Reality Boy

“Craptastic got a girlfriend! You know what to do with her?” It’s Nichols. We ignore him and keep smiling at each other.

“I want a rematch in Ping-Pong soon,” she says.

“Why bother? You’re playing two guys whose entire third floor is home to a Ping-Pong table.”

“Because it’s fun,” she says. “It’s not about winning all the time, you know.” She’s eating a sandwich that we bought at Quik Mart on the way to school. “I was distracted last night. I think I was worried about impressing your dad.”

On our way home, I drive her to the new house and we play two games of Ping-Pong. Then we break rule #5. Then I take her to the deck.

I think, I demand that we get married. I plan on thinking this for a long time before I ask it. But it feels nice having a goal and working toward it. If I think about it, Nanny taught me that with all her stupid charts. And Hannah taught me that with her little book.

It’s never a bad thing to have a list of demands.

61

THE PEC CENTER is crowded on Wednesday for Dollar Night. Hannah and I come straight from school so we’ll be early to pay back Beth for being so cool with us leaving her short for over a week. We tell her what we did after she gives us a warning about how she’ll have to fire us if we ever do that again. Lucky for us, there’s a pool of cashiers to choose from at the PEC Center. It’s not like we’re highly trained brain surgeons.

“Sounds like an adventure,” Beth says while she hands me the large ketchup containers over the counter. Hannah organizes the other condiments and then sets to work wrapping the first batch of hot dogs.

She’s at register #6. I’m still at register #7. I told Dad I was going to be coming home late. He’s all over the place since Mom came back from Mexico and found us gone. She goes between threatening to take him for all he’s worth to sobbing into his voice mail for ten minutes at a time and I know he sees it now—that up and down. The instability she worked so long to pretend wasn’t there.

“Gerald swung on the trapeze,” Hannah tells Beth. “We stayed in a chalet.”

“A chalet?” Beth says. “Sounds fancy.”

We don’t tell her that it is just circus jargon for a prefab house.

“We went skinny-dipping,” I say.

“Not quite,” Hannah says. “It was more of a rescue mission.”

Beth shrugs, and shakes her head as if she’s thinking, Those madcap teens.

The night is a blur of Dollar items, complaints about Dollar items, and running out of liquid cheese, like, three times. Beers. A lot of beers. Beth has me tapping my own now and I tap Hannah’s, too, because she doesn’t look eighteen, even with the extra black eyeliner she’s been wearing.

Beth lets us go out during second period. Hannah gets her new little book and starts to write in it in the smokers’ alley. I stand there with my hands in my pockets, feeling the cold. Christmas is coming. Dad and I decided on no tree in our new pad. Hannah says she’s going to bring us a small one anyway because everyone should have a Christmas tree.

“What are you writing about?”

“Just stuff,” she says.

“Good,” I say. I say that because I like when she writes in her book.

I lean against the freezing brick wall and take a deep breath and exhale the fog into the alley. Gersday is warmer. Lisi is in her leotard and about to swing high on the trapeze and I’m in the ring watching. Hannah is next to me. Holding my hand. Breaking rule #5. I can see it from here, so I don’t have to go in. Gersday is like a show now.

“How much longer do we have?” Hannah asks.

I shrug. “As long as we want, I guess. Break should be soon, though. So—”

She grabs me around my neck and kisses me and I grab her around the waist and kiss her. We become one person when this happens. One warm person.

Then the door opens and it’s a smoker. Only it’s not just any smoker—it’s Hockey Lady.

“Gerald!” Hannah hasn’t let me go yet, and I don’t let her go, either. “Look at you,” Hockey Lady says.

“Is it the end of second period yet?” I ask.

“Nah. We’re just losing so bad I came out before the rush.”

She lights up a cigarette.

“I’m Hannah,” Hannah says.

I nod and say, “My girlfriend,” as if this isn’t obvious.

“That’s great,” Hockey Lady says.

There’s an awkward moment between the three of us. Hannah giggles.

“I wanted to thank you for talking to me that first night,” I say.

“You’re welcome,” Hockey Lady says.

“It really helped me,” I say, remembering all the sobbing I did on her shoulder.

“Glad I could help.”

Then Hannah says, “We’d better get back in.”

“The rush is coming,” I explain.

Hockey Lady nods and then winks at me on my way through the door.

“Who’s that?” Hannah asks as we walk back to stand five.

“Just some viewer I met once.”

“Oh,” she says.

I hear myself say this and I like it. Just some viewer I met once.

Just some viewer.

As I sell sixty more chicken-fingers-and-fries orders and tap ten more beers and sell two little kids some hot chocolate, I see them all that way.

Viewers who will never know the truth. Viewers who don’t really matter. Viewers who just didn’t have anything better to do on Friday nights a decade ago.

I look at Hannah over on register #6. She is more beautiful than anything I’ve ever seen. When she looks at me she is the opposite of a viewer. She can see inside me. She makes me see into the future. I can see myself graduating next year—war paint and all, pushing Deirdre up that ramp they’ll have to build. I can see myself in ten years, married to Hannah, maybe a baby or two if she wants some. I’ll have a job that isn’t counting hot dogs. I won’t have to see Tasha or my mother again if I don’t want to.

It’s like Gersday, but better.

It’s real.

I’ll eat real strawberry ice cream.

I’ll be somewhere else. My own Morocco or India. My own Scotland.

I’ll be just another human on a planet full of humans, but better equipped because I have demands.

For my family.

For my life.

For the world.

For myself.

What acceptable behay-vyah.

What acceptable behay-vyah.