Thumbsucker Read Free Page A

broomstick in my mouth.
    “What’s the despairing look?” Mike asked me one morning, sitting down to bran flakes after his bike ride. His face was red and sweaty and invigorated. “You wear a long face, it’ll end up wearing you.”
    “Stop quoting Woody Wolff.”
    “That one was mine.”
    All I could think about was Rebecca. Suddenly, with leechlike intensity, I had to be around her all the time. As soon as her father’s car drove off each morning, I hurried to her porch and rang the doorbell, loaded down with field guides and binoculars. When I sensed her interest in bird-watching decreasing, I started buying the movie magazines I’d seen her reading with her older sister. Day after day, I barraged Rebecca with Hollywood trivia questions and fun facts.
    “What’s Farrah Fawcett’s beauty secret?”
    “Do we?”
    “She conditions her hair with egg whites.”
    “I said ‘Do we?’ ”
    “Do we what, Rebecca?”
    “Do we
care
?”
    I watched Rebecca grow to despise me. My shining moment with her—ordering her to remove her shirt and facing her down, bare-chested, until she did—seemed impossible to duplicate now that I cared so deeply about her opinion of me. My attentions took on a doomed andingrown quality. I would insult myself in front of her, saying I was stupid, short, deformed, and then resent her for not defending me. When I saw how much she pitied wayward movie stars—drug addicts, wife beaters, hotel room wreckers—I began to regret not having confessed my weakness. That would have won her over, I felt sure, but now it was too late.
    One day on her porch, with her father standing behind her, his broad, callused hands on her shoulders, Rebecca said, “Justin, we think you’re bothering me. We think this isn’t a healthy teenage friendship. We want you to stop coming over.”
    “Move it, son.”
    For the last time, I sought solace in my thumb. The deer with the face of the diaper boy appeared, but even after I chased the creature off, I felt nothing—no comfort, no relief. My thumb felt dead and so did my whole body.
    I blamed them all, but especially Perry Lyman. He’d pretended to be my friend but had snatched my soul.

    The course of the Labor Day bike race ran, for part of its last and twenty-fifth mile, through a highway tunnel. The cyclists emerging from darkness made for dramatic snapshots, so spectators liked to gather at one end. I stood with Joel in the barrow ditch on the other side, where no one could see what we were going to do.
    Perry Lyman approached, head down, pedaling withthe steady, flowing strokes that usually guaranteed him victory. The hazy dot behind him was Mike. I signaled Joel to raise the poster I’d stapled to a stick, then broke into a trot along the road. I saw Perry Lyman glance over at Joel’s sign and I noticed his front tire start to wobble. That’s when I started howling. Joel howled, too. The howls came out of me like weird black scarves. They scared me. And they rattled Perry Lyman. He turned and flipped me the bird as he passed, a look of disintegration on his face. He couldn’t have guessed what he’d done to deserve this—the Sierra Club wolf pack splattered with bloodred paint and my demented yapping. I knew at that moment that I’d broken his power, just as he had mine. In a photo Audrey took of him emerging from the tunnel, he had the face of a man who knew he’d lose.
    He came in seventh. Mike was first.
    That night at our backyard picnic table, when Joel and Audrey went in to get some knives, I said to Mike, “You owe me a TV set.”
    His hand grazed around in a bowl of salted nuts, pausing for the almonds. He was still lost in the haze of victory, and I knew I could get away with more than usual. In front of him was a foaming-over beer can and a can he hadn’t opened yet. Mike had been having an extra drink with dinner ever since Reagan had been shot that spring.
    “I knew you’d forget,” I said, reaching for a beer. “I knew you