“Are you sure you want to do this one?”
“I’m sure.”
“You really have to go for it, okay? I mean, this is dark. Really dark. You’re a crazy murderer.”
“Dr. Langley, I’m sure.”
I was holding a worn out packet of paper with the heading Tell-Tale Heart. I knew what I was doing.
“All right then. We’ll start in about twenty minutes, now go sit and read through it.”
Dr. Langley eyed me with skepticism from behind her reading glasses. She was my favorite teacher. She was a middle aged woman who reminded me of Jackie Chiles from Seinfeld. She wore slacks and dressy, silk shirts all the time that she accented with oversized gold jewelry. She wore a tie to school once. She was no nonsense, and for some reason she liked me a lot.
It might have been the time I wrote half of a poem on the back of my homework about how her student teacher sucked at classroom management. I didn’t mean to turn it in, but when the student teacher saw it, Dr. Langley called me out of my fourth period to tell me I needed to write an apology letter. I was mortified, but Dr. Langley couldn’t stifle a few spurts of laughter. At the time I couldn’t understand why she would laugh at me over something so horrible. As it turns out, I think Dr. Langley would probably have liked the adult me as well. With her sense of humor, we could have been great friends.
I sat down in a desk near the back corner and started reading the piece to myself. I had heard of it before, and I knew it was about a crazy guy who kills his roommate. I liked the idea of pretending to be someone evil. Dr. Langley didn’t know what she was unleashing when she put that piece in the box.
My best friend Brenna had come to the after school Forensic team tryouts, too. She was in a chair two seats down from me reading something soft and fluffy sounding.
“I don’t see any boy pieces in here, Dr. Langley.”
Brad Billings had been rifling through the basket full of papers for probably twenty minutes already.
“They’re in there, Brad. Just read something.”
“But, um…” He was holding three packets and looking helplessly at them, his snaggle teeth exposed by his open-mouthed confusion.
“Oh, here. Let me help you.”
Brad Billings was skinny, pasty white, and had a mom who was a substitute teacher. His sandy brown hair was always mussed up, and his clothes were always sub par by the then current clique rules. It looked like his mom not only embarrassed him by substituting in the same school her pre-teen son attended, but it often appeared that she might have been dressing him, too. Brad always wore either blue jeans that were a little too tight and too short, or the kind of pants that had an elastic band at the waist. In 1998, elastic was so last decade.
Really, though, his teeth were what made him who he was. They were a dentist’s nightmare. Several were actually growing on top of each other and pointing in odd directions. He looked like he had a mouth full of oversized chicklets when he talked, or laughed, or did anything that required the opening and shutting of his mouth in general.
Dr. Langley settled Brad down with a piece called “Dr. Loveletter.” He sat down next to me.
“How’s your mom?”
I looked up at him from my maniac piece and glared.
“Fine.”
“Jake doing any better in English yet?”
“I don’t know.”
I kept pretending to read. I didn’t want to talk to Brad. I wanted to pretend that I didn’t come to his house on Saturdays because my little brother was bad at Language Arts. I wanted to pretend our moms weren’t friends, and that our little brothers didn’t run around together in his back yard playing with Batman figurines. Brad had nothing to do with me. Brad’s single mom had nothing to do with me. His whole family and their buckteeth could just go away. Especially while my best friend was two seats away.
She looked at Brad sitting next to me, smiled politely and looked back at her own paper.
Being twelve and just a little bit nerdy was not cool. There were standards of decorum at that age that were never as important to me afterwards.
I huffed so Brenna would know I didn’t want to sit next to Brad.
Brad didn’t win awards as Dr. Loveletter, but I made a surprisingly convincing madman.
Brad’s mom ran away in his summer after 8th grade to be with her high school sweetheart whom she hadn’t seen in twenty years. She moved the whole lot of them out to North Carolina, and I never heard from him again until I was in college.
I wasn’t huffy at all. I called him from the number he had emailed me and spoke to not only him, but also his mother. They were really nice. I called partly because Brad didn’t look like a nerd anymore. From his pictures it looked like he had gotten braces somewhere along the lines and now looked, in just the right light, like an Abercrombie model. I wasn’t thinking about how he looked, though. So much had changed since 8th grade that I was also a different person. While Brad had gotten sweeter looking, I had begun to feel like I was rotting on the inside.
I can remember sitting in the car outside my dorm room smoking a cigarette out my window with one hand and my cell phone pressed to the ear with my other.
“I can’t believe you’re actually calling me after all these years!”
“I know! It’s been so long!” I gush back.
“I’m sorry about your parents,” he said, “That sucks.”
“Yeah.” So does getting kicked out of school. So does being ostracized. So does breaking up with your boyfriend of four years. So does being told you’re fat. I took another drag and exhaled.
“You know Carly Lewis? She used to be a good friend of mine from church.”
“Yeah. She’s married now.”
“Woah.”
“I don’t know what’s wrong with people these days. I guess that’s great, for her.”
He laughed at my cynicism.
“I wish we could hang out,” he said after a bit.
I wondered what it would be like hanging out with Brad Billings again. Would I go into autopilot and start flirting and forcing out innuendos? Or would I be like I was in eighth grade, all sweet and innocently going with the flow of things. I wished I could be like that again. Unassuming. However awkward it had been, however pretentious I might have seemed at times, my problems were so small then.
“I wish we could too,” I said.
“Too bad I’m in North Carolina.”
“Yeah.”
After I hung up, I considered calling someone else, but I couldn’t think of anything easy. Over the years I had painted myself into a social corner, and the only thing to do was to either pretend to be someone else, or to call someone who might like me. Pretending to be a madman from the Tell Tale Heart had been easy long ago. Pretending to be happy, on the other hand, was hard.
I scrolled through the contacts on my phone.
Brenna was in New York State.
Brad was in North Carolina.
Dr. Langley was teaching college classes up north.
I kept scrolling.
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