The World of Normal Boys. K.M. Soehnlein
it most of all on two hours’ worth of Todd fidgeting at his side—Todd’s leg/arm/hip again and again meeting his own—and on his own obstinate hard-on, impervious to any mental picture (bugs under a rock, his grandmother’s cooking, the bloody crucifix above the altar at St. Bart’s) he calls forth to banish it.
Only near the end, when the movie climaxes in a series of eruptions—a big fistfight, a girl getting gangbanged in the back of a car, a guy falling off the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge—does Todd seem at all involved in it. And then Robin gets drawn in deeper, too. He remembers that some of these scenes are going to be cut out of the new PG version, that he’s lucky to get what he wanted. The final scene has the Brooklyn boy moving out, and moving up, to life in Manhattan. It’s perfect: he gets away from his family, his lousy job, the mean streets of Brooklyn. The whole night is perfect—well, not completely; Victoria is annoyed with him. But Todd—Todd offers to drive him to school in the morning.
Nearly every window in the house is glowing as he makes his way from the Spicers’ yard to his own; he’s mashing a wad of grape Bubblicious between his teeth, extinguishing his beer breath in the sugary perfume. As he pushes open the screen door, a whine of protest is rising up from Jackson, who stands in the center of the kitchen, fists clenched at his side.
“What’s the problem?” his father, wearing the shorts and tank top he jogs in every night, is asking.
His mother flashes what looks like a glare of accusation. “He owns a very nice pair of gray trousers from Penney’s—”
“It’s a prison uniform,” Jackson whines.
“I’ll say it one more time,” Dorothy announces, “for the benefit of everyone involved.” Here her eyes meet Robin with a quick scan from head to toe; he shuffles guiltily, imagining his transgressions spelled out on his T-shirt in iron-on letters. “I am taking a picture tomorrow morning, and I would like my children to look presentable. Allow me this one motherly indulgence. After tomorrow you can go to school in your underwear for all I care.”
Clark appeals to Jackson. “Be a sport, wear what your mother wants you to wear. It’s no big deal.”
“I’ll be the only nerd in the whole sixth grade in dress pants,” Jackson says, dropping cross-legged onto the floor in front of the oven.
Robin fakes a kick toward Jackson. “Get up, Rover. No dogs allowed.” Jackson grabs his leg and pulls, knocking Robin off balance. He reaches for the counter to keep from falling. “Cut it out!”
“Jackson, leave your brother alone,” Dorothy commands, which only makes it worse for Robin: needing his mother’s protection against his little brother. He pulls his foot free and slides away.
In the midst of the scuffle, their sister, Ruby, flutters into the kitchen. Her hair frames her face in golden tubes, carefully sculpted with her curling iron, and she’s wearing a new white jumper and a gauzy flowered scarf tied tight around her neck. The steam of splashed perfume surrounds her—Love’s Baby Soft, Robin guesses, or maybe Jontue; all the girls at school smell like this. She stands in the doorway, hands on hips, ready for attention.
“Hey, who’s this beautiful princess?” Clark asks, right on cue.
A proud smile on Ruby’s lightly glossed lips. “Do I look like a seventh grader?” She skips toward her father—and then lurches violently forward over Jackson’s suddenly outstretched leg. She falls to her knees and skids across the linoleum to Robin. Her face is stricken; the impact of the fall hasn’t yet sunk in.
An expectant pause, followed by the eruption of voices.
Jackson: “It was an accident!”
Robin: “You retard.” He looks at Ruby, whose shock is giving way to misery; at each of her eyelids, a puddle hovers. “You’re OK, Ruby. Really. Don’t cry.”
Jackson: “It’s not my fault you’re a spaz!”
Ruby, brushing a dingy smudge at each knee: “You got my pants dirty! What am I supposed to wear tomorrow?”
Dorothy: “I’ll throw them in the machine tonight. They’ll be good as new by morning.”
Clark, yanking Jackson to his feet: “Accident my elbow! Get the heck up to your room!”
Robin: “You should make him apologize.”
Clark: “Robin, keep quiet.”
Jackson: “Yeah, shut up.”
Robin grits his teeth, not wanting this uproar to turn against him. He’s newly aware of his intoxication, realizes how all those swigs of beer and secondhand puffs of pot have added up, a recipe for confusion.
Ruby rubs furiously at her stained pants. “I have nothing else to wear!”
“Don’t get too worked up about it, Ruby,” Dorothy urges. “Clothes come clean.”
“I’m not going to school if there’s a stain on it. This sucks.” Ruby spins on her heels, treading heavily from the room.
“Spoken like a true princess,” Dorothy mutters, finishing off her wine.
Clark joins Robin and Dorothy at the table. “Doesn’t this happen every year right before school?”
Under the stained-glass lamp hanging by a chain over the table, Robin sees the exhaustion marked on his parents’ faces: bags under their eyes, shadows thickening their brows. Frustration snakes around their ankles like horror-movie smoke. Robin studies a triangular sweat stain dried into the front of his father’s tank top. Strange, he thinks, the way men sweat so much more than women—as if the heat under their skin can’t be contained. He looks away from his father, bothered by this thought.
“I am utterly wiped out,” Dorothy sighs. She stands up and stretches her arms over her head. Robin watches as the motion transforms her: the unfastened sleeves of her sapphire-blue blouse slide down her smooth arms, her honey-colored hair—the same color as his—falls away from her face and the skin on her neck pulls taut before relaxing into a faint pinkness. He blushes when she catches him staring.
She takes a step closer to him and narrows her gaze. “Were you and Victoria smoking in the movie theater?”
He rolls his eyes, trying to display the annoyance of someone falsely accused. “No.”
Her nose is in his hair, an arm on his shoulder to keep him still. “Someone was smoking.”
“No, it was just”—he fumbles for an excuse, and the sentence completes itself almost against his will—“Todd.”
“Todd Spicer, the blemish on the neighborhood?”
“What are you doing hanging around him?” Clark asks. “That kid’s nothing but trouble.”
Instinctively, his glance shifts out the window in the direction of the Spicers’ house. He makes a note to conceal the fact that Todd, and not Mrs. Spicer, as Dorothy expects, will be driving him and Victoria to school in the morning. “Todd just gave us a ride home. He’s cool,” Robin offers casually.
Dorothy shoots him a look as if he just told her he’d packed his bags and would be leaving home on the next bus. “Cool? Have you been watching too much TV lately? What’s that character’s name—the Fonz? Look, Robin, you don’t need any cool friends. The cool kids in your high school years are always the ones who go nowhere fast. My brother Stan was cool as ice when he was Todd Spicer’s age.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” Robin asks—wanting to defend Todd against the comparison. Todd could never grow up to be like Uncle Stan—loudmouthed, ill tempered, full of prickly, conversation-killing opinions. Could he?
“Robin, you’re being difficult. You’re sounding like . . . a teenager.”
“Duh, I am a teenager.”
Dorothy presses her fingers to her temples. “I need an Anacin.”
Clark