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The Mostly Unfabulous Homepage of Ethan Green

 [Fiction]


 [Getting Off Clean cover]

From Chapter Four of Getting Off Clean

By Timothy Murphy



I get us two Sprites from the soda fountain behind the counter (which is not against the rules, I tell myself, because Sal says I can have all the drinks I want from the soda fountain. I'm doing nothing against the rules) and sit down across from him. He takes one sip from his drink, grimaces, says "Syrup," and doesn't touch it again.

"Where have you been since ten-thirty?" I ask him. I'm starting to worry about him creeping all over town.

"I hid out in some shrubs near these apartments right behind here. Two old guys walking by almost saw me, but I ducked down. I blend in, in the dark," he says preeningly.

"Not in that shirt you don't. You look like a sitting duck."

He leans in toward me and lowers his voice. "I took it off," he says, "and stuffed it in my pants."

"Oh," I say, blushing, which is what he wanted, I suppose, because he laughs, robustly. He pushes the paper bag across the table toward me. "I stole you a book from the library."

"From the West Mendhem Library?" All he needs, I think, is to get picked up for theft in the middle of West Mendhem. That would be the end of that.

"Of course not. From the J. Archibald Sloan Memorial Library of St. Banner Academy. Thirty-two thousand volumes and an international array of periodicals." Tonight, I'm noticing, he seems to be talking somewhat more to me and less to himself.

I pull out the book, and he laughs again when I see the title. It's an old hardcover copy of Ragged Dick by Horatio Alger. Inside, there's a yellow stained bookplate that says, "Property Sloan Library, St. Banner, 1924.

"Thanks," I say, wondering how much the gift is or isn't supposed to be a joke on me. "I haven't read any Alger yet."

"He's the patron saint of boys like you. Now you can write your college essay on how Ragged Dick inspired you to shoot for great heights of success."

Now I know the joke's on me, and I'm a little annoyed. "Don't you want to shoot for great heights of success?" I ask him. "You're the one who's going to one of the most prestigious schools in the country. You're the one with everything going for you."

He's quiet for a moment before he looks away and says, "Yes. I am charmed."

"So why don't you want to shoot for great success? Isn't that what you're trained to do up there?"

"My dear Mr. Fitzpatrick," he says, minutely examining his watch. "I am a success. I've already been successfully ejected from two of the finest institutions of secondary education on the Eastern Seaboard. And if I can maintain my dizzying record of success, I'll have been kicked out of the third by the end of the academic year."

His logic flabbergasts me. "You're trying to get kicked out of S.B.A.? I don't understand you."

"Actually, I'm trying not to get kicked out this semester, so I can go back to Virginia for the holidays and not upset my great-aunt, who will surely keel over and expire -- in a genteel, lace-curtain darky sort of way, of course -- if she gets one more letter of termination about me just before Christmas. No. If I get myself expulsed, I'll do it toward the end of second term, so I can leave directly for Paris from Boston and entirely avoid facing my great-aunt's broken heart."

"You're going to Paris this summer?"

"Most likely, yes."

"For the whole summer?"

"That depends. I may go to Florence as well. Or Greece, maybe." He looks at me sharply. "Why? Are you wondering why I don't work in the summers, like you?"

"I guess you don't have to, right?"

"Precisely." he pulls out a cigarette, lights it, inhales, blows the smoke out extravagantly through his nose, and taps the ashes into his untouched cup of Sprite. Only then does he lean over to me and enunciate quietly, "Because I am very filthy rich." Then he throws back his head and laughs.

"So?" is all I can think of to say. And all of a sudden IÕm getting a sick feeling that, in a funny way, has nothing at all to do with him. I shouldn't be here with him; it's wrong; I don't even know him, and even though we haven't done a thing, I know -- looking at him look at me, with some bombastic U2 song blaring in the background, Bono screeching "Sunday Bloody Blah-blah-blah." -- Oh shit, I think, I know where this is going. I know exactly where this is going.

Then, as if I've just told him all this, he draws my hands away from myself and pulls them toward the center of the Formica tabletop and puts his own hands over them. And he says, "I'm filthy rich. And you, Eric Fitzpatrick, are going to Yale University, which is certainly more than I can say. And you are getting the holy hell out of here."

"Thank you," I say, like an idiot, and suddenly, looking at his hands clasped motionlessly over mine, I start to cry, and with that, it's like everything's mixed in -- my home, my parents, my pregnant sister and my retarded sister, my brain-dead friends and good-for-shit hometown. It's like they all come chasing up out of the pit of my stomach and I upchuck them all over the table, in front of him. And then I can't believe it, I'm not crying, I'm sobbing, and I know I must sound like a choking fool.

"Look at you!" he says, laughing. "You're a mess! The little plugger, Eric Fitzpatrick, is a mess." And then he starts to sing, "Don't cry for me, B.J.'s Sub Shop/The truth is, I never left you..."

"Cut it out!" I say, but he's laughing now, and I can't help it, so do I. Then he takes both my hands up to his mouth, and he's kissing them all over, and I don't know whether to be horrified or to do the same. I'm still blubbering, and he seems so intent on my hands. And I take just one of his peculiar slender hands in my own, and draw my head closer to his, hunched in, and hold his fist to my eyes and forehead, and he does the same. I'm quieting down, then, and we just stay that way for what seems like forever, in the dark, scored only by hit radio. I can smell his breath -- it smells like cigarettes and some kind of pungent wood, maybe cedar -- and I can hear it too, short and constrained, like he's in a bush, hiding, which is exactly the way mine sounds, too.

Finally, he whispers to me, "Do you want to go somewhere?"

"Uh-huh," I whisper back, but I can't seem to make it sound quiet enough.

"Okay," he whispers. "Lock up. Let's go."

Copyright © l997, Timothy Murphy.



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