Smooth Read online

  “Are you saying Courtney’s stupid? Mom, Kevin said Courtney’s stupid.”

  “Kevin,” Mom said, in italics. “Be nice.”

  “What? I’m giving her good advice to not be an idiot.”

  Mom put on her fake smile and said her favorite catchphrase: “Positive mental attitude, sweetie.” It was her vague, catchall advice any time I didn’t have a phony Cheshire Cat smile plastered across my face. She’d been pelting me with it for most of my life, anytime I committed the sin of a neutral expression.

  I sighed.

  She added, “Where in your manners books does it say you can speak to your sister that way and roll your eyes?” She was talking about the dozens of books about manners she’d given me every birthday and Christmas for the last few years. I guess it was a parenting shortcut for her, to feed me printed instructions for being alive, like I was a punch-card computer from 1962. The books had titles like Manners for Men, How to Be an Upstanding Gentleman, and Becoming the Respectable Teen You’re Meant to Be. I’d never read any of them. They were piled up in a huge stack on a shelf in my room. Mom thought she was giving me helpful life advice, but it was more like giving me bricks, and soon I’d have enough to build my own house and move out.

  I forced a smile. “Yeah. Right. Sorry.” I took a breath and focused on the bullet points lined up in my head. I was going to talk about how Accutane works for most people, how it’s just a supercharged form of vitamin A, and how I’d only be on it for a few months. I wasn’t going to mention anything about depression and ulcers and all the stuff that would freak them out, but I had the counterarguments to those ready in case they brought them up. I was ready to debate them if they said no or tried to persuade me to try another medicine first.

  Mom and Kate were talking about Courtney and I kept waiting for the right time to jump in, but there was never a gap. I finally just blurted out over them, “Dr. Sharp gave me a new prescription and I need you to sign it.” I pulled the paper out of my pocket and flung it on the table.

  “You didn’t tell me about this earlier,” Mom said, picking it up.

  “How rude of him,” Kate muttered, and folded her arms.

  “I completely forgot about it until just now,” I lied.

  “It’s a new medicine for your face?”

  “I guess.”

  She stood up, got a pen from the kitchen, and signed it. “Okay. We can take this in to the pharmacy tomorrow.”

  Huh. Weird. No discussion, no screaming match. She didn’t seem to care, and Dad didn’t seem to notice I’d said anything at all.

  “Oh,” I added. “I need to get a blood test before we can get the prescription. In the same building as Dr. Sharp. I have to go once a month.”

  “That’s fine, sweetie. Whatever you need.”

  I nodded and ate while Mom and Kate talked about back-to-school clothes shopping or something. I looked at the prescription form on the table and wondered why it had been so easy. Mom and Dad didn’t seem to know what I was getting into, or maybe they didn’t care.

  Now that Mom’s signature was on there, it felt real. I’d been so set on getting the prescription signed that I hadn’t really thought beyond that — the reality that taking this drug could mess with my head. I got nervous and stopped eating. I just sat there staring at the table, telling myself I should be happy I got the signature, trying to push out all the thoughts about side effects, all the stories I’d read online about it ruining people’s lives.

  It’d be worth it. It’d definitely be worth it.

  Probably.

  Most afternoons that summer, Mom dropped me off at Luke or Will’s house while she went to run errands, and we’d hang out all day. Every now and then we’d do something productive like make our own short horror movies, but mostly we watched movies, played video games, and talked about why my mom could possibly need to go to the grocery store, bank, post office, and dry cleaner every single day.

  It was Tuesday, two weeks before school started. I was standing in Luke’s garage holding a white PVC pipe as tall as me. Luke and Will dug through bins of cords and parts, looking for a grill igniter switch so we could finish building our hair-spray-powered potato cannon.

  It was about a thousand degrees in the Georgia August heat, and the humidity made me feel like I was standing in a dog’s mouth. I pulled the bottom of my T-shirt up to wipe the sweat off my forehead, and the cotton stung my bumpy skin. I thought about all the bacteria I’d just transferred from my shirt directly into my pores. I’d probably seeded an entire new field of zits. Shit.

  Luke stood up from the pile, holding the small plastic grill igniter, which had two frayed wires dangling from its bottom. Luke’s hair is long and messy but always looks right. He’s a few inches taller than me and has chest muscles that are visible through his T-shirts and two small acne scars on his cheek that look deliberate — cool, even. Two different times — once when we were in sixth grade, another when we were in ninth — girls told me they thought he was hot. I told them both “Thanks” because I didn’t know what else to say, and neither of them ever spoke to me again.

  Will’s straight-across-the-front hairline makes him seem like an intelligent alien from a TV show. His hair says, “I don’t care what anyone thinks,” and he really doesn’t, whereas Luke’s hair says, “I don’t care what anyone thinks,” but I know he really wants more random girls to tell his friends they think he’s hot. My hair says, “I did not know what to tell the barber to do.”

  Our hair and my acne makes us look a little different, but you could make a Venn diagram of our interests, and it would pretty much entirely overlap: hanging out in each other’s basements, horror movies, talking about testicles.

  Will revved an electric drill and we walked into the dead grass. I held the PVC pipe down while Will drilled a hole through it and Luke stuffed the igniter in. Then Luke sprayed enough hair spray into the pipe to make us all cough, and I screwed the plastic cap onto the back. Will crammed a potato down the front end and used a rake handle to jam it to the bottom of the pipe like he was a Revolutionary War soldier loading a musket.

  “That it?” I said, standing with the end of the barrel in my hand, pointing it straight up.

  “Yeah,” Luke said, peering into the barrel. “We press the igniter, it makes a spark, the hair spray explodes and fires the potato.”

  I said, “How do we know the whole thing won’t just blow up and slice us in half with plastic shards?”

  “It probably will,” Luke said, stepping back and shrugging.

  “This seems like a really dumb way for us all to die,” I said.

  “Dude?” Luke said, looking down at Will, who was crouched near the ground with his finger on the igniter button. “You wanna do it?”

  “Yeah, sure.” He shrugged. His vote broke the tie and there was nothing I could do.

  Will clicked the switch. I squeezed my eyes shut. Nothing happened. He clicked it again. And again. Nothing. I opened my eyes. He clicked it again and — shit! — the potato shot out with a WHUMP and the smell of burnt chemicals.

  I let go of the pipe and ran under a tree, trying to find the potato in the sky. I couldn’t see it anywhere. I imagined it smacking me in the forehead, making my whiteheads pop and bleed, fertilizing a giant purple bruise. I pictured it cannonballing into my penis and scrotum, mangling the whole package before I’d even gotten to really use it, like wrecking a new car before you pull it out of the dealership.

  The potato plopped onto the street at the edge of Luke’s driveway. Luke and Will ran after it and I followed them. We leaned over the smashed lump.

  “That could’ve been our dicks,” I said.

  Luke and Will both nodded.

  “That’s a good idea,” Luke said while I watched Mom’s minivan pull up behind him. Her window was down. “You boys want to cut our peckers off with the Bowie knife and shoot ’em into the sky next?”

  “Hi, guys,” Mom said. She’d definitely heard him.

 
“Hey, what’s up, Kevin’s mom?” Luke said, turning around and smiling at her. I have no idea how he can recover from saying things like that. He was never taught how to properly worry.

  “You’ve got your appointment,” Mom said to me.

  “Oh, sure, yeah, I’ll drive.” I rushed over, took the keys from her when she got out of the driver’s seat, and told the guys I’d see them later, trying to get out of there before either of them could ask what my appointment was for. I didn’t feel like explaining Accutane and the mandatory blood test to them. They wouldn’t be mean about it or anything, but they’d bring it up and make dumb jokes about the tests finding some disease in my blood you can only get from having sex with rodents or something. They’d ignored my acne for years, but once they thought it was acceptable to indirectly bust my balls about it, I wouldn’t be able to deny to myself how obviously bad it was anymore. Plus, telling them would mean admitting not just that my skin was terrible, but that I hated how I looked badly enough to make this drastic step toward fixing it. It was too real an emotion to share with them. They wouldn’t know how to handle it, and I wouldn’t know how to handle however they reacted. It was just easier and more efficient to focus our conversations on our nut sacks instead.

  I had my learner’s permit, meaning I basically had my license as long as I could completely ignore Mom’s existence. “Kevin, please. We have plenty of time,” she’d say every time I eased into a stop at a red light. “You don’t have to drive like a maniac.”

  “I’m driving ten under the speed limit.”

  “I feel like I’m on a roller coaster.”

  When I merged onto the highway, she squeezed her eyes shut, whispered a prayer, and crossed herself. Bold message from a woman who hadn’t been to church in fifteen years. That was why I preferred driving with my dad when he was available. He hardly ever looked up from his work emails in the passenger seat.

  When I pulled into the parking deck at the doctor’s office, Mom gripped the handle above her door and made me drive all the way to the top level, where there were no other cars I could potentially scratch. She got out of the car and guided me into a wide-open space like she worked on an airport runway.

  “Can I go in by myself?” I said after shutting off the engine. I wanted to get it over with as fast as possible and to avoid Mom making it into a big deal.

  “Oh,” she said. “Okay. Do you know which office it is?”

  I had no idea. I nodded and she handed me her insurance card that had my name printed in tiny letters as a DEPENDENT.

  I found the diagnostic lab on the directory and went into their waiting room, which had four fish tanks, three awful abstract paintings on the wall, and two patients.

  The receptionist was college-age with flawless skin that defied the fluorescent light above her. “Hi,” she said. “Have an appointment?”

  I nodded and stared at the ground. Under the overhead lights, my face must have looked shiny and sticky and red, like it was soaked in fruit punch. I handed her the insurance card and said to the floor, “I think the appointment’s at four.”

  “Perfect. I see it right here, Kevin.” It sounded like she smiled. “Is there a co-pay?”

  “What?”

  “With your insurance, do you have a co-pay?”

  It was like she was speaking Portuguese. My parents had made me learn about sex from a book, and I guess they were even shyer about discussing insurance co-pays.

  “Can I, uh, call my mom?”

  “Sure.”

  I took a step away from the counter and called Mom. She told me there was no co-pay. She asked if everything was okay and if she needed to put down her sudoku and come inside. “No, it’s fine,” I said. “I’m fine. I can do it by myself.”

  “No co-pay,” I told the carpet in front of the receptionist.

  “Great. Can you just fill out this information and get it back to me? You can have a seat wherever you like.”

  On one side of the waiting room was a scrawny guy sucking on his fingertips and muttering to himself, then smelling each of his fingers. On the other side was a girl who looked about my age. Her eyes were closed and she had earbuds in. I looked back to the guy, who seemed confused by the smell of his own fingers. I decided to sit near the girl, four seats down from her.

  I filled out my name and address and checked the “no” box beside the hundreds of diseases I was pretty sure I’d never had and assumed weren’t in my family’s genes. I handed the form back to the receptionist, and when I turned back around, the girl’s eyes were open.

  She was looking right at me.

  And as soon as my eyes made contact with hers, she looked at the wall beside me, and then the floor, and then shut her eyes again.

  I sat back in my chair, leaned my head against the wall, and closed my eyes, performing indifference while I couldn’t stop thinking about that girl. What was she in there for? She was around my age, but she definitely didn’t go to my school. What school did she go to? Did she think I was weird for being there? Did she think I was a diseased freak? Was she a diseased freak? Wait, shit. Why did I jump to the worst-case explanation? She could have been there for some boring test, just like me.

  I tilted my head five degrees toward her and focused hard on the music coming through her earbuds. One lyric was playing over and over: “Needle in the hay.”

  I lifted my right eyelid to look at her and wanted her to do the same. But not when I was leering at her. No, I wanted to look at her, and then after I’d looked away and appeared to be contemplating a deep thought while staring at a wall, I wanted her to open her eyes and look at me. Maybe she already had. Maybe while I’d had my eyes closed, she’d been secretly sneaking glances at —

  Shit! She’d just opened her eyes directly into my creepy onslaught of direct eye contact. I hurled my pupils toward the floor and kept them there for a few seconds, mortified. When I dared to flick them back up, she was smiling a little at me.

  Oh, shit.

  I nodded back, excited and stunned stiff at the same time, a combination that likely produced the shiny-eyed-but-stoic facial expression of a remorseless serial killer. Was her look an invitation to move closer to her? Or just an acknowledgment that I existed? It was hard to tell, so the safest way to play it was to remain seated and limp and stare at the floor like I had a fetish for pale carpet.

  “Alex?” the receptionist said. The girl stood up and I saw the outline of her bra through her T-shirt. I didn’t want to seem like a creep, so I looked away, but my eyes locked dead-on with Mr. Fingers, so I had to flick them away again, bouncing them all over the room like I’d been electrocuted.

  She disappeared into the hallway behind the counter and I settled into an imaginary conversation with her in my head. We hit it off. Imagined conversations almost always work out in my favor. I hoped she’d get back before —

  “Kevin?” said the receptionist. “We’re ready for you.”

  Damn it.

  The receptionist led me back into a small room with a padded chair and a table; laid out on the table were a clear vial and a rubber tube with a needle at the end. My stomach got queasy. I’d been under the impression this was going to be a pinprick-in-the-fingertip situation. A nurse stepped in, sat on a stool, pushed up my sleeve, and tied a rubber strip around my arm. I shut my eyes.

  “It’ll be over before you know it. Just a little pinch.”

  I felt the needle go in, and then I made the mistake of opening my left eyelid. The tube turned dark red as my blood rose into the vial, which was the size of a prescription pill bottle. It filled up way faster than I thought it would, like the juice that kept me alive was rushing to evacuate my sinking ship of a body. The nurse pinched the vial off, pulled a second from her pocket, and attached it to the tube. It filled up even faster now that my blood had a running start and a clear path toward the exit. I felt like I was going to pass out and throw up at the same time. How many more vials did she have in her pockets? At the insane rate my blood
was defecting from my body, it seemed liked I’d be drained to death in twenty more seconds.

  “Almost,” the nurse said, staring with twisted delight as she topped off the second vial. She pinched it closed, slid the needle out of my arm, and pressed a cotton ball onto the tiny wound. She stuck on a Band-Aid, said, “We use the second vial to make soup,” and laughed.

  I didn’t know how to respond, so I nodded as if I were agreeing that that was a good idea. The nurse said she’d see me in a month, and reminded me I had to go online to fill out some more forms. I stood up and was so dizzy I had to catch the doorframe to hold myself up. The nurse told me I should sit down, but I took some deep breaths, lowered my head so the overhead lights wouldn’t shine directly on my zits, and walked back into the waiting room with this childish hope that the girl — Alex — would be there.

  She wasn’t, but her earbuds were on her chair. Without really thinking about it, I picked them up off the chair on my way out the door and put them in my pocket. If I ever saw her again, I could give them back to her, but I knew that would probably never happen. I just wanted some physical proof that I really had shared that moment with that girl, that it wasn’t a daydream.

  “See you next month,” the receptionist said as I pushed open the door. I jumped guiltily and speed-walked toward the parking deck.

  When I opened the car door, Mom asked if everything was okay. She said I looked out of breath. She was looking me over like I’d just shoplifted headphones.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “It was fine.”

  “You didn’t have to pay anything?”

  “No?”

  “When you left, did the receptionist give you any paperwork?”

  “I don’t know. I just left.”

  Mom laughed. “They’ll call me if there are any problems.”

  I turned the car’s ignition on and backed out of the space. Mom said, “I was thinking we could go to a movie this afternoon if you want. My treat.” She always liked to add the “my treat” part even though I didn’t have any money, so it was kind of a necessary part of the deal.