Chapter Five

The Remedy was halfway through his junior year at George Washington Carver High.  He was sitting in the back of the class, avoiding eye contact with the other students.  He was drawing a picture in pencil upon the top of his desk.

        On that day he was in a reflective mood.  It might have been because it was his birthday, and he had just turned 17 years old.  It might have been for some other reason.  He was drawing a picture of a car poised between palm trees, but he was thinking of neither cars nor palm trees.

        He was a handsome young man, with the face of a movie star.  His body was a source of pride to him, though he exercised infrequently.  He had a smile that put others at ease, and almost everyone liked him, even if he was a little lonely in their company.  He was never completely confident in his hold over other people, and behind his earnest understanding of other people’s struggles, there lurked an insecurity born of abandonment.  He tried to have faith in other people, but life had taught him otherwise.

He was fashionable without trying to be so, coming to school each day in the same coat and jeans, and in the same worn down shoes.  He was also approachable.  He was the young man you wanted for a friend, or for a lover.  Even in the midst of his quiet moment, surrounded by so many other nervous bodies, his distracted movements had a way of drawing the eye, as if he knew he was being watched, wherever he was.

The classroom where he sat was spacious, but one could tell that behind the posters there was drywall that crumbled to the touch, and bad wiring.  The panels of lights in the ceiling were off that day, and sunlight entered the class from a row of windows to his left.  Peeling brown vinyl blinds were pulled halfway down over these windows, minimizing the glare. 

The rows of desks where the too-large students sat were creaky, Soviet things hacked at and polished over by graffiti experts.  The backs of the chairs were all falling off slowly.  Male classmates lounged in tracksuits and expensive sneakers.  Female classmates glittered in short denim skirts and jeans that accentuated their curves.

14 of the other students were male, and 16 of them were female.  The 30 seats that they occupied were divided into 5 rows of 6, with enough room between the desks for the passing of notes and the sharing of confidences.  Most of the students were black, Hispanic, or both, with a smattering of students from Southeast Asian countries.  The Remedy was the only Caucasian in the class, though there was another young man who claimed to be “half white.”

The Remedy was friends with all of these students to one degree or another, though he knew that these friendships were not likely to last for long.  Some of his classmates had already chosen a slow trajectory towards prison, while others were locked solidly within ethnic enclaves which were by nature closed to white kids such as him.  He had slept with a few of the girls.  The Vietnamese girl sitting near the front, pretending not to see him.  The Eritrean girl to his left, stoned and staring out the window.  The Mexican girl sitting behind him, scribbling away at something.

Before them all stretched an antiquated blackboard, supplied with only a few sticks of chalk and marred by a tag someone had incised into its surface with a knife or paper clip.  A magnet held an attendance sheet to the board, and next to most of the names there were several X’s for days missed.  Only the Vietnamese girl could claim perfect attendance.  Not that she would have ever boasted of such a thing.

        At the front of the class, Ms. Lesiwski was talking about what art might be like in 25 years.  Ms. Lesiwski was a woman in her late 30s, and still attractive.  She was wearing a white blouse over a black skirt, and her curly brown hair hung loose over her shoulders.  She often gestured toward the blackboard, as if there were notes left there for the class.  Perhaps she had written notes for the previous class, erased them, and then forgotten.

She was his art teacher, and the week before he had put his mouth on her pussy.  This happened in that same classroom, long after class had been dismissed. 

She had meant to talk with him about his (bad) grades and lack of initiative, but halfway through her speech he had placed his hand up the summer dress she’d been wearing, and the encounter had gone his way from that moment on.  With her thighs around his head, her fingernails marking his scalp, there was no way for her to bring up his troubles in school, his difficulty reading, or a home life that he didn’t want to talk about.  With her panties around one of her ankles, he was master of the situation.

He wondered what lengths she would go to, this Ms. Lesiwski.  She seemed to radiate a kind of desperation, and even in the middle of her lecture he could feel her eyes straying in his direction, challenging him to look up and see her.  He had already resolved not to appear too eager.  Despite her advanced years, he had, all in all, more experience.  He was not some innocent boy, and he was far from lovestruck.

        He lifted up his binder to see a note written over his desk in pencil.  Linda had Ms. Lesiwski’s class during third period, and used the time to leave him notes.  She made a point of sitting at the same desk – his desk – every day, and there was never a day without a note.  This note was asking him to call her that Friday.  This note told him that she had tickets to a concert at the Arena.  

Linda wasn’t aware that he had already fucked her friend Tracy the week before.  Linda only knew about Judy, and Judy was too long ago for her to be jealous over.  If Linda found out about Tracy, he was fairly certain that the ticket offer would be rescinded.  But then again, Linda had known about Judy, and that hadn’t stopped her from inviting him to other things.

        His mind was full of black girls and Asian girls and white girls.  Their images returned to him, out of sequence.  His thoughts flitted between black girls in the locker room who couldn’t get enough, and from there to Asian girls in study hall, with his hand on the smooth flesh of their thighs.  He remembered white girls behind the bleachers on the field, moaning into his ear.  

Ms. Lesiwski was Polish, and moreover a woman grown, so he was not sure where to place her in his mental file cabinet.  He had only been with one other woman her age, and this other woman had been an uncomfortable, entirely forgettable affair.  Ms. Lesiwski was better than that.  Ms. Lesiwski was worth remembering.  As he thought about her he could almost taste the salty wetness between her legs, and feel her desperate hand probing the front of his jeans.

        The bell rang and he got up to go.  He was the last to leave, and Ms. Lesiwski ran her hand down the small of his back as he followed Brad Taylor and Leroy Jameson out into the hall.  He knew that she wanted him, but it seemed better not to appear eager.  He also knew that she was too scared to approach him in front of the others.  He wouldn’t give her the opportunity to catch him alone.

        That was the last bell.  It was time for everyone to go home.  But he really didn’t want to go home, so he didn’t know what to do.  His foster family lived within walking distance of the school, but walking home was the last thing on his mind.  That home was not a home he wished to frequent.  It never had been.

        Outside his art class, the hall was the usual press of bodies.  Football players and other star athletes gathered together around certain lockers, and others made haste for the doors at the ends of the halls.  Nervous teachers darted in and out of doorways between the lockers, and many kept their heads down, not sure what to think about anything or anyone.  

The hallway he then occupied was like any other hallway, in any other public high school.  Rows of greenish lockers led down a central hallway to an exit at the other end of the building, and punctuating every set of lockers were the entrances to classrooms or bathrooms.  All of the students in that place were, in their own estimation, too mature for it, and they were all ready to leave before they were truly ready to leave.  Their teachers were frumpy, older, balding, fat, or occasionally cool, and all school staff were viewed with a mixture of condescension and pity.  The students might congratulate themselves on a soon-to-be achieved graduation, suspension, or expulsion, but the teachers were chained to that place, and could only resign themselves to the presence of students who often chose to defy whatever authority figures were at hand.  The whiter teachers had it worse, even those who championed lost causes.

        He often asked himself how he, the Caucasian, wound up in a foster home with three Mexican kids and foster parents who were only part white.  He often asked himself how he wound up in a high school so far from the gentler neighborhood where he was born.  He bore no racial grudge against the situation, but the different backgrounds of those in his foster home and those in his school seemed like a recipe for trouble.  His Mexican foster siblings, even the default Mexican from El Salvador, drifted naturally into the gang life of that neighborhood, while he, the lone white kid, had no gang to retreat into.  

All the while his foster parents tried to raise four very difficult young men.  Mr. and Mrs. Jackson were two half castes of uncertain origin, attempting to relate to foster sons from three different countries.  They couldn’t decide about themselves, let alone decide about the young men who were living under their roof.  Even choosing a dinner menu proved an almost insurmountable task.  They agonized between grits and spaghetti, between enchiladas and greens.  There were times when no one knew what to think, or what to do.

        The Jacksons were his second foster family.  The first had been the Davidsons, who were as white as he was.  But Mr. Davidson had been caught with a collection of child pornography, and the fact that all the pictures featured little girls failed to convince the CPS that the Remedy should remain in Mr. Davidson’s presence.  They packed him off to the Jacksons’ before the judge had even handed down a sentence.

        The Davidsons had lived in the suburbs, while the Jacksons’ house bordered the ghettoes south of downtown.  The paint was peeling off the houses, and people parked their cars far from home.  The city had never thought to place sidewalks near his foster parents’ house, and his school’s gymnasium was a lawsuit waiting to happen.  It sometimes felt like being in one of those inner city movies that were popular at the time – something set in Los Angeles or New York – but most of the drama was missing.  Fights happened, yes, but few were shot or stabbed.

In that neighborhood he had almost always been the only white kid in class, and usually one of the few native English speakers.  In different circumstances he might have received beatings inspired by these two facts, but his dyslexia had worked in his favor.  From the beginning, other students knew that they could best him in the game of school, and this had made him a desirable companion.

        For much of elementary school and junior high, he had known how to talk to girls, and this had earned him the admiration of his male classmates.  By the time high school had arrived, even the boys that had teased him in elementary school were asking him how to woo the fairer sex.  Maybe he couldn’t read so well, but he had girls buying him Valentine’s Day presents in the sixth grade, and he’d been making love to them for almost as long.  He was nearly a father at thirteen, but the girl had miscarried - and then committed suicide - and she had never told anyone about him.

        The students in the hall were banging lockers and throwing on backpacks only partly full of books.  He said goodbye to a few of them, went over to his own locker at the other end of the building, and placed the binder he was carrying back inside.  The textbooks inside that locker were nearly untouched, and he kept no personal items in school.  All of his precious things had to be hidden in places he never spoke of.

        He talked to a couple of friends on his way out the door, and then headed down the steps outside the building.  As he emerged from the doorway a car passed by the school, playing 2pac’s “I Don’t Give a Fuck.”  Below the steps lay the street, and the sidewalk in front of the steps pointed towards either home or lazy seclusion.  He had a feeling of not knowing where he was.  He had a feeling that everything had become alien.  He was also afraid to go home, even though it felt like that was a thing he should be doing.  

Home was not a home for him, yet all his friends were going home.  This is the worst kind of peer pressure, he thought, to feel that everyone is doing something you don’t want to do, and yet to feel that you should be doing it simply because everyone else is doing it.  In his mind’s eye he could see himself hanging around street corners until 11 or so, achieving nothing save the worry of his foster parents.  How odd, he thought, that they should worry over me.

        Poor Mrs. Jackson.  She was old and obese, but maybe he should have fucked her.  That would have made things interesting.

        From the front steps on the other side of the doors a chain link fence wound around the school, and he gazed through the links of that fence at the city skyline, just visible beyond rows of houses.  This place, he thought.  This place.  And there was still one more year of it.  One more long year, unless he decided to drop out.  If he had been allowed to remain in the white part of town, he’d probably still be reading comic books and eating Pizza Hut.  Instead, he had social studies textbooks full of last year’s gang logos, Mrs. Jackson’s uncertain dinner menus, and the feeling of always almost being someone real.

        When his parents died he wasn’t allowed to attend the funeral.  People told him about it afterward.  They said it was very nice.  But he never got to go.  No one would tell him why.  After a while he began to think it was because they had been too badly burned in the accident, and the mortician hadn’t been able to put them back together properly.  He had a lot of nightmares about his parents looking at him from coffins, and in these nightmares they were too hideous for the waking world.  The doctors had put him on meds for a while.  He had stopped taking the meds soon after.

        A gate led through the fence, and then he was on the sidewalk in front of the school.  There were smallish houses on the other side of the street, and the sky dimmed as clouds came in from the east.  On his right the road led down the hill to the freeway, where the Rainier Brewery glowered over rush hour traffic.  To his left there were local businesses, small Chinese restaurants and convenience stores that catered only to locals.  This was Beacon Avenue, and it was very far from the world where he had spent his earliest days.  Beacon Hill was another kind of suburb, but it was built by darker shades of people.  He could not grudge these people their accomplishments; it was only that he felt distanced from them.  Perhaps he had spent some time growing up in that neighborhood, but he still felt like a stranger there.

        He began to walk left down Beacon Avenue, towards the strange little road that led over the freeway.  He was going to be out late again, and Mrs. Jackson was going to wonder where he was.  He had already decided this.

        Perhaps after he had fucked Mrs. Jackson they could be more like friends, and not so much like a foster child and his foster mother.  He didn’t want another mother.  His mother was dead, and he knew that he would have to make his own way from then on.  This too he had decided.