Free Townie by André Dubus III

Tina.”
    “Fuck you, Glenn. Where’s the fin you owe me?”
    “Blow me.”
    “In your dreams, faggot.”
    There’d be laughter and more swearing at one another, talk of a fight that was coming, of some Acapulco gold or Angel Dust due soon, who had just fucked whom and who was knocked up and who got rid of it and who wiped out his bike down to the beach and might lose a leg.
    We passed the junkyard and a Catholic church, we rode down under the railroad trestle for Lafayette Square and all its barrooms around the rotary, then the package store and car dealership that year-round had Christmas lights lit up over its used and repossessed cars. We rode up Broadway past a funeral home and St. Joseph’s Church and then we were out near the highway, the bus turning into the lane for the high school, a rambling one-story complex of cinderblock and glass, a statue of Michelangelo’s Lorenzo de’ Medici sitting out front, though whenever I saw it, the form of the man with his elbow on his knee looked to me like a man on a toilet.
    The bus pulled around to the back lot where seniors parked their Monte Carlos and Camaros and Dusters and Trans Ams, a few motorcycles too. Facing the lot was the entrance between the M and L wings. The kids in the front of the bus, the jocks or the studious ones no one had a name for, they went inside to make it to their lockers and desks before the homeroom bell, but I followed Suzanne and the rest to the metal grates up against the walls. There were dozens of kids already there, smoking cigarettes or passing joints or dealing whatever they had, a pocket for their product, the other for cash. And there’d be a lookout for Perez, one of the narcs who wore leather and pretended he was a senior though his shaved whiskers left a dark shadow and there were lines under his eyes and he was at least thirty and a pig, what we still called cops from the antiwar days we were too young to be a part of.
     
    BECAUSE OUR mother worked in Boston, she had to leave for her job before we got out of bed. Most mornings, only Nicole would be on time and walk herself to school a half mile north. Jeb, Suzanne, and I would sleep till we woke two or three hours later than we should have to catch the bus. Some days we’d stay home. Other days we’d go to school, which meant a four-mile walk through town across Main Street down into the avenues past the Dobermans or German shepherds chained in their dirt yards. In some were babies’ toys scattered among the dog shit, the dogs barking at me behind chain-link fences. I’m sure Suzanne and I walked together many days, but I remember more clearly doing it alone, cutting across Cedar down Sixth Avenue past the auto parts store and junkyard, the battered shells of cars sitting in the weeds, many of the windshields collapsed into the front seats, the rims rusted, the lug bolts like eyes staring out at me.
    But I felt watched by no one. Those weekday mornings we slept late and didn’t go to school, our report cards showed as sixty to eighty absences a year, dozens and dozens of marks for tardiness. No adult at school really seemed to notice much. There’d be an occasional letter sent home to our mother, but the counselor or vice principal or whoever it was always wanted to meet during a weekday. How could she do that? She had to work.
    I’d make my way through town, past the boarded-up shops on Winter Street, the gas station and used car lot, the pizza shop and Dunkin’ Donuts where on summer nights old men would sit in lawn chairs in the parking lot, smoking and talking and spitting.
    At Railroad Square, I’d walk under the black iron trestle covered with hot-paint graffiti: Joey and Nina 4-ever , Tommy loves Denise! , USMC Cpl. Steve L. RIP , U suck! I’d walk over broken glass and cigarette butts in my Dingo boots and leather jacket, my hair tied back. Maybe I’d thought if I looked like the toughest kids at the high school, they’d leave me alone and I wouldn’t have