Venomous Read Free Page B

while his was always authoritative and dismissive—I was “nothing more than a punk.” (He’s the kind of guy who likes that word, “punk,” when talking about people he considers insolent.) The fights centered around the venom a lot of the time: He kept saying that it must be her fault, that she kept letting me get away with it, and she kept insisting that I needed a sense of unconditional love and sympathy. He was honest-to-God scared of the venom, too, which was…interesting. One time, in fifth grade, a kid named Alan Raskowitz pulled out a chunk of my hair during art class, because he thought it was funny, so I beat him to a pulp. Just got on top of him and started pounding him with the fuchsia plastic handle of the scissors I was holding. My mom couldn’t be reached, so my dad had to pick me up from school, and the entire car ride, he just kept glancing over at me and shaking his head with this terrified look in his eyes (although it might have been ’cause I looked sickly and miserable and had blood on my shirt, but I was still his son). In any event, point is, Dad left right before I turned thirteen, and I definitely had a hand in it. He said goodnight to Lon and me one night, and the next morning he and his stuff weren’t there, and Mom couldn’t stop crying. He lives in Westchester now with a very nice woman named Millie, who smiles constantly. They have two well-adjusted little blonde kids; a daughter and a new baby boy. I met them at a Christmas party when I was fifteen. Lon seemed to think Millie was really sweet.
    I hope they all die in a fucking fire.
    My romantic life? Right, okay. I’m like an owl: From a distance, I seem graceful and deadly in a stylish way, but up close it’s all claws and fleas and coughed-up pellets of hair and bones. Either the girl gets scared away from me or the venom works its magic and her life begins to slowly spin down the toilet. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not too ugly a guy—I get “handsome” a lot, and sometimes “cute in a certain way,” which makes me think I look like Nick Cave, so I’ve had experience with getting to know and spend time with girls. But every time I enter anything resembling a relationship, the venom makes an appearance—an obscene comment, a violent opinion, a depressed sigh, you name it—at just the right time to leave me embarrassed and my date terrified. One girl, Clarice, even casually mentioned that nights out with me and her other friends always seemed to be a lot less fun than the nights with just her and her friends; she told me she’d been observing this, like a science experiment, for a couple of weeks, and all the evidence pointed to me being a social bad-luck charm. I got the point, paid for my half of dinner, and went home to drink about a gallon of chocolate milk. So after a while, I just stopped giving a shit. My reasoning: better to be terribly lonely than screw up someone else’s life. Girls sometimes shoot me a smile or a glance, and I can’t even look at them, because there’s no fucking hope. That’s it in a nutshell. Hopeless.
    My friends? Make it friend. Randall Elliot seems to be the one person who isn’t affected by the poison that is me. One day in eighth grade, Randall watched a kid tormenting me until I slammed him in the ear with a lunch tray. When the teachers began screaming at me, Randall intervened on my behalf (I believe his actual opening comment was, “Oh, this is some BULL SHIT right HERE!”). Since then, we’ve been inseparable. He’s one of those popular misfits, the quirky kid who still has a lot of friends and a decent social standing. Like…he LOVES Weezer. Which sort of tells you everything you need to know. He still considers me his best friend, which makes no fucking sense considering that I weigh him down more often than not. People always ask him, “Why do you hang out with that kid?”
    He always has the same response: “’Cause he’s awesome.”
    I don’t get Randall a lot