“And who the hell asked you?” He leaned over the coffee table and closed the pizza box and slid it away from where I was sitting on the floor. Like I was an animal he was training that had just lost my privileges. He turned back to Mom.
“You love your kid so much, you let the neighbors fucking raise him. Even though we’ve discussed this. I have talked. And you have not listened. He’s still over at the damn Peggots’ more than he’s in his own house. Am I wrong?”
“No,” Mom said.
“No I am not. You sit here turning a blind eye while he runs around with that little queer next door, with the jailbird mother. Am I wrong?”
Mom said nothing.
“The little queer’s whore mother that is in the pen for shanking her goddamn boyfriend.” Stoner leaned over close to Mom and yelled, “Am. I. Fucking. Wrong?”
She nodded, then shook her head. Confused, due to being terrified. He turned to me.
“Is that your plan, Demon? To grow up and be a fag?”
“I don’t have a plan,” I said. I couldn’t even believe this conversation was happening.
“No? You’re not thinking you’ll find yourself a boyfriend, and then shank him and wind up getting gangbanged in prison? Is that the kind of people we are in this family?”
I wondered how Stoner would feel about getting vomit for an answer, because that’s where I was headed. But he didn’t care, he turned back to yell at Mom. I was starting to run low on sorry for Mom by that point. Marrying the asshole was not my idea.
“Tell him,” Stoner yelled at her. “Right now, so we can all hear it. He’s not going back over there to play with the queer. Not tomorrow and not ever. Or there will be consequences.”
She said it, and I didn’t see forgiving her for it.
I hardly went outside again until school started. It rained the whole week, which made it feel that much more like detention. I watched a thousand reruns of X-Men, Iron Man, Exosquad, Spawn, and Hulk. Whenever Stoner wanted the TV, I went in my room and read them in the comics versions. I drew pictures in my notebook of Stoner as a supervillain getting crushed in various ways. At some point the shows, comic books, drawings, and my dreams all got mashed up so it was like there wasn’t any me anymore. Just a quiet boy that looked like me with a beast inside, waiting to burst in a gamma warrior rage explosion.
What I said about people, that if they care, they can tell one kind of a thing from another? Big if. Possibly the biggest if on the planet of earth. Why notice zero on snakes, and a thousand percent on certain things about people?
You don’t know me or Maggot. If you saw the two of us let’s say in second grade, you’d see two of a kind. Two white boys more or less. My dead father being Melungeon, which passes generally for white, mixed with my little blondie mom. So I’m not as white as some, but enough to say so. Two little rascals then, in Walmart tennis shoes and dirty fingernails: if you’re from the city, I guess you’d say a couple of little hillbillies. Matched pair.
Now I’m going to jump ahead, which is breaking my promise, but just for a minute. Ninth grade. I’ve got a lot of growth on me and a tiny red mustache. Maggot has grown his hair to his shoulders and started stealing eyeliner and nail polish from his cousins, worse case Walgreens. He’s got spending cash, but a boy can’t walk in and buy those things. Because he aims to use them. To switch out the tennis shoes also. Mrs. Peggot’s homemade clothes we had turned against hard, no-thank-you on the fringe cowboy shirts. But now Maggot’s tastes have started circling back around to the eye-catching.
Now take a look at us: a straight boy and a queer. No matter who you are, whatever else you might say—“Good for him,” or “I want to kick his face in,” or even “I don’t give a damn”—you still saw what you saw. A boy and a queer. The eye sees what it cares enough to see. Even though I’m exactly the same kid I was, and so is Maggot. He was always the same Maggot.
It was me that started calling him that. We were little, and it was hilarious. And it was me that kept it up. Because Matty Peggot goes to school, and what is he going to be there but Matty Faggot? I tried to make an end run around that one. I can’t say the other names never got called, they did. But apart from that night with Stoner, they weren’t said where I could hear them.
I wasn’t clueless to people’s thinking. But a thing grows teeth once it’s put into words. Now I felt that worm digging, spitting poison in my brain, trying to change how I saw Maggot. How I felt about people seeing the two of us together.