We first got the idea to shit on his bed in the home team stands, synthetic hands latched to our sweaty instruments that glistened the same way our lineless foreheads did. The touch-down song was ‘Gospel John’ and I was a senior and I didn’t know the notes. When Meg pressed her shoulder to mine, her black flyaways took up a dance along the rim of my ear.
“Look at the student section.” I got a faint whiff of hotdog as I did so. In a sea of bright orange shirted boys and bright orange shirtless girls, all of them looking like they’d been in the splash zone for the cherry-popping of Chernoybl’s elephant foot, a head of curly electric stuck out. He has had the same haircut since he was eight, which is when we first met.
“He’s here?”
“He’s here.”
He was there and the whole band must have known by then because we all shared a K9 nose for the excommunicated. Then our drum major, Okie, shook her stand with the force of her count-in. We wailed out something more Sex Pistol than Sousa and the student section surged accordingly. Over the rented gold of my saxophone’s bloated neck I watched that pubic head struggle to stay above the murky orange sea. Part of me was hoping for his water-boarding. The other part knew I had to wait; revenge was not something to rush.
He - John - and Meg had been together for an approximate three years, all of which were wasted trying to kill each other in the way teen lovers always do. He took her thick mascara tears as proof of their compatibility; he was the type of guy to get turned on by a girl in pain. I had known him in middle school as my robotics partner and promptly stopped knowing him June after junior high.
I met her a month out from their last stint. It took her another six after that to admit to me, toe-against-toe in my childhood canopy bed, what exactly he had done to her. She cried hot tears into my sleepshirt and in the morning we resolved to kill him. But murder is a tall order when you’re sixteen. And anyway, death wouldn’t have been mortifying enough. A dead body can avoid shame. We couldn’t give him that right.
“His biggest fear is poop.” It was impossible for her to say without laughing even when her initial state had been complete hysteria, and so snickers were releasing themselves in toxic pockets of air between each damning word. “When we had a picnic for our two-year anniversary, he got bird shit on his sleeve and flipped the fuck out. Like - screaming his head off and kicking like a four-year-old. It was the most embarrassing shit of my life.”
In her mom’s minivan we pulled up opposite his stucco-ed two-story and slumped down in our seats. We contemplated our next move black-and-white war general style. The heady streetlight was making pale Meg’s face look like she was trapped under a sheet of ice.
“On the lawn?” Meg shook her head. The meticulous grass was not close enough to John; his older sister mowed instead. In the glorious aftermath she’d think some absent-minded dog owner left it as a gift and all potential for vindication would deflate. “His car?” A viable option (he was notorious for leaving it unlocked) if it had been there. It was still in the rat-pack parking lot of our smushed school, no doubt bumper-to-bumper attempting to dip before the losing team left the locker rooms and started kicking in car doors.
The shadows made Meg’s face shift rapidly. I could hear her mind’s computer fan kick on with the brainiac quality of a girl exploited, from smile to grimace to smile again and she jolted across the gearshift towards me, a bubble of genius about to pop against her chapped pink lips.
“What?” I asked, and braced myself against the seat’s armrests for impact.
“His bedroom window is the one on the upper right - above the garage.” Meg used an eyebrow raise to burst from the ice, a fat trout clenched in between her incisors. “It’s open. He left it open.”
I breathlessly repeated: “He left it open.” And so we got out of the Sonata.
The two-story swayed against autumn wind. As we got closer I could hear the sound his bedroom blinds were making against the windowpane, listlessly yanked back and forth by the breeze; they were revelatory curtains going up on a full house. We got downstage as quickly as we could without disturbing his crusty-eyed neighbors.
I had been in this house before - to eat cheese-less tacos with his Jewish grandmother and three equally Jewish younger sisters - and I had been in this room, when he was ten and had covered the walls in Harry Potter stickers ripped out some book fair find. I had sat on the edge of his bed and played with his prize rubix cube collection, which was comprised of all shapes a person could conceivably imagine the rubix to be sold in despite ‘cube’ being arguably the more important half of its title.
Reconciling that bed with Meg’s, where she’d placed her haloed night-jet head against his starry-patterned pillow, was swallowing the same metallic taste as scaling the house’s siding. I found the proper footholds in the stucco but Meg opted for a mix of the trash cans, the precarious gutters, and the new red-sand shingles from when his parents had gotten roofing done two years ago. We recollided on the low part beneath his bedroom window, crouched like predators.
“Do you wanna go first?”
“Give me a leg up. I’m not as tall as you.”
I spread my palms out flat for her. Divine Meg moved through the window with the exaggerated shoulders of somebody playing at being a burglar - not polished enough for Broadway and just try-hard enough for community theater.
When I fell through his window Meg was already sitting at the edge of his bed. Her beady eyes were trained on the water-marked poster that limply clung to the wall above his desk. It was some stupid unending galactic expanse. As I stared I swayed in place and racked to remember if this had truly been there in sixth grade or if my brain was just putting it there for him. I could feel myself keeling to let my molecules be yanked apart by the tight winds of space. Meg felt the same; she pulled her knees to her chin and, with the detached air of a diener, looked at his bed.
“He still uses these sheets,” She said, and smoothed them down with her flat palm that she then balled into a tight fist. The pressure of it left a crease in between fabric constellations.
“I love you.” Even if there had been something more to say - which there hadn't been - I didn't want to.
When she turned her head up to me, her face had grown blotchy and lacked the icy inhumane stare she had taken on in the car. This bed, at one time her burial place, was set to lay dormant in space and be slept on as if everything around it had been a mistaken blip in the space-time continuum, and yet a part of it always sagged with the weight of her sitting at the end of the bed, of me sitting at the end of the bed, of all the women who would be pulled taut across like stretched taffy with the same low resolution expressions, crying and fighting out-of-focus, condemned by the cheek kiss from Judas; but Meg had been the first.
I knew she didn’t want to cry so I looked away from her and instead tore apart his green-painted bookshelves with limp, useless eyes. There were plenty of untouched books and his senior portrait (framed) and a curling family photo (unframed) but also the rubix cubes were still there, lined up in a neat row and preemptively solved. Their colors shown down divine guiding. They chorused their support with the stoicism of ancient gods. Red, yellow, green.
All at once I felt possessed. I unbuttoned my jeans, just as arrogant clumsy as the stupid boy who slept in this stupid room. I yanked down my pants and I did what I had to do.