The Youth & Young Loves of Oliver Wade: Stories

THE YOUTH

& YOUNG LOVES

OF OLIVER WADE

stories

__________

Ben Monopoli

THE
YOUTH & YOUNG LOVES OF OLIVER WADE: STORIES. Copyright © 2015 by Ben
Monopoli. All rights reserved.

No
part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any
form or by any means without the express written permission of the author.

This
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either
products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any similarity
to real persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Cover
photo and design by the author.

Lighthouse
logo design by Jake Monopoli.

www.benmonopoli.com

@
benmonopoli

This
book is also available in paperback:

ISBN:
1512307203

ISBN-13:
978-1512307207

The Youth

& Young Loves

of Oliver Wade

They
claim to walk unafraid.

I’ll
be clumsy instead.

—R.E.M., “Walk Unafraid”

1. Stag

2. Rainbow
Subway

3. Dial
Up

4. The
Weight Lifter

5. So
Long Eucalyptus

6. The
First Time

7. The
Six Months Between Then & Now

8. Honeymoon
for Knights

9. Abbey’s
Mohawk

10. Lumberjack
Slams & Hurricane Swirls

11. The
Key-Touching Guys

12. We
All Go Back to Where We Belong

(Age
13)

STAG

St
ag.

I remember hearing that word, sensing immediately the freedom
in it. Stag. It was a hard word, angular, macho, as navy-blue as military. And cool.
Unimpeachable. It had no weakness, could not be questioned. It was strong.

The first of us to use it was Boyd Wren, and he used it well
aware of its power. Someone had asked him who he was bringing to the dance.

“No one,” he said. “I’m
goin
stag.”

Stag.

Stag.

We whispered it, reveling in it, the five of us, the five bottom
rungs on the eighth-grade ladder. Even those of us who’d never heard the word before
understood its meaning. All except Dwight Macklin, who asked.

But it couldn’t be explained; everyone else understood this.
To provide a definition would be to reduce its power. It would be like explaining
a magic trick.

So Boyd merely said again, “It means I’m
goin
stag.”

When the word came out of his mouth you watched for his back
to straighten and for his fists to press against his hips. You watched for his
cowlicky
blond hair to smooth.

“I’m going stag too,” said Tyson
Cordray
.

“Me too, I’m
goin
staaag
,” said Michael Alonso, the weird one.

“How about you, Ollie?” said Boyd.

“Stag,” I said.

My first choice—skipping the dance—wasn’t an option.
This was the big one, the Grad Dance, the last before high school. People like me
who had successfully skipped three years of middle-school dances could not skip
the Grad Dance. You went because everyone had to be there. The grade policed itself
with the rigid enforcement of a grandmother making sure all the cousins showed up
for Christmas. There was no way out. I couldn’t even try. So I clung to the word.

***

“I’m going stag,” I told my mother, only because she asked;
I never brought up the dance on my own. I tried not to acknowledge it at all.

We were walking up the rickety spiral steps of the town’s only
seamstress. Certain preparations needed to be made for the dance, and my mother
was intent on making them, even excited. My suit needed to be let out.

“Oh, Oliver, you should ask a girl,” said my mother, looking
down from a higher step. “What about Nadia Cummings?”

“All my friends are going stag.” I held the word up at her like
a shield.

“Or Jasmine
Lorange
?”

Names rained down. While we sat in the shop’s stuffy waiting
area she listed all the girls I’d ever been on a soccer team with, all the girls
we’d seen at gymnastics class and town yard-sales.

“No one is taking anyone,” I said.

The seamstress, an old woman overworked in this season of dances
and proms, sent me behind a curtain to put on my suit and then tugged at my crotch
and my shoulders, taking measurements.

“Have you asked a pretty girl?” she said, smiling around the
pins in her mouth.

“No,” I said. “Going stag.”

***

My four friends saw going stag as a way to polish the inevitable.
It insulated them from being mocked for being the kind of boys who couldn’t land
a date. A boy going stag wasn’t going alone, he was choosing to go alone. The difference
between those things, for an eighth-grader, was everything.

For me going stag offered something more. For me it was a relief,
a reprieve from a rite of passage I had come to understand I wasn’t destined for.
I whispered it to myself at every mention of the dance, like a spell to ward off
suspicion. Stag. For me it kept things at bay.

***

Talk of the dance, all year a hum, grew to a buzz, a thump,
a clanging in the school hallways. Girls talked about where they were having their
hair done; boys talked about buying corsages. Invitations to go to the dance were
delivered through the bolder proxies of bashful friends. At lunch, in classrooms,
on the bus, notes were passed. I pretended not to see. That trick for monsters:
if I closed my eyes and counted to three, would it all go away?

***

At the end of one day when I opened my locker a piece of paper
fell out. Notebook paper folded into a triangle and decorated with hand-drawn orange
musical notes. I closed my eyes and counted. One, two, three.

“What is that!” Dwight gasped from the cluttered locker beside
mine. He was ready for it to be a treasure map, a ransom note, but I knew it was
neither of those.

“Just from my mom,” I said, slamming the triangle deep into my
backpack.

One, two, three. One, two, three, one, two, three.

I thought about throwing it away without reading it. I couldn’t
be responsible for something I never saw. I owed no one an answer if I never saw
a question. I was going stag, didn’t they know? The note was an insult. But it was
an armed bomb too. One I needed to defuse before it blew up.

I opened it on the bus, slunk down in the green vinyl seat
with my knees pressed high against the back of the seat in front of me. Within the
pocket of my lap I unfolded the triangle. In orange ink it read:
Oliver. Would
you like to go to the Grad Dance with me? (Jessica Parson) Please check one and
put this in Locker 341. __ Yes __ No. From Jessica Parson. PS: I’m good at dancing,
you’ll see.
Some, but not all, of the I’s were dotted with circles.

Jessica Parson, only Jessica. A weight lifted; I exhaled and
my knees slid down the green vinyl. Jessica was a girl it was OK not to want to
go to this dance with. Any dance with. She was a girl no one would want to go to
a dance with. My friends would excuse this, based on Jessica’s ever-present kitten
sweatshirts, her big buck teeth, her faded stretch-pants everyone said smelled like
horse manure because she lived near a farm. They would reject it. To have help in
rejecting a girl for not being good enough—this was a fine disguise.

“She asked you?” Tyson said, affronted, when I showed the guys
the note. “That wench.”

“I bet she’s going to wear h-h-horse poop perfume to the dance,”
Michael said, laughing, rubbing the heel of his hand against his perpetually itchy
chin. (Sometimes we called him Itchy Chin Mike.)

“I feel so dirty now,” I whispered dramatically. “I need a chemical
baaath
.”

“Let’s see that note again,” said Boyd, holding out a sturdy
hand. I gave it to him. Using his knee as a table, he drew a blue X on the line
beside
No
. Then he paused, touched the pen cap to his lips, then circled
the
No
.

“Write on it
In your dreams Jessica
,” said Michael. “Write
on it
You smell like shit
.” He had the devilish grin of a boy new to swearing.

“This is fine like this,” Boyd said.

He folded the note in a series of halves and handed it back to
me. Between first and second periods I raised it to the ventilation holes of Jessica’s
locker.

I closed my eyes and counted to three. Paper whisked against
metal and it was gone.

***

As the days slid by everything started to become all dance,
all the time, an onslaught too overwhelming for my anti-monster trick. It came from
everywhere—the obvious places, but even my own bedroom.

“We should buy you new shoes for the dance,” my mother said.
My suit was back from the seamstress and she’d realized it was still incomplete.

“I don’t need shoes,” I said, wedging the suit into the back
of my closet, where I could better pretend it didn’t exist. Plastic hangers clattered
to the floor. “I can wear my church shoes.”

“But those aren’t very fancy. Don’t you want to look nice? People
are going all-out for this.”

She was sitting on the end of my bed, cradling her chin with
one hand while her elbow rested on her knee. She was looking at me as though I were
the most mysterious thing in the universe.

“Who cares if I look nice?” I said, shutting the closet door
and letting my hand slide damply off the knob. “Can I go outside?”

She sighed, pressed her knuckles to her lips. “You’re going to
have a lousy time at this dance, Oliver. Do you know why? Because you’ve already
decided to have a lousy time.”

“I’m going outside,” I said, leaving her in my room and taking
the stairs two at a time.

***

In biology class I had been thinking about my suit, thinking
that if I didn’t wear the jacket to the dance—if I only wore a shirt and pants—it
might not seem so official, when a finger poked my spine. It was a poke full of
intention, as though I were being summoned from a lower floor. I pretended not to
feel it. I knew Amy Langley was sitting behind me. I looked toward the blackboard
and closed my eyes. One, two, three one two—

“Oliver,” she whispered, and after hesitating I turned a little
in my seat. “Hi,” she added.

“Hi.”

“Are you going to the Grad Dance?”

“... Yuh.”

“Are you going with anyone?”

I shook my head slowly, slowly, like a person trying to outwit
quicksand.

“Taylor wants me to ask if you’ll go with her.”

“Oh.”

“She really wants a flower, even just a little one.”

“Oh. OK.”

“Good! I’ll tell her.”

I faced forward, almost dropped forward. My fingers were leaving
wet dimples on my textbook pages. What had just happened? What was happening? Why
had I not told her about going stag, wielded it like the weapon it was?

After a few seconds with my eyes shut tight I felt another poke.
When I turned Amy pointed to the far corner of the classroom. Taylor, blushing,
looked up from her doodling, glanced at me, smiled.

At the end of the day when we were all in the hall putting
on our backpacks she came over to my locker. She seemed to peek out from behind
her brown bangs and long eyelashes.

“I’m excited we’re going,” she said. She looked happy. I couldn’t
fathom why. I wanted her to leave me alone. Why was she doing this to me? What had
I done to her? “I heard Jessica was going to ask you, but then she decided to go
alone instead.”

“Oh.”

“So.”

“Yeah.”

“So like do you want a ride to the dance?” she said. “My mom
could pick you up?” She was biting her lip, clicking her Jelly-shoed heels together
awkwardly.

“My mom’s already driving me. So.”

“Well... maybe your mom could pick me up, then?”

“We don’t know where you live, though, so....”

“Oh. OK.” She wasn’t stupid, she was deciding not to press it.
“So.” Her heels stopped moving. “We’ll meet up at the dance?”

“Yeah I’ll just see you there, I guess?”

I hated her for making me act like a jerk but I didn’t know what
else to do. Was being a jerk better than pretending to want this? I knew only those
two options: lead her on or scrape her off. The truth was too much. It was too much;
I was thirteen. No one in this school was like me. No one in this town, as far as
I knew, was like me. Bad people were like me. Dead people were like me.

“What was that?” Boyd Wren said after she’d walked away.

His voice made me realize there were other people around, people
who were knowing. This was already happening.

“Not stag anymore?” Boyd added.

“She asked me, I didn’t know how to say no.”

“She’s cool,” he said casually. He scratched at my locker with
his thumb. “Me, I figure I’ll still go stag. I don’t like to be tied down.”

***

This was the opposite of Jessica. I was afraid to tell the
other guys about Taylor. The reason Taylor was so devastating was that she would’ve
been, should’ve been, exactly the girl for me. Cute. My height. Perfect. But when
you’re hiding, like I was, the sweetest girl is the most dangerous. Her perfection
was like a looming spotlight three steps behind an escaping prisoner.

When the guys found out about her they found out through Boyd.
I volunteered it to no one, including, especially, my parents. It felt like a secret,
a perilous secret wrapped in a much bigger secret. It hadn’t occurred to me that
getting a fake girlfriend could be a good disguise. I was too afraid that if I tried
playing a role I would fail so spectacularly that my secret would be laid open and
made obvious to the farthest reaches of any audience. Better not to play, better
just to stay the same, the same as yesterday and the year before, when no one asked
questions, when lack of interest was normal and taken for granted and OK, when there
was no pretending necessary and I was only me.

***

“I saw Tyson’s mother at the bank today,” my own mother said
at dinner. The dance was just a few days away now and had invaded dinner too. “We
talked about how we can’t wait to see you boys all dressed up in your suits. She’s
going to take pictures. Oliver, I told her you’d kill me if I take pictures, but
she says I should—as mothers we deserve to take pictures.”

I felt sideswiped. Pictures? Posing? I hadn’t anticipated any
of this.

“Oliver?”

“I don’t want you to.”

“Ollie,” my father said, “let your mother take pictures. It’ll
only take up a minute.”

“You can’t. No one else’s moms are going.”

“
All
of the other mothers are going. I’m not going to
follow you into the dance, I just want to see you and your friends all dressed up.”

“No. No, you have to just drop me off and leave.”

“Ollie, do I embarrass you that much? I’m not going to dress
as a clown, for heaven’s sake.”

I finished my dinner in silence. I could feel my eyes were wide,
frozen, too big to close.