Sad Boy

          We grew up near highways that went elsewhere. Our part of the country was mostly gas stations, trees, closed family restaurants set back from the road, half-crumpled barns, and long-arm sprayers sweeping pesticides across acres of potatoes and asparagus.
          There were only a few things for boys to do when they wanted to show off their grown-up feelings, like drive around too fast or snort crushed-up caffeine pills or talk about shooting empty cans with BB guns in the parking lot of the fairgrounds. For a girl the most you got was proximity to these things if you wanted it, and also if you didn’t. 

          For example, at a winter bonfire we’d seen a girl with a black eye yelling at her boyfriend. The shadows were shaky across her face, obscuring or possibly exaggerating the extent of her injury.

          —You’re a liar! she shouted. Her boyfriend was placidly silent. We wanted to look away from them but could not. Her pain was too public, too familiar to be taken seriously. The outlines of their bodies formed question marks facing one another. Who would we rather be? The one who’d been hurt, or the one who did the hurting?

          In the spring of our sophomore year we were all sixteen or would be soon. Sixteen was the year that important things happened to girls in movies and television shows and novels. We were attentive to any and all possibilities. We were waiting.
          In the half-hour between the last bell and the beginning of track practice, we often sat on the side steps by the gym with Harry and Grayson and Jeremy. They made jokes at each other’s expense but we knew it wasn’t serious; they wanted to impress us, and our job was to let them. When we all ran the mile together, we hoped we’d be one of the girls that got bumped into on purpose. When the coaches saw this happen there’d be a whistle blown for horsing around. There was a lot of horsing around. It might be our turn soon.

          The stars of the track team were the sprinters, but we preferred watching the pole vaulters. There was a mystery to what they did. We could imagine being faster, but we could not imagine what it felt like to be one of them. They had their own equipment, their own style, their own private knowledge of bodies and gravity. We jogged numb loops around them while they launched themselves impossibly high into the air.
          Sam was maybe the fourth best pole vaulter, meaning he cleared ten-five regularly but often knocked it down at eleven feet. He got frustrated, kicked things, tried again. Sam was friends with Grayson but he never sat with us on the steps. We didn’t know where he went in the half hour between the last bell and the time when people started congregating on the hill beside the track. 
          Sam’s only currency in the free market of our high school was a little bit of respect because his brother had died in Iraq. But if you’d pressed people on it they would have said that it was respect for his brother, not for him. Otherwise he did not cut an especially discerning figure. He always looked like he’d just come inside from somewhere cold. He wasn’t tall enough to stand out. He wasn’t funny in a way that traveled. He didn’t sell drugs, didn’t punch out windows at parties, didn’t pull pranks like letting a goat loose in the school, which happened in the eighties but was still lore when we were around, always with the subtext of could we pull it off again? With the subtext of but better?

          By this time, we had heard from older sisters and mothers about the kind of obsessive first or second love that does not require and is even diminished by reciprocation. Sam had a few potential characteristics towards our initiation into this experience. For instance, when he pole vaulted, he went completely upside-down just before he straightened over the bar, a skill that emerged only in the moment of necessity. What else might he be capable of? He had mousy eyelashes that were rewarding to stare at. He had a red-and-gray backpack that he dropped in the pile that lined the cafeteria walls during fifth period. In English class, we noticed how the light moved slowly across his open palm, which he would rest on one side of his desk while the other hand, the one holding the pencil, moved fast and business-like. The pace of his writing seemed unmatched to the content of class. We peered toward his notebook but could not read it. We wondered: was he lazy or efficient? Self-possessing or unaware? We scoured him for proof of what we knew to be true: he was surviving something huge and grown-up, a serious kind of grief, and we imagined our own ordinary hurts might be magnified in relation to it.

          Sam’s brother had died in the early fall of our ninth grade year. Sam missed two weeks of school and when he came back nobody really knew what to say to him, so they didn’t say anything. We tried not to look at him during the school-wide assembly, where they showed a slideshow of Jamie in his uniform, Jamie next to a plane, Jamie with other guys whose fates we did not know. At the end of the presentation, it was made clear that everyone had to clap. We watched Sam’s dark hunched silhouette for movement. How would he show his recognition of our attention? We waited, but the noise seemed not to reach him.

          The following year, in tenth grade, Sam joined the track team. We wondered why. We’d joined track because it let our bodies speak a loud language of fatigue and effort. It was a language of childhood and we’d wanted it back. Also, we loved the special clothes we got to wear on meet days: windbreakers with our last names on them and track pants that made a pleasing swish-swish sound as we walked. We tried to imagine Sam’s reasons. We measured them against our own. 

          After practice, we saw Sam getting into cars driven by other people’s parents. He never ate dinner at his own house anymore, Grayson told us. Of course, we never considered inviting Sam over ourselves.

          Early in the season, Coach Jon made an announcement to the entire boys’ team about trying out for pole vault. We were eavesdropping from our slow jog on the long stretch of track near the sand pit. We saw Sam step forward. We paused on the other side of the fence, watching him watch some senior boys sprint down the runway, poles in hand. Plant, swing up, extend, turn, fly-away. Without knowing these steps as discrete things, each something to be examined and perfected, we saw only the smooth choreography of mastery, of ease. We understood why Sam wanted that. Didn’t everyone?  

          That year, our track team made the sectionals and then the regionals. We had no particular involvement in this accomplishment; we were all mid-seed and just along for the ride. Regionals were held in the city two hours away. On the bus Sam had headphones in for the first half of the drive and stared out the window pensively. His hand moved like he was counting something on his fingers. We tried to guess what he was listening to. We always imagined boys listening to sad music, to prove they harbored the same aches that we did. He had those feelings, we were sure of it. As we got closer, Sam took out his headphones and he and Harry and Grayson made a small racket in the back, arm-wrestling. Everyone concealed a nervous, excited energy with casual disdain for winning. Who cares, etc. Goldfish crumbs littered the floor.

          At the high school hosting regionals, each team was assigned a section of the field behind the track. We settled among the little clumps of sports bags and Gatorade bottles. Girls braided one another’s hair with school-color ribbons. Someone had face paint. We saw people’s parents in the stands, but not ours, not Sam’s.
          Everyone had to be silent during a race, or at least at its beginning. The track was the color of bricks and smelled like rubber. There was a weak thrill when we bent down for the starter pistol, and then the mad exertion of running, burning, pushing. At high noon the trees were wet with sunlight. The air came cold into our mouths.
          For lunch we ate white bread sandwiches with ham and cheese out of plastic bags while Shark and the others threw shot put. Shark was the best boy at shot put. His real name was Sawyer and we did not know much about him, besides the lore, besides what everyone knew or thought they did: he’d totaled his stepdad’s truck when he was 13, and he and his mom bred ferrets that they killed and skinned for the fur. Grayson had told us about the ferrets. We teased him for believing this, but we weren’t sure ourselves. The girls he dated and who had crushes on him were not our friends. Still, we admired Shark that day on the field. He was nearly graceful as he hugged the ball close to him and then spun and spun and heaved it far away, like something he wanted to be rid of. 

          Pole vaulting was the last of the field events. Light hit the windows of the school building next to the track, reflecting great panes of brightness that hurt to look at directly. Two other vaulters took their turns in the first round. Sam readied his pole. He was a ten-stepper. He checked the tape measure, and then he was off, counting his steps, three from the last. He planted the pole and took off. Swing up, extend, turn.
          By the fly-away, when he actually went over the bar, everything must have already gone right. The fly-away is not where decisions are made, only where they are made visible. Sam cleared it, and again in the second round, with the bar raised, literally. He’d gotten a new personal best: eleven-nine. In the third round people were gathering to watch. We didn’t know anything much about pole vaulting, but we could see from the way Sam was running that he was off this time. His gait was a little uneven, maybe. We watched him contract and straighten out, but one foot was slightly lower than the other, and it clipped the bar, which flew down to the mat next to him. 
          A kid from a school we hadn’t heard of came in first. Second went to a guy who attended the school hosting regionals, and then was Noel, a senior from our school whom we knew Sam admired, and then Sam, at fourth. Fourth wasn’t bad at all for a sophomore, even though only the top three got medals and went on to states.
          Shark medaled second in shot put, which meant he’d be going to states. People kept slapping him around and his cheeks went red, which we found endearing. On the bus ride home, whispers got back to us: party at Shark’s, tonight. 

          Shark lived on the outskirts of town. The party was half-inside, half-outside, with small groups gathered on old plastic chairs in the yard and in the garage. It was an unseasonably warm night, but still too cold for what we wore: short skirts, tank tops, denim jackets falling off our shoulders. We wanted to be looked at. We ringed each other’s eyes with Maybelline liner and it smudged before we even arrived. But it was dark, so it didn’t matter. There were beers in the back of someone’s truck, parked at an odd angle in the grass. It was mostly track kids who showed up first, and then other people. A guy we didn’t know was trying to get the speaker to work. Every so often, a song would start mid-chorus and then skip again. We stood in a tight circle and mostly talked to one another about who we wanted to talk to. 
          Suddenly it became much quieter. We stood on the lawn, staring into the wide mouth of the open garage. There were voices, and then Shark’s voice in particular, louder than the rest.
          —Sad boy, he was saying. Come on. Say it like you wrote it.
Sam was stiff. Shark was across from him, smiling broadly. He was enjoying this. He wanted to take his time.
          —Want to read your poem? Shark said. Or should I read it for you. 
We didn’t understand at first. It was the punchline of a joke we hadn’t heard. People whispered behind us:
          —It was a real poem. They found it in the locker room.
          —No, someone said. It was just a song lyric. From Nirvana or something.
Shark laughed again and reached towards a cooler. We could see him decide unilaterally that the tension had broken.
          Sam lunged. There was a crash of shoulders, someone stumbling into the lawnmower. A can rolled across the floor. Grayson got between them, then someone else. The tumbling went on for a moment, then moved from inside the garage to out on the grass. We stepped back and then leaned forward. We couldn’t see much, just arms and hands and shirts being grabbed into small knots of fabric. People laughed but we didn’t think it was funny. Our heartbeats grew loud, uneven, scampering.  Someone was saying, Okay, okay, okay. C’mon. Someone was saying, Shut the fuck up. Shark’s best friend Tyler lunged into the pile of grappling bodies, which now consisted of Shark, Sam, Grayson, Shark’s older cousin Elias, who had recently emerged from the house in plaid pajama pants, and a wiry guy named Eric who had already been suspended twice that fall for fighting. We didn’t entirely understand who was defending who, who had stepped in to bring the fight to an end, who wanted to prolong it. A girl started crying, shouting for them to stop. We thought maybe she was Eric’s girlfriend, or Tyler’s. Onlookers became a little bored, turned back inward towards one another, but not us. Our eyes ate it up. The boys’ shirts became wet with effort, with the afternoon’s leftover rain on the grass. Shark’s stepdad appeared at the top of the stairs. He was shirtless and furious.
          —Out, he screamed. Now. Get the hell out of my house.
We backed away as sirens bloomed in the distance.

          At school the next day there was an assembly. We’d left Shark’s house when the police had gotten out their loudspeakers and told everyone to go home, so we didn’t know the details of what happened until later. We sat in the bleachers and the assistant principal read from a paper. He said that as a consequence of violations of the code of personal conduct, there would be silent study halls until the end of the school year. His voice echoed in the gym. It was layered on top of hushed whispers that jabbed at the same limited set of facts. 
          Sam was suspended for two days. He was not arrested, though people lied about seeing him in handcuffs, fibbed about a rough hand on top of his head as someone’s cop uncle forced him into a squad car. Someone said he cried. Someone said he spit in Shark’s face. We believed all of it and then none of it. Shark was suspended for a week and came back for the rest of the school year, but he did not return in the fall. People said he went to jail for beating up on his cousin Elias, but that wasn’t true. He started working in the office at his stepdad’s auto body shop and he still does. 

          Sam became a minor-league celebrity when he got back to school. People called him Sad Boy and he professed to liking it. We began hearing it so much that the word sad took on a different meaning, unrelated to the feeling, or to any feelings at all.
          For a few weeks after the fight, Sam held court in the cafeteria, retelling the story. We sat with him and Grayson a few times. We hadn’t realized that it would be this easy: we chose seats near him. He knew our names. 
          —Were you scared? we asked. Why’d you do it? How much did it hurt? His answers were unremarkable: A little. Because I was mad. He pulled up his t-shirt and showed us the bruise on his stomach, which was beautiful, dappled purple and yellow like a violet. He had a bump the size of an egg on his temple. He asked us if we wanted to feel it, and we ran our fingers tentatively over the soft lump. Later we saw other girls doing the same thing, his head bent towards their touch. We looked away. 
          In the spring, Sad Boy started dating a girl from the tennis team. He had a late growth spurt and got a new backpack. We stopped wondering about him. Instead, we wondered about his poem, and whether it existed, and in what form, and why. We wanted him to have written something astonishing. If it was mediocre, we didn’t want to know. If we’d had the chance to read it, we would have said no.