A Really Awesome Mess (13 page)

“So,” I said. “How long has this been going on?”

“Just since this group started. I was Didier Mogumba, soccer prodigy from Paris, in the group I was in before this.”

Diana wiped tears away from her eyes and extended a hand across the table. “Well played, my friend. Well played,” she said, and Tracy shook her hand.

Later, as we were lying in the rule-mandated darkness of our room at 10:30 p.m., I asked Tracy, “So, were you just, like, sick of being you? Is that what the whole thing was about?” Because that was kind of appealing to me—the idea that you could just throw off your entire screwed-up self and substitute somebody else with
different problems. And if you were as good at it as Tracy is, that person would actually become kind of real. I mean, if you convinced five people that someone existed, doesn’t that make them kind of real?

There was a long silence that made me wonder if Tracy was asleep. “Naaah,” he said. “I just like fucking with people. I mean, really, I don’t hate being Tracy Jefferson. I just like being Tracy Jefferson who gets people to believe a bunch of stupid crap more.”

“So who’s the girl? I mean, the one you talk to when you’re supposedly talking to your mom? The one you were all uptight to get extra time on the phone with?”

“Which one?” he said, and laughed. “I mean, that’s why I always need extra time on the phone, you know?”

I laughed, though, of course, I didn’t know. But I could imagine.

“Who do these girls think they’re talking to?”

“Let’s see. Latasja thinks she’s talking to Rakim, Elizabeth thinks she’s talking to Shane, and Tracy thinks she’s talking to C-Dogg.”

“Tracy? Like, really, you’re dating a girl with your same name?”

“No. C-Dogg is dating a girl with my same name. It’s a weird world, Justin.”

Well, that was certainly true. I lay in silence for a minute or two before asking one more question.

“One g or two?”

“What?”

“C-Dogg. One g or two?”

“Two, of course. Don’t wake me up to ask me stupid questions.” Okay, then.

The next morning at breakfast, everybody—except Jenny, of course—made a big show of saying “Good morning … Tracy,” and smiling.

We were about halfway through breakfast when Tracy turned to Chip, who was sitting next to him, and said, “Okay, Chip. As far as I can tell, we now know everybody’s real name except yours—”

“It’s Chip!”

“Bullshit,” Tracy said, “Nobody puts Chip on a birth certificate. I’m from Grosse Pointe, remember? I know me some Chips. And nobody named Chip is really named Chip.”

“Okay, okay. It’s—”

“Wait. I’m not done. We’re all pretty clear on why everybody else is here—Skeletor over there is kind of obvious, and so’s Mopey”—he gestured at me with his fork—“Psycho”—that’s Diana—“Silent”—Jenny—“and”—he pointed a thumb at his chest—“the compulsive liar. And then there’s Chip.”

“Chesterton,” Chip said.

“
Chesterton?
” Diana asks. “As in The Molesterton?”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Chip said. “And yeah, that’s
the name on my birth certificate. It’s a family name. And if you don’t mind, I’d really rather go by Chip.”

“Whatever, Chesterton,” Diana said.

“And it’s a crack addiction.” Everybody stared. “World of Warcrack, that is,” Chip said, and smiled.

“Wait,” Tracy said. “They locked you up for a video game addiction?”

“They locked you up for lying?” Chip shot back.

Tracy took a breath. “Well. I may have, um … run a bit of a grift on my fellow students at Milton Academy. There may have been five figures of restitution my parents had to make. But we’re not talking about me. We’re talking about you.”

“I wanna hear about the grift!” Diana yelled.

“Long con. Basically a Ponzi scheme. I got a bunch of classmates to invest in my nonexistent drug business. Front me cash to make a buy, I’ll move the product, and double your money. But there’s no product and no buy. Just more suckers putting up money for drugs I never bought.”

We all stared at him for a minute.

“You, sir, are an artist,” I said.

“Unless he’s lying now about lying then,” Diana said.

“Whatever,” Tracy harrumphed. “Can we get back to Chip’s video game addiction?”

“I used to play for days. Days. I bought diapers so I wouldn’t have to get out of my chair to pee, okay?”

“Really? I mean, really, or is this like a Tracy thing where
you’re making up something outrageous and seeing how much you can get us to believe?” I asked.

“Swear to God.”

“What’s it like? Peeing in a diaper, I mean.”

“Warm. At first. It gets clammy later. Poo, of course, is much worse.”

And that pretty much did it for everyone’s appetite. Everyone, strangely, but Emmy, who continued her normal food dissection. Everybody stared at her. “What?” she said.

Finally, it was Friday afternoon. Classes? Over. Homework? Done. Dinner? Eaten. Chores? Everything was clean as a freaking whistle. Finally, we were allowed to leave. It turned out that Assland had one of those extra-long vans that seated about fifteen people. The staff guy who wasn’t Tiny (or tiny) was on driving duty. He said something like, “Don’t know how I got talked into this one,” and shut the plastic window that separated the driver’s seat from the rest of us.

“Alright! Who’s ready for the fair!” Tina chirped as she ushered us into our seats.

“Yyyyyyyeahhhhhh!” Diana screamed, and everybody else just kind of looked at her.

I found myself next to Emmy. “You know, if you time it just right, you can eat a ton of food and then puke it up from the rides,” I offered.

Something was different about the way she looked at me. “If
you time it right, you can throw yourself out of a roller coaster car and kill yourself,” she replied.

“Yeah, you have to be pretty seriously suicidal to throw yourself off a high carnival ride,” I said. “I’m more of a ‘cry for help’ kind of guy.”

“Right, I forgot,” Emmy said. Her smile faded almost instantly, and she stared out the window at the endless rows of corn and soybeans.

After a while, I got the hint she wasn’t in a talking mood—at least to me—so I closed my eyes and fell asleep.

THE RIDE TO THE FAIR WAS LONG, FLAT, AND BORING. JUSTIN HAD
gotten on the van and made some mean joke about my eating habits again, which only confirmed what I’d already decided: He was no longer flirt-worthy. And now that he was snoring away next to me—what was he, a toddler who nodded off every time he was in a moving vehicle?—it only made me more sure of my lack of feelings for him.

With Justin snoozing, Diana deep into conversation with Tina about Joey Chestnut’s hot dog eating strategies, and Chip and Tracy playing poker in the last seat of the van, I had plenty of time to think. I set my mind on figuring out what I was going to say in my Contemporary American Family class to get my level change approved.

So far, we’d tackled single-parent households, same-sex parenting, the foster care system, and being raised by extended family members. After each topic, the teacher always asked for people who had grown up in that situation to share their thoughts on the benefits and drawbacks of the arrangement as they had experienced it.

The kids with single parents said they appreciated how close they were with the parent they lived with, but were mad at the other parent for leaving. The ones with the same-sex parents thought it was a cool way to grow up, but hated how homophobes thought their moms or dads should burn in hell for loving each other. The foster kids liked being part of a family rather than living in a group home but complained about a lack of consistency. The ones living with extended family loved Gram and Gramps or Auntie and Uncle but missed their parents. Next week we were set to talk about adoptive families, so I would definitely be expected to add something major to the discussion. And whatever I said needed to be honest, or no level change and no talking to Joss for who knew how much longer. I couldn’t just bullshit my way through it.

But what was there to say, really? My mom and dad were still together, they were generally cool as far as parents went, no one wanted them to go to hell, and I’d been given support and consistency from the day I’d been adopted. I basically had your run-of-the-mill normal life—no big controversies or
traumas—with the added wrinkle that I was the only one in the family who didn’t come from the same DNA. I couldn’t figure out a good way to tell the class how crappy it felt to be the outsider in your own family—even a nice, normal, nonabusive family—without sounding like a whiny little bitch.

I decided writing down some ideas might help me with that one, so I got up and went over to where Jenny was sitting. Her journal was like her best friend, and when other people were busy having conversations, she’d usually just write away in it. I figured the odds were good she’d have it with her even on a van ride to a state fair. But when I asked to borrow a pen and paper, she patted the seat next to her instead.

“If you’re going to tell me to f-off and punch me in the stomach again, I’d rather not,” I told her.

She shook her head and smiled, pointing to the spot again.

“What’s up?” I said, sitting down. I wasn’t expecting anything in response, of course.

She sat and stared at her hands for a solid minute. Then she sighed, took a deep breath, and whispered, “What is it with you two?”

My eyes flew open and I looked around to see if anyone else had witnessed this momentous occasion—Jenny had actually talked! But everyone was still deep into whatever else it was they were doing.

“Who two?” I asked once I’d gotten over my shock.

“You and Justin,” she said softly.

I cocked my head to the side and scrunched up my nose. “Nothing. Why?”

She shrugged. “Sometimes, I thought you liked him but he missed all the cues. Other times, it seemed like he liked you but you’d just blow him off. Like when he got on the van today. So I guess I’m just trying to figure out if there’s anything there, or if it’s my imagination.”

“All in your head. He definitely doesn’t like me,” I assured her. “Mostly, our conversation consists of him busting my chops about the way I eat. And I don’t know … maybe Women and the Media class is getting to me, but I don’t like how he objectifies and commodifies women by watching porn. So I guess that means I don’t like him either.”

Jenny patted my knee. “If you rule out all the guys who like porn as potential dates, I think you’re going to be alone a lot.”

I laughed. “That’s okay. I was already on a planned hiatus from guys until college.”

“That must have been one hell of a breakup,” she said.

“It would have been,” I admitted. “If we were ever official in the first place. Which we weren’t.”

“Care to share?” she asked.

“And admit how stupid I was? Um, probably not.”

I hadn’t told anyone except Joss—not my friends, parents, school administrators, Brittany, no one—the real deal about
what had gone down. I’d sworn Joss to secrecy for life, and she’d promised to go to her grave with my dirt. So I couldn’t imagine telling Jenny the whole sordid tale now, not after the lengths I’d gone to cover up my shame.

Too bad that didn’t stop me from reliving the nightmare unrelationship in my mind. It had all started back in September, when I was assigned Mason as my lab partner in chemistry. Mason was basically king of the school, and not someone who would have even known I existed if it hadn’t been for the alphabetical proximity of our last names.

As with most kings, Mason had a queen, and they’d been going out forever—like at least two years. Mason and Lizbeth were destined for all the cutesy senior superlatives: Most Popular, Best Couple, Most Likely to Get Married and Live Happily Ever After With Two Gorgeous Kids and a Golden Retriever, the works. So when Mason asked me to study with him for our first test, I might have been a little intimidated to be hanging out with such a cool senior, but I definitely knew it wasn’t code for “let’s fool around.”

We both aced that exam, which was enough to convince us both that studying together was a smart strategy. And after maybe our third session, the strictly business thing started morphing into something else. I would never have imagined a guy like Mason and I have anything in common, but it turned out there was plenty. We both liked horror flicks, pugs, Harry Potter,
and Sudoku. We were obsessed with Scrabble, jalapeño-pineapple pizza, and the smell of vanilla extract. Our siblings were our best friends. By then, I’d almost say we were becoming more than study buddies, albeit buddies who only saw each other in chem class and every so often when we were hitting the books together at my house or his.

And then one night, when we were cramming for our midterm, Mason wasn’t acting like his usual laid-back self. Naturally I asked him what was up.

“I broke up with Lizbeth today,” he said, with a half happy, half sad look on his face. “And she kind of freaked out on me. It was not pretty.”

I felt my heart skip a happy little dance inside my chest, though I tried my best to keep that under wraps. “Well, you guys were together for like, forever, so of course she’s upset. But I’m sure she’ll get over it,” I said, adding quickly. “I mean, not that you’d be easy to get over or anything.”