by Alex DiFrancesco
In high school, Edwin Frank’s older sister told everyone that he’d eaten lead paint as a child, and that was why he was so weird. This was back when weird was more a burden to the normal than something more diagnosable and thereby understandable. Lead paint was something people could get a handle on, an accident that could be nodded over sagely. Weird was something people felt entitled to torment. Weird was a choice not to be normal.
No one thought to question Edwin’s sister, even though both she and Edwin had grown up in a brand new house in a brand new development, years after the common usage of lead paints. Edwin became the lead paint kid. No one said that to him, of course. The time for torment was over. He didn’t get his head flushed down the toilet anymore after that (yes, they did that), or get excluded from lunch groups. The long spaces between what was said and what was his reply were accepted as that’s just Edwin.
It’s so tragic, I heard a girl named Megan say one day. Megan was a girl who was on the yearbook committee, in the homecoming court, and many charity initiatives that belied how cutting the words that often came out of her mouth were. Can you imagine the hospital bills for diagnostic testing? The therapy bills?
I overheard her words from a different lunch table; we were certainly not at the same lunch table. I saw the wheels turning in her perfectly coiffed head.
#
Teeth are terrifying, Edwin said to me one day.
Excuse me? I’d said. Edwin and I were sitting, by chance, at the same study hall table. We were, by the standards of our peers, roughly equal in social standing now. Our physical persons more often gravitated towards the same space than they once had, with his station raised by the lead paint compassion. I was still just a bit too weird, drawing superheroes in my notebooks and dreaming of a future in comic book illustration. Maybe I was a little too dramatic, when I look back. I was certainly not safe from ridicule, from having my notebooks stolen, from a fist shooting out of nowhere to crumple a drawing, but I also hadn’t faced the degree of torment Edwin once had. Maybe it was that boys were more physically mean to each other, I still haven’t figured it out. He might have been a bit above me, socially, after the lead paint thing.
Teeth, Edwin said after a while. You ever pull your lips apart and look at your teeth? I mean, really look at them. They’re like these weird little bits of your skeleton poking out of your face, hidden behind all this red and pink.
What? I said. I just wanted to go back to my drawing.
Teeth, Edwin said. Sometimes I just imagine a whole row of pictures of them, then a whole block, just all these teeth with these drawn back lips. So gross.
I looked down at my notebook. I mean, I was weird, I knew it. But this kid was so weird.
#
Edwin’s sister, Alicia, was pretty. Really pretty. She had long black hair and bright blue eyes, and after everyone started to believe that Edwin was a lead paint casualty, they seemed to see how pretty she was too. She wasn’t just the sister of that weird kid Edwin anymore, who yelled at people who were mean to him. She was compassionate, loving, and beautiful.
I heard Megan talking about her from the table next to mine at lunch.
Alicia’s practically a saint, she said. And she’d look so great with some slate grey eyeshadow and just a little lip gloss.
One day when Alicia was walking into the cafeteria, Megan motioned her over to sit with her. She was so close she was almost touching me. I pressed down harder in the notebook I was drawing in next to my lunch tray full of taco-in-a-bag. She tossed her long hair and it brushed past mine, pulling strands of mine along with it.
When I looked up, Edwin was sitting at the table I was at. There were other people, too, people I knew well enough to sit with, but hardly talked to. They were who you’d expect—the sci-fi kids, the pre-blockbuster-films Tolkien fans, the comic book kids, the D&D kids. We hung together in a safety herd. That was how it was.
Before I knew it, there was a lot more chatter at the table than usual. Edwin had picked up a conversation between two D&D players. He was acting out Burning Hands to everyone, and, to my surprise, the lunch table was delighted. No inside jokes cutting him down. No get-him-before-he-gets-us wordplay. Everyone was smiling.
At the next table, Alicia smiled, too. She came over and sat at our table.
She sat next to me.
Thanks for letting Edwin sit with you guys, she whispered to me. It’s nice to see him making friends.
#
A few weeks later, I still am astounded to say, I found myself in Alicia’s bedroom, both of us naked from the waist down, my legs wrapped around her hips, kissing while we explored each other with our fingers. I would pretend to like her brother all day, every day, if only she let me keep doing exactly what I was doing in that moment.
We learned how to make each other orgasm through a process of trial and error that took place each time her parents left the house. I fell in love with her lips pressed into my shoulder, trying to mute the sounds of her pleasure.
We can’t tell anybody, she’d said once, which pretty much broke my heart. I pretended to be as callous and brave as any action hero. I got it. Weird was a choice. So was gay. That’s what they believed, right? You could just be normal, why wouldn’t you? Alicia and Edwin had just narrowly avoided so much misery with the lead paint story.
Once, when we were laying there naked, she said, There’s nothing wrong with my brother.
I kissed her on the mouth. I don’t want to talk about Edwin. I’d rather do this.
I mean it, she’d said. They’ve done so many tests. He’s just weird, anxious, but that’s not a crime, you know?
Then, There was never any lead paint.
I know, I said. I figured that out, I’m not dumb like the rest of them. But the story worked—look at you, look at Edwin. Nobody bothers him anymore.
She stroked my hair. She liked my comic book drawings, she thought I had real talent. She maybe even loved me, if I could even think of being that lucky.
In the next room, we could hear Edwin laughing his ass off about something that sounded like beeps and blips, not even real television. I wondered what the hell he was up to, and I thought of his rows and blocks of pictures of teeth.
#
A tree, Edwin said, leaning close to me at the lunch table.
What, Edwin? I replied.
I want to be buried in the roots of a tree when I die, so it grows all around me, he said.
I thought about it. It helped that Alicia squeezed my hand, secretly, under the table. If one of the stoner kids had said it, his friends would look at him like he was so deep and profound.
Why couldn’t Edwin say it, too?
#
Alicia kept getting pulled over to Megan’s table, the table full of the kids who did the activities, who had the good-but-not-great grades, who played the sports, who had the friends. Megan kept grabbing Alicia by the arm, locking hers in her own, and pulling her close to talk to her. When one of the basketball players at her table saw me watching, he leaned over and said low, so only I heard it, What’re you, some kind of dyke? I looked back down at my notebook.
Alicia got involved in yearbook, she got involved in spirit squad, she got involved in drama club. I got Edwin. I got told by her parents when I called that she wasn’t in, but they’d be happy to relay the message that I’d phoned.
She had so much more time to do things without having to look out for her brother. What she didn’t have time for was me.
Next to me at the lunch table, Edwin was talking to people who’d been my friends, kind of. We hadn’t talked much, but they’d never talked to him. Now they were his friends in ways they’d never been mine. All because of the lead paint story.
We should plan a fundraiser, I heard Megan whisper to a friend one day when Alicia had left the table. Alicia and Edwin’s parents aren’t rich. They would probably appreciate it, with the lead paint treatments and all.
Jesus! I found myself turning and yelling. There’s no lead paint. There was never any lead paint. They grew up in a house build in the ‘80s!
It was like the whole room stopped. Everyone’s eyes were on me. Alicia had approached the table without me noticing. She was looking at me for the first time in months.
Why would you say that? she said, as if I’d punched her.
Because it’s true. He’s just weird. He’s goddamn weird.
Everyone was looking at Alicia and Edwin. This changed everything.
He ate it at our grandparents’ house! Alicia yelled, and ran out of the room.
I looked down at the paper I’d been drawing on. Suddenly, Edwin’s hand appeared, crumpling it into a destroyed ball.
#
These stories end with the weird kids making good, right? Not really, not this one. I’m not a comic book artist. I work a boring clerical job.
No one really thought much about what I’d said, beyond me being a heartless jerk. It passed. I walked through the rest of my high school days relatively unscathed, if a few layers lower on the social strata.
College came and went; I was less weird, but not really any more liked. By the time I came out as gay, it was a non-issue. Everyone had already suspected.
One day, long after I’d graduated, I was on Facebook and saw a suggestion for a group I might like to join. It was called Best Lunch Table. It was the first time I’d seen many of these faces in years. I looked at it long enough to see that Edwin, now an avant-garde performer in San Francisco, moderated it kindly, generously, and with great joy.
Alex DiFrancesco is a writer of fiction, creative nonfiction, and journalism. Their work has appeared in The Washington Post, Tin House, Brevity, and more. In spring 2019, they will publish both an essay collection called Psychopomps (Civil Coping Mechanisms Press) and a novel called All City (Seven Stories Press). They’ll be spending part of the summer at SAFTA’s Firefly Farm writer’s residency in Tennessee, and going to Graceland.