Reality Boy

Mom turns off her blender and we all look at one another. They look at me like I just shot a bear in the leg or something. Like the bear is about to come at us. I look at them like maybe I’m okay with the bear coming at us. I can take the f**king bear.

Seconds later, it starts up again and it’s really loud and she’s moaning extra-vulgar on purpose and Dad gets up and washes off his plate and puts it in the sink and Mom just stands there with her left hand on the blender’s lid and her right hand hovering over the LIQUEFY button and we hear them both—uh—you know—arrive—and then, inside of fifteen seconds, Tasha’s in the kitchen in her bathrobe.

Dad, Mom, and I stand there looking at her for a second: freshly inseminated, hair standing straight up, cheeks pink, last night’s mascara chipped around her eyes.

“What the hell is your problem, you little prude?” she says to me.

“Hey,” Dad says. This is his attempt to what? Defend my prudeness? What?

She walks over to me and shoves me in the chest. She says, “Dick.”

I stand there and take it. I breathe in. I breathe out. I do not react. I enjoy every millisecond of being her trigger instead of her being mine.

She shoves me again. Mom puts her hand on Tasha’s shoulder.

“This is my house as much as it’s your house,” Tasha says. “I can do what I want in my room.”

“Fine,” Dad says firmly—as a sort of gut reaction to make her just go burrow again.

“It’s not fine. He’s messed up,” Tasha says.

“You make too much noise,” Dad says. “He’s right.”

“Doug, we offered her a pla—” Mom starts.

Tasha turns to me. “Why are you so hung up on sex anyway, Gerald?” She stands inches in front of me with her arms crossed. “Can’t get a girlfriend?” I imagine how bad the screams would be if I grabbed her now and stuck her palm on the burner Mom used to make her tea. I picture the perfectly circular ring burns on her fingers. Breathe in, breathe out.

“Tasha,” Mom says.

Tasha taunts, “No one wants our f**ked-up little crapper.”

I’m chief all the way. Not a word. Not even a rise in blood pressure.

She stares at me.

I stare at her.

Mom and Dad are frozen for a second and then they say “Hey” or “Whoa” or “Enough.”

When she sees she isn’t getting a rise out of me, she leans down to my face and puts me in the patented Tasha grip: my nose pinched between her index- and middle-finger knuckles and my mouth held shut by her thumb. She pinches my nose hard and it hurts. She says, “I always knew you swung the other way. That would explain a lot, wouldn’t it?”

Mom and Dad just disintegrate into two piles of incapable, lifeless flesh. My chief dissolves. My joy is gone. I am brought back. I am drowning right here in the kitchen, surrounded by people who don’t care if I drown. They just stand there, watching. Home snuff movies, reality TV.

As I start to run out of air, I panic. I remember I have arms. And teeth. So I grab her hand and I bite it. Hard. Like a tiger would bite a hand—the same tiger that bit Tom What’s-His-Name in eighth grade. I am not myself. I can only see me from the angle of the camera that was once mounted on the kitchen wall. My stripes are magnificent. Nothing else in the world is that shade of orange.

I watch myself wipe Tasha’s blood on Mom’s sparkling white tea towel and leave for work. Then I turn off the show.

I am eating ice cream in Gersday and driving down the highway at about 234 miles per hour. I may have run red lights. I can’t be sure. I could be driving on the wrong side of the road.

I am four. Tasha calls me g*y and holds my head under the bathwater. I don’t know how to drive a car, but I like to sit in the driver’s seat and pretend.

I am six. Tasha calls me g*y and holds her hand over my mouth and nose while I sleep. I love to ride the shiny, coin-operated race-car ride outside the supermarket.

I am seven. Tasha calls me g*y and tries to suffocate me with a living room pillow. I am driving bumper cars at a country fair.

I am almost seventeen. Tasha says I swing the other way and puts me in the Tasha grip in the middle of the kitchen in front of our parents. I am driving through a watery black hole, never to return.

PART TWO

18

THE HIGHWAY IS made of ice cream. The bridges are made of waffle cones. There are smiling, waving Walt Disney characters as mile markers. Each one says, “Hello, Gerald!” I take the butter pecan exit. The road is bumpy from pecans. I bounce into the backseat, where Snow White sits with her hands on her lap and says, “Good boy, Gerald! You’ve made us all very proud.”

Snow White looks out the window and waves to her friends as we pass each one. Goofy. Pluto. Mickey. Donald. They blow kisses to her.

She says, “Would you like a regular cone or sugar?”

“Regular, please,” I answer. She hands me a chunky cherry regular cone, and I begin to eat it.

The limousine driver asks, “How’s the weather back there? Are you too hot? Too cold? I can adjust it if you want.”

“I’m fine,” I say.

Snow White says she’s cold, so he turns up the heat. “Ladies first,” the limo driver says. “You have to make them happy or else we all suffer, right, Gerald?”

“Right,” I say, but I don’t mean it. I can’t see why ladies have to come first. Not in Gersday.

When I look out the window, I see we’re driving to Disney World. There are signs that say ONLY 100 MILES TO THE MOUSE! or BE OUR GUEST! I eat my ice cream and try to ignore the stifling heat. Snow White doesn’t seem bothered. She just keeps waving to her friends.

“Gerald,” the limo driver says, “do you want to go to the circus before or after we drop Snow White at home?”

I don’t know how to answer this question.

Then Snow White hands me an inflatable hammer. It’s the same one I won at the fair when I was five. I wondered where it went. I hug it even though I am nearly seventeen and there is no reason for me to hug an inflatable hammer. Then she hands me a Ziploc bag of Game Boy games. When I look closely, I see they are all the games I ever asked for. The ones I never got. Before I can hug those, she hands me a puppy. And a hamster. And then she hands me a card that says Happy 8th Birthday! On the inside, she has forged Mom’s and Dad’s signatures perfectly. I realize that Snow White is a lot craftier than she seems. I’d never have pegged her as a forger. She always seemed so sweet.