The Scar Boys (20 page)

“Hi, I’m Stumpy Joe.” I must’ve looked at him crosseyed, because he laughed and said, “Nah, that’s not really my name, but it breaks the ice. My real name is George. What’s your name?”

As usual, I was frozen and couldn’t think of a response. Not even my name. I guess he figured that I was both deformed and a bit challenged, because he turned to the
kid sitting on the other side of him and said, “Hi, I’m Stumpy Joe.”

So missing arms, missing hands, missing legs weren’t anything new to me. Seeing Johnny’s stump wasn’t going to be a problem.

It was the rest of him that was making me nervous. The part of him that would remember that I was the guy who’d hit (slapped) him, and that I was the guy who’d started the chain of events that ended with his leg on an operating room floor.

When I rang the doorbell, Mrs. McKenna—a tumbler of brown, translucent, and potent-smelling liquid in her hand—greeted me cordially, which was all she’d ever done. Johnny’s parents wished he’d hung out with a better class of friends, and given how things turned out, you can’t really blame them.

The cubes of ice were clinking against the sides of her glass and echoing through the hall as she escorted me to Johnny’s bedroom door. She put a hand on my shoulder and said, “See if you can help him, Harry.” The tone in her voice suggested no else had been able to. She walked away down the hall and I went in.

I found Johnny sitting up in bed, the covers pulled to his waist, his missing leg hidden from view. He was reading a weathered, library copy of
The Catcher in the Rye
and looked up when I entered. He didn’t smile.

“Hey,” I said. Johnny nodded in response. “How’re you doing?” He shrugged his shoulders. I sat down on the edge of his bed.

I saw something in Johnny that I hadn’t seen in a long time. A decade, to be exact. Written in the creases of Johnny’s brow, in the glass sheen of his eyes, in the tension in his neck and back, on his foul breath, in the dirty pajamas he wore, in his unkempt and uncut hair, and across the expanse of clutter in his room—written in every fiber of Johnny’s being was the same agony I’d felt after the thunderstorm. He was trapped in the disaster of himself and couldn’t find a way out.

Seeing him sitting there, seeing
myself
sitting there, I realized that I’d never left that place. And suddenly, I felt like a fool. Like the biggest god damn fool on the god damn face of the god damn Earth. This is what Dr. Kenny had been trying to tell me. That I was a fool. I was such a fool that I had to laugh out loud.

“Jesus, Harry, did you come here to laugh at me?” Johnny’s face was turning red.

“What? Oh, no, no. I was thinking of something someone said to me a long time ago, after the lightning strike.” His posture relaxed. He waited for me to continue.

“Do you know anything about Chinese butterflies?”

I don’t know if I did Lucky’s story justice, or if it helped, but it was enough of a distraction to allow Johnny to loosen up. He asked me questions about the day Lucky came to
see me, and for the first time in a long time, we just talked, like we used to, before, well, before everything.

After a while there was a break in the conversation, so I steeled my nerve and said, “Johnny, I saw Cheyenne.”

At the mention of Chey’s name the temperature in the room dropped fifteen degrees.

Johnny looked darts at me. “What about Chey,” he said. My first thought was that he somehow knew that she and I had kissed, but I couldn’t imagine how so I pressed on.

“She thinks you hate her.”

“Good.”

“What?”

He nodded to the blanket, his hidden wound meant to serve as an exclamation point.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“I’m letting her off the hook. I don’t want her pity, and I don’t want her to have to settle for someone who isn’t all here.” He threw his book onto the blanket, landing it in the spot where his leg should have been. He did it to make me uncomfortable, but it didn’t work. Johnny had lots of weapons against me; disfigurement wasn’t one of them.

“I don’t understand.”

“You said that already.”

“If you didn’t want to see any of us, why did your mom call Athens to tell us you were in the accident in the first place?”

“Who said I didn’t want to see any of you?”

“I don’t under—”

“You don’t understand. Yeah, so I’ve gathered. Look, Harry, I’m not sure if I told my mom to call the skate house, or if it was her idea. That was like less than two days after my surgery”—he nearly gagged on the word—“and I was so full of morphine you could’ve, oh, I don’t know,
slapped me in the face
and I wouldn’t have felt it.”

Ouch
, I thought.

“And it wasn’t the band I wanted to get in touch with, it was you, Harry. You!” His cheeks were the color of an apple and he was short of breath. “Where the fuck have you been?” he shouted at me.

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what to think. “I’m sorry,” I muttered. “I thought you were mad at me, because I hit you.”

“Slapped me,” he corrected.

“Slapped you,” I admitted.

“I
was
mad at you, Harry. But then this happened,” he said, pointing to his leg, “and somehow the slap in the face didn’t seem so bad.”

“But I still don’t understand,” I said. “Then why didn’t you call me?”

“You were supposed to call me!” he said, his voice rising again.

“You’re right, you’re right,” I said, hands up and out in
a sign of surrender, hoping to calm him down. “I’m really sorry, John. I really am. But I’m here now.”

No response. I let a long moment pass. Maybe I’d been wrong. Maybe I’d been judging Johnny through a lens of jealousy. And not just jealousy about Cheyenne, jealousy about everything he was and I was not. Maybe it was me who’d been the crappy friend.

But something was still bothering me. “I still don’t understand,” I said quietly.

He rolled his eyes. “What?”

“Why you don’t want to see Cheyenne.”

“I told you. I’m doing her a favor.”

“But she loves you.”

“Which is why I need to push her away. Do you think I like doing this?”

“Then don’t.”

No response.

“You know, John, sometimes you can be one stubborn, arrogant prick.” As I think I’ve established, this isn’t the kind of thing I was used to saying to Johnny, and it wasn’t the kind of thing he was used to hearing from me. But seeing him there helped me understand how the world saw me and that was like a tonic. For once, I could be the other guy. I could be Kung Fu.

“Be careful, Harry.” He didn’t even try to hide the anger in his voice. I ignored it.

“Dude, you’re my best friend.” This hung in the air for a second. I think it surprised us both. “And you’re the luckiest guy in the world to have a girl like Cheyenne. I’d give anything for that. I almost did. Don’t blow it.”

“Luckiest guy in the world? Are you out of your mind? Look at me!”

“I am looking, John.”

“You’re looking but you’re not seeing! This is not lucky!” He pulled the blanket back, exposing his stump. His pajama bottoms were tied up in a knot, hiding the wound, but that didn’t lessen the impact of the visual. “I’m a cripple, a gimp, a freak! How the fuck would you know anything about what I feel!” He screamed so loud I thought a window might shatter. I let his words ricochet around the room, bounce off his stereo, zigzag through his books, rattle the lightbulbs in the matching bedside lamps, careen off the poster of 1972 Olympics marathoner Frank Shorter, bounce off the worn carpet, shoot back up, and explode off the ceiling, until they were falling down on his head like soft rain.

He looked up at me, and he saw me. He really saw me. His shoulders sagged, and he nodded, realizing that I was the only person in his entire world who knew exactly how he felt.

“Just talk to her, okay?” I said quietly.

Johnny nodded again.

The shoe of our conversations had been so long on the other foot—with Johnny schooling me, and me setting my jaw and taking it—that neither one of us knew what to say next. Or maybe we’d both said what we’d needed to say, and we were worn out.

Either way, I couldn’t really look at Johnny so I let my eye wander the room.

There was a new acoustic guitar—a sunburst Takamine with a built-in pickup—propped against the wall opposite the bed. Johnny saw me eyeing it.

“Go ahead,” he said, I think relieved as much as I was, to change the subject. “My parents bought it to cheer me up. I haven’t touched it.”

I took the guitar, more as a defense against further angst than anything else, sat down cross-legged on the floor, and started strumming and picking random notes. The guitar felt heavy in my hands, but not like a weight. It was like an anchor, rooting me safely to the spot. It was like morphine, replacing so much pain with so much euphoria. People would come and people would go, I realized then, but music would be there until the end of time. (Note to self: Never question Dr. Kenny again. The guy is almost always right.)

I let that thought, about music, wash over me as I started to absentmindedly strum the chords of a song Johnny and I had been working on before we left to go on tour.

A to A7, A to A7.

I was playing soft but with a quick tempo. I let the simple chord progression drone on, the sound of it filling Johnny’s room with the joy that only an acoustic guitar can bring. Just before I was about to shift to the chords in the bridge, Johnny surprised me and started to sing along.

We looked at each other as the last chord faded out, both cautious. It was Johnny who let his guard down first.

“You know,” he said, “the name of this band will make a lot more sense now that there are two of us.” He paused a beat, and we both burst out laughing. We laughed like that until we both cried.

When we were both tired and dried out, I started to strum chords to another Scar Boys song. Johnny pitched forward, ready to sing the first verse.

Music to the rescue again.

I wasn’t sure what I wanted to accomplish when I sat down to write this essay. Strike that. I know exactly what I wanted to accomplish. I wanted you, Faceless Admissions Professional, to know who I was. You were never going to get that from SAT scores, my GPA, and a two-hundred- and fifty-word essay.

That day in Johnny’s room was nearly six months ago. He never went off to Syracuse and I don’t think he ever will. The four of us have been jamming again, and it’s been great. I’m not sure where it will lead, but this time I understand that it’s not where I end up that matters, but how I get there.

The truth is, while I know I’m supposed to want to go to college, that everyone is supposed to want to go to college, following the pack has never worked out all that well
for me. I only filled out your application to please my parents. After everything that happened, it seemed like the right thing to do. What I want is to play music. If you’ve read this far, you’ve probably figured that out. But, did you read this far? I doubt it. And that’s okay. The exercise has been its own reward.

I started out telling you I was a coward, and I probably still am. But maybe I’ve learned something else here, too. I finally know who I am. I’m no longer the shy ugly kid with the scars. I’m the shy ugly kid with the scars who plays guitar, who loves music, and who has friends. And you know what? That’s good enough for me.

This book would simply not exist with the love, support, input, feedback, advice, pushing, prodding, cheering—and did I mention love?—of my best friend, live-in editor, and oh yeah, my wife, Kristen Gilligan Vlahos. Without Krissy, I’d still be writing really bad screenplays in the basement.

Carl Lennertz, Allison Hill, and Sarah Darer Littman were all early champions of
The Scar Boys
; without their editorial input and encouragement, I’d still be writing really bad poetry in the attic.

There were far too many readers of various drafts of
The Scar Boys
, all of whom provided valuable feedback, for me to remember and name, but I’ll give it a shot. Thank you to Stephanie Anderson, John Bohman, Tom Gilligan, Bobbi Gilligan, Tommy Gilligan, Richard Hunt, Grandwinnie Kalassay, Kathy Leydon, Lauren McCartney, Karen Schechner, Nadine Vassallo and, and … damn, I’m very sorry if I forgot to include you here. Without
your collective help, I’d still be writing really bad polemics on the patio. (Yeah, okay, this joke is already stale.)

My outstanding agent, Sandra Bond, never wavered in her faith in this project; and Greg Ferguson, my brilliant editor at Egmont, understood this story from the beginning. His keen insight made
The Scar Boys
a better book at every turn. I am indebted to both. And thank you to Andrea Cascardi, Margaret Coffee, and the entire team at Egmont for their incredible, and incredibly smart, support.

Thank you to my parents for instilling in me a love of the written word. Thank you, Oren Teicher and everyone at ABA, for the ceaseless encouragement and support, especially Mark Nichols. Thank you, Chris Finan, for all the good writing advice.