I Swear I'll Make It Up to You by Mishka Shubaly Read Free Book Online

and a pierced nose. He wore a beret constantly, even to bed. Each morning, he carefully pulled hispants on both legs simultaneously just so no one could say, “Oh, James, he’s a regular guy, he puts his pants on one leg at a time like everyone else.” Zack, the lanky smartass across the hall, owned every Beastie Boys album, even the early punk shit, and had played drums in his high school band, Fuck You, Punk Rock. Ben Bertocci was a local kid, a handsome goblin obsessed with Tolkien, a great chunky scar over his left lip from blowing up aerosol cans. He drove a lurching 1970s Chevy Nova, always blasting Gwar or Metallica, and enjoyed making weapons and terrifying masks and creepy sculptures out of the bones of roadkill. Ben White, a skinny Florida redneck in a Skinny Puppy T-shirt, was quiet but cuttingly funny whenever he spoke. Sure, there were nerds and jocks and even a few normals, but for once, freaks were in the majority. After a month, Simon’s Rock felt more like home than any of the five houses I’d lived in, my friends closer than my family.
    My easiest course was more challenging than anything I’d encountered in my life. We were treated like adults in class and expected to respond as such. My classmates were up to it—was I? For the first time, I couldn’t phone it in. I was no longer the smartest kid in the class; I had to bust my ass just to keep up.
    Still, to be a rebellious fifteen-year-old, liberated from your parents, treated with respect by your professors, living in a coed dormitory with your best friends, three meals prepared for you each day, surrounded by woods, a creek running through campus . . . it was heaven. I had been allowed to spit out my pacifier. I was living my real life.
    But you can’t be good all the time. We drank vodka, we drank cough syrup, we smoked pot, we screwed, we stayed up all night, talking endlessly about music: Big Black, the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, Nick Cave, Bauhaus, Daniel Johnston, John Zorn, Einstürzende Neubauten, Bikini Kill.
    I lived in terror of getting caught drinking. One night, I stumbled home drunk to find myself locked out. James was in his girlfriend’s room, not to be disturbed. I wobbled out to the atrium,where people often hung out till the sun rose. A couple of second-years were in the kitchen. One sat on top of the fridge, loudly singing Frank Sinatra, tripping on acid. The other, Galen, sat at the table, smoking a Camel, laughing at his friend. He had a wooly head of thick brown hair tied into a loose ponytail at the base of his neck, scruff on his face and neck.
    When I explained my problem, Galen grinned and rolled his eyes, then hopped up from his chair.
    â€œYou,” he said, pointing to his friend giggling on top the fridge, “stay here. I’ll be right back.”
    Galen followed me to my room.
    â€œI can’t believe no one’s showed you this. This is one of the fundamentals.”
    He knelt down by my door, pulled out his student ID, and pushed it into the crack between my door and the doorjamb. There was a soft click. My door swung open. Galen stood up, bowed grandly, and gestured at my open door. I shuffled in. When I turned around to thank him, he was already gone.

    I spent all of Monday, December 14, cramming for my physics final the next morning. The class had seemed an obvious choice, but I soon realized my father’s gifts for physics had passed me over. I was in my room with a friend from class, struggling desperately to understand the concepts that were so immediately logical to him. I heard a thin, explosive sound, a feeble pap , then another, then a flurry. Firecrackers? No, firecrackers didn’t sound like firecrackers; they split the air, they made your ears ring. Firecrackers sounded like guns. That firecracker sound I heard, it was a gun. It could only be Wayne Lo.
    Under the spikes and Mohawks and combat boots, Simon’s Rockers were just goofy kids.