Reality Boy

So far, Tasha’s Disney World dream was close to coming true. I’d stopped crapping anywhere but the bathroom. We all did our chores. Sometimes Tasha was even nice to us. She’d offer to play a board game or do something fun. But then she’d go back to her usual self and haul off and hit me or half suffocate me and call us names. Lisi told me that Tasha was hormonal. I had no idea what that meant, but Lisi said it made Tasha worse than she already was, so we should just try to keep to ourselves.

That day when freshly showered Tasha and freshly showered Mom had a huge screaming match upstairs about something, we crept up the steps and peeked into Tasha’s bedroom and saw what Tasha was doing.

I remember my eyes going so wide I couldn’t blink. Lisi’s jaw dropped.

Tasha had Mom pinned up against the wall, her hands around Mom’s neck. She shouted, “Bitch! I hate you! I wish you never had me!”

Mom tried to say something, but Tasha was squeezing too hard. Then she realized she was squeezing too hard and let Mom go. Then Tasha slapped her roughly, right across the face. I lived that scene over and over in my head for years. I thought about how I should have saved Mom. How I should have stopped it somehow. But I knew I couldn’t, because I didn’t fully understand it. I didn’t know the word psychopath when I was six. But it would have been helpful.

I could still see the mark on Mom’s face when we all sat down to dinner that night. Lisi pointed at it to remind me. Dad didn’t come home until later, when Mom was already in bed.

36

I WAKE TO find that my facial bruise from Jacko’s lucky right hook didn’t surface. It’s just a little red. My ribs? My ribs are another story. They’re purple and blue and yellow and black.

If my ribs were my face, I’d be in serious trouble.

But no one is going to see my ribs, so I just take a few headache pills and go to school. I get to my car without seeing anyone. No Mom. No Tasha. I skip the drums and the war paint. After beating the fake Jamaican in the ring yesterday, I feel like it would be disingenuous.

At lunch, Hannah finds me at the door to the caf and we walk in together and we sit in a booth and stuff the other half of our seats full of our books. She pours out the contents of her bag and I give her half my ham and cheese sandwich in trade for a pack of Oreos from her mountain of weird junk food. She even has Pop Rocks. I didn’t think they made them anymore.

“Rule number three,” I blurt. “No talking about TV. Especially reality TV.”

She stares at me. “But that’s all I do.” Then she can see I’m hurt or concerned or whatever I am and she says, “I mean, I have to watch what my parents are watching because we only have one TV, and that’s all they watch. But it’s not all bad, Gerald.”

“I’m not telling you what to watch or what not to watch, but just don’t talk about it with me. I don’t watch TV. At all.”

“Wow,” she says.

“It’s not as hard as you’d think,” I say. “There are plenty of other things to do, you know.”

She pulls out her notebook and flips to the blank back page. “So rule number one was no saying retarded,” she says, then looks at me. “I still can’t believe you’re okay with that word.”

“You’ll understand one day, I promise,” I say. Shit. I’m not sure I even understand it, so I have no idea how I’ll explain it to her. Maybe a letter. Dear Hannah, I’m not really retarded. My mom just insisted that I be retarded for some reason I can’t figure out yet. Love, Gerald.

“What was rule number two?” she asks.

“No musicals.”

“Right,” she says, and scribbles. “And rule number three is no talking about TV or reality TV.”

“Right.”

“Like, can I mention that I watched it?”

“Nope.”

“And I can’t share a funny part?”

“To me, there are no funny parts,” I say.

She nods. “I get it.” She stares at the list. “So, I guess rule number four is that our parents can’t know and my brother can’t know.”

“Or my sister. Ugh.”

“Right. Or your sister,” she says. “Didn’t she go back to college or something?”

“She lives in our basement. And I’d rather not talk about it,” I say. “But that’s not a rule. I will want to talk about it, I guess. Just not now.” She nods. “And what’s with your brother? Will he come after me and chop my dick off?”

She chuckles through her nose. “He’s in Afghanistan. But he’s very protective of me, and my parents are, too.” She sighs. “They seem to think that I’ll become a statistic.”

“Oh,” I say. “So that works with my next rule. Number five. No physical contact for two months.”

She looks at me. “What the f**k? Seriously?”

“You think that’s too long?”

“Um—yes?” she says. “Two months is, like, sixty days.”

I shrug. “I have trust issues. You do, too. We see shrinks and shit. I think we should take it slow.”

“But two months? You’re on crack,” she says. Then she leans in close to me. “I was hoping to kiss you later. Or maybe on our date. Or maybe at work on Wednesday. Dollar Night, right? Who couldn’t use a kiss on Dollar Night?”

“I still stand by rule number five,” I say. I just don’t want this to go wrong. I want it to be real. Not sure how to express this to Hannah. Dear Hannah, Up until now, my only choices were jail or death. Love, Gerald.

“Look,” she says. “I’ll write it in, but I think it’s excessive. And I think it’s a rule we can break. Deal?”

“Deal.”

She closes her book. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“Is reality TV real?”

“Are you seriously asking me that?” I ask while simultaneously thinking, I can’t believe she just asked me that.

She nods innocently and I look at her for a minute, feeling my broken ribs throb underneath my shirt. Have I told you yet about her freckles? “It’s so far from real, you have no idea,” I say.

“So, you weren’t anything like the kid I saw on TV?” she says awkwardly. “Like, you didn’t do those things or you did?”

I take a deep breath. “I did those things. But you guys never saw the real us. You only saw what they chose to show you to make it more entertaining. The nanny wasn’t even a real nanny. She was just some actress. Did you know that?”