“A lot of the time, they’d just assign busywork to keep the class under control, so I never did it because it was pointless. Then, when I actually did my homework, teachers acted shocked, which would piss me off. One year, I wrote an essay for my English class after I hadn’t turned in much homework and the teacher accused me of plagiarizing it. The only thing that saved me was that I’d written it out longhand because I had to type it at the library, so I had the draft and everything.
“Anyway, got in trouble at school, at home. You name it. I got suspended for fighting, suspended for smoking, suspended for skipping. Then when the school’d call my dad I’d get in trouble with him.”
“You get picked on?” Rex says, and I swear, a vein pulses in his temple like he wants to punish the kids who beat the crap out of me in high school. I smile at him.
“A bit. I wasn’t a bad fighter; I was just small. Had to play to my other strengths.”
Rex raises an eyebrow in question.
“You know, freak them out a little so they’d leave me alone.”
At first that was all I’d wanted—just to be left alone so I could pay attention when Mrs. Caballeros would talk about Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson, and Mr. Seo about the Civil War. Then, later, when I was alone, I wished for a friend. A real friend. Not the kids I hung out with when we cut class, smoking while we leaned against the chain-link fence in the abandoned lot a few blocks from school, talking about nothing, fronting like we didn’t want anything else.
“Your brothers didn’t look out for you?” Rex asks.
I let out a bark of laughter. “Ah. No.”
The dark look in Rex’s eyes is back. He’s a rather strange conversationalist. It’s almost like he’s interviewing me. Not that he doesn’t seem interested; he does. His eyes never leave me when I talk. It’s more like he’s out of practice or something.
“Then junior year, when we did mandatory standardized testing and they found out that I wasn’t stupid, they gave me all this shit about applying myself and rising above my circumstances. Just total savior bullshit, you know. Like, we treated you like crap for years because you weren’t a good kid, and now that you have high test scores we suddenly believe you have a responsibility to yourself. It really turned me off school even more.”
“So, how’d you end up going on to college if you didn’t like school?”
“Um, I really liked learning, even though I hated school. I’d read in the library for hours. Just wander through the stacks and pull out books on whatever seemed interesting. Sometimes when I was there, there’d be free lectures downstairs and I’d go listen and just never want it to end. It was mostly adults in the audience and they were quiet and respectful and they seemed to care. I saw this guy speak once and he’d written a book about the Essex, this nineteenth-century ship that got rammed by a whale and sunk. The crew had to abandon ship and try and survive in these small boats and eventually they had to resort to cannibalism to survive. He was a really good speaker and he made it so interesting. I got his book from the library and read it and I was just amazed because this had happened, like, almost two hundred years before and was kind of a mystery in some ways and this guy had done all this research and was able to reconstruct something after the fact and then write the whole thing like an adventure story. I think that was the first time I thought, oh, learning doesn’t have to be like it is in my shitty high school.
“And I loved to read, you know? Ever since I was a kid. Just not the same book for two months the way it was in school, reading it out loud torturously. I read all the time and when I was in school, I would daydream, pretend I was a character in a book. Sometimes that’s how I got in trouble too, because I’d be thinking, hey, this is the scene where the scrappy hero tells off the bully, so I would. But things don’t usually go the way you write the scene in your head.”
Rex smiles. “I used to do that with movies sometimes,” he says. I grin, picturing him as a noir detective, the collar of his overcoat turned up against the rain, brushing his strong jaw, but he doesn’t elaborate, just keeps looking at me like he wants me to say more.
“Anyway, that’s how I met Ginger,” I say, smiling at the thought of her. “My best friend. I skipped school one day when I was seventeen. Don’t remember why. I walked over to South Street, just for something to do, and I ended up looking through the window of this tattoo shop around the corner. Really old place, not fancy or anything. There was this girl in the shop tattooing an older guy. Fifties, maybe. And the guy was just crying. Not from the pain or anything, but, like, sitting there totally still with tears running down his face. I couldn’t see what the tattoo was of, just their faces. I must’ve stood there for half an hour just watching them. I remember thinking that anything that could have that kind of an effect on someone, I wanted to know more about. Finally, the guy left and the girl looked right at me. She gestured for me to come in. Of course, I tried to play it off like I hadn’t been spying on them, but she just rolled her eyes and came outside.