Reality Boy

Now he has a New Jersey accent. Or New York.

I ask, “You’re with the circus?”

He laughs again and smoke comes out his nose. “I am the f**kin’ circus, man. Every f**kin’ day of my f**kin’ life.”

Down by the loading bay I can hear big, bald Joe yelling. “Where the hell is that kid? I told him to get that bus cleared out before matinee! Useless son of a bitch!”

“Huh,” I say, because I don’t know what else to say. Then I add, “What’s with the clown-dentist thing? How come that’s funny?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “I never understood clowns.”

“You’re the circus and you don’t understand clowns?”

“Nope. I think they’re totally stupid,” he says, taking a pull from his cigarette. “But the kids like them.”

“Huh. A clown pulling his own tooth doesn’t seem like kids would like it,” I say. “I guess that proves I’m not a kid.”

“What do they pay you? Seven, eight bucks an hour?” he asks.

“Seven fifty.”

“You cook?”

“Nah. I work the register. It’s okay. Keeps me out of the house,” I say.

He laughs at this.

“What?” I ask.

“I sure as shit wish I could get myself out of my house.” He takes a last drag on his smoke and crushes it under his boot while it’s still only half smoked. Then he points to the circus buses in the parking lot. “I’ve wanted to blow it up for years,” he says. “I know how, too. I could do it. Blow the whole thing up. End this shit for good. For all of us.”

“Shit,” I say. Because I feel like I’ve just met myself. Hello, other Gerald. Nice to meet you. Would you like to blow up the world with me? The whole f**king world?

“Can’t blow up your own family, though, you know? I got sisters. Nieces and nephews. And a grandmother…” He trails off because Joe is yelling again. “Find that little shit for me and get him into that f**kin’ bus. It has to be clean in an hour.”

“True,” I say. “You can’t blow up your whole family. Been there.”

“Really?” he asks.

“Yeah,” I say.

“We should be friends. I don’t have any friends, so why not be friends with another psycho like me?” When he says this, my heart aches a little for being a psycho like him. But I can’t deny it.

“We should,” I say. “What’s your number?” I give him mine.

He enters the number into his phone and sends me a text. It says I’m Joe Jr. While I enter his number into my contact list, I text back I’m Gerald and I half expect him to look at me and point and say something about Nanny-Fuck-This-Shit, but he doesn’t.

“I’d kill to come with you,” I say. “Everything sucks here.”

“Trust me, nothing sucks more than my life. Anyway, you make seven fifty at your job, and you’ll never make that with us. Big Joe is a cheapskate.” On cue, Big Joe starts to yell again. “Shit. I’d better go. My dad is pissed,” he says.

As he walks down the steps and out into the open lot, his father screams stuff at him and he ignores it as he goes to one of the buses and stands out of sight and lights another cigarette. I realize that I want to be him, even though I’ve only known him for five minutes.

“Fuck this shit!” I yell after him.

He nods and I can hear him as I walk away. “Fuck this shit!”

23

THE GIRL AT register #1 has told me her name again, but I still won’t use it. I just smile at her and feel scared of her and want to smell her hair. Which sounds creepy, but I don’t mean it in a creepy way at all.

When I look over at her during the preshow rush, I see that she’s not happy today. I think back to when I saw her in the smokers’ alley between shows. How she had a quiet conversation on her phone. How she wasn’t her usual smiling self. At the time, I thought she was mad at me because of what I said when she and her friend came over to see what the yelling was about, but now I’m thinking this has nothing to do with me.

So when I see her on my way to refill her drawer with hot dogs, I say, “Hey,” and she says, “Hey,” and she makes it really clear that she’s not going to smile and so I smile at her but she still won’t smile.

Fact: Being in a five-foot radius of her makes me not want to kill anyone.

Once the circus starts and the crowd dies down, I walk to register #1, where she’s leaning on the counter writing something in her tiny book. I don’t want her to think that I’m reading it, so I stand back and wait until she’s done.

“Whoa. Gerald. Way to sneak up on me.”

I ask, “You okay?”

“No.” She sighs.

I nod, and I want to hug her because I can tell a hug would make her feel better. But Roger told me that I need to stop thinking that I know what other people need or want. He said, “Because of your childhood—uh—situation you have a larger sense of self than many.”

I remember that frustrated look he gave me when I didn’t understand this.

He translated. “You think the world revolves around you.”

“No I don’t,” I said. What does Roger know anyway? He’s just another guy like me who graduated from lame anger management class. I hate when he talks like he’s some sort of headshrinker.

Thinking about him makes me mad, so I look back at sad Register #1 Girl and I say, “Can I help?”

She laughs a little. “Only if you have a magical time machine.”

“And if I had a magical time machine?” I ask.

“Then I’d want to be in the future, two years from now. Preferably with some money and going somewhere exciting. Like Morocco. Or India.”

“Wow,” I say, because I’ve never known anyone who wanted to go to either place before. I don’t think, in nearly seventeen years, I’ve ever even heard a person use the word Morocco in a sentence.

“Would you come with me?” she asks.

I want to make her smile, so I say, “Yes.” But I don’t want to go to India or Morocco.

“Really?” she asks. “You’d want to come with me?”

“Sure,” I say. “I mean, I guess. I don’t know anything about India.”

“I can’t figure you out,” she says. “One minute I think you might be nice and then the next minute, you’re—uh—just hard to figure out.”