Disclaimer: Jonathan Larson owns; I'm just borrowing the characters to express my teenage angst.
Boys like Roger are born knowing how to kill. They stop themselves from thinking. They care nothing for each life around them. They accept, appreciate that life, but do they care for it? Do they love it? No, they do not. There will always be life. Each life is of little importance. It is the overall concept that matters, that universal heartbeat.
In the summer, the spring, Roger camped in his backyard. He slept on his back under the stars. He used to say, "I don't sleep at night. I just lay there and let myself go up, and up, and up. Trees don't sleep. Stars don't sleep." Those nights, he kept his eyes open and awoke in the morning with chafing dry eyeballs. No one taught him how to make a fire: he knew. He climbed a tree and took the fragile eggs from nests, cooked them on rocks by his small, blazing fire.
Eating those eggs never bothered Roger; I cringed at the merest mention. "You eat chicken eggs," he would say. "These are just smaller." He kept the shells as intact as possible and glued them back together whenever he could. He kept them in his sock drawer. Once, only once, he showed them to me. It was after school one day in seventh grade; "Come on," he insisted from the top of the stairs as I marveled at the obvious financial status of his family. "Hurry up, my mom'll be home soon." I followed him to his room, where we knelt. It could have been a séance, we could have kissed, all the nonsense teenagers do. "You can't tell anyone," he said. "Promise."
"I promise."
He pulled open his drawer. Inside he had dozens of tiny, beautiful eggs. "Aren't they great?" he asked in a breathy whisper. It was the most intimate I had ever been with anyone. "Just look at all those different colors..."
Every single one was blue. I knew better than tell him that.
People called Roger weird. They called him morbid. Roger pithed the frog while I hurled into the trash can. Roger tossed his soda bottle to kill a rat that crept into our classroom--glass everywhere, and Roger hauled bodily away as he insisted he would put the bottle back together. They called him tough, and when he said he was just curious, they called him twisted. This was seventh grade, after the eggs. One of his sisters, Marcy, she had a big mouth, saw the eggs, word got around.
Boys like Roger are born knowing how to kill. He fought efficiently, a few quick shots, then he looked over his shoulder at me, jerked his head and said, "Let's get outta here."
No one suspected, because of the fights, but I knew them better than anyone. I knew. Roger's bruises came later, after the fights. But all our dads were bastards then. Today, things like this are stopped. The government steps in. When we were kids, no one cared. Roger would have black eyes, split lips and no one cared because they knew he was a fighter. He did it to himself, they supposed.
I know what Roger did to himself. I saw him behind the art building, a single, stucco bungalow. "Going for a smoke," he said. Roger would've been fourteen by then, maybe fifteen, and I a year younger because of my late birthday. It was sophomore year, near the start of Spring term.
"Don't. C'mon, Rog, don't do that. You know my granddad had lung cancer."
"I'll be okay," he promised. I followed him behind the bungalow, meaning to stop him.
As it turns out, Roger's cigarettes wouldn't give him lung cancer. He lit the end, rolled up his cuff and brought the burning cigarette down to kiss his flesh. "Shit, Roger." We lived in a fairly suburban area. I had never before heard of anyone doing that… mutilating himself like that. "Here." All I could think was that it had been an accident despite the determined set of his eyes, his clenched fingers. I drenched one of the napkins from my lunch (yes, my mother made my lunches) and grabbed Roger's arm. I slapped the wet paper cloth over the burn.
"Thanks, man," Roger said. His voice had gone dull. He tried to pull his arm back, but I had seen the scars already.
"Shit, Roger," I said again. "What… how long?"
He shrugged. "Three years? Four?"
"Because of your dad?"
"Yeah. Kinda. I mean, lots of things."
"Can you stop?" I asked him. "Can you call me instead? We can talk… I can help…" I couldn't understand why Roger had never come to me with this. Didn't he know I would always be there for him? Over the next few months, Roger would call me, sniffling, and apologize. That's one thing boys like Roger aren't born knowing how to do: cry.
Acts but no hour wanted remorse--it was too late after eight o'clock, was I spending time with my family, he knew I had homework. I told him I wasn't busy, even when I was, and we would talk for hours about the most insignificant things. We talked about baseball--Roger did, anyway, I wasn't much of a sports fan--politics, school. We talked about countries we wanted to see. Food. Roger liked to talk about food. Around this time his mother went back to work as a nurse, leaving him home with his little sister. Roger learned how to cook and we would talk about all the things he found in cookbooks, these beautiful words. He loved asafetida, cardamom, turmeric.
I got into trouble for those phone calls. "Mark, don't leave the table to talk to your friends, it's very rude."
"I know, Mom, I'm sorry."
I wished I could tell her about Roger. She would know what to do. Besides, surely, knowing my friend was suicidal, my dad would stop kicking my ass for leaving the table, for the phone bill. But then school let out, and the phone calls stopped. I got more and more scared, by the end of July wound, as my sister said, "tight as a virgin." That was the day I got on my bike and rode to Roger's place. I watched him for a moment: he and his sister were outside; he was teaching her how to shoot baskets. I remember how strange he looked, wearing long sleeves in July.
I went home, determined to think of some way to help my friend.
One morning in September, I sat at the kitchen table watching my mother, the way she moved. She didn't look at what she did, be it pouring milk or untangling Cindy's pathetic attempt at French-braiding her hair. She just knew. Every part of her knew what to do: her fingers, her face, her soft hands.
"Mom," I started. She knew what she was doing. She would tell me what to do. Surely she knew some phrase to use, something to tell Roger to stop hurting himself. Wasn't there a magic Mom word to make bad boys behave? I hadn't thought it before, but the term fit Roger well. He was a bad boy, not in the glorified, James Dean sense, but literally.
She looked up from Cindy's hair. Cindy was maybe sixteen or seventeen then, but had only recently outgrown childhood, an event that coincided mysteriously with my being told to stay out of the bottom cabinet in the bathroom, and if I did need something I was to ignore completely the blue plastic bag, do you understand me, Mark Cohen?
"What is it, Mark?" Mom asked. "And drink your milk, you're nearly late."
"Ow!"
"Cindy, if you sit still…"
"Nothing, Mom," I muttered, but she wasn't listening anymore. That was the day I started my junior year of high school.
TO BE CONTINUED
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