ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
THE HIDDEN LIVES OF VIRGINS
After a lifetime of living in the shadow of dazzling Mackenzie Foster, Vaughan Fitzgerald is cutting lose. Sophomore year at Jamnia High School will be different. But he doesn't know just how different. He can't stop having visions, he can't stop seeing saints and now his dead mother keeps visiting him in the middle of the night. Add to this Mackenzie, the All-American altar boy is in love. With another boy. Add to that the troubles of a disaffected Tina Foster, her homeless would-be boyfriend, and Madeleine Fitzgerald's battle with Tina's twin, Ashley, to see who can sleep with the most football players before the year's over. The mess has just begun. Riding trains, hopping buses, stealing cars, sleeping in warehouses, and having visions these are the hidden lives of some of the virgins of Jamnia, Ohio.
P A R T
O N E
JATI
O where can I go from your spirit
Or where can I flee from your face?
If I climb the heavens you are there.
If I lay in the grave you are there.
- The Book of Psalms
C H A P T E R
O N E
AILEEN FOSTER BRACED herself.
All that summer Martina had been going on about how things had to change and how now they finally would. Last week, after saving up all summer for her daughter’s wardrobe, Aileen had said to her, “We’ll go shopping for your Back-To-School clothes on Sunday. After Mass.”
But Tina had shaken her head and said, “I’ll go shopping. I saved up some money.”
This had perplexed Aileen, but she’d told Tina, “Well, I’ll just give you the money and you can get what you want.”
“No, Mother. I don’t think so,” Tina shook her head. “It’s your money, and I’m going to buy things I don’t think you’d like. Nothing slutty. Just... you’d hate it.”
Aileen opened her mouth to protest, but Tina had said, “Trust me, Mother.”
She didn’t say Mama with a winsome smile the way Ashley did. Martina’s tone was all business and not open for debate. Trust me.
So the first time Aileen had braced herself was when Tina did come home with the clothes.
“Where from?”
“Goodwill. And the Episcopal church was having a bazaar.”
Aileen reached into a bag and pulled out a white, frilled blouse that looked like it had been donated by a pirate’s wench. Then she examined a leather vest.
“I certainly hope you plan on washing these before you wear them.”
“I do,” she said, gently taking the suede vest from the other woman’s hands. “See why I told you I would spend my own money?”
“Well you can still have the money I saved for you,” Aileen said.
“Put it in my account. For when I really need it.”
“Like prom?”
“You’re joking, right?” she’d said.
Aileen was standing in the kitchen combing out her long hair, whitish blond, touched with honey brown. The kitchen was a mess. Tina would simply have to clean it when she got home. Or one of the other kids. Kenzie maybe. Mackenzie pelted down the steps.
“Is your sister finished yet?” Aileen demanded.
“No, Mom. Have a good day, Mom. Love you Mom.”
The door opened and swung shut behind him.
Aileen was not entirely sure what her fifteen year old looked liked anymore. She had meant to ask him to clean the kitchen. At the table Ryan began to twitch.
“Oh, honey, knock that off. You know I can’t take it right now.”
Ryan Foster, unapologetic, twitched on.
Aileen looked from her son to the empty stairway that led up from the kitchen. The footsteps were deliberate. Tina was about to make her appearance.
Last night, after dinner, Tina had announced the need to go see her grandmother. Aileen, having grown up in Ida Lawry’s house, thought that sending her already crazed eldest daughter down to the house on Windham Street with her mother and two aunts was like sending Macbeth to the heath. Tina had returned late, with a look of triumph on her face.
“Did your grandmother have anything to say to me?” Aileen asked. She was sitting in the kitchen smoking a cigarette.
“No,” Tina said breezily, heading up the stairs with the bag of whatever Ida and her sisters had given her.
“Martina Renee Foster,” Aileen pronounced the name as her daughter came into the kitchen.
Ryan stopped twitching and shouted out, “Goddamn motherfucker!” And then clapped his hands over his mouth.
“Shit fuck!” he shouted again.
Aileen ignored him.
Tina’s lips, black with lipstick, smiled beatifically. She took out her Marlboro Reds and lit one, taking a long drag, and then blowing out smoke. She was shorter than her mother. Her very long once luxuriantly blond hair was blue-black. She was wearing hip hugger red felt bellbottoms and rainbow colored flip-flops. She held a macramé handbag in one hand, and her book bag in the other. She was wearing the pirate blouse.
“How do I look?”
“Like you’re dressed to go to hell.”
It was then that Aileen realized that Tina was wearing a rosary around her neck.
“That’s exactly where I’m going,” Tina said, taking another drag. “But don’t worry. I graduate from it in June.”
“Well, they’ll never think you’re Ashley’s twin now,” Aileen said as her daughter headed out the door.
Tina grinned as the storm door shut behind her and said, “That’s kind of what I was looking for.”
WHEN MADELEINE FITZGERALD AND CLAUDIA Daniels saw Martina the first time, the two Black girls had to look twice at the sight, and then a third time when they realized it was their friend.
She parked the old red LTD in the place closest to the football field and then, seeing the look on her friends’ faces, Tina started to shimmy toward them, blowing out smoke and shaking her titties.
“Oh, my God,” Madeleine swore as Claudia offered a hand to help Tina ascend the bleachers.
“What are we watching, ladies?” Tina said in her husky voice.
“Girl, you!” said Claudia. “You look crazy as hell.”
“I like it,” Madeleine said.
“You would,” Claudia told her cousin.
“Thank you, Maddy,” Tina said. “Care for a morning ciggy?” She offered up her Marlboros.
“It’s the only way to start the day.”
Coach Foster—Tina’s father—blew the whistle. Young men in white ran across the field and pummeled a dummy. Tina blew out smoke.
“So how’s Rodder playing out there?” Tina asked.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Madeleine said.
“What I’m talking about, bitch,” Tina exhaled, “is why would we be out here watching the football team practice, and at seven forty-five in the blessed fucking morning, if you weren’t checking out Rodder Gonzales?”
Madeleine shook out her thick, black hair and said to her friend, “How do you know I’m not looking at Bone McArthur?”
None of the girls could hold a straight face then.
Kevin blew the whistle again. Recently, his mind was not always with him. Aileen tended to say it had never been with him. For a brief second he was caught up in what an amazing blue the sky was this morning and... Why the hell were they practicing night and morning? And... The girls on the bleachers. That weird one with the cigarette, crossing her legs…
If she were my daughter... Kevin thought and shouted, dropping the whistle from his lips and clapping, “Rush! Rush!”
There were two assistant coaches and this year he’d left selection up to them, for ethic’s sake. Ross was a Freshmen, and Kevin couldn’t have selected his own son for his team.
Ross—right over there making fast friends with some of the older guys—would be one hell of a linebacker, was built like a brick. He looked more like Kevin’s brother, Todd, than like Kevin. Kevin admitted that in high school he’d had brains and been a good athlete. He’d managed to fuck that up by the time he was sixteen. In the house on Logan Street, though, all the gifts had been divided up among three boys. Mackenzie had been athletic, still was a little, but had no interest in football. He was the brain and the heartbreaker, a little unfair. Ross would be the jock and a bit of a heartbreaker himself. Ryan had gotten the weirdness. All he could do was twitch and stare. To make matters worse, Ryan was the only boy who looked just like him. Ryan had his father’s sharp, elfin features and his blue eyes. Kevin would come downstairs in the morning to see his own image smirking at him—Ryan always smirked—sitting there virtually saying, “Look at me, Dad. I’m fucked up.”
Kevin blew the whistle. He seemed to be all there. No one knew he wasn’t. People did not know that around the football coach’s head the world twirled very, very slowly, and tilted... Just a little bit.
CEDRIC FITZGERALD OPENED HIS EYES TO THE MORNING. Through his open window he could hear Kevin Foster’s whistle blowing on the football field. He lay in bed a little longer before turning to the clock. It was not yet eight.
Of late Cedric’s joints were not saying kind things when they talked to him as he rose. This morning to celebrate the departure of the children for another nine months he had not made breakfast or gotten up on time.
Now he climbed out of bed naked as birth, reached for his Pall Malls, took one out and lit it. He inhaled. And it was good.
Cedric stood at the window, watching the would-be football players, white ants on the green, chalk marked grass, watching Kevin Foster blow his whistle, watching the sun rise behind the expanse of Jamnia High School.
“Goddamn,” he said, exhaling white smoke, “Another day.”
For Vaughan William Alexander Fitzgerald, the last four years of school had been as much a trial as pronouncing his name. Things had been fine up until about fifth grade. It had begun in fourth grade when girls began to hate him for no apparent reason, and then he had gone myopic, and had to put on glasses, another downfall. And then the frequent trips to the ice cream truck, paid for negligently by his father, had taken their toll. Not much of a toll, but in childhood any excuse to call another child a fatass will do.
And it did.
And he was bookish and uncoordinated. Life at Our Lady of Jamnia Catholic School had been bearable at best, a misery on most days. To his credit, it had never driven him to tears. Very little ever did.
And Vaughan had been blessed with a brain so he didn’t have to work very hard. Still, he wasn’t valedictorian of his class. That went to Mackenzie Foster who was handsome, intelligent, kind, gentle, athletic, everything a boy should be, everything a girl could have a crush on, everything you wanted in a friend.
He was Vaughan’s best friend.
Sometimes Vaughan hated his best friend.
Mackenzie had never been awkward or uncoordinated. He had never had to struggle for attention. Girls talked about how hot he was—how could a thirteen year old be hot!—and all the guys listened to whatever he said. When he was captain of teams in gym he was always kind and picked his uncoordinated best friend first for which Vaughan was grateful and resentful in equal parts. And when Mackenzie wasn’t captain he was always first pick by whoever was. Vaughan languished until Mackenzie went up and whispered to whoever was captain, and then Vaughan was called to that team.
The good thing about high school was that there was only one in town, and it was public and most of the kids at Our Lady of Jamnia were going to be shipped across the river to Indiana to attend either Saint Xavier’s for boys or Saint Mary’s for the girls. The families with lots of money were going to send their kids to Uz, Ohio where there was, admittedly, not much, but there was Saint Michael’s Men’s College Prep and Saint Anne’s, run by the Sisters of Notre Dame.
Out of the whole class of forty- eight, it would be Vaughan, Mackenzie, Joe Patalca and two very pimply faced girls who would go to Jamnia High School.
“I’m glad they’re out of our life,” Mackenzie said one afternoon in his bedroom. “They were all a bunch of snobs.”
Vaughan thought his friend was incredibly naive.
“They loved you,” he told Mackenzie.
Mackenzie smiled sadly and turned his blue eyed gaze on his best friend. “Vaughan, they didn’t love anybody.”
Then Mackenzie leapt up from the bed, shook his dorky friend by the shoulders and told him, “Oh, Vaughan! High school will be so much better! It really will. You’ll see. It’ll be the time!”
Vaughan had hoped a little bit that Mackenzie was right.
But only a little.
And Freshmen year had proven how wise that small hope had been.
Freshmen year:
It had begun with insult added to injury. Cedric had never been solicitous of his son’s wardrobe. In fact he had never had to be since Vaughan was in Catholic school, but now the boy was treated to all manner of taunts and ridicules. His jeans were not only the wrong sort, they were rolled, which was hopelessly out of style. His shirts were ugly. His hair was horrible. He talked like a book. Black people said he wasn’t Black enough. White people agreed. He faced being stuffed in a locker once or twice. Football players made fun of him. So did cheerleaders.
The only hope for him was to join the band—where everyone was a disgrace.
“I wish you would,” Mackenzie said.
“I can’t play an instrument.”
“You could do the triangle.”
Vaughan just looked at his friend through his glasses.
“I was actually serious,” Mackenzie said.
“I know.”
And Vaughan couldn’t figure our where Mackenzie had learned to play an instrument either. What’s more, being on the band did not make Mackenzie less popular, though Coach Foster was a little upset his son did not try out for the football team.
And then there was Coach Foster. It was not his fault that he was the gym teacher, it was just that gym was even worse for Vaughan than math, and it was dreadful to be under a man who was his best friend’s father. Mercifully, Mackenzie was not in this class with Vaughan. It all had to do with what time math and foreign language classes took place. Mackenzie was taking French and he was in Algebra. Vaughan was in remedial math, taking Latin. So they wouldn’t see each other much that year.
What Vaughan had was his sister, who was an outcast in a whole other way. Dating the quarterback, beautiful and glamorous, Madeleine Fitzgerald was an outcast. He had Claudia who had cast herself out and Tina who had done the same and seemed doomed to live in the shadow of her sister.
Ashley was no outcast.
Nor was she worth talking about, and so they didn’t.
However, due to the advanced math class on Mackenzie’s part, extreme loneliness on the part of Vaughan, and learning how to cheat a little when it suited him, Vaughan learned at the end of his Freshmen year that he had the highest GPA by far in his class. Some boy he didn’t know was a distant second. Fourth place was held by Mackenzie.
“I’m so proud of you!” Mackenzie said, shaking his friend, which made Vaughan ashamed for feeling triumphant.
The year came to an end with high school as bad as ever, Vaughan a laughingstock, though a brilliant one, who’d narrowly missed being shut in lockers by basketball players. He was sitting on the large front porch of the Fitzgerald house, Coke bottle glasses down his nose, raspberry colored Argyle socks pulled up to his knees, and looking to his right, to the high school across the field when he made a discovery. Vaughan at the age of fifteen learned what most people never learned at all. It wasn’t high school or any other thing or place that would change him or how people looked at him. It was all him.
And now he was about to change his image.
He and Mackenzie went with Tina that day to buy her wardrobe, and after Tina had treated herself to an assortment of oddities, they went to shop for Vaughan. As they drove away from the Goodwill in the battered red LTD, Tina lowered her shades and said to Vaughan, “Do you know what you’re looking for?”
“I know exactly what I’m looking for.”
“Should we go to Marshall Fields or- ”
Vaughan shook his head. “We can get it all at Target.”
Tina lowered her glasses, smiled at Vaughan and said, “That’s why I love you.”
Vaughan marched into the store, picked up a red basket and made his way through shaving and hygiene, and then picked up Hawaiian shirts, button down shirts, solid, brilliant violent colors all of them. Slacks, cargo pants, he even bought underwear. The thong kind because it looked cool and he was tired of these tired briefs. He bought shades, and then he bought a thin glass frame, popped out his Coke bottles lenses and stuck them in those.
“How do I look?” he smiled.
“Triumphant,” Tina replied.
Mackenzie nodded.
Vaughan had already bought silk shirts out of style for thirty years and double pocketed yellow and sky blue bowling shirts, one white shirt with blue blossoms running up and down it at the rummage sale.
“What are you planning to do?” Mackenzie asked him as he stuffed that shirt into a bag.
“Look like no one else will look.”
Mackenzie nodded. He had settled for looking like everyone else wanted to look.
After Target, Vaughan bought two shirts with dragons running up and down their lapels and one shirt with bright yellow bell peppers going up and down along the button holes. Then, for added pizzazz, bandannas: yellow, navy, bright blue, violent red.
“It’s like getting ready for a parade,” he said and smiled.
After he checked out, Tina told her brother and her friend to go to the car. She came back a few minutes later with a smile and handed Vaughan a pack of Lucky Strikes.
“Tina!” Mackenzie protested moving to snatch away the cigarettes. But Vaughan beat him to the punch.
“The transformation’s just not complete unless you do,” Tina said. And to illustrate she took a cigarette out and lit one herself.
She had been blond then.
Tina’s soft knock on Mackenzie’s door the night before school prompted a whispered, “Come in,” from him.
In the opening and shutting of the door a line of light briefly crossed the room. Tina came to sit on the bed smelling of Grandma Ida’s perfume and four different types of cigarette smoke.
“Did I wake you?” Tina asked.
“No. I was just trying to sleep. No luck.”
“Wanna see?”
“See what?”
“The new me?”
“What?”
Tina reached over her brother and turned on the light.
“Oh my- ” Mackenzie started, but Tina put a hand over his mouth.
When she had removed it, he said, “Your hair!”
“I know,” Tina nodded, smiling.
“What... the... I don’t- ”
“Grandma gave me the dye. I told her and Aunt Meg and Aunt Ally I had to have black hair.”
“But it was so pretty before.”
“But blond is so played out.”
“Thanks,” Mackenzie said wryly.
Tina smiled with equal sarcasm and said, “Except with you, Kenzie. Everything is lovely on you.”
“I know.” Then he said, “This is so you can be totally different from Ash. Isn’t it?”
“This is so I can be totally different from everybody.”
“But especially from Ash.”
“Has it ever occurred to you that Vaughan is doing the same thing?” Tina said.
“Vaughan just wants to change his image.”
“And be different from everybody else?”
“He already is.”
“And be different from you.”
“What?” Mackenzie sat up in bed.
“I can’t believe you didn’t even think about that. He decided to evolve in the complete opposite direction that you did. You dress out of Abercrombie and Fitch magazines. You wear Banana Republic to bed. You’re a catalogue for Aeropostale and American Eagle Outfitters. You’re hip.”
The look on Mackenzie’s face was tragic.
“It’s no sin,” Tina said. “But for those of us who don’t carry off hip well... counter hip is one hell of an option.”
Tina got up and flicked out the light.
“Good night, little brother,” she said.
So on the morning of the first day of their sophomore year, Mackenzie rushed over to the Fitzgeralds to see what Vaughan was wearing.
“Oh my God, you are so cool!” he cried out, shaking his best friend. “You’re like New York!”
“Only it’s Jamnia, Ohio,” Vaughan said, grabbing his Lucky Strikes, and slipping them into the breast pocket of his black shirt.
“Let’s roll, Tonto.”
Vaughan closed the old door to the house, and Mackenzie turned around to straighten his shirt and pat down his hair, looking at his reflection.
“You’re gorgeous. As always, Abercrombie,” Vaughan said.
“I wish you and Tina would stop saying stuff like that.”
“What?”
The two boys, completely dissimilar, plodded down the steps of the house, and, heading out the gate, turned right on Michael Street.
“Like that I’m an Abercrombie-holic and that I’m trendy and pretty and stuff like that.”
“And don’t forget popular,” Vaughan added.
“Vaughan!”
“What? There’s nothing wrong with being trendy and popular. You’ve always been trendy and popular, and I’ve always been me.”
Mackenzie stopped, jamming his hands into the pockets of his white trousers.
“Kenzie,” Vaughan said.
“Do you hate me?”
“Because you’re so beautiful?”
Mackenzie went red and said, “No. Seriously. Do you… not resent me? I mean, do you... ever hate me?”
“No,” Vaughan said loudly, hoping Mackenzie would not pick up on how loud a protest that was.
He didn’t.
“Good,” he smiled. It was a dazzling smile. You couldn’t hate him because it was natural with him. “Because you’re my best friend. You know that don’t you?”
Vaughan pushed his glasses up his nose and nodded.
“Yes, Mackenzie. I know.”
What Mackenzie also needed to know is that Vaughan’s new tactic would work.
“What do you mean?” Vaughan said as they approached the long walkway to their school. “I wanted to change. I wanted to be me. Now I am.”
“The new you?”
“No. The me that has been buried under Argyles and bad fashion, smoldering to come out for fifteen years. I’m coming out today. Everyone has a You,” Vaughan said, “deep inside that needs to come out.”
Mackenzie nodded and smiled.
“What’s the YOU in Mackenzie that hasn’t come out, yet?”
“Vaughan, you’re nuts. You know everything about me.”
“Nobody knows everything,” Vaughan differed. “Not even about themselves.”
Vaughan took out a cigarette and lit it, and Andrew Long—the basketball player that had referred to him as a “Gay-ass-sissy” last year looked at him, shocked.
Vaughan grinned at him and asked, “What the fuck are you looking at?”
Andrew Long stared at him, screwed his mouth up to say something, and then, confounded, turned his head and went through the glass doors into school.
“Oh, my God,” Mackenzie said, “My heart was pounding cause I thought we were going to have to fight.”
“My heart was pounding cause I wanted to fight,” Vaughan discovered, smiling brightly. Then he took a reflective drag on his cigarette and murmured, “I’m so glad I brought my switchblade.”
“Are you serious? You are serious,” Mackenzie realized.
Vaughan nodded.
“You’re also mental,” Mackenzie mumbled. Suddenly he knew that things were going to be very different this year.
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