Last Day on Earth Read Free Page B

ninth-grader in the fall, he’s already an outcast.
    Goths. This is what Steve and his friends become in high school, except that Steve is an outcast even within this group. Just beyond the school grounds is a parking lot where they all gather and smoke. Long black trench coats, black leather boots, chains and spikes. Officer Lancaster lurking at the edges with his bionic mic, trying to catch drug deals.
    It takes time, unbearable time, all of ninth grade and into tenth grade, for Steve to regain his friendships with Joe and Lee, and there’s always an edge with Adam. Steve waits for his life to change, passes the time with Pete Rachowsky, who becomes a drug dealer.
    Steve and his friends form a campus club in the fall of their sophomore year, try to get a radio station. It starts with just a few short bits to go with campus announcements a couple times a day. Free Your Minds,they call the club, and it’s unsuccessful. They’re not liked, after all. Who would want to listen to them?
    Steve doesn’t care much, though. Somehow, the miraculous has happened. A girl named “Missy” likes him for some reason, and suddenly he has a girlfriend. She’s cute, too, looks like Liv Tyler, wears a black choker. His parents let her stay over a couple nights a week as a “family friend.” Then, in the winter, Missy dumps him, tells everyone he has a small penis, can’t satisfy her in bed. Steve’s older sister, Susan, is no help. She laughs at him too. She’s always had an easier time. The two of them are night and day.
    So Steve goes for the lowest common denominator, “Nicole,” “a girl with a self-esteem problem, a girl you wouldn’t want your parents to know about,” according to Adam. Secret sex for that entire summer after tenth grade. No one is supposed to know, except Steve’s friends. At Rich’s house, there’s a foam lounger that reclines. They call it the Flip-N-Fuck. They do it on the ottoman, too, in Rich’s living room late at night, just a moving sheet with two bodies underneath.

I COMMITTED MY CRIMES ALONE partly because, like Steve, I was losing all my friends. Eighth grade was the time of “cut-downs,” competitive insults. After my father’s death, I was weak. Ian VanTuyl, who had been my best friend, began using everything he knew against me. At school, on the blacktop, we’d all stand around in a circle with our hands in our pockets and Ian would say that my front teeth were too big, or I smiled too much, and I would grin weakly and not know what to say. This is how you become a target in junior high. Others in the group were relieved, because this meant they were no longer targets, and they heaped it on. Every day I was made fun of, every day, all day, and so I know some of the rage Steve must have felt, and I know what it means to be an outcast in your social group.
    Like Steve, I turned to secret sex. A girl with a terrible reputation, someone from a poorer part of town. At her house after school, her parents never home, we made out on her bed. I put my finger inside her and couldn’t believe how soft she was, but then she said we could have sex, and this scared me too much. I wasn’t ready. I had limits. My friends were just starting to drink, but I refused. It was something about control. My father’s suicide had come as a shock, and perhaps I couldn’t sleep and couldn’t drink and couldn’t have sex because I wasn’t willing to let something happen again that would be beyond my control.
    I broke up with this girl, and then a guy named Ryan started having sex with her and telling everyone about it at school, started calling me a pussy. So now my friends had two new ways to make fun of me, about drinking and about sex. I still invited them for sleepovers, and had an agreement with my mother that we could go out toilet-papering people’s houses and such and she’d pretend not to notice. One time she forgot and came out into the hallway when she heard a sound, so then she had to