The Evolution of Ethan Poe Read online

  Mom says, “Are you happy?” I grin and nod. “Happy enough to let me look around a little for myself?”

  By the time we leave, I’ve picked up another pair of black jeans and a black leather jacket that’s nearly free, and Mom’s found a shearling coat that she doesn’t take off until she’s paid for it. I’m thinking we might come back here again and wondering how much cred I’ve got with her now.

  On the way back to the car I notice something I hadn’t seen on the way here, probably because I was looking just for This Time. Right next door there’s a body art place. Photos of tattoos and piercings pretty much cover the front windows so you can’t see in very well. I’ll bet they don’t always want you to see what they’re doing to people in there. One close-up of a nipple with a barbell through it makes me gasp. It had been one thing when I let my best friend, Jorja Loomis, push a needle through my frozen left earlobe last July, but this? I mean, wow. Then I look hard at one tat, a yin-yang circle. I have a T-shirt Mom bought me last June, white with a red and white yin-yang symbol on it. I can’t remember ever wearing it; if it had been black, maybe. But I do know yin stands for inward, or female, and yang is outward, male. The two together are balance. And, in a way, they’re also androgynous. A balance of male and female, not all one or the other. And it hits me all of a sudden: This is me.

  Mom pulls at my arm. “Forget that, Ethan.” This is one of the times she means it. But the seed has been planted. Before another day has gone by, I’ve started my tattoo fund.

  Jorja gets on the bus for the first day of school decked out for real. Kyle’s on the bus, too, but we never sit together. Jorja and I had pretty much decided to go Goth together early last spring, getting black stuff cheap at Walmart. Goth came and went around here a few years ago, and now that it’s kind of out of fashion it’s that much more appealing; no one else will be copying us—been there, done that, bought the safety pins, using them on diapers—and we can let it be known that we like being outliers. She makes her way toward me, hugging her book bag to her chest, head down so that the look her eyes give you from under her eyebrows is kind of scary. As usual, there’s more black makeup than skin around her eyes, but the reddish-blond hair falling in strings around her face kind of dampens the effect. She plunks down beside me in the seat that everyone knows is saved for her, trying to pretend she doesn’t care whether I notice the black fishnet gloves that hook over her thumb and not the fingers. Makes me wish it were cold enough already to wear my own new gloves, and that new coat.

  “Gloves in summer?” I ask, pretending it’s a genuine question.

  She looks at them, shrugs. “I have a pair that pull all the way over my elbow for when it snows.” She half glances at me to be sure I’ve caught the irony, but then something outside the bus catches her eye. It’s the flimsy marquee outside her church. In slightly crumpled black capital letters it says, A PRAYER A DAY KEEPS THE DEVIL AWAY. From the corner of my eye I see her send two thumbs-up toward the sign. And I know she’s serious. She already prays in school, even when someone might be looking. Before last winter, when we hooked up as best friends, I thought she was doing it to be sarcastic. Now I know better. Even so, I still think she does it at least partly to be noticed. After all, it’s proof that she’s an outlier by choice.

  If I’m an outlier—and I guess I have to admit that I am—it’s not because I want to be. It’s just safer. And hanging with Jorja is protection for both of us. I mean, she’s so heavy-duty Christian that she doesn’t want boys approaching her for sex, and when the other kids see us together so much, they won’t guess about me. So I go along with putting on this show—like the Goth thing—to pretend I’m an outlier by choice.

  It was my idea, actually. Goth, that is. You can tell, just by looking at photos of Edgar Allan, that we’re related. Kyle, with his light brown hair and chipmunk cheeks, takes after Mom’s side of the family. But with my wide forehead, black hair and eyebrows, and a long nose, I look like the famous Poe except for the moustache and the dark eyes; my eyes, for some unknown reason, are blue. I even have a widow’s peak, and even though Edgar Allan didn’t, it seems appropriate somehow. He was Goth inside. Maybe I’ll get there someday, but for now I’ll do my best to look the part.

  Jorja and I don’t sit together in every class; that would be lame. So we arrive separately to Biology today just before lunch and sit a few rows apart.

  The teacher this year is new. Or, not new exactly. She grew up here, went to college in Orono, and came back to teach. Not that Orono is that far, but it’s just far enough that Sylvia Modine could insist on not living at home, I guess. I don’t really know her that well. I don’t really know her at all.

  I know her brother, though. Not as well as I’d like. Imagine Kevin Bacon at sixteen, in one of his blonder phases, and you’ve got a pretty good idea of what Max looks like: dark blond hair just mussed enough to make you wonder if he just got out of bed, a prominent chin, and a look in his blue eyes that’s either I might be pulling your leg or I’m imagining you naked. Max Modine has had my attention for about a year now. I can’t say whether I’ve had any of his, but I’d sure like it. There have been a few times when I thought that maybe, just maybe . . .

  Of course, he may not know he’s got my attention. This is just so wrong. It’s not fair! It’s okay for people to think I’m with Jorja even when I’m not, but if Max and I were together—I mean, if he’s even gay—it’d be a freak show around here.

  So now Ms. Modine is our Biology teacher. I suppose if I were straight, I’d think she was pretty. Long hair, light brown with blondish streaks, and one of those enthusiastic voices that makes me want to pull something over my head and hide. And she makes me want to hide right away.

  “Good morning, class! I’m Ms. Modine, and before anyone has a wisecrack about it, yes—my brother Max is in the class. Anyone got anything to say about that?” She waits, her face smiling but her eyes challenging, and no one says a word. A few kids turn in Max’s direction for a second, and I realize I’ve blown a chance to look at him when it would be safe—when others were looking at him, too. Crap. Guess I’m working too hard to avoid being seen looking at him.

  Ms. Modine has big plans for us, it seems. Dissecting frogs, field trip to a fish farm, twig identification after the leaves are off the trees, all kinds of fun. She assigns us some reading for tomorrow’s class. I don’t pay much attention until I hear a couple of girls make squealing noises; we’re to be prepared to discuss the circulatory system of a Japanese beetle.

  “I’ll bet you never thought of a beetle having a circulatory system, did you?” is Ms. Modine’s snarky comment. That’s probably not how she meant it, but that’s how I heard it.

  After school, on the bus ride home, Jorja tells me I’m coming to her church for Teen Meet with her. She likes to order me around. Sometimes I let her. I’m not sure why I don’t today, except that I’ve never agreed to go to this meeting before, and I don’t feel like it today, either. I’m pretty focused on the back of Max’s head two rows ahead of us.

  Jorja sees this. Her voice hissing into my ear is almost painful. “You can’t do that! You know that! It’s your cross to bear.” She punches my arm hard as she gets up for the stop in front of her church, Society of Nazareth. I know what she means. She knows I’m gay. That’s why she feels comfortable with me. But she also believes it’s this huge sin to give in to the temptation to actually be gay, so she needs to believe that I would never act on it. She prays for me all the time, sometimes to be strong and resist temptation and other times to be straight, and every once in a while she checks in: “Are you still gay?” One time she’d had some kind of vision that told her the prayers had worked, and when I insisted I was still gay, she said, “You’re not just telling me that to get into my pants or anything, are you?” This made no sense to me, so all I could do was assure her that I was still gay. Still me.

  Following Max’s ass with my eyes as he gets up for his stop, I’m thinking maybe, just maybe I
’ll say something to Mom today. About me. But as we approach our stop, Kyle pokes my shoulder on his way forward in the bus. “Grass-cutting day,” he says, like I’d forgotten. I had, but I still don’t want him reminding me. And mowing the yard is not a small task. We have two full acres. Guess “true confessions” will have to wait.

  Mom is standing on the front stoop, arms crossed on her chest, her head cocked at Mr. Phinney, who has his campaign persona in full swing. He’s running for the open seat on the school board for our district, which includes us and two other towns. No one was running against him until a few days ago. But now Etta Greenleaf has joined the race.

  Ordinarily I wouldn’t pay much attention to this kind of thing. What do I care? School is school, whoever’s on the board. But Etta is famous. No one calls her by her last name. She’s lived here, like, forever, though she did move away for a little while. And mostly she’s kept to herself, in a small house that used to belong to her father, who’d been caretaker for the old Coffin estate, when the Coffin family owned this big tannery. It’s closed now, and the Coffin house burned down way before my time.

  There’s a lot of rumors about why Etta came back and why she’s still here, but I think the most likely one is that her father didn’t leave when the Coffins moved out. He hung on, living off savings he’d never touched, until he couldn’t do things for himself anymore. That’s when Etta reappeared. To take care of him. He died years ago, but she’s still here. She must be at least sixty by now. Ancient. But she’s running for the school board. Go figure.

  Her other claim to fame, which probably adds to the way everyone thinks of her as some kind of recluse, is her dog. It’s a pit bull, kind of a bronze color, named Two. Makes people wonder where One is, like Two is a distraction while One is getting ready to ambush you. But Two’s reputation is that he’s plenty ferocious enough; he doesn’t need a One around to help him with anything, thank you very much. Etta controls that dog. That vicious, man-eating dog. He might be a medium, if she were a witch.

  Anyway, there’s Mr. Phinney, a vision of earnestness, eyes trained full on Mom’s face, a pile of those roadside VOTE FOR signs at his feet, with CARL PHINNEY SCHOOL BOARD in that shade of red that makes your teeth hurt, it’s so fake. Even from the end of the driveway I can practically see the tongue Mom’s poking into her cheek. She’s not big on politics, as long as they stay out of her way. Which is probably not a very sensible approach, especially in a town where positively everyone knows everyone else. It’s also a little weird, when you consider that she works at the town hall, unless you know why: she wants to keep an eye on them.

  I don’t pay much attention to Mom or Mr. Phinney, knowing she’s not putting any VOTE FOR signs in our yard for anyone, and just make my way to the back door so I don’t have to be polite, so I don’t get trapped into a discussion. Upstairs, I throw my books on the tiny desk that barely fits in my room with the twin-size bed, which I throw myself onto as I grab my iPod nano. I’m pressing an earbud in when Kyle darkens my doorway and glares at me.

  “Shit,” I say, barely above a whisper, and get up, knowing that Mr. Righteousness will be on my ass until I do the lawn.

  He slaps the back of my head as I push past him. “Watch your language!”

  Why do people say that? It’s stupid! Watch your language. You can’t do that unless you’re writing!

  It takes me seven tries to get the old mower going, and by then I’m even more pissed off than I was when Kyle hit me. I shove the rattling contraption in what’s more or less a grid pattern over the front yard, beyond impatience, and it catches on every lump of dirt and irregularity, making me more and more furious. Finally, in the side yard, I step back from it and lean over, take a few long breaths, and force myself to calm down. Otherwise I’ll never finish; one of us, the mower or me, will be dead before I can wrestle my way around the back of the shed.

  It goes along a little better now, but I’m dripping with sweat. I keep breathing and let my mind go where it wants. It goes to trees. They’re phallic; maybe that’s why. But—why don’t we have any trees to speak of? There are a few on the side of the yard, and one or two in back of the shed, but otherwise our old once-farmhouse sits on this big, square patch of land that has no other shape to it, nothing interesting to look at. Most of the houses on the main roads are like this, though, so there must be something to it. I suppose I could find out who owns the land surrounding our plot, but it’s just scrabbly woods, nothing going on there. Ticks. Snakes. Fruitless blueberry bushes, and gray boulders everywhere, like monsters’ droppings. That’s about it. If we didn’t have a high chain-link fence around the back, it would be hard to tell where our land ends and this semiwilderness begins.

  Somewhere around the far south corner of the backyard I decide to tell Mom. I’ll do it tonight. I have some homework—like reading about beetle blood—but there wasn’t a whole lot assigned the first day. Yeah; tonight’s the night. If I’m thinking about it all the time, I may as well get it over with or I’ll go crazy.

  After dinner I make sure Kyle is in his room deep into something and I go find Mom. She’s sitting on the back step, smoking a cig, gazing into the sky where the sun fizzled out below the horizon just a little while ago, swatting at mosquitoes.

  I plunk down beside her. “Can I have one?” I’ve tried smoking a few times; didn’t like it much. But she doesn’t know this.

  She blows a stream of smoky breath, looks at me, says, “You may not.” And takes another drag.

  I pluck a few strands of grass growing too close to the step to have been beheaded by the mower and fix all my attention on them so that I can surprise myself when I say, “There’s something I need to tell you.”

  “Oh? Haven’t got that little witch-slash-Bible-pusher preggers, have you?”

  On another day I might have snorted in appreciation of this comment; Mom thinks Jorja’s harmless and doesn’t mind her, but she does use her as a source of sarcastic humor sometimes. Tonight, no snort. “It’s about me. Not her.” I don’t know what to say next. Or, really, I do. I can’t quite say it.

  Mom turns to look at me. “What is it, Ethan?” Her voice is soft, encouraging.

  I don’t look at her. Eyes still fixed on my grass, I say, “I’m gay.”

  She’s very still. Not tense, though; calm. Another drag. Another smoky breath. I let my peripheral vision take in more of her, and she nods a few times. “I guess I can see how you might think that.” She looks at me again, and I do turn to her this time. “But you’re young, Ethan. Don’t worry about decisions like that.”

  “It’s not a decision, Mom. It’s who I am.”

  “Yeah, I suppose. But look at it this way. When I was your age, I thought who I was would be a housewife. Now look at me!” She holds her arms out toward the hidden sun and then drops them. “No way.”

  “Mom—”

  “Ethan, kid, don’t worry about it. It’s a natural thing for you right now. I mean, look, you don’t like football, you don’t like sports in general, you’re not very big, you got kind of a sweet face . . . well, gentle, anyway. And so far the only girl you’ve hung with is this kid who actually tries to make herself look gross and probably wears a horsehair-lined chastity belt. What other conclusion are you gonna come to, I’d like to know?”

  I have to say, this is not what I was expecting. I know Mom is enough of a social rebel that this revelation of mine wouldn’t throw her over some edge or anything, but this? It’s like she isn’t taking me seriously. Instead of pointing out that maybe I’m hanging with Jorja because I’m gay, not the other way around, I say, “Don’t you believe me?” My voice sounds whiny, and I hate it.

  “Oh, don’t get your knickers in a twist. It’s not that I don’t believe you. And yes, I’ve noticed how you are with Mr. LeBlanc. It’s just that I expect you’ll change your mind once or twice, and I want you to be able to tell me when you do, if you want. If you get yourself all locked into something, you might not wanna say if anything ch
anges. And, like I said, you’re young.”

  “But—what if I’m right? What if I am gay?” A cricket at my feet makes me jump.

  “Can’t say I’d be happy about it. I don’t understand it, that’s for sure. And you sure better not say anything to your brother just yet. Not until you can outrun him. But you’d still be you, right?” She swats at my head, winks, and says, “Skeeter.”

  It takes me a while to fall asleep that night. So I’ve told her, and up until I did it had seemed like such a huge deal. Now it feels anticlimactic. Like it almost doesn’t matter. But it’s still a big deal to me.

  She wouldn’t be happy about it. What does that mean? Would she be not happy about me? But she said I’d still be me. Does that mean she’d wouldn’t feel any differently about me? I don’t know what to do with this. I feel like I’m still in limbo.

  Whatever, it doesn’t seem like this is something she wants to talk about a lot. At least she didn’t freak. And when there are further developments, she can’t say I didn’t warn her.

  Chapter 2

  After school the next Monday, before I step up into the bus, I hear a whistle I recognize—sharp, swooping up in a smooth slide, with a little toot at the end. It’s Dad. He’s standing at the open door of a Public Works truck, not his own pickup, one foot on the running board and one on the ground, one hand on the top of the door and the other hung from a finger tucked into his jeans pocket. The way the sun falls on his hair makes it look as black as mine. His sleeveless T-shirt was white once and there’s a hole dead center over his beer belly. He’s not fat, or anything. Just got a gut.

  I wave to Jorja so she’ll know she’s on her own for the bus, and run toward the truck. I haven’t seen Dad for maybe three weeks now. I still don’t understand why he left, or why Mom wanted him to leave, whichever way it was. He hooks my neck with an arm when I’m close enough and squeezes. It presses the back of my black onyx ear stud into my neck, but I like it anyway. I can smell the sweat of his armpit for just a second before he lets go—sort of like some weird mixture of coffee and eucalyptus.