Free So Shelly by Ty Roth Page B

ironic. Shelly’s mother killed herself before Shelly’s baptism and left her in the care of a disinterested father, yet Shelly loved her. My mother couldn’t put her smokes down long enough to make me a toasted cheese sandwich, yet I loved her. There was nothing Gordon’s mother wouldn’t do for the boy who’d grown into the spitting image of the man who’d nearly destroyed her, yet Gordon loathed her very being. I don’t know. Just saying.
    Gordon’s body rocked the school-mandated white polo shirt with the Trinity crest and the khaki uniform pants like they had never before been rocked. Word of his enrollment had preceded him. Even I, then the lowliest of freshmen, had overheard the news of his arrival. On the first day of school, I stood, rising to tiptoe and peering between bodies, to get a peek as packs of his less-than-peers parted from his path and then re-formed in his wake as he entered the building and walked the main hallway of Trinity in search of the guidance office and his schedule of classes. The girls parted their lips and dropped their chins while the boys either did the same or clenched their fists according to their respective unconsciously inspired first desires.
    “Jesus” was the ambiguous reaction of one unidentified voice nearby.
    Gordon was especially surprised and disappointed by the rampant homogeneity of the male members of Ogontz’schapter of the Benedict Youth. The school uniforms certainly contributed to their sameness, but it was more than that. There had been a dress code at the Rood, but the boys had been somehow able to rebel and to resist the school’s attempt to dehumanize, whitewash, and control them, primarily through constant, even if ineffectual, complaints and small bits of civil disobedience: low-hanging ties, untucked shirts, sockless feet, and hair grown beyond the established parameters. All petty but clear “fuck you’s” directed at the administration and the slavery of institutionalized conformity. The mannequins of Trinity, however, appeared happily anesthetized, except for Shelly, of course, who Gordon passed in the main hall that first day. She was wearing a black “Save the Planet” T-shirt over her white blouse, an offense for which she was summarily sent to the office by her homeroom teacher.
    Trinity was a jock factory, one that would have done cold war East Germany proud. Ironically, a large percentage of Ogontz’s population are descendents of German immigrants, who came too late to the American party and were forced to leapfrog the already immigrant-saturated East Coast and settle in Ohio in order to pursue their dreams of New World prosperity. Every parent in the four-county area, Catholic or not, sent his or her child to Trinity—if the parent had even the slightest hope that his or her son or daughter had college athletic scholarship potential.
    The halls were yearly stocked with long, lean, broad-shouldered, and graceful demigods. To the contrary, most of the kids at the Rood had been rather anemic, bookish, and soft—absolute pussies by comparison with these Warriors, which just so happened to be the name of Trinity’s sportsteams. Gordon must have immediately determined that it would be impossible to impress these roboteens by mere physicality; nor could they be intimidated by intellectualism. For they were the most unquestioning party-line-swallowing irony-deprived adult-pleasing collection of kiss-asses Gordon could have ever imagined, and their Teflon-coated psyches were angst resistant and oblivious to both his superior erudition and his sarcasm.
    The purchase of the Hummer, however, had been a stroke of accidental genius. He would soon discover that the lever that would move these lumps of clay and undo many a button, zipper, and Velcro strap was good old-fashioned American materialism and class envy.
    It was common in those first days at Trinity for Gordon to be regularly asked—exclusively by girls—to sign copies of
Manfred
or one