Total Constant Order (7 page)

T
hayer passed notes to me in class. Not the junior high variety, with felt-tip boxes along the margins: “Check ‘yes' if you're bored.” Thayer had other questions.

“If you could be happy for a year,” he wrote, “but remember nothing, would you do it?

“Would you put up with horrible nightmares for the rest of your life if you could win a million dollars?

“Which is better: to die like a hero or in your sleep?”

I honestly didn't know.

For the entire week, Thayer would pass me a note before science class. His random thoughts took this order: electronic voting booths, the
difference between Haitian voodoo and Cuban Santeria, night swimming, Internet blogs, and hairless cats. Soon I had a collection of notes hidden in my desk. I read them over and over until my eyes blurred.

At lunch, I sank back to earth. I knew that everyone was staring at Thayer and me. So we hid in the music room. Thayer materialized there with his binder and markers. He picked the lock with a paper clip and snuck into the empty room, with its thicket of music stands. We cranked the stereo, a dusty Panasonic that only played tapes. It was a relief dodging the lunchroom, with its sour popcorn smells and gossipy caste system.

Thayer wasn't born in the '80s, but he had memorized the decade in movie quotes.

“Come to me, son of Jor-el. Kneel before Zod.”

“I'm a mog. Half man, half dog. I'm my own best friend.”

“Chester Copperpot, Chester Copperpot.”

“Sir, you are a vulgarian.”

He could be Chunk in
The Goonies
, Barf in
Spaceballs.
Gasping, he ranted about Klingons and Kryptonite. He knew all the music: the stuttering
beats of Kurtis Blow, the robotic bass lines of Big Daddy Kane.

His energy had an edge, as though he might combust, Wile E. Coyote–style, if I stopped paying attention. I was his audience, a human laugh track.

Thayer Pinsky could quote lines from commercials so ancient, they pre-dated the Internet.

“Crisp and clean and no caffeine.”

“When you eat your Smarties, do you eat the red ones last? Do you suck them very slowly or crunch them very fast?”

Thayer said that it all started in elementary school. Fed up with his miserable grades, Thayer's mom dragged him to a doctor.

The doctor asked a lot of questions. “Do your thoughts bounce around like a pinball machine? Does your brain feel like a TV set with all the channels on?”

The night before a test, he found himself battling man-eating robots on the PlayStation or walking Bozo, his English bulldog. He wasn't lazy. When he studied between video game sessions, he felt okay. But when he sat at his desk, he couldn't concentrate.

The doctor offered Thayer a weapon.

Ritalin.

When Thayer swallowed the pill, he went to school and waited for the static to return when the meds wore off. Instead, he got a tingle between his eyebrows. In class, sitting quietly at his desk, he crunched up math equations like Pac-Man.

In the final hour of school, waiting for his second dose, his mood turned sour. Ritalin's magic didn't last long. At home, he took another pill. Soon he was tingling, though not like before.

He began to lose weight. His long, flat feet no longer fit his sneakers. He missed the way he used to feel, his needle hovering at ninety miles per hour. Most often, he floated in space.

 

“A group of foxes is called a ‘skulk,'” Thayer said at lunch.

We were hiding in the music room, listening to gloomy old jazz records. It was getting late. Soon lunch would be over. Mr. Clemmons would shove his key in the lock any moment now.

“Sometimes they're also called a ‘leash,'” he added.

Thayer reminded me of an orphaned animal.
His dad had split once Thayer started walking and talking. His mom worked in a hospital all the time, helping sick kids.

“She sees them more than me,” he said. He was fiddling with his glove. If Thayer was in a bad mood, he wore a mechanic's glove on his left hand. He'd growl, “I'm agga-rah-vated.” He'd been wearing that stupid glove for a week. Finally he took it off.

When I asked why, he said, “Because I'm not agga-rah-vated anymore.”

Thayer couldn't've cared less about his SAT vocab. All day, he had doodled robots during class. Sometimes he'd write down his dreams. In them, he was always an animal—a lion, a dolphin, a fox. He believed that he morphed into these creatures.

“It's not the fact that my mom's dating,” he told me. “It's the fact that she's replacing my dad. I don't need more adults in my life.”

“My dad's dating someone. It's weird. But I guess it's good that my parents aren't together and fighting,” I said.

“Yeah. I just wish Mom would wait until I was older.”

I turned off the record. The melody spiraled out of measure. “Thayer, you're like one of the smartest people I know. Why are you bombing English?”

He shrugged. “Because it's tedious and I really don't care.”

“You should care.”

“Who gives a crap about mapping sentences? It bores me spitless. And poetry sucks beyond comprehension. My interpretation is always ‘wrong' because it doesn't match the teacher's.”

“But what about rap?” I asked. He was always writing rhymes on every available scrap of paper. “Isn't that poetry?”

That got his attention. “Look, I can handle writing on my own time. In class, it's different.”

“True,” I said.

“Besides…English is my last subject of the day. That's when my Ritalin wears off and I zone out.”

I wanted to tell him about my Paxil nightmare. If anybody would understand how it messed with my head, it would be Thayer. But he had already switched gears.

“It doesn't help that I'm dyslexic,” he said.

“Does that mean you see words backward?”

“No. That's what most people think.” He jiggled his foot. “Really, it means I'm ‘memory impaired.' Written words don't stick. So I bring a tape recorder to school.”

A knot tightened my throat. I said, “Do you think you're, like, dependent on Ritalin to help you study?”

Thayer stared right into my eyes. Maybe he was examining his own reflection. “If you're trying to say I'm addicted, you're wrong.”

“Don't get mad. I didn't mean to be in your face about it.” I studied the clock on the wall. “We should get going.”

He grunted. “Maybe I
am
hooked,” he said. “Did you know that Ritalin belongs to the same class of drugs as cocaine? You can snort crushed Ritalin for a rush.”

“Have you ever done it?”

He didn't answer.

“When I eat Ritalin, I'm not watching the clock, counting the seconds,” he said.

Counting seconds was my forte.

“You don't know what it feels like,” he added.

Yes, I did.

I chewed my lip. “Thayer, I want to tell you something.”

“Yeah?” His foot hadn't stopped jiggling.

I yanked down the denim that had creeped up my thighs. There was no way to begin. I was ashamed of my “depression,” a word that conjured Monday-morning blahs.

Thayer tapped my knee. “So what's crackin'?”

I was starting to get dizzy. “It's weird,” I said. “You'll laugh.”

Thayer tapped again, only this time, he didn't let go.

“I won't laugh,” he said.

I believed him.

“Talk to me, Fin. We're buds, right?”

“Yeah. Sure,” I said.

If that was true, then why was I staring at his hand—all five digits curled like they belonged on me? My own hand was trembling, getting ready to match Thayer's movement. That would mean evening out the gesture, in other words, skimming
the hard shell of his kneecap.

So I did.

He didn't seem to mind.

There was the wheeze of a door unlocking. All the lights snapped on.

Mr. Clemmons hustled inside. Students were funneling into lines. Their voices droned.

“What are we going to do?” I whispered.

“We're gonna dip outta here,” Thayer said.

Before I could stop him, Thayer snatched my hand, plowing a path through the maze of chairs and music stands. Kids stared. Mr. Clemmons was so flabbergasted, he only managed to croak, “Frances? What are you doing here?”

I could've strung him a paragraph of lies, but he wouldn't have heard it anyway. When we finally made it to class, Ms. Armstrong wrote our names on the board, a form of public humiliation.

I glanced at Thayer. He was too busy doodling to notice.

I
'll show you how to drop a tag.” Thayer ripped a page from his notebook and drew:
NERS
.

When I asked why he tagged the girls' bathroom, he said, “So you could see it.”

I shoved him. “No, really. I want to know.”

“I like it better in there,” he said. “It smells nicer. Has a nicer view, too.”

I sighed. No hope of getting a straight answer.

He scribbled graffiti the way I drew numbers, his hand squeezing the tip.

Thayer would tap my arm and say, “Check it.” He would stare at a fence, at the block letters in thick black ink. Or a mailbox trimmed in balloon-shaped tags. He would explain how an Aerosol Prophet had tagged a Metro bus on Biscayne Boulevard.

“If you're gonna do a bus, then do it with style, man. Take it from me. When you go out to the street, hit it big.”

And he talked about South Florida legends, the crews with names like INKHEADS, 7UP, BSK, DAM.

“This guy, Elite, has got some mad style. I caught a few fresh panels by him, some pretty dope murals. I personally don't like Krash's pieces letter-wise, but I give him props on bombing.”

In time, I noticed. Everywhere I looked, there were codes in layers. If I spotted a tag, finger-traced on a dusty bumper, I was beaming.

An extravagant tag could send Thayer into such a dreamworld, he couldn't move until he had painted one of his own. He had tagged the school's metal bleachers near the football field. What he noticed, he wanted to copy. The bus tag, for example, could be better.

Thayer had seen me carving digits into desks. He asked me to show him my secret chain of numbers. So I snuck him into the girls' bathroom during lunch. We had to wait for Sharon Lubbitz and her
clones to finish smearing their mascara. Then I opened the door and he strolled inside like he owned it.

“You've got some ill skills. Why did you do this?” he asked.

The question surprised me. “I don't know. It's just something I do. How did you get into it?”

“Nothing special. I started writing NERS a long time ago. Back then it seemed short, which is always good in the graf world, and it sounded like a cool name.”

“Ever get caught?”

“Yeah, I was bombing in front of this store. Some security guards chased me around Sunset Place. I had to hide under a car until they rolled out. And I had red paint on my hands, like I had just murdered somebody.”

Thayer reached into his jacket. He gave me his Sharpie pen. His fingers brushed mine and an electric jolt shot through them.

“You try,” he said.

“I've never tagged here before. I just draw things.”

“So what?”

“I'll get caught.”

“No, you won't. I'll keep watch for you.”

“I don't know.”

“If you're going to be a smart bomber, you'll know what to hit and when to hit it.”

He left me alone in the bathroom. I uncapped the Sharpie and sniffed ink. I scribbled NERS over the walls, across the mirrors, and down to the petal pink floor tiles. The untagged surfaces seemed too clean. I couldn't stop myself.

“Damn.”

I didn't even notice that Thayer had returned. He stood back and studied my tags. He whistled. “That's tight.”

For a while, we stood there, looking. Part of his unlaced Converse was bumping mine. Everything seemed out of the ordinary: His foot tapping my toe. The mere concept of toes.

I knew from his expression that I had done well. More than well. My tags looked solid, the edges outlined in thick halos. Already, I felt the urge to tag again.

“Yo, we gotta dip,” he said.

By the end of the day, the school was buzzing about the graffiti in the girls' bathroom. Everyone believed that a boy had trespassed into that forbidden zone and left his filthy mark. The teachers questioned Thayer. His notebooks were infested with ballpoint NERS tags, just like those on the pastel tiles. Since nobody would come clean, the principal made Thayer scrub the stains with nail polish remover.

The NERS incident didn't do much for Thayer's popularity. But the four-letter stares and acid-laced insults rolled off him. He didn't even pay attention.

On Saturday, we walked from our houses to the Metrorail station near the park, which dumped its passengers in a nowhere zone of treeless sidewalks. He brought his skateboard and I pretended I knew how to ride it. We went to the mall, where Thayer made up voices for the pigeons. Around him, I didn't count so much anymore. Tagging kept my head and hands working in total constant order.

Just watching Thayer wind his streaky hair into a knot was a landmark moment—the same when he
recited the alphabet in Spanish or when he ate a bowl of Cocoa Puffs for lunch, sipping the last drop of tinted milk. I liked the sight of him marching into our hideout, the music room, his banged-up skateboard at his side like a faithful steed. He'd wrestle it up the stairs and lean it against the wall. I couldn't help wondering why he felt comfortable doing these things in front of me.

On the way home on Saturday, we were writing tags on each other's hands.

“So what was your first impression of me?” he asked.

I didn't know what to say. I thought about him sitting alone on the bench that day at lunch and throwing the tennis ball so hard, it broke the window.

“You seemed kind of angry,” I said.

“Huh,” he said. “It sucks that you saw me that way. Sometimes I get pissed when my Ritalin wears off.”

I was counting the syllables in his sentences. He spoke super fast, in 8/8 time, while most people talked in plain old 4/4 rhythm.

“So your emotions are, like, all over the place,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. For once, he was quiet.

“Hey,” I said. “So what did you think of me?”

He perked up again. “I thought you were a rock star.”

“Liar,” I said.

“Why would I lie?” he asked, genuinely confused.

“So what makes me a rock star? I can hardly play the violin.”

“But you have perfect rhythm. And you always wear that '80s jacket. So hard-core. Nobody in the entire school looks like you.”

“That's sad.” I covered my face in my hands.

“No. It's good.” Thayer pulled my hands away. “Quit hiding.” He wrote a row of numbers on the inside of my wrist. “Now write yours,” he said. “Just in case.”

“Just in case what?” I asked, staring at those inky digits, half expecting them to float away.

“In case I need to talk to a rock star,” he said.

I scribbled my number on his skin.