You Are Not a Stranger Here - Adam Haslett [17]
I found the class entrancing for another reason: the chance to be with Gramm Slater, an angry, cherub-faced boy who wore steel-tip boots and a baseball cap pulled over his brow. He stood a head above the other kids, already as large framed as my father, his forearms covered in a layer of golden hair. His lips curled easily into a sneer and his eyes were full of mockery. When he caught me gazing at him, he’d smirk knowingly, like an angel. Twice our shoulders had touched in the cafeteria line.
On a Friday afternoon a few weeks after my father died, Mr. Raffello began explaining the use of clamps. The thermos of gin I’d washed my sloppy joe down with at lunch made concentration a challenge but like a good student, I held on to my bench and remained upright. It struck me our teacher might be an inhabitant of some kingdom of middle earth, with his rickety frame and nose jutting over his mouth like a cliff above the entrance of a cave. His voice sounded like the bass notes of an organ.
“The instrument is here in your hand. You’ve sanded your wood. You’ve applied your glue. The time for the clamp has arrived.”
Eyes in the class fluttered shut as his bony hands began turning the rod. Steel squeaked in the thread. I imagined the sound as the creaking of a ferry’s oar in its lock as we pulled away from the shore.
Leaning into the noise, I watched Gramm on the stool beside me. He sat hunched forward. Through his worn cotton T-shirt, I traced the perfect arch of his spine. I wanted him to look at me. I wanted him to touch me. I didn’t care how.
My foot reached out and tapped him on the shin.
“What the fuck?” he whispered, his sneer coming to life.
I suppose the incident could have ended there, but the expression on his face, the way his eyes narrowed and his upper lip flared off his front teeth, appeared to me so beautiful I couldn’t stand to see it fade. I swung my foot back and hammered him on the calf. This brought a wonderful color to his cheeks.
“Cut the shit!” he said in a louder whisper, turning the heads of our neighboring carpenters. The sound had traveled up to the front of the industrial arts studio, where Mr. Raffello cast his ancient eye to us and said, “If you never learn to clamp, you never learn to build.”
I swung again, nailing Gramm in the ankle. He jumped off his stool and I thought he’d punch me right then, but instead he paused. The scraping of the other students’ chairs filled the room. If there was a fight we both knew he’d win. I sensed the amazement in him at what he was about to do, the sheer pleasure of an excuse for rage. At last it came, his fist planted just under my heart like a battering ram against the gates of a castle. The air rushed from my lungs and I fell backward onto a low bench. Looking up, I saw him closing on me. My muscles went limp. I waited for his tackle.
But Mr. Raffello had reached Gramm by then and he stepped between us.
GRAMM STARTED CALLING me faggot and dissed me in front of my classmates, who were appalled he could do such a thing to someone who everyone knew had lost both his parents in a year. Most people thought silence was kindest. But whenever he and I saw each other on our street or at the supermarket where I bagged groceries, he showed a sullen kind of interest in me.
On a Saturday in the beginning of March, he came in the store to buy orange juice and asked me what I was doing that night. I told him nothing, and he laughed. He said if I didn’t want to be a loser my whole life I should come to his house, where he planned to get drunk.
I arrived at about ten o’clock, expecting a party. As it turned out, Gramm was alone. His eyes were bloodshot and he smelled of dope. He offered me a vodka and orange as soon as we got into the kitchen.
“Where’s your mom?” I asked.
“She went shopping somewhere for the weekend.”
Mrs. Slater had been divorced three times and was very rich as a result of it. The house had six bedrooms and was built in the style of an old Southern mansion. Small computer