Geography Club (5 page)

I nodded again, but secretly I was a little jealous. It sounded wonderful.

“But last night, it felt different,” Min said.

“Because people know about you now? Kevin, Ike, and me?”

“I don’t know. I guess. Nothing’s really changed. But we got together at the warehouse last night, and it felt different. I still love her and everything. But it felt awkward. Like she wasn’t quite the same person I remembered. Like we turned on the overhead lights in the warehouse, and we could see everything clearly for the first time, but nothing looked like we thought it did. Everything was messy. I liked it the way it was. I don’t want light in that room.”

“No one’s going to tell,” I said. “If you’re thinking one of us is going to tell people about you guys, we won’t.” I don’t know why I believed this so strongly—I barely knew Kevin and Ike. But I
did
believe it, as much as I’d ever believed anything. They’d never tell anyone about Min and Terese, and neither would I.

“It’s not that,” Min said. But she didn’t say anything else, which made me think she didn’t know what it was exactly. Finally, she said, “It’s just a feeling.” “Maybe you just have to get used to it,” I said. “People know now. I guess that makes it feel more real. But maybe once you get used to that, you’ll go back to feeling the way you did before. Or maybe it’ll be different, but better.”

“Maybe,” Min said, but I could tell she didn’t believe me.

“You want to forget the idea of the club?”

“No. What’s done is done.” She said this hesitantly, but I was relieved anyway. Without Terese and Min, there was no Geography Club. And with no Geography Club, there was no Kevin and me.

“But?” I said.

“But I can’t shake this feeling that something bad is going to happen.”

I thought, Something bad to you and Terese, or something bad to the whole Geography Club? But I didn’t ask this, because it seemed rude to be thinking of myself. Still, I couldn’t help but remember what had happened the last time one of us had felt just a partial feeling of impending doom.

On that happy note, we reached the Children’s Peace Park. It looked incredibly cheesy, just like I remembered. The painted wooden cutouts were all these horrible ethnic stereotypes of the children of the world. But it had been changed since I’d seen it last. Someone had taken a black marker and drawn tits on the wooden cutout of the Polynesian girl in the grass skirt, and they’d given the grinning, sombrero-wearing Mexican boy a hard-on. But the rosy-cheeked Eskimo boy had it worst. They’d pulled him off his base, kicked him in half, and knocked both pieces clean out of the garden.

“Nice,” Min said.

“Yeah,” I said, now shivering myself, and not just from the cold.

“The first session of the Geography Club will come to order!” Kevin said in a voice that was a cross between television news anchor and Baptist preacher. Everyone laughed. He laughed too, but managed to add, “Damn! I knew I couldn’t say that with a straight face!”

No one made the painfully obvious pun about none of us having “straight” faces, and I thought how glad I was to be here, surrounded by smart, funny friends, one of whom happened to be the hottest thing this side of an Old Navy commercial.

It was after school a few days later, and we’d gathered in an empty classroom on the second floor of the deserted school building. Technically, we weren’t really the Geography Club yet—we hadn’t been officially approved by the school. But we’d filled out all the necessary forms and submitted them to the school office, so it was only a matter of time. Mr. Kephart had agreed to be our faculty advisor, just like Min had said he would. And once he’d signed the forms, he’d disappeared from our lives forever, just like Min had said about that too. Before he’d headed for home, he’d even given us a key to his history classroom.

And so here we were.

Slowly, we all stopped laughing.

Here we go again, I thought. Another awkward silence, and I couldn’t think of anything to say except, “So. Here we are,” which had proved to be pretty worthless the last time around. There was a poster on the wall with a photograph of a bust of the head of Julius Caesar and a quote of something he said: “I came, I saw, I conquered.” Whoever Julius Caesar had conquered, I knew how they felt. I felt defeated too. Was it going to be this hard to start a conversation every time we got together?

Kevin cleared his throat, and I thought, Oh, God, now Kevin’s bored.

“We need rules,” I blurted out.

They all looked at me.

“You know,” I said. “Bylaws and stuff? It’s not a geography club, but it’s still a club.”

I figured, if nothing else, at least this gave us something to talk about. I appreciated that no one flipped me any crap. Everyone was taking the club seriously.

“What kind of rules?” Terese said.

We all thought about it.

“How about we all get five minutes to say anything we want?” I said. “That’s how we can start things out. We can kind of go around in a circle. And no one can interrupt.” In the seventh grade, one of my classmates had been run over by a train. For the next couple of months, we’d had these support groups, and this is what the counselors had had us do. The Geography Club was a kind of support group, so I figured, What the hell?

Everyone nodded or grunted, which I guessed meant my motion had been carried.

Kevin said, “Whatever anyone says in this classroom stays in this classroom. No talking about the club with anyone outside.” I figured this kind of went without saying—I’d said as much to Min that Sunday. But I was glad someone had said it anyway.

“Majority rules,” Ike said. “If we ever have to decide some issue, we take a vote. Whatever gets the most votes, we go with it. And since there are five members, we can’t ever have a tie.”

I couldn’t imagine anything that we could possibly ever have to vote on, but it made sense in theory, so I nodded along with everyone else.

“How often do we meet?” Min said, and I realized this was the first thing she’d said in a long time. I couldn’t help but remember what she’d said on Sunday, about the Geography Club screwing up her relationship with Terese, and I wondered what she was thinking. (Great, I thought: Now I didn’t just have Kevin’s every little reaction to worry about—now I had Min’s to worry about too!)

“Twice a week?” I said in response to Min’s question. This might sound like a lot of meetings, but being in high school, we had classes or workouts five days a week. So twice a week didn’t seem that often.

“Which days?” Terese said.

What with Kevin’s baseball games, Terese’s soccer games, and Min’s and Ike’s other clubs, we had a hard time pinning down days. But we finally came up with Tuesday and Thursday, right after school. If we kept it at thirty minutes or so, Kevin and Terese could both get to their practices before the end of warm-up.

“Anything else?” I said. I meant any more rules.

We thought for a minute more, but no one came up with anything. They all looked at me, since for some reason I had suddenly become our unofficial leader.

“So I guess we get started with the five-minute thing,” I said. Since it had been my idea, I figured it was up to me to go first. (Me and my big mouth!) I started in on everything that had been on my mind that day. Everything, that is, except Kevin and Min, the two things that had been most on my mind.

I wasn’t exactly counting the minutes until the weekend and my date with Trish and Gunnar and Kimberly. Then Saturday morning rolled around, and I
did
start counting the minutes, but not in the good way. The truth was, I hadn’t been on that many dates before. None, to be exact. Not real dates. Oh, I’d been to plenty of parties and group things, like when everyone gets together to go to a movie. But I’d never really done anything where I was paired up with one particular girl, and which involved the possibility of kissing or actual sex. (Do we really need to go into this again?) Let’s just say that, up until this point in my life, I had kind of made it a point not to be alone with a girl.

Gunnar was picking me up at six, and then we were going to go pick up the girls at six thirty. So around four thirty, I started to get ready. I was allowing myself some extra time in case something went wrong, like if I cut myself shaving and had to be rushed to the emergency room so they could sew my nose back on.

I wasn’t sure why I even cared what I looked like that night, but I did. So after I showered and combed my hair, I took a look at myself in the mirror. It’s true, I had a whole flock of new zits on what was, three days ago, a blemish-free face. But I wasn’t the worst-looking guy in the world.

Then I got dressed. I spent a good twenty minutes picking out the right pair of underwear to wear, turning sideways in the mirror and trying to decide which pair looked best. Again, I had no idea why. It’s not like I thought there was any chance Trish would actually see me in them. It’s also worth noting here that, as okay as I thought I looked, I looked nothing whatsoever like Kevin Land in a pair of Jockey shorts. Not that Kevin Land wore Jockey shorts. Kevin Land was a boxer shorts kind of guy. Which has absolutely nothing to do with my date with Trish, or even my getting ready for my date with Trish, so I’m not exactly sure why I’m going into it here. I guess just to give you some sense of exactly how much I was dreading this date.

Gunnar picked me up right on schedule, and I had to admit, he’d cleaned up well (smelled pretty good too). For one brief, very weird moment, I imagined it was the two of us going out on the date. The idea of dating Gunnar held absolutely no appeal, but the idea of being picked up in a car by a guy who’d taken a shower and put gel in his hair just for me—well, let’s just say it appealed.

Trish was spending the night over at Kimberly’s house, so Gunnar and I headed over there.

“Do you think we should get burgers after the movie?” Gunnar said to me, gripping the wheel as he drove. “Or maybe we should get pizza. We could eat at the food court at the mall, but they close at nine o’clock, so we’d have to eat first and go to the later movie, but I just had dinner, didn’t you? Or we don’t have to go to a movie. We could go to that teen dance club downtown. Do you think Kimberly would like that? But if we do that, we really won’t be able to talk. Of course, we won’t be able to talk at a movie either, but we could go out for food afterward; what do you think?”

There were a whole bunch of questions in there, but I didn’t answer any of them, because Gunnar never really stopped talking long enough, not even when we got almost to Kimberly’s house. Obviously, Gunnar was even more nervous about this date than I was.

When we pulled up at Kimberly’s house, Gunnar finally took a breath, so I turned to him in the front seat and said, “Gunnar? Calm down.”

“What?” he said.

“Try to relax. You’re making
me
nervous.” Actually, this was a lie. The truth was, Gunnar’s anxiety attack had somehow calmed me down. Go figure.

Gunnar took a couple of deep breaths, then nodded, and we headed for the flickering light of the front porch.

We’d barely pressed the doorbell when the front door flew open. It was Kimberly and Trish, filling the whole doorway. They both looked flustered, and there was a panicky look in Kimberly’s eyes. Gunnar and I both took a couple involuntary steps backward on the porch.

Kimberly was already shouting back into the house. “I’m
leaving!
” she called. “’Bye, Mom; ’bye, Dad!” Then she glared at Gunnar and me, and said almost as loudly, “Go, go,
go!
”

Gunnar and I were both kind of speechless. But Kimberly had already slammed the front door behind her and was now forcibly pushing us toward the car. “Come on, come on!” she said. “Let’s
go!
”

Only now did I understand what was going on. Kimberly didn’t want to have to introduce us to her parents. I didn’t particularly want to be introduced to her parents, so this turn of events was fine with me.

Gunnar was clueing in at exactly the same time I was, so together, we all turned and bolted for the car like characters outrunning an explosion in an action-adventure movie.

Just as we reached the car, I saw a rectangle of light burst open on the front porch behind us. “Kimberly!” said the silhouette in the doorway. “Kimberly, wait a minute!” Kimberly’s mom.

“Ignore her!” Kimberly whispered, throwing open two car doors at a time. “Let’s just go!” She turned back toward the house and waved. “’Bye, Mom! We’ll be home by one!”

“But Kimberly—!” the voice said, but it was too late. We were all inside the car now, and Kimberly’s mom could only glower at us helplessly from within the wan light of the front porch.

“Drive!” Kimberly said, and Gunnar did. He didn’t actually peel rubber, but he came close.

When we reached the end of the block, Kimberly finally relaxed, and the rest of us did too. Sitting in the front seat next to Gunnar, she lit up a cigarette. “Oh, man,” she said. “There was, like, no
way
I was doing the whole parent thing.”

“It’s okay,” Gunnar said. He hesitated a second, then added, “You need to change the bulb in your front porch light.”

I thought, We’ve been on this date for ten seconds, and Gunnar has already said the wrong thing. This had to be some kind of new record.

Trish was sitting next to me in the backseat, so I turned to her and said, “Hey.”

“Hey,” Trish said. Up in the front seat, Kimberly was pretty heavily made up and was busting out all over in front. Trish, meanwhile, had a little less on her face and a little more on her body, but her clothes were pretty tight and didn’t leave a whole lot to the imagination either. She didn’t look horrible, though.

“You look great,” I said, and she blushed.

“Thanks,” she said in the mousy, whispery voice I remembered. “You do too.”

“Where we headed?” Kimberly said, somehow managing to blow smoke in all our faces at exactly the same time.

“A movie?” Gunnar said. It was a question, not a statement, and I saw Kimberly wrinkle her nose in disgust. I knew right then that she liked her men loud and confident and crude, and that poor Gunnar didn’t stand a chance.

We bought tickets for the stupid romantic comedy rated PG-13, but once we were inside the multiplex, Kimberly said she wanted to see the stupid erotic thriller rated R instead. As for me, I didn’t want to see either the romantic comedy or the erotic thriller. I wanted to see the animated Disney musical, which I guess just proved that I really was the gay boy that I’d been thinking all along that I was. But once again, I knew enough to keep my opinion to myself, so we snuck into the erotic thriller just like Kimberly wanted.

There was a late-night entertainment complex in the same strip mall as the theater, and after the movie, we walked toward it across the parking lot.

“That movie was so gay,” Kimberly said. She meant it sucked, and I hope it goes without saying that I was totally offended by this.

Then I noticed Gunnar looking at me in the dark, as if trying to read my reaction to Kimberly’s comment about the movie. I thought, Why is he looking at me? Does he have suspicions about me or what? But then it occurred to me that he was probably just trying to gauge my reaction to Kimberly, which was pretty thoroughly negative by this point.

Inside the entertainment place, Kimberly went off to play the pinball machines, with Gunnar trailing behind her and feeding her quarters as she went.

Trish and I went to the snack bar, where I ordered us a couple of burgers and Cokes.

“Kimberly’s a lot of fun,” I said as we stood around waiting for our food. I said this in a completely neutral way, so Trish wouldn’t take offense if she really did think loud, obnoxious Kimberly was a lot of fun. But I really meant it sarcastically, and I figured Trish would pick up on it if she thought the same thing.

“Oh, she’s okay,” Trish said. “She just gets like that when she has too much to drink.” Kimberly had brought a flask into the theater and had been slipping rum into her Coke all during the movie. Of course, this didn’t explain her being a bitch even
before
the movie, but I didn’t point this out to Trish.

Once we picked up our food, we headed for a booth, and I noticed that a couple of guys were checking Trish out. (Like I said, her clothes were pretty tight.) They both looked at Trish, their eyes scanning her like an X-ray machine. Then finally they looked at me, and I knew what they were thinking. They were jealous. This was all new to me, so I didn’t quite know what to do here. Should I bare my teeth and growl?

“How long you guys been friends?” I said to Trish once we’d started in on our food.

“Forever,” Trish said. “Since first grade.”