Free Mean Boy by Lynn Coady

were there to clean me up—as my mother talked Lydia down from her tower of rage.
    That’s the first thing I think when I think of Janet at the Thanksgiving table. I imagine Lydia with her switch. I imagine her reaching over to snap Janet’s neck between her pink, paper-skinned fingers with their prim old-lady rings. Lydia would have become very still, almost stupid, like a drugged animal.
Nonsense!
Reach,
snap
. It’s the only word she knows in that state.
    Another crazily vivid memory I have of Lydia. I broke my nose when I was twelve, playing softball. Lydia doesn’t have anything to do with this particular part of the memory—anyone would remember breaking their nose. I remember it because it hurt, and because it was the last time I ever played softball, or any sport. There were these guys on the team. They knew I didn’t belong there, that I was the kind of kid who was playing because his father yearned for him to do something male and normal. They knew I didn’t enjoy it the way they did. That it didn’t drive me absolutely crazy when the other team stole a base or made a really great hit, that I just couldn’t bring myself to care as much as I was supposed to about an entire afternoon of throwing and hitting and catching and running and throwing and hitting and catching and running. I was an outfielder, of course. I would loiter on the grass thinking about Leonard Cohen, and there were at least a couple of guys on the team who I swear could actually
see
that this was the sort of thing I was standing around thinking about. Therefore whenever we practised, they threw the ball not
to
me, but
at
me, as hard as they could. It always looked very innocent—a vigorous game of catch among high-spirited boys—but for the most part it was guys like Barnard Leary trying to hit me in the head, and me trying toavoid being hit in the head. It was probably only my fifth practice or so when Leonard Cohen or whomever it was I happened to be thinking about got the better of me. I was remembering this really sexy poem that used the word
breasts
—not the singular,
breast
, in the Shakespeare way where it just means chest, but
breasts
. It was my first poem that mentioned breasts. And it was describing the shapes of them—the breasts. And I was thinking about how if these guys knew how much smut there was in poetry books, they would be lining up at the library and poring over them the way they did in grade 5 looking up words like “titular” in the dictionary. Then I was hit in the face.
    How else to say it? There’s no poetic way of saying hit in the face. I was hit in the face, then I was on my back, and bleeding bleeding bleeding from a broken nose. I didn’t know what to do with all the blood. I still can’t remember the thought process that led to it, but I took off my shoe, yanked off a sweat sock, and held it to my face. I must’ve done this in a split second—people were running toward me, but no one had yet arrived.
    Anyway, that’s not the important memory. It is awful to break your nose, and I looked like a circus freak for a couple of weeks as my face swelled up with fluid and the flesh around my eyes went black, then blue, then greeny-yellow. It was summer, and summer often meant hanging out at Grandma Lydia’s because her house was close to the beach, whereas our motel was by necessity on the highway, and my parents were always frantic during tourist season. So I dragged my bloated head back and forth across Lydia’s kitchen all summer long, not wanting to go out because I was grotesque. My grandmother not being much of a beachgoer herself, we hung out together baking bread and drinking lemonade, reading our respective books—Lydia enjoyed the great moralizers like Bunyan and Milton—on the porch.I mostly avoided the tire swing by this point in our relationship.
    So here’s the memory: Lydia was cutting out sugar cookies, and I was placing slivers of maraschino cherries in the centre of each one. I,