AS I'M DRIVING BACK TO SCHOOL FROM THE LIQUOR store, I keep thinking about this TV show I used to watch in New York, The Confessor. The title character, the host, is a dude called Antoine Abbotson, who's short and smiley and wears a navy blue suit. Each show, he brings in three people who each have a secret. The idea is, the Confessor bids up the price to get them to confess that secret on live TV. But if he hits a certain dollar threshold—a concealed number somewhere under $50,000—the contestant walks away empty-handed. Sometimes, though, the people on that show make bank. One woman got paid $47,000 to explain to her husband that the front room in their house smelled awful because she'd pooped into their upright piano while sleepwalking, couldn't reach down far enough to extract the resulting poop after the fact, and never had the heart to tell anyone.
It's strange, watching that show, seeing how people price their secrets. My family hangs their eccentricities around their necks when they walk out the door every day. There's Uncle Jeremy, who won a trophy for having the longest mustache in New York State. There's my cousin Cabret, who dropped out of college to start her own private-investigation service. And you can't forget Great-Grandma Louise, who at age ninety-one lives alone in a cabin in the Catskills and still checks her traps every morning for dead animals.
My family values honesty for a couple of reasons: first, the Ten Commandments say, "Thou shalt not bear false witness"; and second, my family is full of givers. Givers palm off their secrets with every handshake; they lay it all bare.
Me? I keep one secret from my parents. It's boring, and everyone at school knows it: I sell drugs. Not hard drugs, just weed and booze, but I'm not about to tell my mom and dad. They think my money is leftover from sweeping aisles down at Brent Hardware, where I work over the summers.
It'd break their hearts if I ever told them, but as selfless as they are, what they give me never feels like enough. I always want more, and Paloma only makes it worse. This place seemed unreal when I got here freshman year: a dollhouse town, unimaginably small, and it's shrunk since then. I've met everyone. I've been everywhere. There's nothing left to collect now, except profits from deals. It gets depressing, sometimes.
As I turn into the junior lot, the cases of beer make a chorus of metallic clinks in the back of my truck. Then a scuffed-up Camry looms out of nowhere, its horn blaring. My foot jerks toward the brake pedal. Too late.
The Camry smacks into my front bumper, and I lurch forward. The sound isn't so much a crash as a thump. "Car thump" doesn't sound as dramatic as "car crash." I feel sort of gypped.
In the sudden stillness, I take inventory of my body, scribbling a mental list across my mind's eye:
? Icy skin.
? Pulse in strange places—earlobes, forearms?
? No pain.
I'm in one piece, at least, and I have something to cross off my "Never Have I Ever" list.
The wounded Camry pulls into a spot, and I park beside it, bolting out to check the damage. My truck door squeals as I swing it shut.
The Camry came out unscathed, except for a tiny dent under one headlight. My pickup, on the other hand, looks as if it got into a fight with a Transformer. The Camry must've hit the last thing keeping my front bumper attached. Now it dangles askew, a lopsided leer.
My jaw tightens, and I bury one hand in my hair. Look at me, worrying over a broken, mud-encrusted pickup. What would my middle-school friends think?
It takes a minute to shake the thought. First of all, if everything goes according to plan, I'll have saved up enough for a new car, a nice one, before graduation. Second of all, I'm out of touch with everyone from the Pinnacle School, so their opinions don't matter.
Still, I can't get rid of the complex that place gave me.
My middle school was a private academy in Brooklyn's richest neighborhood. I was a scholarship kid, the poorest person there by a margin so huge, it was humiliating. Everything about me stood out, from my haircut to my clothes to my commute. An hour's trip separated our apartment in Coney Island from Pinnacle's cushy spot in Brooklyn Heights, and I did homework on the Q, wedged into a corner of the train car beside my mother.
Pinnacle kids never seemed to think about money, but around them, it was all I saw. Every break, my Instagram and Facebook feeds flooded: photos of spring trips to the Maldives, skiing trips to Aspen, and summer homes in Europe. They wore their wealth effortlessly. The preppier crowd had polo players and Golden Fleece logos on their pastel clothes. The "alternative" kids wore baggy woolen tops and artfully shredded leggings, but it was the same old story of unspeakable amounts of money, just translated into a different language.
I don't miss that place. I still feel embarrassed about my family because of it. I still worry how we look to people, even here in Paloma, where we're now comfortably lower-middle class.
"Lucas, you okay?"
I look up from my bumper. The sight of a familiar face floods me with relief—I've dealt to Matt Jackson since I started freshman year.
I nod at Matt. "You good?"
"Yeah. You wanna call the cops?"
"Cops." I glance at my truck bed. "Right."
Matt eyes the tarp that covers the cases. "We don't have to. My car's fine, so if you're okay driving around with your bumper half off, be my guest."
"Thanks, dude. Appreciate it."
Matt's head bobs. The kid is low-key cool, but getting him to say much is tough. He's also hot, in a my-type-of-way, but I've gotten good at ignoring when guys are hot, since everyone at this school is so aggressively heterosexual.
According to an article I read, three or four percent of people are gay, lesbian, or bi. Wherever they dredged up that statistic, it wasn't Paloma High School. Twelve hundred kids, and I haven't met a single other queer person. Definitely no Gay-Straight Alliance Club here.
Sometimes I feel like we should have a club for all minority populations, since this place has all the ethnic diversity of your average mayonnaise jar. The culture shock was real at first, moving here, where everyone's the same shade of white and the same subgenre of Methodist.
Matt opens his back door and leans into his car, his shoulder blades pitching tents in the back of his hoodie. His voice is muffled as he rummages through the mess in his backseat. "Hey, are you selling today?"
"Yeah, hit me up after school."
"Sweet." He shoulders his backpack and shuts the door. "It's a date."
Something goes still in the center of my chest. I stay quiet as Matt pulls a beanie over his head. His eyes are light brown and guarded, and I can't help but wonder.
A date?
An impulse hits me. Maybe it's the adrenaline still zipping over my skin, or maybe it's the smell of cold air conjuring the feeling of someone's hand in mine. Winter of eighth grade was the first time I ever held a guy's hand, and chilly afternoons remind me of it every so often: Caleb's warm, uncertain grip.
"Hey, Matt," I say. "You maybe want to get coffee sometime? Or dinner or something?"
His expression freezes. If it were a computer screen, it would read: 404 error. Unable to process request. "I … what?" he says.
Bad guess. Crap. Say something, Lucas.
"Nothing, never mind," I blurt out. The least convincing three words ever spoken.
Matt, of course, because he is not a moron, doesn't buy it for a second. He stares at me as if I'm a poisonous snake that's tried to strike up friendly conversation. "Weren't you straight, like, six months ago?"
A gust of wind scurries through the parking lot. I watch it toy with the heavy leather laces of my Sperry Top-Siders. I shouldn't have said anything.
Nobody cared at Pinnacle, home to yuppie liberals galore. My friend Alicia used to kiss her girlfriend in the stairwell, and they were only thirteen, and nobody cared. Paloma High, though, is different. On the swim team, if you make a one-word complaint about a workout, you get told to "suck it up, fag." After a hard test, people whine, "That was gay as shit." And when my teammates compliment one another, they follow up with "no homo." (They do this every time, as if people might've forgotten from the last time that they're not a homo.) I've never seen anyone getting crucified for actually being queer, but that's just one step up from, "Suck it up, fag." So I've stayed quiet.
I should say "no homo," pretend I was kidding, but I can't get the words out. They taste bitter sitting on my tongue.
Matt still looks startled. "I thought you dated that Claire chick forever."
"I did."
"So?" he says.
I shrug. "So … what?"
"So how does that work if you're gay?"
"I'm not gay."
He looks baffled. "You just asked me out, dude."
"Yeah, well, I'm not gay. It's—"
The warning bell blares, saving me the explanation. Matt hoists his backpack higher on his shoulder and gives up. "Okay, whatever. After school? Weed? We good?"
"Sure," I say. "And, um, Matt?"
"What?"
"Would you … don't say anything, all right?"
He shrugs. "Yeah, no."
He walks off, leaving me uneasy but relieved to see him go. I hate the What is a pansexual? conversation. It means explaining the same thing I've explained so many times before to every cousin, aunt, and uncle in our address book. I'll come out a million times before I'm dead, and I'm already bored of it.
To be fair, though, the What is a pansexual? conversation is a million times better than the That doesn't sound real conversation. Uncle Jeremy still stands by his claim that my sexuality is imaginary. Nice to know I don't exist.
Mostly, though, I'm lucky in the family department, since my parents are the type of Christians who don't stick too close to Leviticus. My dad still wants me to settle down with a girl, but he's stopped saying it out loud, at least.
The seed of the secret being out in the Paloma world worries me. I want to snatch it back, put it deep in my pocket. Never talk about it again.
Making sure the lot's empty, I transfer a half-dozen cases of Miller to Dan Silverstein's SUV, grab my cash from the trunk, and head out. Thumbing through the thin leaves of twenties, loving the smell and feel of them, I cross the green at a jog. It's ridiculous, the profits I make, with a couple of extra dollars per case as commission. People always want the same stuff: beer that's basically sugar water and enough weed to sedate a bull elephant.
The only vaguely difficult part of this was getting hooked up in the first place. For the liquor, I called in a favor from back in New York to get a fake ID sent to me here, since fakes in town are way overpriced and way unconvincing. Now, with my magic piece of plastic, my secret identity is local superhero Anderson Lewitt, a twenty-two-year-old from Vermont who always buys in bulk.
I got lucky with the weed. The guy who used to deal to our school moved away six months into my freshman year, and I networked my way into replacing him. My supplier is a morbidly obese thirty-six-year-old named Phil who prefers to go by "Teezy." He has never explained this to me.
The bell rings. "Crap," I mutter, stowing my wallet deep in my pocket. I take the last bit of the green at a run, shoulder through the door, and skid into the Spanish room. Se?or Muniz-Alonso gives me a hawklike glare, and I respond with a sheepish grin, scurrying to my table.
"Luciano … tarde," Muniz-Alonso says, like a death sentence. "Y fuiste tarde ayer también. ?Ten cuidado! No quiero darte una detención …"
I try to translate the words, but they slip away the second he says them. "Sorry," I say, sitting down.
"En espa?ol, por favor."
"Uh," I say. "Lo siento."
Muniz-Alonso goes back to writing irregular conjugations on the board, and I relax.
"Yeah, Luke, ten cuidado." My tablemate, Herman, elbows me. I elbow him back, grinning. Herman swims backstroke, and of course, the second he joined the team, people nicknamed him Merman. He has such long, thick hair that some people call him Mermaid instead, but I don't know. I'm into the idea of mer-dudes drifting through the ocean, straggly hair wafting down to their waists.
Muniz-Alonso starts another conjugation chart. I wait for him to finish, stretching my arms out. Herman eyes my wrist. "Yo," he says, "nice watch."
"Thanks," I say. Before I can restrain myself, the brand slips out. "Movado."
He looks mystified. "Huh?"
I clear my throat. "Knockoff," I lie.
"Oh. Thought you were conjugating on me there."
I grin, rubbing my thumb across the watch face. I don't mention the price tag: most of August's profits. I want to regret spending nearly a thousand dollars on a watch—I could be saving the money for my car fund or, hell, helping my parents with the bills—but I can't regret it, as much as I try. With something this valuable wrapped around my wrist, I get a thrill every time I glance down. I'm already thinking of my next buy, Gucci or Citizen, stacked up by the dozens in my online cart.
Muniz-Alonso steps back, revealing the conjugation charts. Sounds of copying break the air, pencils scratching on notebooks, a few fingertips tapping laptop keys. I take my pencil from behind my ear. I bought myself a new laptop last Christmas, but when it comes to notes, the feel of writing satisfies me more.
"Yo, Mer," I say quietly, starting to copy. "Anything happening tomorrow night?"
"Not much. I heard some of the team's doing a surprise birthday party for Layna."
"Probably at Bailey's house, huh? You think they'd mind if I showed?"
"I don't think it's open, man." Herman copies a conjugation chart from the board, brushing his hair out of his face.
"So what else's going on?" I ask.
He lets out a laugh. "You'd know better than me."
"Okay, so nothing," I say, scribbling down tendré, tendrás, tendrá. "Know what? I'm gonna get some of the guys together. Nothing worse than a quiet Friday night."
"Dad, come onnn," Herman says, pitching his voice up to a whine. "Give the team bonding a rest."
I chuckle. They can rest when I'm dead. When you move every few years, you live with shallow roots. I've been getting ripped up all my life, and I'm done with it. Time's accelerating. I'm not aiming to end up with nobody and nothing.
Teenage years are the best years of our lives. They keep saying that. I don't know, though. I keep grasping for people, hunting for them. I take people and I write them down, and I think about the ones I want to keep. And sometimes I find people, and I wonder—I don't know. I wonder, are these really the best people we're going to be?
