My Bug Friends

The following is a work in progress. If I choose to add another installment, the above title will appear plus “Part 2.” The end seems like a both a stopping point and a jumping-off point, so it feels right to me. Hope you agree. — D.

It was fifth period, and just a few hours ago, I thought that God had answered my prayer. Now it was shit again, so I pressed.
“Why. Tell me.”
“Stop bugging me,” said Julia. Cute. I had never heard that one before. She must have learned that from one of the bitches that told her about my dad, an exterminator.
“Shh,” said Mrs Neely, trying to exercise maximum patience with her favorite students.
“I want to know how you could do what you did. Just…”
“Not here.”
Then where? I wondered. Lying in my bed the previous nigh – a Sunday – I had asked God to give me a sign that someone could admire and respect me. Not that I believed in any of the shit the evangelicals passed out at the mall or anything, but what the hell. Nothing else was working for me, the class clown that people laughed at.
Julia had moved to the neighborhood that summer, before eleventh grade. She was good-looking in a way that the others could never obtain, at least the ones that tried so hard. She was a natural, totally unpretentious. So in my naive adolescent mind I gave her the benefit of the doubt. No way she was capable of ripping a boy’s heart out and grinding her Payless shoes into an aorta. I was wrong, of course.
Thinking as I did, I asked God if she could be the one. I pictured Julia’s smoky gray eyes staring into mine, her hips swaying as she approached, parting her supple lips and a long, deep kiss. I imagined it in my backyard, in the place where the colorful mushrooms grew beside the church camp, on the steps of her apartment, but never, in those wild dreams, did I see her kiss me in the hallway before homeroom.
I should have known that it was a trap for an embarrassment. I should have slapped the bitch just as she, or any of her bitch friends, would have done to me if I would have tried to make a move like that. All the prime indicators took their posts. By indicators, I mean her bimbo task-masters, Britney, Bevan, Bethany and Bella. Her name didn’t begin with a “B,” so she had to earn her spot, I guess.
On the bus she cast more than the cursory glance, a little nervous, now that I recall. That morning, I stood beside my locker, conveniently located next to homeroom, as usual. Nothing new except the Four B’s standing about twelve feet away, casting expectant looks in my direction.
It was better than my dream, of course. I had never felt a woman’s tongue, which probably made me stupid enough to make me think I wasn’t the butt of some bitchy initiation ritual. Burn a human heart to prove you don’t have one and you’re in. Oh, to be young, again.
The bitches tittered, but I didn’t notice because Julia was staring and swaying just as I had seen in my dream except for the B’s huddled together a hallway away from their homeroom. It looked like the three of them had four eyes. Julia touched the peach fuzz just above my underdeveloped voice-box. I felt an embarrassing twitch in my pants. “She looked at it!” I said in my head. Julia bit her lip then bit mine, gently, then rotated her tongue in my mouth and created the gentle suction of an expert kisser. I knew jack shit about anything besides anatomy and the basic sexual mechanics.
“Hmm,” she said. The bell rang. She turned and jogged to her homeroom with the B’s. Stupid me thought nothing of this. I swaggered late into homeroom and interrupted Mrs Quinlan during roll-call with a big “Hello!” She laughed and didn’t mark me late.
For the half the day, I felt like The Shit. I made the kind of half-jokes in class that teachers actually appreciate, even though it distracts them. The class appreciates it too. Anything is better than being talked at in a way that is obviously rote. Everyone talked. It was fucking magical to hear my peers laughing with me, as if they admired me and I deserved to go kissing a hottie like Julia Stamp.
By lunchtime, I felt like the Mac Daddy. No one tried to clown on me and all my lunchtable buddies were well.
Aaron, my closest friend of the bunch waited for the rest to arrive and said, “Should I tell them, Jake?” The other four said “What?” in unison.
I shrugged, unable to find the words to describe something so magnificent, especially with the extra hormones pickling my brain.
“Julia fucking Stamp put her tongue in his mouth,” said Aaron with pride. One of us had made it respectable to be one of us. Something good for one of us was good for everyone. They gasped in unison.
Paul, the quiet, skeptical one asked “So are you in? Did you actually say anything to her?” Everyone looked at me. I had no answer. “You blew your wad, didn’t you?” he said, laughing. The rest joined him.
“What would you say to a girl like Julia Stamp?” I asked everyone?
“You mean after she mind-fucked that shit out of you?” said Chris, the shrimpy one that Aaron and I took turns defending against Allan, Alex and Anthony, the Assholes, or A’s, as we called them.
“Exactly,” said Trent, putting my situation in perspective with one word. He was always good for that. No one said anything for a few bites.
“Well, you have to go over there, now, and say something. The Bitches are just talking shit now.”
“But what? I have nothing. I feel like the luckiest son-of-a-bitch alive!” I said. They all nodded in agreement.
“Which is why you can’t wait any longer,” said Chris. “Do you realize what this means for you, for us?”
“Respect,” said Trent.
Now everyone looked to Aaron, who scratched his chin, full of thought. “Just walk up to her, like you were walking over to us, no sweat, you know. Then just ‘Hi.’”
Just say Hi, he said. Sometimes your friends let you down, but I wanted to believe it was that simple.
I certainly didn’t know what else to say. So that’s what I did after nodding awkwardly to the others at the table – I can’t even remember their faces now, just their disgust mixed with dumb-girl confusion. Julia kept one eye on her uneaten salad, the other on me as I stood next to her, trying not to shake. “What are you doing here?” she asked.
I puffed and jostled my arms like a drunken marionette. “What?”
“I’m trying to eat and, like, I don’t want any bugs in my food,” said Julia as if I should already know this. The girls at the table laughed uproariously. If I could have talked or held a thought in my head, I probably would have done something evil. Even more difficult than unfreezing my legs and returning to my lunch table was not crying. I welcomed the apocalyptic asteroid to stop my throat from bleeding, my heart from going flaccid and the shit from forcing its way out of my body. For a second, I doubled over, cramped. I looked at the sky through the window. “Fuck you, buddy,” I said aloud.
My friends looked up at me like hungry dogs wanting a bone. “Well?” said Aaron. I shrugged. They looked at each other as if to ask each other what this meant, then looked at me again. Chris said “What, man. Tell us.”
“Nothing. She fucking snubbed me. Told me she didn’t want bugs in her food.”
They knew what this meant and leaned back in their chairs. “Fuck that bitch then,” said Trent. “If she’s going to cold dis you like that her shit smell like spring daisies and yours is just some ordinary shit…You should feel good that you found out sooner rather than later. Sorry though, man, really.”
We sat in silence for a minute plotting our way out of this new funk like trapped miners. I remember wishing at that moment that I was a cockroach – a creature that could distinguish the fat-free ranch in Julia’s salad among the smell of hairspray, cosmetics, anti-antiperspirant, armpits and genitalia in order to perch upon a tomato. Then I’d look at her a thousand times and die happily underfoot, or drown in her dressing. If we were in a mine I could follow the heat through the cracks to daylight. Then if some evil bastard decided to drop the bomb, I could crawl back into the mine and live on bacteria and dead animals. I wouldn’t have to worry anymore about people treating me like a clown or an insect. I cold fly. But I was still human with a stomach and a heart and a brain that couldn’t tell the difference between them at that moment.
The unbelievable had happened that morning because I had asked. For it to turn out to be just a cosmic joke, God’s foot up my ass, began to piss me off.
“Just forget it ever happened,” said Aaron.
“No, I won’t,” I said. “I’m not a fucking cockroach, damn it. People like her need to know that they can’t get away with treating people like shit just because we’re not the ‘cool kids’ or whatever. By the end of the day, I’ll have an answer.”
The next class was fifth period English for an hour and my seat was behind her. I waited for the second half when Mrs. Neely opened the discussion of The Metamorphosis.
“Why? Tell me.”
Then she made another bug reference and we were scolded with the sound like an insect hissing. That point, when a person cannot remain civil and rational, I felt rapidly approaching. I not here then where and when I asked a little too loud.
“Mr. Trumble, if you please, we are trying to have a discussion. So if you would kindly postpone your personal business to another time and place it would be greatly appreciated,” said Mrs. Neely. She always liked me, even when I was being an asshole.
I would have stopped at that, but one of the Bitches said, “Pest,” under her breath.
“Shut up, bitch!” I shouted and pointed.
“Mr. Trumble!” said Mrs. Neely, aghast at seeing my ever-hidden dark side.
“As for you, it better be today!” I said to Julia. “I’ve had enough! Enough!”
“Then you will kindly excuse yourself,” said Mrs. Neely.
I told the assistant principal exactly what I did. He listened patiently and said that, while he sympathized with teenage heartbreak and embarrassment, he would have to give me an after-school detention for the next afternoon. I told him that it was important that I ride the bus home that afternoon.
“My advice to you,” said Mr. Yarble, “forget about it. In ten years, you might remember it and if you do, you won’t be bitter. You’re almost out of here. Just try to have some fun while it lasts.”
Easy for him to say. He didn’t know the toxic taste my late childhood would leave in my mouth. My mother, dead after an extended psychopathic break from reality. My father, a noble babbling fool, haunted by the memory of his wife, who resented him before the onset of her paranoid delusions, which led to her to beat by father, sometimes on our front lawn. Or my uncle who died in a meth-lab explosion police say was intentional to escape prosecution for manufacturing a controlled substance and inappropriate contact with a minor. I was the one weak flicker of hope in a family of fuck-ups. The “good one,” Bobby Ray, had died in a car accident. I had to live after a chemical accident melted half of the skin on my face. Yeah, I looked like some monstrous tropical insect, so when a girl kisses me, I’m going to take it seriously.
I told him this and it seemed to touch him in a soft spot. He winced and wiped the sweat from his temples. “I feel for you, buddy. Come here, let me tell you something,” he said. He put his arm around my shoulder and whispered, “These bitches ain’t worth a bucket of your shit.” Then he drew himself away, smiled and nodded, as if he had won me over. “Think about it: Do you want to waste your time and emotions on a person who will treat you like that. Like a…. a… “
“An insect?” I said.
“Right.” Then he rambled on for another ten or fiftenn minutes about when he was a kid and then he grew up and met his wife and now he’s so happy, blah blah blah. What does that mean to me, the Toxic Crusader? For all a teenager knows, embarrassment is eternal and respect is everything. Not glory, just a little fucking respect. I didn’t tell him that. I just listened and thought about the things I would say to Julia to make sure I got it.
I said nothing to anybody the rest of the day. Usually I say something either constructive or distracting out of sheer boredom. Today, I imagined the scene of my vindication, my eloquence and righteous indignation. She would weep and I would console her. Then we could take a walk together and she would smile when I saw her in the hallway. That’s all I wanted, just for someone pretty and popular to acknowledge my existence without disgust or contempt.
Julia said nothing to me the rest of the day, or even passed a note telling e a time and location. Nothing on the bus, either, so I followed her to her door. She didn’t scream or even crack a disgusted leer. She merely opened the door, tossed her backpack onto a segmented couch and gently pushed my shoulder to turn me around. I followed her to a shady spot behind an apartment building next to a little play area.
Some grade school punks craned their necks to see this pretty lady talk to the bug boy. “Get the fuck out of here or I swear I’ll come into your room at night, rape your Teddy Bear and cut your balls off!” said Julia. They scattered in several directions.
“Now. You wanted to speak to me about something?” Her stern, businesslike tone, not to mention her beauty at that moment, disarmed my indignation, temporarily.
“Well?”
“Well, you tell me, Miss Thing. First, you kiss me, then, in front of your friends you insult me like I’m some piece of shit?” The whole time she was nodding in agreement as if to encourage me to continue. “When have I ever treated you so mean as to deserve this, to have my heart kicked around for the whole world to see. It’s like I’m on some sort of sick tele….” Julia raised her eyebrows, expecting me to give the correct answer next.
“No, damnit,” I said. “Now you’re going to tell me. Why!?”
“Lower your damn voice. Now we have to go someplace else.” We walk a little deeper into the woods next to the apartments along a path that looked like it used to be a road, probably leading to the chapel in the Catholic cemetery. On a fallen long, worn smooth by many clandestine meetings, we sat.
Next, I tried pathetic sincerity. “Look, Julia, I didn’t think you were like that; someone who could just destroy a person for no reason.”
“You think I did that for fun, because I had nothing better to do? You must be stupid.” She turned her head away.
“You’re still not telling me why. I want you to say it.”
She snapped her face to me again. “You’ve never wanted to please someone? You’ve never just wanted some damn respect?”
I did a double take. “Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to here? The mayor? Micheal Jordan?It’s people like the bitches you sit with at lunch that clown on people like…” She was doing her head-nod move again.
“Do you see yet? Believe me, I’ve been on the other side and I’m not going back.”
“So you did it just to…”
“Just to humiliate you in front of as many people as possible. That was the plan. That’s what I had to do,” she said.
“Fucking truth or dare?”
She nodded.
“But why me? Why not someone really down in the shitter like Bobby Renko or Daryl Hankin?”
This question disturbed her the most, as if she had hoped to avoid it. She rose to leave. “Sit down. You can’t just get away with this – Sit!”
She picked up a twig and began peeling the bark. Then, suddenly, she snapped it and looked at me with a face black as death. “You don’t want to know, believe me.”
“I’m already crushed here. Can’t get any lower, hun, so you might as well try.”
“Because I like you! Okay? Because you actually had a spirit to crush! Is that what you wanted to hear? To not be a victim I had to prove I have no heart.” Her eyes moistened and glimmered softly in the orange light of Autumn evening. “I did, but you can do whatever you want with it,” she said through tears and ran away, wiping her face.
In cold times, bugs seek warm piles of shit. Even among kin, their segmented eyes create a view of millions of bugs and tons of shit. Such a picture leads one to mount a stool like a throne and sit as if alone, though each knows they are surrounded by their bug friends.

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