Victor hadn’t forgotten how he used to react to the harsh edges at the end of fuck and crap. Such a childish kid he’d been. “Is that why you worship the devil?”
“Micah, don’t be a dipshit.”
“What do you mean?”
“Should I hit you again?”
Victor nodded not because he liked the feeling, but because of symmetry. If Albert wished to slap him, and Victor wished to allow it, there was symmetry. Anyway it never hurt much, at least not until the day Albert watched him brush his teeth.
They had spent three hours in the bus. Afterward Victor swallowed the toothpaste like usual.
“Raise your arms,” Albert said then. When Victor did, Albert punched him in the gut. He dropped his toothbrush and bowled over.
“Why’d you do that?” he howled.
“Because you’re retarded.”
“For swallowing toothpaste?”
“Did you swallow toothpaste?”
“I’ve always done it that way.”
“You’re worse than Sievert,” said Albert, turning to go.
As he crossed the road home, the curtains fluttered in the Alfssons’ living room. “I don’t care,” said Victor aloud, enjoying the words as he spoke them. He stayed put afterward, admiring their echo. Nothing was symmetrical about I don’t care, but the phrase wasn’t ungainly. He was seeing beyond its shape and sound to the deeper meaning, the notion of not caring. Who gives a fuck, he thought, feeling wise beyond his years. That night, still buzzed, he spat his toothpaste out for the first time. Thinking back to Albert’s last withering glance he watched it swirl down the drain.
The next morning, sober but still wise, he did the same. “It’s what I always do,” he let himself whisper aloud, a workmanlike phrase striking in its plainness. After a few more days, spitting was old hat. The shift proved so strangely easy that, when Albert didn’t show up the following weekend at the usual hour, Victor braved beginning a journey on his right foot, ending on the Alfssons’ porch on his left.
He rang the bell. Almost immediately the door opened to reveal white-haired Mr. Alfsson, his hazel cat-eyes daring Victor to ask, “Albert home?”
“Where Albert is is the Lyman Ward Military Academy,” Mr. Alfsson said. “You can write to him there.”
“When will he be back?”
“Sievert is inside. Would you like to play with Sievert?”
“Okay,” he heard himself say, but he meant no. Suddenly Sievert appeared at the top of the stairs, as fat as his brother used to be. Their spirits had traded bodies, Victor thought, already pondering an excuse to leave. “I forgot my mother needs me,” he said, backing away.
Switching feet hadn’t worked out, he thought as he headed home. He should obey his own rules, heed words’ sounds and keep things tidy, swallow his toothpaste every time. Except he was realizing something. He wasn’t sad to lose Albert. Or he detected no sadness. What he gulped down as he crept across the road was excitement. Adrenaline. At school there were tons of better-looking boys than Albert, with names as hideous as Hugh and Horace and he didn’t care, he had put that crap behind him. Names were subjective. The objective problem was obtaining alcohol.
Victor studied that problem until the day a Desert Storm veteran and addict in recovery came to speak at Magnolia High. On the gym bleachers, Victor positioned himself behind two kids he’d heard speaking on the subject in biology class, the ugly-named Hugh and Hugh’s neutral-named friend Clint. It seemed they drank from Clint’s parents’ liquor cabinet while they played Dungeons & Dragons. The fact that they were gaming nerds lowered the stakes for Victor, who waited to make his move until the assembly speaker alleged that no one ever wanted to grow up and become a drunk.
“I want to grow up and become a drunk ASAP,” Victor said.
Hugh laughed and turned to see who’d spoken.
“I’ll be better at it,” Victor added. “I’ll set high goals.”
They got to talking. Victor mentioned Dungeons & Dragons admiringly. Soon enough Hugh was suggesting he hang out with them. Did he want to? “Why not,” Victor answered. Within hours they were in Clint’s bedroom pouring peach schnapps and rolling dice to learn what qualities his character would have in the campaign.
For six months Victor played D&D, drinking more than Hugh and Clint and their other friends. The fakeness of the game’s dungeons compared to his dungeons stopped mattering. The energy he’d once spent hating names like Hugh’s he funneled into a crush on the boy, battling orcs until finally he acknowledged that they would never get naked together. That didn’t stymie him long. He drank until his old idiosyncrasies were like a logic problem he’d solved. He started going to the quarry on weekends. One moonlit Friday there, as some girls teased him about his gaming days, he thought how lucky he was that the Alfssons had banished Albert. Without outgrowing Albert, he couldn’t have outgrown Hugh. Now he would also outgrow these girls, along with their friends. It was a destiny that seemed to stem from innate willpower. Night after night he drank with whomever at whatever house, whatever their names. Then one day as he was about to check the mailbox, he heard someone saying, “Micah,” and gazed across at a gigantic figure in the Alfssons’ downstairs window, summoning him.
Ignore, pretend, thought Victor. In a sort of trance, he walked over. There in a window that rose to the level of his neck, backward on a couch, knelt a curly-haired teenager bloated to nearly three hundred pounds.
For a moment Victor feared there’d been yet another spirit trade, until the pale, obese boy said, “I need to discuss Albert.”
“You’re supposed to be in high school,” Victor said, hoping none of his friends would drive past and see.
“I’m in the equivalent of the twentieth grade. It’s Albert who’s unwell.”
“Come again?” said Victor, although he’d heard clearly.
“He wonders why you abandoned him.”
When Victor didn’t answer, Sievert carried on. “He sends you love letters that our mom burns. He carved your name in his bed frame and everyone saw.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’ve never asked for his address.”
“What’s his address?”
“If you don’t love Albert back, write it. I’ll send it.”
Through the window Sievert offered a sheet of paper, the sight of whose untidy torn chads made Victor yearn for a drink. “Why would you want his heart broken?” he asked.
“If he falls out of love, he won’t go to hell.”
“Okay,” said Victor, taking the paper along with a pen. Against the house siding he wrote, Dear Albert. About to tell a vague lie like I miss you, he wondered what kind of retard carved into a bed that he loved a boy.
He glanced behind him at his own house and imagined Sievert peering through a telescope, jacking off and eating hot dogs.
Fat Sievert was the one who loved him.
Now Victor knew exactly what to do. I have a whole new life, he wrote on the paper. We were immature kids. You called yourself a devil worshiper, which is stupid. I don’t miss you. I never loved you. — Victor (Micah)
“Here,” he said, handing it back.
“Thanks,” said Sievert. “Bye.”
Retreating across the Alfssons’ yard, Victor doubted his reasoning. If Sievert really liked him, he’d have kept him lingering longer by the window. “Wait!” he would be calling. And what if he mailed the letter? Walking faster, Victor grew light-headed the way he used to. The idea of a lovelorn Albert reading his hateful words might have sent him regressing into a panic if not for the acceptance packet he discovered in the mailbox from Tulane.