Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [96]
“You know what he called Teddy?”
“I don’t care, Jude.”
“He called Teddy a fag.”
“I don’t care what he called him! You’re the one who stole his weed. And you’re riding your straight edge high horse?” He shook his head in disappointment. “A straight edge kid should be the one breaking bongs. You’ve got it all backwards.”
Johnny had finally pocketed the knife, but he hadn’t uttered a word as they’d all filed back into the building to load out their equipment. They’d left everything in the van, and Johnny had headed straight upstairs to Jude’s room. Rooster had followed him to try to calm him down.
“Rooster feels bad,” Jude said, “because he’s the one who helped to start shit.”
“Whatever,” said one of the guys. “It’s a hardcore show. What does Mr. Clean expect?”
“That’s why he left his first band,” said another. “He was pussying out.”
“Doesn’t he have a wife?” someone wondered. “What is he, eighteen?”
“Yeah, but she’s pregnant,” said someone else.
“That’s not very edge.”
“That’s totally edge. What’s he supposed to do, abandon her? He’s committed.”
“I don’t know,” Kevin said. “He goes around pledging a clean lifestyle, and it turns out he’s knocked up some girl he just met?”
“Whatever, man, you were seeing that girl in Ohio.”
“We were pen pals! She’s in the scene!”
“She was until she graduated.”
“True Till College, man.”
Jude shot a look at Delph and Kram, reminding them to keep quiet. “Johnny really . . . cares about her,” Jude said, even though he hadn’t seen him acknowledge Eliza in days. “He’s trying to help her.”
“I’m sure he’s helping himself to her upstairs right now,” someone said.
“I wish he was down here, though. I want him to do Xs on my hands.”
“We could borrow his kit,” said someone else.
“No way,” said Jude. “He’d kill us.”
“We can do our own,” said Kram. He peeled up the sleeve of his T-shirt, showing off the poke-and-stick tattoo he’d given himself at age fourteen. KRAM. It was inscribed across his meaty shoulder, in haphazard pointillist fashion. In Jude’s opinion, no one should take advice from a kid who did his own tattoo backward, but the guys lit up. “All you need is some India ink and a needle.”
Jude stepped over the sleeping bags and went to Harriet’s desk drawer. “Is this India ink?” he asked, holding up two black bottles. For once, he was glad to have an artist for a mother. In the sewing basket above the sink, he found a cloth tomato stabbed with needles.
Delph went first. No one was pussying out of this one. He offered Kram the back of his hand, eight other heads bent over them in a huddle. By the time Kram was done with one leg of the X, the rest of the room had begun their own, dipping the needles in the flame of one of Harriet’s candles, then running them under hot water. Jude paired up with the kid with the missing teeth, tracing his Magic-Markered Xs, blotting up the blood with a rag, then another when he’d soaked the first, so much blood that it was hard to see what he was doing. Then the kid did Jude’s. Only the right hand—the left was too scarred from the fire at the temple. The tattoo hurt more than he’d thought it would. It took a long time. Toward the end, exhausted and numb, Jude fell in and out of sleep.
The single X, Jude saw when he woke the next morning, was dark and fat and a little crooked, and still crusty with ink. He sat up. Everyone was asleep, feet in faces, asses in armpits, mouths quivering a lullaby of snores. His head was heavy, and he felt as if he’d been pelted by several baseballs. He lay down again, but he couldn’t fall asleep—he kept opening his eyes to look at his hand. As long as he had a hand, this X would be on it. X marks the spot. Jude was here.
Harriet and Prudence were at the kitchen counter, eating breakfast and sharing the