Bad Kid by David Crabb Read Free Book Online Page B

as they weren’t easily tricked like adults into thinking I was “normal.” Here I am taking solace with Whitney, the poodle of a seventeen-year-old girl named Michelle. I’m also taking solace in the third glass of wine cooler mixed with Sprite that Michelle snuck me at this party. I’m actually quite happy here. Even as an adult, “tipsy while holding a dog” is still one of my favorite states of being.

CHAPTER 4
I Want to Wake Up
    I f Why don’t I like girls? was the controlling thought of my life in middle school, my high school brain was consumed by Why do I like boys?
    I asked myself this repeatedly, my gaze roaming up and down the length of his chiseled physique, his body so spectacular that I didn’t know where to focus. The ripples in his abdomen transfixed me. The magnificent striations in his upper thighs were stunning. There was also that beautiful space near the armpit where the muscles of his chest and arm merged, flexed from holding the weight of his body up against the giant wooden cross.
    â€œBenedictum Nomen Sanctum eius,” hummed Father Carol, gassing our entire pew with incense fumes from his swinging thurible.
    â€œOh dear,” my mother coughed, overcome by smoke, “it’s enough to knock you out. Isn’t it, Leonard?” She glanced aroundme to my father, who was so bored by Christmas Mass that he looked dead, like a pale, bald corpse propped up in his seat as a holiday prank.
    â€œUh-huh,” he groaned as we proceeded to lip-sync another hymn.
    Since their divorce when I was two, my parents had held on to the idea that their spending time together in my presence was good for me, regardless of their differences. My mother had grown up deeply embedded in the Catholic Church. She remained devout in an open-minded way that allowed for her other interests: metaphysics, exorcisms, and Shirley MacLaine books. Her esoteric hobbies were at odds with my dad’s interests in astronomy and fiber-optics.
    After Mass my father took us to Church’s Chicken for lunch, a prospect that appalled my mother.
    â€œChurch’s?” she muttered as we arrived. “Fast food on Christmas Day?”
    Half an hour later we were gathered around a sad pile of cardboard and Styrofoam that sat atop a yellow linoleum table. My mother was not happy and, in a passive-aggressive fashion, made a big show of picking greasy bits of napkin off her manicure.
    â€œI guess it’s not about where you are but who you’re with,” she sighed with a Plasticine smile, sounding like she’d rather be anywhere else. I stayed quiet and gorged myself on drumsticks, again trying to soak up the tension in my bones with the food in my mouth.
    â€œYou eat up, sweetie,” my mother encouraged. “You’ve gotten so skinny lately. Hasn’t he, Leonard?”
    My father nodded silently behind the reflective lenses of his sunglasses, which were lightly misted with mashed-potatosteam. Mom continued to chatter on the way home, a nervous response to my dad’s silence that, ironically, only made things more tense.
    By the end of the day I was emotionally exhausted. I went to bed early but couldn’t stop thinking about Jesus, in the bad way. As I imagined dragging a moist cloth down the length of his torso, it occurred to me that maybe, instead of giving him a sexy sponge bath, I should ask him for help. So I closed my eyes and posed the simple question: Dear God, why do I like boys?
    I waited for an answer from on high until eventually I fell asleep, but I decided to keep at it. I started the new year praying all the time: in the car on the way to school, in the locker room after gym class, during my lunch break in the library. Sometimes I prayed in sync with my sinful thinking, asking Christ to heal my wayward soul while I watched Greg Brooks’s beautiful butt ascend the bleachers ahead of me.
    At first, I asked God for his help nicely.
    Dear