The World of Normal Boys. K.M. Soehnlein
agent, Jandy Nelson, has worked tirelessly on my behalf, greeting each challenge with enthusiasm, intelligence and determination. John Scognamiglio at Kensington Books has been a thoughtful, attentive and accessible editor. My deepest thanks also to the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University, my former coworkers at Film Arts Foundation, and my beloved playmates and coconspirators in the World of the Cubby.
Finally, I am indebted to my family for encouraging a writer in their midst. My mother, from whom I inherited “the gift of the gab,” died before I began working on this book but remains a constant guiding force. My father, my sisters and their partners, and my grandparents have offered support in countless ways. They have made this possible, and for them, I gladly make one thing clear: this is a work of fiction.
Chapter One
Maybe this is the moment when his teenage years begin. An envelope arrives in the mail addressed to him from Greenlawn High School. Inside is a computer-printed schedule of classes. Robin MacKenzie. Freshman. Fall, 1978. He has been assigned to teachers, placed in a homeroom. His social security number sits in the upper right corner, emphasizing the specter of faceless authority. Someone, some system of decision making, has organized his next nine months into fifty-minute periods, and here is his notification. This is what you will learn. This is when you will eat. This is when you go home to your family at 135 Bergen Avenue. This is how you will live your life, Robin MacKenzie.
He has climbed out his bedroom window, onto the roof that covers the kitchen and back door below, with a pile of college-ruled spiral-bound notebooks purchased earlier that day at Woolworth’s. His transistor radio is tuned to WABC, just now starting up ABBA’s new song “Take a Chance on Me.” He bobs from his shoulders, trying to harmonize, but his voice—revolting against him all the time lately—fails to hit a high note, collapsing into an ugly squawk, a bird being choked. He looks past the garage at the end of his buckled driveway and into the next yard, the Spicers’ yard, wondering if Victoria has returned from her summer visit with her cousins in Pennsylvania. He needs to compare schedules with her, to find out how many classes they’ll be in together; he needs to talk to her about high school.
The Spicers’ lawn is a perfect spring green, stretching out from the cement patio and redwood picnic set to a neatly trimmed hedge that separates it from his family’s weedy plot. The Spicers’ graystone house rises up like a small mansion: slate-tile roof, royal blue shutters, and white curtains in every window. Only one thing upsets the serenity: a rebuilt ’69 Camaro jacked up in the driveway, surrounded by tools and oil spots; Victoria’s brother, Todd, has been repairing the engine all summer long, since he turned seventeen and got his license.
He’s there now, Todd Spicer, rolling under the hood—all but his blue jeans and work boots disappearing from view—and then back out again, sitting up to swig from a paper bag stashed behind a toolbox. His sleeveless T-shirt is smeared with a greasy handprint; his arms tense up into lean ridges as he tries to make things fit into place. Even from his perch on the roof, two yard lengths away, Robin can tell the repairs are not going well, can feel Todd emitting frustration. When the hood slams violently, he knows the afternoon has been a failure.
Todd lights up a cigarette, raises his eyes. Pins Robin in his sights.
Caught staring, Robin blushes, embarrassment jetting up his neck, saturating his ears. He waves—what else can he do?—hoping the gesture reads as casual, just friendly, not eager. He knows—the way you just know how you’re supposed to act—that he shouldn’t pay this kind of attention to Todd.
Todd exhales and yells up to him, “What’re you looking at, Girly Underwear?”
Girly Underwear. Todd picked the name just for him. Robin has a clear memory of when it started: he was seven, Todd eleven. Todd was circling around the yard on his dirt bike while Robin and Victoria were acting out plays they had made up; without warning, Todd zoomed in to swat Robin on the butt. Having done it once, he did it again, and again. Then he pushed it further, grabbed the elastic band of Robin’s underwear and tugged up. His underwear that day—to his unending regret—was tinted pink; his mother had let something bleed in the wash. From then on it was, “Hey, Girly Underwear, watch your back,” “Hey, Girly Underwear, how’s it hanging?”
When he was seven or eight “Girly Underwear” could make him cry. It let Todd strip him down; it was all his weaknesses rolled up in one. He’d look at himself in the mirror: the sweep of his eyelashes, the swell of his lower lip, the curve of the bones around his eyes. His face was girly. Not like Todd’s face: behind Todd’s eyes was a storehouse of secret knowledge—how to be cool, to be tough, to get what you want. And the tone of Todd’s voice, the weight of his stare when he called out the words—it was the way a guy teases a girl, an insult that shudders like a flirtation. It used to terrify Robin. But now, after years of it—years of watching Todd, thinking about Todd—now “Girly Underwear” leaves Robin feeling less assaulted than unnerved, as if enveloped in a nameless wish—a wish like wanting to leave Greenlawn and move across the river to New York City—something you can long for all you want, though there’s no guarantee you’re ever going to get it. Sometimes, “Girly Underwear” echoes later in his daydreams as a command, Todd’s order that Robin strip off his clothes. Sometimes, in private, with his clothes off in front of the bathroom mirror, he wonders how his body compares to Todd’s, wonders what Todd’s body looks like naked.
On this late-summer day, the name and the disturbing longing associated with it evoke only anger. Maybe it’s the safe distance between Todd’s backyard and Robin’s roof that emboldens him. Maybe it’s the computer-printed class schedule he’s clutching in one hand, reminding him that a week from now he’ll be in high school just like Todd, that he’s no longer some little kid to be picked on at will. Maybe it’s just ABBA telling him to take a chance. When Todd yells, “Hey, Girly Underwear,” Robin gives him the finger. “Fuck you,” he yells back. “That’s not my name.”
Robin picks up his stuff and retreats through his bedroom window, his pulse thumping at this rare display of nerve. He glances back once before pulling down the blind: Todd is still looking his way, smiling, half a smile really. He sees Robin and nods. He might, Robin lets himself believe, be impressed.
Lying on his bed, Robin opens one of his new notebooks. High school. The hallways will be filled with boys, the speeding train of their conversation echoing off metal lockers. He thinks about popular boys from middle school, the jocks, boys whose names everyone knows. Their presence is inescapable, their actions gossiped about, their dating patterns speculated on by lesser beings like him and Victoria Spicer during late-night phone marathons. Popular boys are like TV stars: you don’t have to know them to have opinions about them. You can spend your time imagining how they will react to something you’ve said out loud in class, or something you’re wearing, when in fact they don’t even know you exist.
On the top of a page he writes: TAKE SOME CHANCES.
Must make an effort to make friends with guys
Should get into a fight to prove myself
Should find a sport to play
Get a girlfriend
Tell jokes in class—people like that
Have not yet learned to smoke (buy cigarettes)
Should stop making it so easy for other people telling me what to do, etc.
The list pours out effortlessly, his handwriting uncontrolled, the tip of his ballpoint pen chiseling the soft paper. It’s all so obvious—it’s everything that he doesn’t do. Everything normal. At the bottom of the page he writes, “Pick one to do everyday!” and underlines it twice.
The next day Victoria gets back from her cousins. Robin is mowing the Feeneys’ lawn, another lawn in a summer of lawns he has taken on at three dollars a pop. He wears his work clothes—cutoff shorts and Keds and tube socks, all licked with mint-colored grass stains. Victoria is a gusher of stories about her Pennsylvania trip: the excursion to Hershey Park, the raft ride down the Delaware, the trip to the Colonial hot spots of Philadelphia. Her return is not the reunion he’d looked