They disliked me, so they were guarded. Their thoughts impenetrable even if they were some combination of drunk and high.
I glanced around.
I had never been to a high school party before. People stopped inviting me around fifth grade. That was also the time people started calling me faggot. I don’t know how they knew. I didn’t know myself.
At any rate—I’d been wrong to be so afraid of this. I’d always pictured these parties as frenzies of alcohol and weed and sex and violence. And while the first two were certainly in evidence, everyone seemed about as frenzied as an anaesthetized cow. Instead of the hate I always thought lurked beneath every handsome jock’s facade, there was mostly apathy. Instead of the violence I always associated with alcohol, there was mostly just a doofy happy lazy buzz. I stood there, smoking, almost belonging.
“Come on inside,” Tariq said, “let’s get you some food.”
In the house, I shut my eyes and smelled, and knew at once that the place belonged to a boy in my grade named Griff. That his parents were not home. Two stuffed moose heads and a taxidermied alligator watched Tariq and me stroll through.
“Hungry?” Tariq said when we got to the kitchen. I almost laughed. Food covered every surface of the place, great unhealthy heaps of it, oily chips and creamy dips, baked frozen fried breaded appetizer monstrosities, store-bought cookies stacked like coins, sugary sodas, all of it sending broken-glass shivers of agony through my midsection. I smothered the pain with one last long pull on the cigarette and stubbed it out sadly.
“Nah,” I said.
He smiled. A lonely smile. Open and trusting. And yet, I couldn’t read his mind, either. No doubt, he was an expert at hiding things from the people around him.
But then again, so was I. “Let’s go get us some beer,” he said.
I followed him outside, down a long, dead, sloping lawn, through flocks and gaggles of boys and girls. I tensed, every muscle anticipating some sort of attack.
I thought of those scenes in The Birds when for no reason at all the birds cease to be evil and violent and just stand around harmlessly, apathetic to human beings instead of bent on their destruction. Maybe I was safe . . . for a little while.
Once I no longer feared my own death, I heard everything. Scraps of conversation, words that said almost nothing—while my sense of hearing detected so much more.
“So I went out for the team—”
“All I know is there were rumors—”
“I just stood there, I was so shocked, I couldn’t believe she said that—”
Underneath I heard happiness, fear, insecurity. I looked from person to person in a state of tingly shock. I inhaled. I knew that Tammy Ladonnia was pregnant, and that Pete Shumsky was the father, and I knew that she knew it, and he did not.
I detected things others did not. I saw, heard, and smelled things others could not.
Somehow, I had become Peter fucking Parker.
Somehow, I had—could I even say it? I had powers.
I followed Tariq down to a bonfire, blazing tall and bright against the dark. I walked a little bit behind him. His shoulders were so broad, backlit by the fire in front of him. His arms filled out his sweater so nicely. Sad, jangly pop music blasted from a parked Jeep. I let him pour me a beer, but resolved not to drink it. He poured one for himself, and took a sip, and then looked up—
“Pass that bottle,” he said, too loudly, seeing glass glint in the firelight, and joy and relief crackled in the air around him. Someone laughed, came closer, dumped tequila into his beer.
“More . . . ” he said, laughing, “more . . .” even when it overflowed and soaked his fingers. He took a long, long sip.
I stepped closer and breathed him in. Really breathed. Looked past all the surface smells, the stink of the world he walked through . . . and then past the smells of him, of the outer shell of his body: sweat and hair and saliva, and found:
Loneliness.
Tariq gave off a crushing, overpowering loneliness. A smell of McDonald’s breakfasts eaten alone in parking lots, and long hours standing on the edge of a circle of friends, and the bitter odor of knowing none of his buddies truly knew him. Girlfriends who dated him to piss off their parents but who didn’t care about who he was as a person. Random strangers responding with hate and suspicion to his Middle Eastern name or looks.
Loneliness.
The smell was so strong, I wobbled on my feet. For a split second, I faltered. The rage and hate cooled into pity.
He’s miserable, I thought.