Experiment in Terror 05.6 The Dex-Files (2 page)

They don’t know where I’ve come from.

They don’t know my side of the story.

But now you do.

AFTER SCHOOL SPECIAL

“Hey Dex. Way to fuck my girlfriend, you dick!”

That was the only warning I had before Chase Huntington – steroid monkey and douchefucker extraordinaire – punched me right in the face. I don’t know if you’ve ever had a fat, pharmaceutically pumped fist meet your eyebrow ring and eye socket at the same time but I gotta tell you, it’s not fun.

There was a black explosion of pain and I stumbled backward and hit the wall, dropping my joint to the ground. My friend Toby gasped and I couldn’t tell if the fuck was upset about the joint or that his bandmate was injured. I was seeing stars out one eye and squinting angrily at Chase with the other.

“What the hell was that for?” I cried out as Toby quickly scooped up the joint from near my feet.

“Are you fucking deaf?” Chase bellowed, taking a step forward, his fist raised.

Oh right. The whole girlfriend fucking thing.

It was true. Not a misunderstanding by a long shot. But I was going to play it that way, especially as I saw the hungry eyes of our nearby classmates focus on us from across the yard, sniffing the potential blood in the air. Kids, they always liked a fight, especially one between a jock and a skid like me. This was David and Goliath level here, people. One scrawny, pierced 15-year old fuck up against an 18-year old who failed high school twice because he couldn’t spell his name properly.

I mean, what, they were really going to believe that Amanda Layne, Chase’s gorgeous, straight-A student, gymnastics champion girlfriend would sleep with someone like me?

Well she did. Don’t ask how I did it, I think I give up some kind of “I don’t give a fuck” charm or maybe it’s the long hair and eyebrow ring. Or maybe it’s because I’m very, very persistent and I more or less cornered her in the darkroom after photography class and shoved my tongue down her throat and gave her a taste of something she couldn’t say no to. A Dex sample, totally free. She didn’t have to buy the thing, but she did.

I’m a good product.

For whatever reason it worked and a few days ago I was going down on Amanda underneath the bleachers (yeah, yeah how cliché but chicks dig clichés). I think I ate as much dirt as I did pussy but she seemed to like it. No, scratch that,
love
it. I could tell from the way she screamed out my name until I had to put my hand over her mouth in case someone heard us. The bleachers soon led to her car (she’s a year older) and I took some perverse pleasure in the fact that I was screwing something Chase prized very dearly. It made me feel like I was
The Shit
. She wanted me. He wanted her. I walked away clean.

Or at least I had until Chase found me during lunch hour. I knew this was coming, I just had hoped I wasn’t stoned at the time so I could have had a little more warning. I could have devised a better plan than the one that came into play.

“How dare you accuse me of something like that?!” I hollered back in mock disgust and rubbed at my eye which I knew was going to black and swollen very soon. “I wouldn’t touch that skank with a ten-foot pole.”

Big mistake.

The gathering crowd gasped.

“Dude,” Toby said under his breath before toking away.

This time I did see the fist coming. I planned on it. No guy worth their salt wants to hear their girlfriend being called a skank, even if she was a skank (and, come to think of it, she really was - though I was no better).

Chase lunged for me, but I was smaller and went lower. I tackled him at the waist and it was only surprise that allowed me to knock him off his feet. We hit the ground and fumbled for a bit until I managed to straddle him much like I wanted Amanda to straddle me (she was too shy or some girly bullshit) and I delivered a few quick jabs to his jaw and a crushing one to the nose. He cried out in pain, at the crunch and blood and then literally threw me off of him.

I rolled for a few feet expecting to have Chase’s overpuffed Nike sneakers crushing my face at any second but there was nothing. I opened my eyes and blinked at the sky. Something was blocking it. Something fat and round like the sun.

Principal Gould.

From what he saw, the scruffy, troublesome Dex Foray had randomly attacked Chase Huntington, one of the star football players and heroes of the school. No wonder Chase kept failing, why leave a place where even the Principal worshipped the ground you walked on?

I (barely) had the chance to defend myself physically but there was no way I could do so by talking. I opened my mouth to say something, anything, but Gould shot me that look that said I would only harm myself more by talking.

I took my chances.

“He attacked me!” I protested, trying to get up to my feet. I shot Chase a look and wasn’t surprised to find him shrugging and looking totally innocent. I then looked to Toby.

“Tell him what happened,” I said frantically.

“Uhhhh,” Toby said through glazed eyes and at that moment we realized that getting in a fight wasn’t our biggest problem. Toby was caught red-handed with a joint in his hands. I admired the balls (or blunted stupidity) on the kid because instead of sticking up for me he puffed on the joint at supersonic speed before Gould snatched it out of his mouth.

“You boys are coming with me.”

I had been at my new high school for two years now but time hadn’t eased anything. I had been happy at my old school in Manhattan, happy with my life before my pa decided to up and go. Leave me and my brother Michael behind with nothing but our crazy mother. OK, maybe not happy as a “pig in the shit” type happy but I was certainly
happier
. Here, in Brooklyn, I never found my place. I coasted through life fucking around, barely going to classes, doing a lot of drugs fifteen-year olds should never do, doing a lot of girls fifteen-year olds should never do. Ha.

At my new school I came in as the brooding, mysterious fuck-up and I remained that way in the eyes of everyone, Principal Gould especially. This wasn’t my first fight either. The first day of school some drooling asshole found out I had come from the Upper West Side and said I was a tightassed prepster. How the hell he got tightassed prepster from my uniform of cargo pants, Misfits tee shirt and boots was beyond me, but it pissed me off enough to lay the smack down on him. Unfortunately, the drooling asshole was also bigger than me and that fight ended with my face in the dirt. Still, my reputation as being a scrapper was sealed.

Gould ushered us into his office, the dungeon of doom as we liked to call it, and gave us a threatening lecture that made his cheeks puff out and turn all red. He said he was going to call our parents…actually he shot one look at me and decided that Toby was the bigger issue here.

It was a smart move. My mom would have been drunk on her ass and he would have gotten an earful from her. As much of a mess as my mother was, you didn’t fuck with her children. Only
she
could fuck with her children.

So Toby’s mother heard all about how her son broke the law by smoking pot at school. Of course Principal Gut had to bring me into it anyway he could and made it sound like I was the bad influence on Toby. Phhfff. Toby was bad before I even showed up.

I’m not sure how much Toby’s mom, who was a whippet-shaped dream muncher, really cared about the fact that I got in a fight and it must have gotten through to Gould, because when he was done with her, hanging up the phone in a sweaty huff, he looked at us both with frustration.

“You’re both suspended for the rest of the week,” he growled. “Go home.”

Woo hoo! All right! No school!

That’s what most kids would say. I mean, with suspension you had the lecture and grief and disappointment from your parents, but after that you didn’t have to go to school, and your classmates would talk about you for months like you’re a real bad ass.

Notice I said most kids. That wasn’t the case for me.

I actually liked school. No, wait, I take it back. I actually liked
being
at school. Classes and teachers could kiss my perky ass, but school wasn’t home. And any place that wasn’t home was a place I wanted to be. My mother worked nights and she was home during the day. It was bad enough having to see her for a couple of hours after class where, if I was lucky, she’d throw a cheap frozen meal in the microwave for me and Michael. If I wasn’t lucky, Michael would be out with his friends, my mom would be in rage mode, and I’d have a belt mark on my neck for looking at her wrong.

I exchanged a grim look with Toby, who no doubt would be grounded during his suspension and thus no band practice nor access to weed. This was going to suck.

In the months to come, I’d look back at that moment and want to pull my hair out. I wanted to yell at myself, tell myself to not go home. Go anywhere else. I wanted to hold onto that feeling that things couldn’t get any worse when they very well could. I wanted that ignorance back.

But there was no turning back.

I went home. I was hungry and bored and even though I hung out at my favorite record store for a few hours, killing time, my house was calling me.

I knew it was a mistake the minute I walked in. Our place was small as all hell, with sad, peeling blue walls that looked silly against the relatively fancy furniture that we salvaged after dad left. The apartment normally had this moldy smell about it, like death clung to the walls, but that evening it was another smell. It was the stench of melted plastic and it stung my nostrils something bad.

I quietly placed my backpack on the floor and shut the front door behind me. Living in an apartment was hard when you had a mom who liked to scream and yell and cry and puke a lot. The neighbours, even the drug dealers, must have hated us. I had this weird feeling that this was going to be another epic disturbance and I hoped the other tenants weren’t home.

The next thing I found weird, aside from the gross stench, was the silence. Usually the TV was blaring, or you could hear the sound of my mom pouring herself a drink, or she was yammering en Français to far-off distant relatives who didn’t want anything to do with her nonsense.

But there was nothing.

It was fucking creepy.

I crept down the hallway, wishing I’d worn my Vans to school instead of the combat boots. Wherever my mom was, she knew I was coming.

I looked in the kitchen. Empty.

I peeked in her room. Empty.

I peeked in Michael’s room. Empty

I stopped outside my door. It was closed. I always closed it but I knew she was in there. The god awful smell of burning plastic filtered out from under the doorframe.

Along with a tuft of smoke.

Holy fucking shit.

I put my hand on the knob and before I could hesitate any longer, I whipped the door open.

My mother was on her hands and knees in the middle of my room. I had a terrible sense of deja-vu, like I’d seen this before. My mother wasn’t very original with her drunken terrorizing.

But that’s not what caused my heart to fill with ice. That’s not what made my skin crawl with disgust and righteous, bubbling over anger.

All of my records were sprawled out on the floor in front of her. My precious vinyl collection that I had worked for so long to acquire, paid for with the paltry change I scrounged up over the years. The music my mother said was the work of the devil.

She hadn’t said that lightly. It turns out she very much believed it for my mother was lighting my records on fire. Let me repeat that. She was lighting my fucking record collection on
fire
. Half of them were reduced to a nauseating pile of melted black vinyl, producing a stench that made my eyes water. Maybe I was crying too, I don’t know. Call me a pussy for shedding a tear but those records meant absolutely everything to me and she was destroying it.

“I’ll cast you out!” she screamed with a wicked smile, holding a lighter in one hand and Pink Floyd’s The Wall in another. She was destroying it and loving it.

I don’t know how long I stood there in stupor as the smoke began to flood the room. She had left the window open but it wasn’t helping. The carpet around the melted records began to flicker a little from budding flames. My room was about to turn into an inferno if I didn’t do something.

It was a tough call. I wanted to save my records, what was left of them. I wanted to prevent my room from going up in flames. And I wanted to go over there and hit her so bad. And fuck you if you think that’s wrong. I was so angry at her and this horrible thing she’d become. Angry that I came from her and angry that she made my dad leave and angry that she always loved Michael, but not me.

Never me.

I didn’t hit her, even though it would have been karma for beating me up all these years. I gathered my wits at the last minute and ran out of the room and to the kitchen. The rage was blinding me, taking over but I had to think. THINK! I needed to get water to the fire and fast.

I pulled out a bucket from under the sink and flipped on the rusted tap. The water wasn’t coming out fast enough. Fucking plumbing in the building had always sucked.

I heard her coming behind me.

Please don’t come any closer, I thought to myself, closing my eyes and gripping the bucket even harder. I was afraid what would happen if she did.

I turned and looked. She was walking unsteadily toward me, her clothes stained with ash and grease. She pointed at me, fixing her dark eyes on mine. Oh how I wished I didn’t look so much like her.

“Mom, go away!” I cried out, my voice cracking shamefully. I looked back to the bucket. Half-full. Just a few more seconds.

“You’re not my son,” she said in this low, utterly deranged voice. “You’re not my son.”

Fuck, this again? If I had a nickel for every time she told me I wasn’t her son, I’d be able to re-buy my record collection.

I caught a whoosh of sound from around the corner and beyond my mother’s sad form, there was a hint of light on the walls. The fire was growing. The bucket would have to do for now.