Senior Retreat

M. Mackey to Eric Cartman: Fwd: graduation photos?

Mmkay Eric,

Here's a link to the graduation photos. Give me some time to dig them out of the mothballs and repost them. Let me know if there are any questions or problems, mmkay?

Thanks,

Mr. Mackey

Graduation pics caught my eye. I had to tell myself not to look for myself. You know, pictures of self always distract you.

Everybody claiming their diplomas and, in some cases, awards. People making speeches. One of Craig Tucker staring at the camera during the service, as if saying, "What the fuck are you doing, Mr. Mackey?"

No pictures of Stan.

Some good ones of Butters. Seeing pictures made me think of old sense of inadequacy. I really was inadequate. We were a weird old pairing. One of us in the library. I had a big pimple that day on my right cheek. Crossed the Odd overnight just to land on my face that day. And I was sweaty and... I just wanted to hide the damn thing. I didn't want it to be evident in the pictures, but I didn't even know how evident it was. Anyway, I was never good enough for Butters, pimples or no. On Graduation Day I didn't graduate with honors. Never worked in high school. Meanwhile, Butters was pretty and he worked hard. His schoolwork meant a lot to him. He learned to play the piano good too. He was talented technically, although he suffered when expression came into play. He always got nervous and stiffened up like a big brass bed. More like one of those Tempurpedic pillows. College-bound. Not me. No wonder after we broke up I was like something floating around the cosmos. Totally lost. I don't know. In some of these graduation pics I look pissed off. In most of them I was exercising my latest smile strategy, which was act like something really funny had just happened. Made me look crazy. But that day I did want to get one of us together. I've got the picture here. I'm leaning to the right 'cause I didn't want that pimple to show. Course that didn't help. Butters looks more natural. But you can see we were a weird pairing.

Some pics of Kyle looking more latter day Kyle-like than he did a few weeks before at the retreat. He got his hair cut and adopted a smile that seemed to say, "I'm stoned." Course he wasn't, just transcendent. Him and Bebe.

I remember we got there and they had us stand in the school library. We all saw each other in the suits. This was the opposite of a wedding, it was a divorce, so I guess it didn't portend bad luck. Stood around and talked. I think the predominant mood was positive. Then they had us line up outside, and that was when things got hot. We were sweating through our blazers. All the girls wore white dresses with their arms exposed. We were jealous. Seems stupid to have us all wear suits, but I guess that's South Park tradition. We had to stand outside the Arts Center, which was new then, for a while. There was some kind of holdup, maybe, or else waiting was tradition, too. We went in and we all had partners to walk with us. Who was my partner? Not Wendy, she would've been with Kenny. Not Bebe, she would've been with Kyle. Not Red, she would've been with Bradley. Not Butters, sure as hell naw-he never would've gone for it, and anyway we had to have opposite-sex partners. I don't remember who he was with either. Kyle did a tango spin and dip with Bebe in the aisle-that was not tradition. Everybody watched them.

Kyle had a natural way of attracting attention and then glowing in the spotlight. And Bebe was so beautiful she drew the eye anyway. But Kyle especially. Quite the conversationalist. And uninhibited, unpretentious, funny.

I went up and got my diploma when they called my name.

After the ceremony we all stood outside talking for a while. And I think it was around that time the mood turned sour. Or maybe not. I didn't like sticking around, I think. Maybe it took a week or so for the mood to turn sour. That summer everybody curdled. Or at least everything in my world. Even Butters admitted he didn't know where he was at. (Denver University was course-correction.)

We had all gotten used to ceremonies at that point. Oddly, South Park High seemed to have a lot of them, or anyway enough. So the ceremony didn't seem significant, but it also didn't seem like a formality. The main graduation was the last day of school. Everybody stayed up all night. Or anyway, a lot of people stayed up real late and woke up early. We tried to do our senior prank, which didn't go so well. Principle Victoria called it "harmless." We were always a lackluster group. Anyway, filled a hallway with balloons (sort of-about ankle height), put pink flamingos all over the grass in front and in back of the school. But that didn't matter, 'cause I felt like a real rebel. Wendy and I went to get breakfast tacos for everybody at a gas station outside of town, since Kenny had fallen asleep in a hammock strung up between two lockers, over a bunch of balloons of different colors. And we came back and everybody moved out onto the front lawn when the sun started to rise. That's one of the few times I've ever watched the sunrise. Not to get corny, but I think we all felt real sentimental. Especially since it was such a small class. I loved everybody, then. Then after the sunrise it was a day of school, but nobody took that seriously, not even the teachers, since they let us hang out outside whenever we got the chance. And Butters wouldn't talk to me. We didn't have anything to talk about but I found it disturbing. I lay next to him on a blanket. I thought he was being a real bitch. Anyway, at the end of the day we all threw rocks against the flag pole. Or someone threw rocks at it and we all clustered around it. That was also tradition. It rang loud twelve times-something like that. Maybe that was supposed to signify 2012. After that we were no longer seniors. We all got in a big circle and held hands and swayed back and forth and tried to think of a song to sing, but no one could agree on anything so we disbanded.

The mood was giddy but the real feeling, underneath it all, was awful. To be cut loose, or at least seem to be cut loose. To be gone. And quickly forgotten, too. We left but a small impact on the school. But it had played a pretty important part in our lives.

Anyway, the senior retreat. That came after the de facto but before the de jure graduation. I want to recount all I can about the senior retreat. Someday I will have forgotten all of this. My memory's been getting worse and worse lately, but I can still remember certain things about the retreat.

We took a bus several hours out of South Park. During the bus ride I think yearbooks were going around. I think I tried to write something meaningful in Butters's. He wrote something thinly disguised as something meaningful in mine. Token told me later he was disappointed by what a lot of people wrote, but Butters especially-it seemed tossed off, not a fitting testimonial to what Token thought of as a pretty solid friendship. Of course, how much did Token really know about Butters? Did he even know he was gay at that point, or what he had been going through the previous three years? I suspect nobody really knew a whole ton about Butters. I wonder how much there was to know. Like in his yearbook message, he seemed to be open and genuine and caring, but he had a way of talking a lot without saying much.

I sat near the front of the bus. There were probably the obligatory sing-alongs at the back of the bus: popular country songs, songs from Disney movies. I know Butters was enamored of the Lion King soundtrack. He was never connected to the popular girls' group in any way, but maybe he sang along. Whether or not his enthusiasm was for real I don't know. Anyway, everything was dusty. And behind me on the bus were these three Mexican kids crammed into one seat. Two girls and one profusely hair-gelled guy. They spoke Spanish. They were weirdly cliquish or shy, and in their time at the school, they had probably only spoken one or two times to non-Mexican students. I don't know if I felt bad about that or not. But they seemed to get along fine. They were all laughing and talking really loud, which was probably more than I was doing at the front of the bus.

We stayed at a spot in the woods 'cause Jimbo Kern, Stan's uncle, knew a guy. And even though Stan wasn't there anymore Jimbo wanted to do something for us, because we'd talked to him after and all. When the bus stopped and we got off, we had to walk along a long river to get to the campsite. (That's an interesting sentence. Broken down it says, "When the journey ended, the journey continued.") Everybody took off their shoes. The water was ankle-high, like when I was walking through that creek a couple weeks ago with Kyle. Everybody kept almost slipping and catching themselves, 'cause the bottom of the river had moss on it. Then we emerged from the river onto a rocky dirt road, and we walked down that a ways. I was walking with friends. There were trees all around, obviously. Thankfully the road was mostly flat. It seemed like we were walking forever, but finally we reached the campsite. It was surprisingly nice. There were cabins (pretty crappy ones, but still) to the right of the road we walked in on. There was a big meting place to the left. The river was across from us.

We all had cabin assignments, but I think we just dropped off our stuff and went to the meeting area. We all probably sat around for a long time. And I think for the next three days that was all anyone did, in between bouts of playing on the river and taking walks. It sounds relaxing now, and I suppose it was. But it's not like I needed stress-relief then; I had never cracked a book or lifted a finger in high school. There were picnic tables outside the meeting area. It was fun to sit there and talk with people you knew and loved. And the people you knew and loved made a big group, 'cause you loved all your classmates, or so many of them. I remember bonding a lot with Annie, and feeling really affectionate toward her. We had bonded on and off in high school, but no friendship ever came of it.

Butters and some other people were down at the swimming hole (or whatever it was). They were jumping in the water and laughing and all. I think Kyle had his guitar (he took up guitar after Stan didn't play guitar), 'cause we went down there together and he took it. I remember walking down there and talking, and we were talking about whether someone could really love another person unconditionally. And I remember all the needles had fallen from the pine trees and they were hurting my feet, 'cause I was barefoot. Once we got there Kyle played some music for people. But he didn't want anyone to listen to him, just to let it be like a backdrop since there was no radio. And that's what it was, though a radio would've been better; Kyle never really got that good at guitar; I guess it's true after all that Jews have no rhythm. But anyway I understood why he wanted to play and I sat by him. I didn't want to go swimming because of the scars on my arm and on my sides, and also probably because I had pimples on my back, and I was so freaking fat. Those are three compelling reasons why I've hardly swum in years.

There's a picture from Mr. Mackey of Butters looking unbelievably hot as he gets out of the water. Later on after I lost some weight I met this fuck in Denver, not near the university, and I showed a shot of Butters (not that one) to him, he was just some boy, and I told him I dated that guy. "Isn't he hot?" I said. "Eh," he said. That pissed me off. If he could see this picture he'd know how wrong he was. And I've got it right here in my dresser so I can see it whenever I want, not that I want to that often-I've got a bunch of pictures in there.

I was close with Wendy on that trip. That was the year we had both taken independent study classes, which were taught together since we were the only two people doing them, and so the curriculum made no sense. But we really bonded a lot in that class. She's not like anybody else I've met. She went to college, too, her and Kyle both are out of state at Iowa University. And Kyle's studying religion, which he's gotten pretty interested in, and which makes sense for him because he always seemed so above and beyond.

On the second day of the retreat we went for a big hike up into the hills. I took a bunch of pictures with somebody's camera. There was a big group photo of us standing in front of a cliff with a good view, but I can't find it anymore. During the hike Kyle and I talked about coming out here during the summer to stay and write. Just write whatever came to mind. It seemed like paradise, because we've both always loved to write. (But I later found out that was something he had always planned to do with Stan, go somewhere and write, 'cause Stan had loved to write too and was damn good at it because he was so sensitive.) Toward the end of the hike dark clouds started to move in. It got colder.

When we got back to the meeting area, we were sitting in a group, talking, and Kyle was there. I think he was hard to reach on that trip. He was always with Bebe, or else always doing something somewhere, or in a conversation with other people. I think somebody proposed we get up and do something. And we all got up to do something, except for Kyle. And I said, "Dude, aren't you coming?" He looked at me all embarrassed, and said in a low voice, "Man, to be honest, my balls really hurt." And I was like, "That happens to me a lot." He said, "Really?" And I said, "Yeah. It's weird, but if you drink some water and then sit down for a while you'll start to feel better." He hobbled over to his backpack and got some Aspirin. Once he started to feel better he probably went off and hung out with Bebe again or something. Not that I was mad at him. He wanted to see his girlfriend. He loved her madly for a while, before he got sick of her.

Butters and I wandered off in the woods and were making out when it started to rain. We found shelter under this little generator building or something. They had a roof over a little porch of concrete. I offered to give him a blowjob. He said no. "What if somebody came by?" "Nobody'll come by," I said. "I'll be quick." I was always offering to give him a blowjob, and he was always saying no. Usually I did it anyway, but that time he was insistent, and we decided just to head back. On the walk back to the meeting area, I said, "Do you think we'll ever have sex?" He immediately said, "No. I mean, I think it'd be for the best if we didn't." And I said, "Yeah, me too," which was true.

After that I walked back to the cabins in the rain. It was still daytime. One of those times when it's sunny but it's raining. I lay in a hammock by one of the cabins and listened to My Life by Iris DeMent, which is softer than what I normally listen to. Maybe I was thinking of Stan. He and I had driven around listening to My Life earlier in the year, when he was in his rural graveyard phase. Or maybe we just talked about My Life and I'm remembering it wrong. I don't know what I would've thought at that time about Stan. Did I wonder where he was now? Did I feel any kind of tenderness for him? Would I have wanted to think about him at all? In any case, I kind of fell asleep in the hammock in the rain, and when I woke up it was on "Easy's Gettin' Harder Every Day" and the rain had stopped. The sun was still peeking out from behind the clouds, but soon it would be night. So once the track ended I got up and stopped the music and walked back to where everyone was.

Some of us trekked back to the river and sat on a rock overlooking the water. It was probably me and Kyle and Kenny and Token. And Butters was there. All of us were joking and talking. It was a good conversation. At some point Butters sat next to me and put his arm around me. That was really nice. I think that was the first inclination anyone had that we were together. But no one seemed surprised. I mean I guess they had suspected we both might be gay for a while, "for a while" like since middle school. It was unusual for Butters to show any kind of affection for me publicly, probably partially because he was so turned around emotionally he had almost no affection for me to begin with. I think there was just that time and then another time, after graduation, the night before my birthday, when we were all in his backyard and his parents were asleep and he sat on my lap (since there was no way he could fit in the same chair as me) and let me put my arm around him and kiss his hair or something, even though everyone was there.

The sun went down and it was dinner time, and we all ate. Then Butters and I were sitting in a corner, talking. And Annie came over. And Wendy and Kenny. And then a ton of people. And we all huddled close together, which was really nice. It was nice to feel that physical closeness to everyone, although I was big enough to be like Santa Clause testing the structural integrity of his throne at the mall while all those kids gathered around him. And we were so close that I could put my hand on Butters's knee without anyone noticing.

Then Kenny wanted to play basketball, and Wendy came with Butters and me on a walk. I guess we invited her. She knew we were together, because I had told her. And she had told Kenny, too, and they had been the only people who'd known about us for a long time. So I guess Kenny wasn't jealous. And I guess Butters and I were like, fuck it. It was full dark now, and Butters and I made out at some point while Wendy just sort of... what, looked away? Stupid.

Anyway, then was the bonfire. Dude, I'm getting my nights mixed up. It must've been a four-day trip, not a three-day, with a bonfire on the third night and not the second.

Anyway, that night, there was a bonfire. We were all supposed to say things about our class that meant something to us. But no one could think of anything. There were long silences. If Jimmy had been there, he might've stood up and made some jokes, but he and Timmy couldn't come because of the river and the rough terrain. And so Bradley stood up like three times and made some of his typically bad jokes. Maybe it was just his delivery that was bad, but in any case his repeated speeches just made things more weird.

When I was going through the bonfire pictures, I again looked for pictures of myself. But I couldn't find any at first, so I gave up. I looked at other people's pictures, I remember Clyde gave a speech that broke the ice a little. He talked about the first girl he had sex with. She went to school in Fairplay. He mentioned her by name. Then called her a bitch. He talked about how Craig stayed at his house for like a year and all they did was smoke weed. I liked Clyde's speech, but nobody else seemed to. I remember Kyle disapprovingly grunted and sighed through it. Not surprisingly, there weren't any photos of Clyde giving his speech. The faculty in attendance were quite angry.

People made smores on the fire during the speeches. Mr. Adler had found sticks for us, or something like that.

Tweek gave a speech. There are two photos of it. In one he looks like a normal person using his body in a normal way. In the other his arm is gesturing, but pressed awkwardly against his side. He had himself on a tight, tight leash. A shot of Rebecca, who had had an off and on thing with Kyle and confessed in her speech to feeling awkward around Bebe, reveals the same thing. Her transformation from a nerd to a slut didn't erase her self-consciousness, apparently. Bebe, by contrast, looks totally at ease. She's addressing the class in a friendly, unself-conscious way, because that's how she felt about us. Although she pointedly did not respond to Rebecca's T.M.I.-session. Bebe cried in her speech, which made everybody feel pretty sentimental. And in the picture you can see she had borrowed Kenny's fishing cap or something, so she was the only one who looked like she belonged at that camp ground in the woods, where permanent residents viewed South Park as a big city.

I gave a speech and Butters gave a speech. I remember I thought Butters was gonna come out in his speech, but he didn't. It would've been stupid if he had. I was stupid for thinking he might. In my speech I said I thought Clyde's speech was cool, and I appreciated the way he broke the ice. I said something embarrassing, like, "I've got nowhere near the balls you've got."

Kyle gave a speech I don't remember. I found a photo with him, me, and Bebe in it. He is standing, talking, and he has his hands like he's praying, and he's looking up at the sky. Bebe is looking up at him adoringly. And I'm looking dourly down at the ground, like I'm on the cusp of a downward spiral. I guess that sums us up pretty well, or at least predicted our personalities that summer and the next year. I would've looked good with a bullet in my head.

When it was fully dark Craig stood up and said something. He leaned against the back of Mr. Adler's pickup truck. You could see him in the firelight. He said, "It's easy for you all to say, 'I'm sorry we didn't always get along, and I wish we had all been friends,' now. But I gotta tell the truth, and it's that that's bullshit. All you can do is not be an asshole in the future. And don't be dishonest now." Something like that. I wasn't appalled by the speech like some other people were. He got it right, he just said it kind of abrasively. One time later on Craig and I got drunk and he confessed to keeping people at arm's length by being mean. I guess it was a habit at that point. He also said something about the school's administration, how as it was becoming more and more conservative because of drugs or gays or Mexicans or whatever, it was making South Park as a whole a shittier place. He said something like, "Fuck the faculty." Of course, they had been generous enough to organize the trip.

But then Wendy stood up and said basically the same thing Craig said, but cushioned it a little. I think she was more reasonable. Sometimes it seemed like Craig's emotional state ranged from mild annoyance to anger. Actually, Stan knew him better than anyone, even Clyde, and I'm sure he would say that wasn't true. But that was what Craig showed me, anyway. So Wendy reminded us of teachers from the past, and of people from the community who would come in and talk to us at assembly, and how everybody had seemed cool and engaged with the students, and commented that she found those qualities lacking in the administration today. She remembered especially Father Maxi's uncharacteristically poetic regular speeches about the changing seasons, and what he saw in us as students, and what he loved about the school and the assembly and seeing us at church... (I don't think our entire class loved those things as much as Wendy.)

Somewhere in there the bonfire ended. They put out the fire and suddenly my mood dropped. It hit me that we were done. And I had the sense that my life was done too.

I tried to talk to Kyle after the bonfire, but he was talking to Heidi. Kyle used to play for the football team but broke his collarbone and had to stop, and that was when he started studying religion, I guess because he was questioning the existence of God again, who was so cruel as to let a boy break his collarbone. I don't really remember. Anyway, after he had to stop playing football, he had to stop hanging out with the football team, and then with the girls who hung around the football team, including Heidi. Now Heidi was telling Kyle exactly the thing that had earned Craig's criticism a few minutes before, but Kyle wasn't offended. He said he thought the same thing of Heidi, that they should've hung out more. And they came away feeling good and mutually respectful. Good for them-they were both nice, respectable people. But I wasn't in the mood for respect and I went off to walk through the woods by myself.

I found the generator building where I had threatened Butters with a blowjob, and sat down. That may have been the first time I felt it was my destiny to kill myself. I had met everyone I would meet, and done all the things I would do. Other people were meant to go on to other things. I was meant to die. It was my time. I felt like Neil Young on the cover of On the Beach, one of Stan's favorite records. I thought of cliffs I could jump off. I wish I had a gun or a knife-I wasn't turned off to the idea of slitting my wrists at that point. But I also thought about what effect that would have on people, how it would be the ultimate downer at the end of their trip. Not just saddening, but disturbing. The dead body of a classmate you never really talked to but hadn't felt particularly bad about in a long time either. Someone who was generally (if inexplicably) decently-liked. It would ruin everything. And after Stan, God. God dammit.

But I felt so intensely sad that I wanted to put myself out of my misery. I had often had that feeling over the past two years. It had been nothing but sadness since I realized I was gay. I felt like a burden and I felt burdened.

Then I got up to go back to the camp, trying to feel a little better before I got there. I found Butters and asked if we could take a walk. He probably didn't want to walk with me. He had already walked with me a few times too many on that trip. But we left the meeting area and walked along the road, took a right at the fork, walking away from camp. We walked over to the field by the small building.

"Eric, is something wrong?" he asked.

I decided not to say what I had meant to. I don't know what I had meant to say. Something like, "Help me." We could hear people talking in the distance. A car went by a ways from us, and we could hear its wheels on the dirt road and then see its red taillights through the trees. Then I came right out with it: I told him he was a premature ejaculator.

"What?" he said incredulously.

"Well, you do ejaculate prematurely."

"Jeez, Eric," he said. "That's not the kind of thing you just drop on a guy. Hamburgers."

We started walking back to the camp, talking about other things. Maybe our futures. When we got near the main road, I threw in some line about killing myself. And he freaked out.

A little while before, Principal Victoria had given us all this talk. She had called all students to an assembly during class. And it was jarring for many reasons. I remember we were in Theology class, with its open-ended discussion questions about the Bible. And the Bible got left in the Theology room. And Principal Victoria said student Stan Marsh wasn't with us anymore. Found out later he had thrown himself off Lookout Mountain in Denver. Among other things, I remember she said, "If anyone tells you they are thinking about suicide, you are morally obligated to tell someone. No matter how logical or reasonable they seem to you, they are sick. And you are responsible for getting them the proper help, not them." But nobody ever did that for me, and nobody ever did that for Stan-I never did that for Stan-and nobody ever did it for anybody else. Even after that speech. Even after that whole fucking thing. So it's a wonder any of us is still alive.

Anyway, Butters quoted Principal Victoria. I said over and over, "No, no, no, relax. I was only kidding, not serious." Then I said, "Absolutely not. I was only kidding, jeez, for real. Come on, don't take everything so seriously. Can't you recognize a joke when you hear it?" Butters sighed. He encouraged me to seek professional help. Then I guess I got a little cold. Butters didn't want to roll up his sleeves and deal with my problems. I didn't blame him, but I didn't want to tell him anymore. We kind of made a game of dismissing it. We started walking toward the cabins. It started to rain.

Right about that time Mr. Mackey, whose pictures started this whole freaking thing, drove by. He pulled up next to us and said, "It's past curfew, boys, mmkay. I'll drive you to your cabins." But he only had one seat in his car, because other students were in there too. So I told Butters to take it and he got in the front seat. I don't remember if he looked at me. They drove off down the road. I walked slowly after them. I don't remember how I was feeling. Probably not great. When I got to my cabin the car was parked outside and Butters was still in the front seat because he was staying farther down the road. Mr. Mackey was in the cabin urging everybody to shut up, with no luck. I stopped by the truck and Butters gave me a look. It was a slightly sad look, with the eyebrows raised, as if to say, "Well?" I had seen that mysterious look on his face many times since we'd gotten together. But it wasn't until New Years a year later that I realized it was a look of pity.

And that was the senior retreat. Although I've done a bad job of representing it. The feeling in the air was one of having your close friends all around, and being out in the Colorado woods. A very good feeling. But I guess Butters was on my mind pretty much the whole time. I'd like to read other people's memories of the trip. Kyle's, Butters's, Kenny's. People who could've seen it more clearly. Hell, I'd just like to read their memories about anything.

Wow, did you get to the end? Hope you liked it. I know it was sort of rambly and looking-back, but in the future this multi-chap fic will deal mostly in present-tense stuff like a regular story, talking about the stuff floating up from the wreckage of Eric's and Butters's relationship, and he and his other friends, and his isolation. I can't promise any lemons, cause although Eric is roughly lemon shaped, that's not a box I can see him fitting easily into.

And yes, if you noticed, that was a prompt at the end! So many talented writers on this website write about things currently going on in their characters' lives, but never take the tack of writing like a remembrance of things past, at which point you've gained some perspective on things. I guess that's because a lot of the people on this website are themselves currently going through the things in their stories. But I'd love to see some stories from other characters' points of view, reflecting on whatever! Let me know if you choose to do this, as I'd be excited to see what you write.

Thanks again for reading!

nemo