Real Live Boyfriends Read Online Free PDF Page B

in the ground.
    Uncle Hanson was drinking from a flask, sitting on the hood of his rental car.
    My mom was furious with me.
    I didn’t feel like laughing anymore.
    Another video clip:
    Hutch is in Kevin Oliver’s greenhouse repotting a bonsai tree. His haircut is growing out and he has it tied off his face with a blue bandana. His acne flares in the summer heat, so his forehead and chin look swol en and irritated.
    Roo: (behind the camera) I’m asking people to define words for me. It’s a project for my film school applications. You’re my first victim .
    Hutch: Rock on .
    Roo: So. What’s your definition of love?
    Hutch: (laughs) Nature’s way of tricking people into reproducing .
    Roo: Come on .
    Hutch: A reason people kill themselves .

    Roo: Ahem. Would you like to know why you’re single?
    Hutch: (smiles regretfully) Oh, I know why I’m single .
    Hutch has been going to school with me since kindergarten. He’s been a roly-poly1 since seventh grade due to a tragic case of acne, the cruelty of middle schoolers and a tendency to quote retro metal lyrics
    in
    place
    of
    making
    ordinary
    human
    conversation. He works for my dad as an assistant gardener, and somehow we’ve become friends.
    Just from proximity, I guess.
    And because everyone else at Tate Prep shuns us.
    Anyway, Hutch is funny, once he starts talking. He doesn’t like his parents much, and they don’t seem to like him either, since they never come to any school events. He seems to think hanging out with my dad and eating raw food for dinner at our house is preferable to whatever he might be doing at home, so he’s around a fair amount. I’m taking his cinematic education in hand. We made our own documentary film festival that we named The Kirk Hammett Festival of Truth and Glory, Hammett being Hutch’s favorite guitar player and subject of the best movie in our whole series: Metallica: Some Kind of Monster , which is all about a dysfunctional metal band in group psychotherapy. We also saw this film about a guy who lived with grizzly bears (until they ate him) and another about all the incredible grossness of fast food.2
    More from the Hutch interview in the greenhouse: Roo: What’s your definition of popularity?
    Hutch: I used to think people were popular because they were good-looking, or nice, or funny, or good at sports .
    Roo: Aren’t they?
    Hutch: I’d think, If I could just be those things, I’d—you know—have more friends than I do. But in seventh grade, when Jackson and those guys stopped hanging out with me, I tried as hard as I could to get them to like me again. But then … (shaking his head as if to clear it) I don’t really wanna talk about it .
    Roo: What happened?
    Hutch: They just did some ugly stuff to me is all. And really, it was for the best .
    Roo: Why?
    Hutch: Because I was cured. I realized the popular people weren’t nice or funny or great-looking. They just had power, and they actually got the power by teasing people or humiliating them—so people bonded to them out of fear .
    Roo: Oh .
    Hutch: I didn’t want to be a person who could act like that. I didn’t want to ever speak to any person who could act like that .
    Roo: Oh .
    Hutch: So then I wasn’t trying to be popular anymore .
    Roo: Weren’t you lonely?
    Hutch: I didn’t say it was fun. (He bites his thumbnail, bonsai dirt and all.) I said it was for the best .

    After Grandma’s funeral, and after Hanson went home to crawl into whatever hole he lives in, Dad had to clear through Grandma’s things and field condolence notes from all her friends. One afternoon, he came home from walking Polka-dot with tears streaming down his face.
    The next day I found him weeping into a pot of miniature roses. And from then on it was pretty typical to have him sobbing into his salad at dinner, or to find him lying on the couch in the morning, insomniac, staring at the ceiling fan with a quivering lip.
    Mom got progressively impatient with him—she’d say things