Free How I Paid for College: A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship & Musical Theater by Marc Acito Page B

over me, but suddenly I'm worse than Duncan, tearing around corners, zigzagging up and down hilly backstreets, and probably ruining Al's alignment as I deliberately land in potholes. We approach the high school and, rather than go all the way around the block, I simply drive right up onto the playing fields and cut straight across, even rounding the bases a couple of times on the baseball diamond.
    Duncan practically coughs up a lung from the dust.
    Back at Oak Acres I take a shortcut across the lawn of our neighbor, Mr. Foster. Okay, I admit this is more Vandalism than Creative, but Mr. Foster's the kind of guy who gets up at six on a Saturday morning to vacuum his driveway. I figure he's got it coming to him.
    SOTGFTT think it's fucking hysterical.

    As a result, Duncan treats me with a begrudging respect for the rest of the night, although he and the others take every opportunity to mock Doug for being in a musical and liking to sing, calling him Florence Nightingale without realizing how stupid that makes them sound. I definitely sense Duncan is competing with me for Doug's attention because he keeps bringing up various “comical” things from their shared past that I don't know about and, frankly, aren't particularly comical. But then Doug will do something like know where the towels are kept in my kitchen or refer to us as “we,” and Duncan will challenge me to a chugging contest or some such nonsense. Not that I mind; alcohol helps dull the throbbing pain in my tailbone. But it's like there's a little version of each of us on Doug's shoulders, a Teen Angel and a Blue Devil, both vying for his soul.
    Doug stays over and as we clean up the house and talk trash about the guests I indulge in the fantasy that my suburban split-level ranch house is actually a converted SoHo loft that Doug and I live in together. I'm aching to tell him that I'm bisexual, that I'm destined for a life of sexual deviancy way more interesting than the buttoned-down future he can expect staying in Wallingford. I'm longing to whisk him away to Neverland like I'm Peter Pan and he's one of the Darling children. What's more, I'm longing to reach for his peter and have him call me “darling.”
    But instead I just ask him if he'll drive me to the emergency room.
    “I think I broke my ass,” I say.
    Wuss.

 

    T here's this scene in
South Pacific
where Nellie, the hick army nurse, and Emile, the cultured Frenchman, sing a number called “Twin Soliloquies,” but they never actually sing it together. In the original Broadway production, Mary Martin, who played Nellie, was afraid of being overpowered by Ezio Pinza, the Metropolitan Opera basso who played Emile, so they just traded verses back and forth, singing their thoughts. That's kind of how it is with me and Doug as we sit in the emergency room, except that occasionally we're interrupted by people with knife wounds and heart attacks.
    There's something about sitting in a hospital late at night that makes you want to swap autobiographies. So I tell Doug all about how the 1960s and '70s hit my mom like a ton of wind chimes and made her have a Feminist Awakening, but how I completely understand because if I were married to Al and had to live in Wallingford the rest of my life, I'd get out as soon as I could, too. And I tell him how she rejected her Roman Catholic upbringing, threw off the yoke of bourgeois oppression, and became totally funky-woo-woo. Now, whenever I visit her, we always do cool New Age-y stuff together, like balance our chakras or make jewelry from hemp. She's in South America now, communing with the Incan spirits.
    And Doug tells me about his creepy, square-headed father and how the happiest years of his dad's life were when he was stationed in Germany. But then his dad went to Vietnam and got weird and now he hates his life because he drives a Tastykake truck. And he says that sometimes his dad takes his frustration out on him, like the time he knocked over the breakfront