Reality Boy
“About my mom,” I say, somewhere around the South Carolina border. “And Tasha.” I don’t know what to say afterward.
“Yeah?” Hannah says.
“Like—you could tell in the show that something was wrong? Like—when you watched it?”
“Oh yeah.”
“Could you see that Tasha was nuts?”
“She was such a passive-aggressive. Totally. I could tell,” she says. “It’s complete Schadenfreude, dude, so most people are just watching for the thrill of being better off than the people in the show.”
“Schaden-what?”
“Schadenfreude,” she says. “It means when people take pleasure in others’ pain or humiliation.”
“Oh.” Jesus. I had no idea there was a word for what I’ve suffered for my whole life. It’s like being asthmatic but no one telling you until your seventeenth birthday the name for why you couldn’t ever breathe. “I didn’t know there was a word for that.”
“It’s German.”
“I gathered that.” I paused. “Did my mom look nuts, too?”
“I don’t know. I never thought about it,” she answers. “Is she nuts?”
I sigh. “Yeah. Pretty much.”
“Isn’t this breaking rule number three?” she asks.
I keep my eyes on the road and stay quiet for a second. “A lot gets cut out,” I say. “From the show. Like—you only saw what they wanted you to see.”
“A lot?”
“Like, almost all of it,” I say. Including all the shit that was important.
We both stay quiet for a little while.
Then I ask, “Did Tasha really look crazy on the show? Because I couldn’t understand why they didn’t show that more.”
“I’ll be honest,” she says. “They didn’t make her look all that bad. It was really you they focused on. You know. You were kinda the star of that family.”
“Great.”
“Nothing you didn’t already know, though, right?”
“Yeah. Still. It’s such a bummer.” My life. My life is such a bummer.
After looking at the map while Hannah drove, I realized that Bonifay, Florida, is in the Panhandle, so we decided to get off I-95 and go west. We find a motel in western South Carolina.
Still no word from Joe Jr.
My dad has tried calling three times but didn’t leave messages after the first time. The message he left is the one thing making me feel like this plan could work—kidnapping ourselves, demanding shit until something changes.
Isn’t this what Nanny taught me? Isn’t this the foundation of parenting responsible children? You demand proper behavior. And when they disobey, you punish them. I have done what any responsible parent should do… to my parents.
I demand their punishment.
Anyway, what Dad said in his message makes me feel like this might work.
We can work this out, Gerald. Any way you want.
I haven’t even sent my list yet.
Dad doesn’t know I’m in some motel in South Carolina about to have a shower for the first time since yesterday morning. He doesn’t know I got my ass kicked in his living room last night. He doesn’t know that my life has been a series of fails that could have been wins. Nanny’s coming! We’re saved! Nope. Hannah likes me! I’m saved! Nope. Run away with the circus! I’m saved! Nope.
“Gerald?”
I hear Hannah say that, but I keep staring out the motel room window, thinking about everything. We can work this out. Any way you want.
“Gerald?”
“Yeah?”
“You wanna take a shower together?”
I look at Hannah. She’s naked.
I can’t find anything to say, so I sit there and stare.
And as sick as it sounds, I can’t get those thoughts of Tasha and my dad and my life out of my head. How can Hannah just stand there na**d and not think about her junkman family? Is she a robot? Or am I just too emotional?
I demand to know if you are a robot, Hannah.
“Gerald?”
I stand up and strip off my clothes and we walk to the bathroom, where the shower’s been running. It’s like walking into a foggy dream. A good, foggy dream.
I can’t come up with words for what we do. Kissing, touching, loving all sound too intimate. We are not intimate people, but we fit, you know? We are breaking rule #5. Bouncing off each other. Like balloons.
And the best thing about being in a shower together is no one has to say anything.
54
“I SHOULD CALL my mom,” Hannah says after we eat the Chinese food we ordered. “She’s probably freaking out.”
“Isn’t that the point?” I ask. I’m sitting at the small, round table in our room with the paper from the 2-4-1 Crab Shack with our lame demands written on it. I’m trying to think of more.
“You don’t understand. My mom can’t live without me.”
“Shit,” I say. “You never put it that way before.”
“It sounds so dramatic,” she says.
“Do you have to give her special shots or something?”
“No.”
“So she’s not going to technically die without you?”
“No. But she’s going to freak the f**k out,” Hannah says. “And I don’t want the police to come while we’re sleeping.”
“That would suck.”
I break out in a cold sweat at the thought of what I just got us into. We are in a motel in South Carolina. We just took a shower together. The police could be looking for me because I beat Jacko’s face into roadkill again, in my parents’ living room. I dragged Hannah into this.
“That would suck?” she asks.
“Yeah.”
I admit, I’m not all here. I’m picturing Hannah watching me get arrested outside this crappy motel in the middle of the night. It’s playing like a movie in my head. A young Martin Sheen plays me.
Hannah goes out the door and stands at the railing that overlooks the kidney-shaped motel pool. It’s closed for the season and they have a cover over it. I watch her through the front window of our room and I slip into Gersday, where nineteen-year-old Gerald knows what to do with a girl’s body. Seventeen-year-old Gerald had some trouble with that back in the shower.
“We all learn as we go along,” Snow White says. “I thought the whole thing was quite romantic.”
I don’t know where I want Snow White to take me. I don’t want to go to the trapeze. I don’t want to talk to Lisi about taking a shower with Hannah. That would be weird.