Lawrence, Page 2

true that you’re gay?” It was Boyce, the leader of a four-jock pack that formed a semicircle around Wieder. Wieder lowered his reddening face, which Boyce took as confirmation of the obvious. Wieder was in fact gay; worse for him, he was fighting a terrible crush on Boyce, who was tall, blond, and lean, and spent hours in the weight room as Wieder covertly watched his desperate efforts to bulk himself up against teasing jocks who said he looked gay. “Hey, that’s alright,” said Boyce in a honeyed voice laden with sympathy. “We all need to be who we are, you know,” words lifted verbatim from a recent assembly lecture on tolerance. Boyce rested his hand on Wieder’s shoulder, raised his thumb and brazenly stroked Wieder’s cheek while one of his pals chortled and another faked retching. Wieder raised his blue-eyed gaze to Boyce’s in tremulous stages till at last he gazed directly up into eyes shining with the knowledge of their own seductive power. “Just admit it,” cooed Boyce, leaning close to allow Wieder to feel his warm breath and see his lips pucker. “Just say the word, dude. Come on. Be yourself.” It was the seminal moment of young Wieder’s existence, terrifying and wonderful. “Say you’re gay,” murmured Boyce. “Say it. Come on.” Wieder blinked, and tears flushed from his eyes onto Boyce’s hand. Boyce disgustedly flung the drops. “Say it!” he snapped. “Say it! Say you’re gay!”

  “I’m gay,” said Lawrence, who had grown tall and thin and had slid through a gap to stand next to Wieder. His hands were passively clasped at his groin and he gazed at Boyce with a sad-eyed, fatalistic frown as Boyce’s face froze at first then rebooted, the boys behind Boyce jockeying like hounds awaiting the alpha’s signal to attack. It would not have been the first such attack: Lawrence had been beaten in ninth grade by a different pack for “hating America!” after saying in class that slavery was evil and that we killed, too. But then in slid Tina, Lawrence’s combative, plump, short Chinese pal from Origami Club. “I’m gay,” she said, thrusting her chin up at Boyce as she grasped Wieder’s hand.

  “I’m gay, too.” This was Kayley, whom Boyce had long lusted after in vain. Kayley knew that her dating record belied the assertion, so she pressed against Lawrence’s flank, twined her viney arm in his, and cooed in a precociously smoky voice, “Well I’m bi, anyway,” breathing warmth into Lawrence’s ear.

  Foaming, fuming, red-faced and shamed, Boyce managed a feeble “I’ll see you later” at Lawrence, to which Kaley laughed, “Hands off him, he’s mine,” thus perfecting Boyce’s disgrace.

  Lawrence dreamed of Kayley through sweat-stained nights, but managed only a bright, shy smile when they passed in the hall. She honored the remembrance of their stand with a smile, but did not stop to talk. He daydreamed too of Tina, lowing at her as they and two other girls folded origami like pioneer girls in a knitting circle, Lawrence unselfconsciously gazing at the lustrous black hair that curled sharply around Tina’s square jaw, gazing at her thick neck full of power and the soft curves beneath her red cable-knit sweater and the skillful hands that turned out flocks of cranes as she chatted of things Lawrence followed but dimly, detecting his interest but protecting his feelings by looking away from his dimly comprehending gaze, unsure how to fill his wide-open eyes. For prolonged eye contact with women there was still only Mercy, and when they locked eyes a circuit of trust flowed between them in alternating currents of question and answer, call and response.

  “Is evolution true?” he asked during homework help, looking up from an illustration of the stages of human evolution in his bio book.

  “Of course,” she smiled. She could tell from the way he sucked on his lip that more questions were coming, and she gave him time to formulate them.

  “So we didn’t start as humans?”

  “Nothing started like what it is now, L. Dogs came from wolves, and humans came from these guys–just like chimps and gorillas. We all come from the same primitive ancestors, and became different over millions of years.”

  “So we’re cannibals.”

  She marveled at his pure simple logic.

  “Is that why you don’t eat meat, Merse?”

  “I don’t eat animals, Laurie–meat is just a phony word for the animals people murder for food.”

  “Murder? How?”

  He had opened the spigot, and she let the facts flow. She told him about “Cattle–that means cows and steers, which are bulls who’ve had their testicles cut off–without anesthesia!–and they’re shot in the head with steel bolts and hung from chains, and while some of them are still conscious, they slash `em in the throat and hack `em into pieces with long knives.” She spoke of chickens, shackled, dipped in electrified water and then passed before buzzing rotary blades meant to slit their throats, some birds still conscious when the blade slices their throat, some dodging the blade only to die when submerged in a “scalding tank” thick with boiling water, feathers, and blood. Lawrence choked out the words, “That’s evil, Mercy” with his hand on his stomach, and she said the animals way they lived was even worse. With quiet reverence for the grim truth, she played for him an undercover film of a feedlot where steers stood hide-to-hide in an inches-high sludge of manure, mud, and urine, then showed a film of a factory egg farm where birds stuffed into battery cages lacked the room to even turn around. The camera closed in on a bird’s vacant eyes. Lawrence lowered his head towards the computer screen, his lip hanging low as if he lacked the will to stiffen it, his eyes mirroring the bird’s helpless gaze, his cupped hands unconsciously reaching for the screen as if to succor the hen.

  He ate no bite of stewed chicken that night, for he saw in the bones that stretched the blanched skin no meal, but a friend. The next night he would not touch his ground beef. The night after that he picked at the veggies in Dad’s famous beef stew, but would not touch the meat until the anguish in his mom’s voice moved him to do so. He took a spoonful into his mouth; the meat had the tang of death to him now, and he disgorged it back into the bowl on a vile stomach acid tsunami.

  “Dead animals,” he murmured with a sorrowful gaze as his mom wiped his mouth.

  “Dead animals,” he reported with sincere helpfulness in The Chefs Club, an

  after-school class for kids behind in their graduation requirements. “Meat’s just a nice word for murder.”

  Mercy, who bodyguarded her eleventh grade brother from a discreet distance as if he were the president’s son, glided to the cooking table and positioned herself between Lawrence and a meat-loving, thick-necked boy named Mark who was unaccustomed to being contradicted.

  “You’re calling me a murderer?”

  “No,” said Mercy with a disarming smile. “He’s just trying to help.”

  Mark grinned down at Mercy through narrowed eyes. “Hey, I like brainy girls.”

  “I’ve got glasses, so I’m brainy?”

  Mark shook his head and smiled, turned to the counter and pressed a glob of raw ground beef with the heels of his hands, then rolled hunks of the beef into balls with occasional lascivious grins at Mercy. She stayed in position between Mark and Lawrence the rest of the day and the rest of the year, and rebuffed Mark’s frequent advances with subtle wit and grace.

  In twelfth grade Lawrence was back in the Chefs Club, as was Mark, as was Boyce, as were two dozen kids who needed one more credit to graduate. “So you want to be a cook when you grow up, Lawrence boy?”

  “Oh yeah,” Lawrence said dreamily. “It makes me happy to serve people food.”

  Mark snickered ostentatiously at that, and Boyce, who had dropped out of sports and grown a jawline beard to go with his red-rimmed, lunchtime beer drinker’s eyes, snickered too. “I bet decorating cupcakes makes you happy too,” Mark said.

  “Oh, yeah,” agreed Lawrence. “I love sprinkles the most.”

  “Sprinkles,” Mark snickered. “Lawrence Man, where’s your sister?”

  Lawrence rolled his tongue around the corner of his mouth in reflexive synch with his rolling of the pizza dough, much as a dog kicks when his paddle point is petted. As with all repetitive manual tas
ks, he rolled dough expertly. “She was accepted at Cal,” he said with a strained effort to talk while rolling. “But she wanted to live at home, with me.”

  “Who wouldn’t want to live at home, with you?” sniggered Boyce.

  “Tell her hi from me,” said Mark with an anaconda arm around Lawrence’s shoulder.

  They left him alone for the day and the week.

  “Did you tell your sister hi from me?” Mark asked.

  Lawrence was intent on shaping the tail of a croissant, his tongue sticking out the side of his mouth. Mark backhanded him hard on the arm. “Did you?”

  “Huh?” asked Lawrence. “Yeah. I said hi.”

  “And?” The demand in Mark’s stare would have been understood by most guys but was wasted on Lawrence. “What’d she say?”

  “She said not to get too close to that guy. But I don’t think the cooking table’s too crowded.”

  Snickers erupted from Boyce and from Boyce’s pal Hank, who always wore a down-grin of mocking disdain. Mark raised his voice to tamp down theirs. “Is your sister a lezzie or what, Lawrence Man? I mean come on, that short hair.”

  Lawrence smiled, visibly at a loss.

  “He means,” said Boyce, leaning in on Lawrence’s face, “does she like boys?”

  “Oh, sure,” Lawrence brightened. “She goes out with Draco.” Then, as if