Smooth Read online

  “What movie?”

  “Any movie,” Mom said. She was not a discerning moviegoer. She wouldn’t care if it was just two hours of a well-known celebrity poorly assembling a table. I think when she said she liked movies she actually meant she liked air-conditioning. “You can pick. You know, movies are a good thing for a guy to like. You’ll make a great boyfriend someday.”

  Alex appeared in my head as I pulled onto the road. She was the first girl my age to look me in the eye. Store clerks and waitresses had looked at me, but they don’t count. Her look meant something. Out of the infinite points in space around her, she’d chosen the precise coordinates where her eyes met mine. Not at the scars on my forehead or the dry red patches around my mouth. I didn’t just like her because of how she looked; I liked her because she made me forget about my skin for a second.

  “I don’t think there’s anything good out right now,” I told Mom. I was thinking about Alex again, about how all I knew about her was her first name and that she liked a song that was probably called “Needle in the Hay.” It wasn’t much, but I’d have to try to find her online with those clues. I kept driving and pictured her back in the waiting room, trying to etch how she looked into my memory. She’d had jaggedly cut brown hair that stopped above her shoulders. She wore nonskinny jeans and a loose white T-shirt and sat with her head against the wall and her legs pulled up to her chest, flip-flops on the seat cushion. Her face was round, and it looked like she had a lot of makeup on her cheeks, but you could still tell her skin was bumpy underneath, and her forehead was shiny. She had acne scars on her jawline and temples. They didn’t make her any less pretty. I wondered if she was there for Accutane, too. But her skin wasn’t that bad, and the coincidence felt too far-fetched, even for one of my fantasies. Anyway, she looked like a girl you’d meet at a bookstore or a museum.

  I have this fantasy of meeting my future girlfriend at a museum. It’s probably telling that my fantasies about my future involve being a guy who goes to museums alone. But my dream girl does that, too, apparently, so maybe it’ll all work out.

  Mom turned on the TV in the family room and I sat at the computer behind the couch, put in my earbuds, and went to the iPLEDGE website to fill out the questionnaire so Mom could get my prescription the next morning. There was some scientific language on the site confirming how disgusting I was:

  Isotretinoin is indicated for the treatment of severe recalcitrant nodular acne. Nodules are inflammatory lesions with a diameter of 5 mm or greater. The nodules may become suppurative [ripe with pus] or hemorrhagic [ready to erupt blood all over my mirror]. “Severe,” by definition, means “many” as opposed to “few or several” nodules.

  I clicked to confirm that yes, indeed, I had a gross face.

  Next was a page where I had to click about sixty “Yes” boxes to promise I would not have sex while on Accutane. Apparently if you do and the girl gets pregnant, she’ll have a cone-headed baby. There were lots of diagrams showing this baby, like he was the mascot of Accutane. I agreed to that and all the other pledges to be a loser, too. It was like official, government-sanctioned cyberbullying. Some faceless agency was telling me, “There’s no way you’re drinking this year,” and I shouted, “Yes, sir!” “There’s no way you’re doing drugs this year.” “Yes, sir!” “And there’s definitely no way a guy like you is getting laid this year.” “Yes, sir!”

  After I finished, I realized I’d been absentmindedly holding the tangled cord of Alex’s headphones in my pocket. I took my earbuds out and put hers in. I searched for “Needle in the Hay,” which led me to a clip from The Royal Tenenbaums, a movie that came out a few years ago, where a character cuts his wrists while the song plays. It was raw and painful and beautiful. It said a lot about who Alex was.

  I started torrenting The Royal Tenenbaums, and while it downloaded I thought about how absurd it was to daydream about this girl I knew almost nothing about, but what the hell? Everyone needs an absurd goal to chase, right? Some idea of heaven you force yourself to believe in just to have a reason to keep moving forward. Guys at my school dream of making it to the NFL, and there’s no chance they will, but that fantasy makes them try harder at practice. She was my NFL, my goal, my reason to keep hoping I could get better so maybe someday I’d have another moment with a girl like her, and I could actually talk to her.

  I wanted to carve the misshapen stalagmite of bumpy, mumbling stone I’d become into an upstanding, normal member of society who stands with his back straight and keeps his chin up and rarely drools or stutters incomprehensible half sentences often missing verbs. I’d refine myself over the year, whittling down and smoothing over the nervous, rough edges to find some better person underneath. The statue of David started out as a dumb-ass slab of rock, too, and if I wanted it badly enough, I’d be able to do it for her.

  The white pharmacy bag was waiting on the kitchen island when I woke up. I snatched it and ran back upstairs to take the first pill. The night before, I’d imagined swallowing the pill and seeing a montage of the year, like time-lapse footage of a flower sprouting from nothing into something impressive and strong. It was an important moment, and in my head, I took the first pill in a sophisticatedly decorated, softly lit room.

  Kate and I share a bathroom. It’s windowless, with harsh overhead lights. It’s a passageway linking our rooms together, but we’ve never been in there at the same time. We have two sinks and an agreement that neither of us would cross onto the other’s side of the counter. On the wall on my half was a poster from an anime show I’d been interested in for two weeks in sixth grade that I’d been too lazy to remove in the four intervening years. Be careful with new interests on the day your mom asks you what you want for Christmas. You may be stuck with disturbing Japanese elves on your bathroom wall forever. On Kate’s half was a poster of a horse with a smiling set of human teeth that upset me every day.

  I decided to use the bathroom in my dad’s office upstairs, which has no stupid decorations, a window with shades for soft natural light, dark-blue wallpaper, and dark-blue towels no one uses. Mature and serious. I looked myself over in the mirror and took a deep breath. I scooped handfuls of water into my hair to tame it with my fingers. There was a candle beside the sink, and I found a lighter in the drawer and lit it. I set up my iPod’s portable speakers and played “Needle in the Hay.”

  The pack of pills was covered in small silhouettes of pregnant women with red Xs over them and a bold warning: DO NOT GET PREGNANT. I tore one of the expectant mothers off, threw her in the trash, and put the pill on my tongue. I shut my eyes, took a deep breath, and swallowed.

  I heard my dad sniffing on the other side of the door. “Kevin! Why do I smell smoke?” He must have thought I was badly attempting to light my first cigarette.

  “Sorry, I lit a candle,” I said. “For the . . . bathroom smell.”

  “You playing music in there?”

  “To cover up the, uh, noise,” I said. He definitely thought I was masturbating. “I’ll be done in a second.”

  “All right, take your time. Didn’t mean to scare you.”

  I shut the music off and realized what a stupid scene I’d set up. I was taking a pill, not losing my virginity. I flushed the empty toilet and snuck back into my room, telling myself that once my skin cleared up, I’d be confident and in control and wouldn’t find myself mock-shitting near my dad anymore.

  That night I squinted at my stream when I peed, trying to tell if it was darker than usual. Sort of, but hard to blame that on the pill, since my water intake for the previous five hours consisted of one Mountain Dew. I looked my face over in the mirror. Maybe my cheeks were drier, but it was probably just wishful thinking. I took my second pill before I brushed my teeth, and when I was in bed, I shut my eyes, trying to feel the medicine in my bloodstream. If I focused hard enough, I could convince myself it was in there, running through my shoulders and arms like grains of sand. I felt a headache coming on, and I smiled. That was a side effect. I hoped
it was real.

  The night before school started, I went to my room, turned on my Xbox, put on my headset, and joined a lobby with Luke and Will to do a four-way prank call.

  “George Foreman grill?” Luke said.

  Will and I agreed, and Luke put his phone on speaker, set it next to his headset, and dialed the customer service number. I muted my microphone so no one would hear me laugh.

  Once someone picked up, Luke said, “Hello, my name is Doug Ronald and my brothers are on the phone here, too. Chip Ronald and Kyle Ronald.”

  I had no idea where he was going with that, but the best calls were the ones we didn’t plan out and just agreed with whatever Luke said. I unmuted and said, “Hey, Chip here.”

  “I’m Kyle,” Will said.

  “Right,” Luke continued. “So this is more of a question than a complaint or anything. Honestly, our grill is working great. Doing exactly what it’s supposed to be doing. It grilled up everything we put on it. So I guess we’re looking for some advice. Essentially, my brothers and I accidentally grilled our dongs together on the Foreman. It roasted them up real good, seared them and everything. So, again, no complaints about the performance of the machine. It certainly did its job. But now our dongs are all fused together and the timing is terrible because tomorrow we each have separate business trips in Atlanta, San Francisco, and New York, and while I’d like to tell you each of us is hung well enough for that kind of cross-country stretch to pose no issue, I’ve got to be honest and own up to the fact that our gear just isn’t long enough. So I guess my question is, what advice do you have for us?”

  There was a pause before the customer service woman responded. “Sir, do you want a replacement grill?”

  “No, it works great. Our peckers are fat free and seared with really nice grill marks. I guess I’m asking if you offer a product designed for unsticking penises that were fused together in your roasting-hot iron grill. Surely I’m not the first person with this request.”

  There was another long pause. “How old are y’all? Why is that funny to you? Grilling your . . . I don’t even . . . That’s nasty. You sound way too old for this. You boys don’t have anything better to do than . . . Shouldn’t you be talking to girls? You’re not gonna lose your virginity calling me to tell me about your wieners.”

  Luke hung up. Will and I unmuted and burst out laughing.

  “Good call to end summer on,” Will said.

  “Shit,” Luke said. “Is school tomorrow?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Well . . . huh,” Luke said. “Guess I have to fake all the summer homework tonight. Did any of us, like, do anything this summer?”

  “We stood around talking in a lot of movie theater lobbies,” I said.

  “My dad knocked over that giant display of apples at the grocery store, and I think it’ll be the funniest thing I ever see in my life,” Will said. “That was back in May, and nothing topped it.”

  For a second I thought about bringing up Accutane and Alex. It seemed like maybe I should tell them, since they were the biggest developments to happen in my life in years. But it didn’t feel right. They probably wouldn’t care, or if they did, Luke would dominate the conversation and make me feel like I wasn’t a part of my own story. Best to end the call on a high note.

  “Nope. Didn’t do shit,” I said.

  On the morning of the first day of school, I woke up an hour early so I could take my pill, take a shower, wash my face, rub green salicylic acid juice all over it with a cotton ball, and then coat my whole face with moisturizer. I’d decided to keep my external skin regimen going alongside the Accutane, so I’d flank my zits, imploding and exploding them at once. I used Q-tips around my nose and jawline to wipe off the extra shiny moisturizer goo, so I wouldn’t look too buttery.

  I was almost out the door when Mom held up her digital camera and said, “First-day-of-school picture?” In the one from last year, my skin didn’t look too bad. At the time I thought I looked hideous, but compared to now, I was fine. I was just starting to get blackheads on my nose then, but that was when I started to hate having my picture taken. There are only, like, six photographs of me from freshman year, and in most of them I’m twisting away from the camera like I’m afraid it’ll fire a bullet at me.

  “Pretty please?” she said. “I can’t have a gap in my collection.” I smiled and she told me real smiles have teeth in them. I kind of opened my mouth a little. The flash went off. She showed me the photo on the screen and ruined my day. I had all these red splotches on my forehead and a bunch of red scabs on my temples where I’d been squeezing stuff last night. My cheeks were covered in pink sprinkles, and every inch of my face was shiny. The lighting in my bathroom had lied to me. I looked like a glazed Freddy Krueger.

  Luke, Will, and I had agreed to meet at eight, and they showed up at 8:21, which wasn’t surprising at all; order and structure never cross their minds.

  Luke’s desk in elementary school was chaos. The first time I saw it, it confused and stunned me and I’ve never forgotten it; it was my first clue that the world isn’t the orderly, organized place children’s television had promised. His desk was a whirlwind of crumpled papers, food debris, and broken pencils, like a thief was always breaking in and not finding what he was looking for.

  Will’s desks were always empty. I still have no idea how he passed classes without ever having books, or why he never had them in the first place.

  My desks were always neat, deliberate, and so logical that I still picture one sometimes when I get stressed out.

  I wish I could have some more interesting descriptions of Luke and Will. I mean, no offense to them, but none of us is really that interesting. Neither of them has diabetes or dead parents or a tragic terminal illness. And none of us has been chosen by a prophet to go on a quest to destroy an amulet and retrieve a magical scroll. We’re just three white kids from the suburbs who like watching horror movies in basements. You can go to any tenth-grade hallway in any suburb and find our clones. We are highly replaceable.

  The lighting in our morning spot by our lockers was brutal, like it was designed by the guy in charge of the before photos in the Proactiv commercials: fluorescent bulbs in the ceiling and the glare of the piercing morning sun through a wall of windows. It was a greenhouse built to grow low self-esteem. I shielded my face like a vampire while Luke and Will talked about Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers.

  We looked at our schedules again and had all the same teachers except one. For math, I had Algebra 2, but they both got put into trigonometry because they got As on the ninth grade geometry final and I got a B-plus. I wondered if those two problems I messed up were going to someday mean Luke and Will would get jobs as nuclear engineers while I worked in a factory putting corn in cans.

  For an unexplained reason Luke pretended he was a wrestler bouncing off ropes and knocked his shoulder into Emma, his ex-girlfriend. Emma had dark, thick eyebrows and long brown hair, and from the look of her cheeks, she probably didn’t even know what a zit was. Like, she’d seen articles in girl magazines about how to clear up zits, and she didn’t know what they were talking about, so she’d just turn the page. She was a member of the God Squad, a group of ambiguously religious girls who went to a lot of events that involved free T-shirts with crosses on them. For some reason, everyone knew about the abstinence pledges they’d made the summer before ninth grade, which was ludicrous because absolutely no one our age was having sex anyway. When I’d heard about it, I thought it would be equally valid to publicly announce I’d pledged to abstain from time-traveling.

  “Yo,” Luke said to Emma, laughing. “Sorry.”

  “It’s all right,” she said.

  Luke thought it wasn’t a big deal that he and Emma had gone out for, like, three months last year and now they had to see each other every day in school. It seemed like a huge deal to me. If I were him, I’d spend the entire school year in a bathroom stall trying to avoid her and the awkwardness. They never h
ad a fight when they broke up. They weren’t in any of the same classes, so they grew apart and decided to be friends. I still don’t know how they could be so well adjusted.

  “Hey, guys,” Emma said to Will and me. There were a few times last year when she hung out with us on Friday nights at Luke’s house. It was okay, at least until around ten o’clock when all of a sudden Luke told me and Will we should probably head out but Emma was going to stay. That was kind of weird. I never asked what they’d do after we left, and I didn’t really want to know because we all sat on that same couch, and there was plenty of weird stuff two teenagers could do to exploit loopholes in an abstinence pledge.

  “Did you go to the beach?” she said to me. “You look like you got some sun.”

  Goddamn it. I shrugged and looked at the floor and said, “Yeah . . .”

  Will said, “Wait, when did you go to the beach?”

  “No,” I said. “I mean, I meant, ‘Yeah, no, I didn’t go to the beach.’”

  “Oh,” she said. “All right.”

  There was a silence just long enough to make me seem like one of the dumbest humans on the planet, and then the bell rang before I could change the subject, canonizing another episode of my confusing idiocy in everyone’s heads.

  The first few periods were relatively normal — avoiding eye contact; racing to the backs of classrooms to secure seats; feeling my entire body tense, hoping teachers wouldn’t make us stand up and introduce ourselves — until Luke, Will, and I had language arts with a new teacher, Mr. Meyer.

  Mr. Meyer was this short, stubby, bald guy in khaki pants and a tie who looked like he should be plotting his suicide in a cubicle. So it was weird when he went on this long lecture — it was more of a performance, really, since he had weird tribal music playing off his computer while he spoke — about story-telling, like it was some mystical dark art. He said that most literature teachers we’ve had in the past have probably only talked about novels, short stories, essays, and poems. But those are just a small piece of what counts as storytelling. He said that just about every type of communication — songs, emails, phone calls, telling your friends about what you did last night, receipts, internet browsing histories — is storytelling, and no one form is any better or worse than the others.