The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait Read Online Free PDF Page B

Catholic education at Bishop McGuinness High School, where he soon had a girlfriend named Sally, who struck me as stupid but nice. Because she couldn’t keep her hands off my brother, he liked to find pretexts for bringing her into my room like a prize monkey. I had narrow beds arranged in an L-shape with an eight-track stereo built into the corner table, and those two would wrestle around to the music while I sat chastely abashed on the other bed. In fact I felt sorry for the girl: she gazed at my brother with a kind of vacant adoration that, I could tell, was already grating on his nerves; also her father was a third-rate shyster named Wayne who liked to be called Dr. Wayne because of his Juris Doctor. Sally’s fate was sealed by my father’s gleeful teasing: “Son,” he’d say to my brother, “I have this bad pain in my asshole. Next time you see Dr. Wayne, could you ask him to have a look?”
    I envied such dilemmas as a vulgar, stupid girlfriend who put out. I was unpopular at my new school and very depressed about it. I’d done everything wrong. At my other school I’d been the kind of audacious wit whom other seventh-grade boys tend to emulate and elect class president; eager to reestablish myself as such, I regaled my new homeroom with what I thought was a spot-on imitation of Linda Blair in The Exorcist . Nobody laughed; nobody had seen The Exorcist . My teacher was so embarrassed for me that he chose to ignore this sudden eruption of guttural profanity. Perhaps he thought I was nuts. In a flustered way he cast about for a change of subject and didn’t look at me the rest of the period. My next class was Spanish, where we were given a diagnostic quiz to determine how much of the language we’d retained over the summer. I’d retained nothing, since I hadn’t taken Spanish in seventh grade like the rest of my classmates; nevertheless, I gamely copied a few sentences from my neighbor’s paper. I hadn’t gotten far when our teacher, Miss Hernandez, asked if I was cheating.
    “No!”
    The woman snapped up my quiz. “Yo soy Mateo,” she read aloud (this appeared under the prompt “Tell us about yourself in Spanish”), and everybody laughed, including Miss Hernandez and Matt, the guy sitting next to me.
    I sat alone in the cafeteria that day. My old friend Brian, who was in a different homeroom, already knew of my disgrace and was pointedly avoiding me. I was aware of people murmuring around me, about me, and I could hardly swallow my food. Finally we adjourned to the playground. I was thinking I’d ask a teacher for permission to go to the bathroom, where I could hide in the stalls until the bell rang, when somebody called my name. It was Brian, surrounded by his smiling, waving friends. Elated, I trotted over.
    “See the top of the monkey bars?” said Mark Roach, the funniest kid in school. He pointed at the knobby apex and I nodded. “The first person to touch that thing in the middle wins. Ready? . . . Go!”
    We all clambered up. Galvanized by what I thought was some kind of redemptive crucible, I beat the others easily and slapped my hand on the knob. It came away sticky. The others were laughing as they jumped off the bars and ran away. They’d each taken turns hawking loogies on the top knob to see if I was really as lame as everyone said. I’d passed the test with flying colors.
    For the rest of that first month or so, my only friend was a kid named Weldon, whose claim to fame was twofold: (a) he had the oldest parents in school, older than most of our grandparents, and (b) he liked to hit himself on his shaggy, oversized head with rocks whenever people happened to be looking. We both collected comic books. Later I teased him mercilessly by way of distancing myself once I’d gotten more suitable friends, and because I suspected that Weldon and I were a pair of sorts, and I didn’t want to be a pair with Weldon. Not long ago I heard that Weldon had died, and my only surprise was that