“Like I said before, I was hoping that I’m wrong, that life gets better for some people when they get older, and even the most miserable people—such as you and me—might be able to enjoy at least some aspect of adulthood. Like those ads where gay guys talk about being picked on in high school but then they grew up and discovered that adult life is like heaven. They say it gets better. I want to believe that happiness might at least be possible later on in life for people prone to sadness.”
She swatted my words out of the air with her hand and said, “All ads are lies. Life doesn’t get better at all. Adulthood is hell. And everything I told you about myself was a lie too. I made everything up just to see who you were because I thought they paid you to be a spy. But the joke’s on me because you really are just a crazy, sad, underfed high school student who follows random people. That’s sick. Perverted. I’m keeping your ID and if I ever see you again I’m pressing charges and getting a restraining order.”
She stood up and glared down at me through her huge sunglasses.
“This little prick follows women into dark alleys and asks them intimate questions. He’s a true pervert. Do with him as you will,” she said loudly to everyone eating breakfast, and then her heels clicked out of the shop—POW! POW! POW! POW!
I could tell everyone was still looking at me and so I shrugged and said, “Women!” too loudly. It was supposed to be a joke to break the tension, but it didn’t work. Everyone[23] in the coffee shop was frowning.
I figured the woman was really deranged—I had simply picked a femme fatale to follow, there were surely better case studies to find, happier adults prone to sadness, and she was just an unlucky fluke—but the problem was that she sort of reminded me of Linda, who also thinks I’m a pervert.
And what the 1970s sunglasses woman had said was so mean, public, and maybe true, that I started to cry right there, which made me really SEEM like a pervert.
Not big boo-hoo tears.
I pretty much hid the fact that I was crying, but my lips trembled and my eyes got all moist before I could wipe them away with my sleeve.
“I’M NOT A FUCKING PERVERT!” I yelled at the people staring at me, although I’m not sure why.
The words just sort of shot out of my mouth.
I’M!
NOT!
A!
FUCKING!
PERVERT!
They all winced.
A few people stuck money under their utensils and left, even though they weren’t finished eating.
This huge muscle-inflated tattooed cook came out from the kitchen and said, “Why don’t you just pay your bill and leave, kid? Okay?”
Just like always I could tell I was the problem—that the coffee shop would be better off once I was no longer around—so I pulled out my wallet and handed him all my money even though we only had a coffee each, and in a normal speaking voice, I said, “I’m not a pervert.”
No one would make eye contact with me, not even the cook, who was looking at the money now, maybe to make sure it wasn’t counterfeit, which is when I realized that the truth doesn’t matter most of the time, and when people have awful ideas about your identity, that’s just the way it will stay no matter what you do.
So I didn’t wait for change.
I got the hell out of there.
I went to the park and watched the pigeons bob their heads and I felt so so lonely that I hoped someone would come along and stick a knife into my ribs just so they could have my empty wallet.
I imagined all of my blood flowing out into the snow and watching it turn a beautiful crimson color as Philadelphians walked by in a great big hurry, not even pausing to admire the beauty of red snow, let alone register the fact that a high school kid was dying right in front of their eyes.
The thought was comforting somehow and made me smile.
I also kept oscillating between wanting that crazy 1970s sunglasses woman’s mom to die a horrible painful cringe-inducing death and wanting her mom to live and start to get healthier—younger even, like the two of them might even begin aging backward all the way to childhood—even though the femme fatale probably made the entire mother-dying story up just to mess with my head. But she had to have a mother who was either dead or elderly, and so it was nice to think of them getting younger together rather than older, regardless of whether they deserved it or not.
It was a confusing day, and I felt like I was in some Bogart black-and-white picture where women are crazy and men pay hefty emotional fees for getting involved with “the fairer sex,” as Walt says.
I remember skipping four days of school after my encounter with the 1970s sunglasses woman just so Walt and I could watch good old Bogie keep things orderly in black-and-white Hollywood land.
My high school called a hundred million times before Linda checked the home answering machine[24] from NYC, and, to be fair, she actually had a driver bring her home that night and stayed with me for a day or two, because I was really fucked up—not talking and just sort of really depressed—staring at walls and pushing the heels of my hands into my eyes until they felt like they would pop.
Any normal mom would have taken me to a therapist or at least a doctor, but not Linda. I heard her talking on the phone to her French boyfriend and she actually said, “I won’t let some therapist blame me for Leo’s problems.” And that’s when I really knew I was on my own—that I couldn’t count on Linda to save me.
But somehow I pulled myself together.
I started talking again, went back to school, and an extremely relieved Linda left me alone once more.
Fashion called.
There were camisoles[25] with built-in bras to design, so I, of course, understood her need to float away to New York.
And life went on.
TWELVE
I walk into A.P. English halfway through the period and Mrs. Giavotella stares at me for just about seven minutes before she says, “How nice of you to join us, Mr. Peacock. See me after class.”
My A.P. English teacher looks like a cannonball. She’s short and round and has these stubby limbs that make me wonder if she can touch the top of her head. She never wears a dress or a skirt but is always in overstuffed pants that are about to explode and a huge blouse that hangs down almost to her knees, covering her belly. A beaded line of sweat perpetually sits just above her upper lip.
I nod and take my seat.
The troglodyte football player who doesn’t even belong in A.P. but just so happens to sit directly behind me—that guy knocks my Bogart hat off my head and everyone sees my new fucked-up haircut before I can get my skull covered again.
“What the—?” this girl Kat Davis whispers, making me realize my hair looks worse than I had imagined.
Mrs. Giavotella gives me a look like she’s really worried for me all of a sudden, and I look back at her like please return to the lesson so everyone will stop looking at me because if you don’t I will pull the P-38 from my backpack and start firing away.
“Mr. Adams,” Mrs. Giavotella says to the kid behind me. “If you were Dorian Gray—if there was a picture of you that changed according to your behavior, how would that picture look right about now?”
“I didn’t knock Leonard’s hat off, if that’s what you’re implying. He knocked it off himself. I saw him do it. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
Mrs. Giavotella looks at him for a second, and I can tell she believes him. Then she looks at me, like she’s wondering if I really did knock my own hat off, so I say, “Why would I knock my own hat off? What purpose would that serve?”
“Why would you interrupt my lesson by arriving late?” she says, and then gives me this lame look that’s supposed to intimidate and control me—and it probably would on any other day. But I have the P-38 in my backpack, and therefore am uncontrollable.
Mrs. Giavotella says, “So. Back to Mr. Dorian Gray.”
I don’t really listen to the class discussion, which is all about a painting that gets uglier and uglier as its subject ages and becomes more and more corrupt, but magically never ages himself at all. It sounds like an interesting book, and I probably would have read it if I weren’t so obsessed with reading Hamlet over and over again. If I weren’t going to shoot Asher Beal and kill myself this afternoon, I’d probably read The Picture of Dorian Gray next. I’ve liked everything we’ve read in Mrs. Giavotella’s class this year, even though she’s always going on and on about the bullshit A.P. exam and dangling the college-credit carrot way more than she should. It’s almost obscene.
Mostly, as I’m sitting here in A.P. English, I think about the way my classmates are always raising their hands and sucking up to Mrs. Giavotella just so she will give them As, which they will send to Harvard or Princeton or Stanford or where-fucking-ever, to go along with their lies about how much community service they supposedly did and essays about how much they care about poor minority children they’ll never meet in real life or how they are going to save the world armed with nothing but a big heart and an Ivy League education.
“Save the world in your college application essays,” Mrs. Giavotella likes to say.
If my classmates put as much effort into making our community better as they give to the college-application process, this place would be a utopia.
Appearances, appearances.
The great façade.
How to Live Blindly in a Blind World 101.
So much bullshit gets flung around in here, the stench gets so strong that you can hardly breathe. The best thing about killing myself will be that I’ll never have to go to a fake university and wear one of those standard college sweatshirts that’s supposed to prove I’m smart or something. I’m pretty proud of the fact that I will die without officially taking the SATs. Even though Linda and everyone here at my high school has begged me to take that stupid test just because I did so well on the practice one a few years ago.
Illogical.
Epic fail.
Somehow the class ends and I remember I’m supposed to speak with Mrs. Giavotella, so I just stay put when everyone scrambles out the door.
She walks over all slow and dramatic, sits on the desk in front of me so that her feet are resting on the seat, her knees clamped together tight so that I don’t get a direct view of her overly taxed zipper, which I appreciate very much, and says, “So, do you want to talk about what happened to your hair?”
“No, thank you.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, then. Why exactly were you late for my class?”
“I don’t know.”
“Not good enough.”
“I’m thinking of dropping down to the honors track. You won’t have to worry about me then.”
“Not a chance.”
I’m not really sure what she wants from me, so I look out the window at the few leaves clinging to the small Japanese maple outside.
She says, “I graded your Hamlet exam. How do you think you did?”
I shrug.
“Your essay was very interesting.”
I keep looking at the few clinging leaves that seem to shiver whenever the wind blows.
“Of course, you completely ignored the prompt.”
“You asked the wrong question,” I say.
“I beg your pardon?”
“No offense, but I think you asked the wrong essay question.”
She forces an incredulous laugh and says, “So you gave me the right question.”
“Yes.”
“Which was?”
“You read my essay, right?”
“Do you really think Shakespeare is trying to justify suicide—that the entire play is an argument for self-slaughter?”
“Yes.”
“But Hamlet doesn’t commit suicide.”
“You did read my essay, right?”
Mrs. Giavotella smoothes out her pant legs, rubbing her palms down her thighs, and then says, “I noticed you didn’t bring your copy of the text to the open-book test. And yet you quoted extensively. Do you really have so many quotes memorized? Is that possible?”
I shrug, because why does that even matter? It’s like my English teacher gets off on having supposedly smart people in her class, and yet she doesn’t even realize what’s important about the books and plays we read. She doesn’t understand what’s important about me either.
“Your essay was brilliant, Leonard. Perhaps the finest I’ve come across in all of my nineteen years of teaching. I read it several times. You have a real way with words. And your arguments—you could be a fantastic lawyer if you wanted to be.”
I keep staring at those few clinging leaves, waiting for her to flip the praise into scorn like she always does.
Who the fuck would want to be a lawyer? Being forced to argue for money—supporting sides you don’t even believe in.
After a dramatic pause, she says, “But you didn’t answer any of the simple multiple-choice questions. Why?”
“You only ask those to make sure everyone read the play,” I say. “My essay clearly proves that I read the play, right? I demonstrated proficiency, did I not?”
“They were worth thirty points. You didn’t demonstrate the ability to follow simple directions. That counts in my class, and in life too. No matter how smart you may be, you’re going to have to follow instructions once you leave this high school.”
I laugh because we’re talking about her grades and points as if they’re real or something. And knowing that I’m about to kill Asher Beal and then myself makes this conversation all the more absurd and irrelevant.
“I don’t really care about the grade. You can fail me. It doesn’t matter.”
“That’s very noble of you, but you have to think about your future, Leonard.”
“Do you think Hamlet would have followed directions if he had taken this exam? Do you?”
“That’s hardly the point.”
“Then why do you make us study characters like Hamlet—heroes—if we’re not supposed to act like them? If we’re supposed to worry about points and college-acceptance letters and all the rest. Do what everyone else is doing.”
“Hamlet went to college,” she says weakly, because she knows I’m right. She knows she’s fighting on the wrong side.
I smile and keep looking at the tree. She has no clue. Never in her wildest dreams would she imagine I have a Nazi gun on me. Her imagination is so limited. She has a multiple-choice-question-making imagination. It makes me laugh, how stupid our A.P. English teacher is.
She says, “I’ve tried to contact your—”
I use my acting voice to say, “Make you a wholesome answer. My wit’s diseased. But, sir, such answer as I can make, you shall command—or, rather, as you say, my mother. Therefore no more but to the matter. My mother, you say—”
Mrs. Giavotella just sort of stares at me like she’s afraid, so I say, “You’re supposed to jump in as Rosencrantz,” and in my acting voice I say, “‘Then thus she says: your behavior hath struck her into amazement and admiration.’ You see—I was quoting from Hamlet. You did realize that, right? You can’t be that much of a shitty teacher. Come on!”
Her face goes blank and her mouth becomes an O, like I slapped her hard.
Eventually, she stands and walks to her desk.
I watch her write a pass.
She hands it to me and in this new stern faraway detached voice she says, “I’m here to help, Leonard. I’m glad that you found Hamlet so stimulating. I won’t pretend to know what’s going on with you, but I have to report your bizarre behavior to Guidance. I just want you to know that. And I’m not really sure what you’re after, but I try very hard to be a good teacher. I spend a lot of time and energy on my tests and lesson plans. I care about all of my students, thank you very much.” In a whisper, she says, “If you want to throw that in my face then—then you can go to hell.” Much louder she says, “When you’re willing to talk straight with me, I’m willing to listen. But if you ever come to my class again even one second late, you won’t be permitted entrance. You understand me?”
I look into Mrs. Giavotella’s eyes and her lids are quivering, which is when I realize that she’s going to cry just as soon as I leave the room. And this is going to be her last memory of me. I’m not really sure why, but I feel terrible all of a sudden. Like I want to pull out the P-38 and off myself in the bathroom stall. If I didn’t have to deliver the other three presents and shoot Asher Beal in the face, I probably would just get it over with and be done with everything.
I have the pass in my hand and now Mrs. Giavotella’s looking at the almost completely bare Japanese maple outside her classroom window.
What makes sad people want to look at that tree?
Her back fat is hanging over her bra strap and it makes me wonder if she was picked on a lot in high school for being so short, overweight, and squishy. She probably was, which makes me feel even worse.
“You’re a good teacher,” I say. “I knocked my own hat off too. I’m an asshole, okay? A HUGE asshole. I don’t deserve to have such a fine teacher as yourself. Okay? Don’t worry about the stupid things I said. I’m sorry I interrupted your class today. My head’s not right. I’ll answer multiple-choice questions in the future if it will make you happy. I know you work hard on your lesson plans and—”
Without facing me she says, “Just go, Leonard. Please.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’d like you to leave now,” she says in a shaky voice.
So I do.
THIRTEEN
LETTER FROM THE FUTURE NUMBER 2
My Dearest Hamlet,
I’m five foot five with short brown hair (think pixie cut), a cute ass (or so you say, and I believe you because you can’t keep your hands off it!), and I wear a full (perky) B-cup. You find me irresistible and we make love at least once a day, but usually manage to do it multiple times employing all sorts of creative positions too. That ought to get your horny little teenage mind reeling.
Can you even imagine sex every day with another human being?
You told me that when you were a teenager you believed you wouldn’t ever have consensual sex with anyone—that you would die a consensual virgin, which would have been a shame, because let me tell you something, you LOVE sex.
Sometimes I make you beg, and beg you do.
And if you would just ask a girl on a date, Mr. King of Masturbation, you would definitely be surprised, and maybe we’d have fewer issues to work through when we first get together. Not that I want you fooling around with little chicken-assed high school girls before we meet! Ha!
You get to make love to me in the future hundreds (thousands?) of times!
Doesn’t that make you want to live on into adulthood?
Aren’t I enough?
All joking aside—for a couple that lives with a small child and an old man in a lighthouse, our sex life is mind-blowing.
We work all day outside, doing routine rounds, excavating buildings, checking our flotation devices, testing the radioactive levels of the water, and then we swim for hours and hours, so our bodies are firm and tan and beautiful, unlike the fat mush they would have turned into had we gone to the enclosed cities and worked desk jobs where no one ever sees the sun.
We are very, very lucky.
In many ways, we avoided adulthood.
Outpost 37 is our own private utopia.
You call it “second childhood.”
Do you want to know how we meet?
Should I ruin the surprise?
I feel like I better entice you. It would be a shame if you never made it this far—to the best part of your life.
After the war, when things settled and the North American Land Collective was formed, thousands of nomads were forced to repatriate through camps set up along the new controlled borders, which began in the state you now call Ohio, but have since been forced much farther west due to rising water, earthquakes, and general instability. Those who repatriated were absorbed by one of the many enclosed cities that were built and continue to be built upward. Those who refused to repatriate were considered a threat to the new order and therefore were hunted and, once captured, given the choice between death and forced labor in outdoor prison camps.
From what you’ve told me, the bounty hunters employed by the Repatriate Act of 2023 caught you asleep in a cave. You were surviving off wild berries and the small rodents you could kill, mostly rats. It was not a good life for you, I’m afraid, and you were not very well mentally. Actually, you were certifiably insane.
You did a tour overseas, during the Great War of 2018. You won’t talk about your time in the military, but sometimes you have nightmares when you scream about killing. Again, you won’t talk about it so I don’t know more.
You say, “That was the before life. Let’s live in the now life.”
And since you are generally happy when you are awake and are such a good husband, I don’t push it with the questions about the past and the night terrors.
But back to the story of how we met. You were brought into an outdoor labor camp, and you refused to work or talk, even when they withheld food and water and finally tortured you, almost to death.
When they decided that you were expendable and that it had been a mistake to bring you in alive, you were saved by a request from the heartland for test subjects and shipped to a government testing facility. I just so happened to be an administrative operator back then, and you were assigned to me.
I was a scientist working on a drug that made it easier for adults to conform to the new enclosed world. The idea was to rid the planet of rebellious people and to make sure we curbed the human tendency to disagree and argue, which has led us to nuclear war and all that followed.
Mother Earth was angry with us, and so we had to “teach ourselves to be better children,” which was the tagline the new North American Land Collective government preached.
At first you wouldn’t speak to me either. I had you in a padded cell and I would talk to you via speakers. But you just sat in the corner with your head between your knees, getting skinnier and skinnier.
At night we’d gas you, and then my aides would give you shots full of vitamins, nutrients, and the experimental chemicals.
I don’t remember why I decided to read to you, but we started with Shakespeare—Hamlet—which was damn lucky for us. Made me believe in fate again, if you’ll allow me to be mystical.
I read, saying, “Act I. Scene I. Elsinore. A platform before the Castle. Francisco at his post. Enter to him Bernardo. Who’s there?”
That’s when you lifted your head and said, “Nay, answer me: stand, and unfold yourself.”
I was shocked. You hadn’t spoken once and here you were reciting the next line in Hamlet. It was like I found the key to your mouth. So I read on, saying, “Long live the king!”
“Bernardo?” you said.
“He,” I replied.
“You come most carefully upon your hour,” you said, and then we traded lines from Hamlet all day long.
A few times I tried to break and ask you questions, but you would only say, “More words! Words, words, words!”
And for a week or so we played this game—putting on the play, just the two of us through speakers.
You were so passionate about it, such a good actor, actually—reciting Hamlet’s soliloquies with such zeal and conviction that I began to think you were perhaps once a budding movie star.
Eventually, I broke protocol and entered the padded cell so that we might read the play together in person. That’s how taken I was with your ability to breathe life into Shakespeare’s lines.
We acted out Hamlet for weeks, and the drugs we gave you started to work—you lost the wild look in your eyes and eventually began to speak to me like a regular human being. Only you weren’t regular at all—you were full of magic.
I remember the first thing you said too, when you finally broke character. You said, “Can I take you to dinner sometime?”
It was a ridiculous thing to say, since you were locked up.
But I laughed, and you smiled.
You began to tell me the story of your life, and I broke protocol again by telling you mine.
I began to take you out into the world—partly to show my superiors how I had tamed the wild man with my science, reclaimed his mind for the good of society, but mostly because I was in love with you.
As you will learn, my father was a high-ranking military man during the Great War and many of the North American Land Collective leaders owe him favors. It wasn’t really all that hard to get both of us transferred to Outpost 37 under his command.
Once the paperwork was complete, after I had finished my drug study and vitamin Z was introduced successfully into the controlled population, we were flown by helicopter to Outpost 37.
My father threw open his arms and said, “Welcome home.”
You and Dad took to each other right away, and he presided over our wedding a few weeks later when we discovered that I was pregnant.
That’s right, Leonard. You’ll be hearing from our daughter next. You love S even more than you love me, and I don’t mind that one bit, because I love you both to death.
You are a fantastic dad.
Fantastic!
And I know that your childhood wasn’t all that great—that you felt a lot of pain, and that you are in a lot of pain right now. But maybe you have to go through all that so you’ll learn just how important having a happy childhood can be, so you will provide one for our daughter.
I wish I could send you a video or a picture of you and S playing in the water with Horatio the dolphin. If you could see that, you’d know that all of the pain you have to endure to get here, where you are happy in the future, is most definitely worth it.
Even though she’s getting too old to be sleeping with us, she still falls asleep with her head on your chest every night. You kiss the top of her hair before you man the lighthouse with Dad and me.
We send out the beam for twenty minutes, and then conserve energy for twenty minutes, repeating the forty-minute cycle all night long. Three or so minutes before we switch the light back on, after our eyes have just begun to adjust to the dark, you and I always go out onto the observation deck to search for shooting stars. There are a lot these days and we’ve been keeping track of who spots the most. This year I’m beating you 934 to 812. We’re hoping to get to 1,000 each before the year ends, and it’s looking good.
And we kiss every time we spot a shooting star too.
So we’ve kissed 1,746 times on the observation deck this year alone, and many more times have we kissed elsewhere.
I like that you are so affectionate with me. You always say you’re making up for lost time and that you wished we could have met earlier in life, so that we would have been able to spend more time together.
It’s a good life, Leonard.
Hold on.
The future is better.
We have so much sex!
Your daughter is beautiful.
And my dad becomes a dad to you too—just like you always wanted.
Just hold on, okay?
Please.
Love,
Don’t-You-Dare-Call-Me-Ophelia,
A
FOURTEEN
My friend Baback is of Iranian descent, but when I first met him, he used to tell everyone he was Persian, because most American teenagers don’t know that Iran used to be Persia, and most American teens have watched enough news to hate Iran.
Back when he was a freshman, if you gave Baback some wrinkles and a salt-and-pepper beard he’d look exactly like the current Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, which could cause him problems, especially during patriotic times like 9/11 anniversaries, and whenever Ahmadinejad made anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, and anti-American comments, which was all the time.
At the very least you would have thought that Baback definitely could be related to Ahmadinejad, that’s how much he used to look like the Iranian president.
I met Baback during freshmen orientation, right after he came to America and ended up in our school. For a year I saw him around the halls looking tiny and terrified, dressed in really formal clothes—like if you gave him a tie, he’d be a prep school kid in a uniform. He had a backpack that was bigger than him, and he was always carrying this violin case—like everywhere he went. He wouldn’t leave it in a locker, except during gym class, when he was forced to—I know because we had gym together as sophomores.
There was this one gym class where we were playing floor hockey and our teacher Mr. Austin got called away on some sort of business for ten minutes. Baback and I were on the same team and not really participating all that much. We were sort of just standing in the middle of the gym holding sticks, watching everyone else chase and slap at a little orange ball.
Asher Beal was on the other team, and just as soon as he saw that Mr. Austin was no longer in the gym, he slap-shot the ball at Baback. It hit him right between the eyes. Baback blinked a few times in this really comical way, which made everyone else laugh, but I could tell that Baback was actually hurt so I didn’t laugh. I remember feeling hot, like my face was on fire, because I already wanted to kill Asher Beal back then, but I still thought I might want a future so I wasn’t really actively planning his execution, well not consciously anyway.