Misconception Read online

  Misconception

  Also by Ryan Boudinot

  The Littlest Hitler

  Misconception

  Ryan Boudinot

  To my mother and father.

  The Pacific Northwest.

  I was suspended in eighth grade for bringing my semen to science class. We were supposed to inspect living things under the microscope. Mrs. Wheeler had used the example of pond water. My friend Paul Dills's sample was a minnow that had eaten itself to death. Other kids brought leaves, feathers, dirt, hair. The morning of the assignment I whacked off into a Tupperware Popsicle mold. On the way to school, I revealed the contents of my plain brown paper sack to Paul as we hacked on his aunt's menthol cigarettes under the bridge. First, Paul expressed amazement that I had experienced an orgasm. Second, that I'd thought to bring attention to this fact in science class. Third, that I expected to ace the assignment with it.

  There were three students at each work station. My partners were Paul and Rachel Hilden, one of the kids who'd brought a jar of murky pond water. Rachel had accumulated a tragic assortment of nicknames, among the most recent, Toilet Paper Stuck to Shoe Bitch. Her mouth, reengineered with scaffolding and rubber bands, had allegedly been the subject of a research paper in an orthodontia journal. Though she would grow up to become vengefully gorgeous and anchor an Idaho news show, in eighth grade she was prone to postlunch fishing trips in the Dumpsters to recover missing retainers. I doubted Rachel knew that semen existed.

  We inspected Rachel's pond water first, taking turns peering at the boring blobs. Then we looked at Paul's minnow bacteria and saw a few crawly things. I used a Q-tip to dab a slide with my substance.

  "What did you bring, Cedar?" Rachel said.

  By the way, I was named after a tree.

  "I brought baby tadpoles," I said.

  "That's not tadpoles. That's spit."

  I loaded the slide and turned the dial to 200x magnification. I'd often examined the photos of sperm cells in my dog-eared masturbation material, Our Bodies, Ourselves, and watched footage of wriggling sperm on PBS, but these sperm were special: they had originated in my testes, each one trafficking my genetic material in its top-heavy little head. They had been designed to withstand the arduous trip into a uterus, but few had survived my two-mile bike ride to school. Even dead they were fascinating to look at, each a tiny exclamation point carrying my half of what could have been a human being.

  "Let me see!" Paul said. When I moved away he squinted into the instrument and his jaw slowly sagged. "They have tails and everything! Holy crap!"

  Paul's excitement quickly attracted the attention of nearby work stations. He was bad at keeping secrets, and was probably the last guy in class I should have told about my semen sample. Everyone wanted to take a look. Kat Daniels stepped up and brushed a few strands of hair from her face as she bent to peer into the battered middle school microscope. By our rudimentary, junior high standards, Kat wasn't counted among the prettiest girls at our school. She had a slightly upturned nose that would have looked awkward if it weren't for the sleepy eyes hanging over it. She wore chipped, sparkly fingernail polish. Her beauty was slowly unfolding, refracted through my growing capability to notice her. As she squinted into the microscope, there passed an interminably nervous moment occupied by her, me, and millions of reproductive cells. She was quiet a moment. I watched her understand. Then she looked up and said, "Cool."

  After that I didn't care how grody I was in the eyes of my classmates. Kat slithered back to her station to study a daisy. In an instant, everyone was crouching over my sample, the guys exclaiming and the girls making retching noises. Mrs. Wheeler peeled her face from an Agatha Christie novel and slammed down her coffee cup. Everyone scattered. Our teacher peered into the microscope long enough to determine the nature of my sample, then pointed in the direction of the door. "Mr. Warner's office. Now."

  As I walked stiffly from the room, Rachel Hilden pressed her eye against the microscope. "Whoa," she said. "These tadpoles really are miniature."

  Mr. Warner, tapping a ruler against his knee, sat on the corner of his wood-grain, Formica-topped desk in a way that must have stimulated his anus. Individual fibers of polyester in his tan Sansabelt pants audibly creaked when he shifted from one buttock to the other.

  "Human sexuality is what we're talking about here," he said. "Poets? Yeah sure they wrote about it, scientists have performed serious research into it, heck, some of the world's greatest paintings depict figures of the nudes and what have you." He leaned closer and leveled his ruler at me. "But based on the undistinguished year you've had at this institution of learning I can only conclude that these kinds of fancy thoughts were not what you had in mind when you pulled your grotesque little stunt."

  Mrs. Wheeler sat in the other visitor's chair, the paper bag with the offending specimen on the desk before her. A dark brown patch grew larger as my semen leaked through a corner of the bag.

  I hoped Mr. Warner wouldn't make me call my mom. He leaned closer. "Everyone's sexual maturity has to start somewhere, Cedar. Do you really want yours to start like this? The mistakes you make now, when it comes to sex, will shape the rest of your experiences. Do you want to become a pervert? A homosexual? Cedar, are your parents exposing you to pornography?" he said quietly.

  "Right," I said. "I wish."

  The principal sighed, displaying a theatrical sort of disappointment. "It looks like in light of some of your recent unexcused absences, your role as ring leader in February's biscuits-and-gravy lunch-room walkout, and this sperm business, you've left me no other choice but to issue a week's suspension." As if to add a little ceremony to his decision, Mr. Warner picked up the bag and dropped it into his waste can. A string of semen dangling from the bag fell across his left knee.

  My father was Wade Rivers, a name as dumb as mine. That afternoon he arrived home early, took two steps into the kitchen, and threw his briefcase against the refrigerator. The magnetic letters spelling profanities limited by five lousy vowels skittered to the floor in clumps. A picture of me taken with my mom's fish-eye lens floated to the linoleum as the freezer door swung open, releasing a carton of Neapolitan, a tray of ice cubes, and an inadequately-sealed bag of frozen peas. My dad's briefcase popped open and scattered his hectic legal scribblings. He swore. He kicked cabinetry. Apparently he'd lost another case. Helping him pick up the mess seemed the most sensible course of action. I had seen my father this angry before, many times, and knew that the best thing to do was to eradicate the stunned silence by being productive. I began gathering his papers and re-adhering magnets to the fridge. My dad sighed, bent down, said, "Shit, no, no, I'll get that," then saw that the cardboard flap of the ice-cream carton had been left open.

  "Have I or have I not explained the concept of freezer burn to you?" my dad said.

  "I'll eat it."

  "Not helpful, Cedar. Now nobody else can enjoy it, and you'll only eat it to make a point."

  "I'm sorry you lost your case." This is what I thought I was supposed to say, so I said it. My dad shrugged. "Also, I got suspended."

  "What for?"

  "We had an experiment where we had to bring something from nature to look at under a microscope."

  "And you brought-"

  "Sperm?"

  My father sat down at the kitchen table and considered the pig-shaped salt and pepper shakers. Finally he said, "Please at least tell me it was your own sperm."

  "It was," I said. Then my mom came home.

  My mother, her name was Janet, was a medical photographer who documented abrasions, growths, and autopsy oddities for the university hospital. In my house, Frank Netter's classic text Atlas of Human Anatomy was coffeetable material. We had a model skull named Barbara on our mantle. My mother and
I had a standing arrangement that whenever I had an abrasion or ingrown toenail I'd be sure to show her. Most families kept photo albums of birthday snapshots. Ours contained a few vacation shots and photographic proof of bicycle accidents, blisters, pustulant sties.

  My parents met when my dad was starting out as a public defender and my mom worked for the county coroner. Their courtship revolved around a spectacular triple homicide that rocked our county in the early seventies. My mom recorded the crime scene and subsequent autopsies. My dad admitted years later that her grisly pictures were what had swayed the jury. She often told me that if the murderer had gotten off, she would have never forgiven my father. I was lucky: the guy was sentenced to death; I was conceived.

  My mother, striding through the front door with her swaying camera bag, praising a particularly photogenic teratoma: "From the outside it looked like any other tumor, but in dissection we found hair and teeth and I think even a fingernail or two."

  "Go ahead, tell her," my dad said, confronting the refrigerator for a beer.

  "I got suspended for looking at sperm under a microscope."

  "Clarification. His own sperm."

  "Cedar," my mom said, then turned to my dad, "Did you remember to make ice cubes?"

  "Yeah, you want an iced tea?"

  "I'll make it," my mom said. "I mean really, Cedar. Sperm?"

  "I wanted to know what they looked like."

  My mother opened the freezer and twisted the ice cube tray until it yielded its cubes. "Who left the ice cream open?"

  "You were expressing curiosity in human physiology," my dad said, leading the witness.

  "Human physiology, huh?" my mom said. "If that was the case, why didn't you just use the microscope we bought you last Christmas?"

  "It was me who left the ice cream open," I said.

  "Don't try to change the subject," my mom said. "We're talking about sperm, not ice cream. Jesus, did we miss the deadline for the masturbation conversation, is that what this is about?"

  "I've told him a hundred times about freezer burn!" my dad shouted.

  "My microscope doesn't have good enough magnification," I said.

  My mom said, "Cedar, we're not mad at you for wanting to understand the workings of your own body. But what were you thinking? It was Mrs. Wheeler's class, right? Christ, she drives a VW Rabbit with a Mamas and the Papas bumper sticker. She teaches a bread-making class at the community college! How did you expect her to react? My point is that if you want to look at your own sperm under a microscope, I can introduce you to some lab techs at the fertility clinic who'll leave you alone in a closet with a Juggs magazine and water-based lubricant and you can look at your own sperm under a microscope until the cows come home."

  "Really?" my dad said, "They only had Playboy when I was there."

  In truth, I had observed my sperm under my own microscope many times. I had witnessed their mass extinction suspended above the heat of the bulb, hunted for the oddball spermatozoa with two heads or tails, gazed myopically into the mystery of my chromosomal output. The secret reason for my act of scientific inquiry unraveled before me like the paper vortex of a Chinese yo-yo. I had taken the sperm to class to perform an experiment, certainly, but not the one that had been assigned. My experiment had proceeded from the hypothesis that if I were bold enough to offer forth my sperm as proof of my virility, I would win Kat's heart. After all, she was the girl who had approached me at my locker after my oral report on the state of Rhode Island and breathed two fantastic, incandescent words into my ear, "I'm ovulating."

  My parents drafted a list of chores for me to complete during my one-week suspension, but I still had time to read, shoot hoops, and masturbate in every room of the house while they were at work. Every day around three o'clock Paul would stop by on his way home and brief me on the shifting alliances and petty grudges of our classmates while we shared his cigarettes behind the garage. On the last day of my suspension Paul crashed his bike into our hedge and declared, "Kat has the slide. She took it from the science lab and keeps it in her jewelry box!"

  I demanded that he reveal his sources. Kat's friend Margot had told him, making him promise not to tell me, knowing that he would.

  I said, "I'm going to need one of your cigarettes."

  "You're in luck. I've got menthols."

  We went around back behind the garage and conducted our adolescent tobacco ceremony.

  "You think this means she wants me to call her?" I wondered.

  "Call her? Cedar! Come to your senses. She wants you to bang her!"

  That night I tried willing my mind into clairvoyance, desperate to know what Kat was doing that very moment, twenty blocks away. She was tucking my sperm into a little velvet-lined jewelry box among her rings and friendship pins. She was sneaking peeks at the slide as she did her homework, holding it up to the light of her bedside lamp. I conducted conversations with her in my head while I scraped moss off the deck, alphabetized the LPs, pulled rocks and weeds from the garden. I created a twenty-item list of conversation starters in case she called, but she remained as silent as me.

  After a long and boring weekend I returned to school. Before I made it to my locker I learned that I'd been tagged with a number of nicknames that Paul hadn't had the heart to reveal. Post-it notes had been inserted into my locker through those slots the manufacturer must have included to avoid the liabilities of suffocated nerds. Wanker, Jizzmaster, Spermy. I wadded the notes into a ball and stuffed it deep behind a month-old lunch bag.

  The final week of junior high school washes the blood from the most culpable of children's hands. My science class transgression was relegated to lore by other scandals -the Kevin Johnson pot bust, a girls' locker room raid, petty theft from Mrs. Wheeler's purse. Just over the hump of the academic calendar were neighborhood lawns to mow, each a counter-clockwise mandala generating the most beautiful aroma of summer. Emboldened by the freedom of the year's end, I called Kat the night after the last day of school, prepared with my list of topics and subtopics should our dialogue come to any awkward pauses. I didn't refer to the list once. We were like this diagram of bacteria entering a nostril I'd seen in one of my mom's medical books, nodes glomming onto receptors, spreading something virulent. I plundered Kat's opinions about our classmates, our teachers, the media products that had located us through TV, radio, and the multiplex. But I hesitated broaching the subject of the sperm that had brought us together. Now that we had entered the codified process of courtship-fake insults, overwrought pronouncements, long stretches of breathy silence between phone receivers deep into the night-now that we were falling for each other, it felt like a transgression to mention testosterone, ovulation, or spermatozoa sandwiched between layers of glass.

  I slowly shoved breakfast at my face as my parents orbited the kitchen table, inserting themselves into my periphery with gentle threats of punishment for undone tasks and admonitions about how I chose to spend my lawnmowing money. How pathetic their domestic regulations, how trivial were their to-do lists, when one could sup from the pond of the infinite in the sound of a sigh transmitted over a phone line. My dad apparently won an important case and I observed myself talking to him about it, prompt ing the man with questions at periodic silences. My mother showed me some photos she had taken of a diseased pancreas and I reacted as I suspected she wanted me to, with feigned sick fascination.

  I mowed Mr. Dickman's yard, chopping up bits of cedar shingles ripped from his roof during a remodel, splattering piles of Saint Bernard shit. Mr. Dickman, shirtless, drinking a wine cooler, watched me from the window of his living room, which he had converted into his bedroom, as was the prerogative of a bachelor. I think he was some kind of public accountant but I'd never thought to ask. He occasionally entertained his busty Italian girlfriend, nuzzling her on the weather-beaten lawn furniture of his patio, slurping cocktails inappropriate to consume when enjoying a view consisting of the back of a bowling alley. When my lawn-care duties brought me in contact with the coupl
e, they were usually feeding on Ritz crackers turded yellow with EZ Cheez and planting hickeys on each other's leathery necks. I went out of my way to chop up a lot of slugs with the weed whacker, spraying their guts on Mr. Dickman's deteriorating siding. When Mr. Dickman wasn't distracting me by using his rowing machine in the driveway, the drone of the mower lulled me into a meditative state in which I enumerated the obstacles between my and Kat's naked bodies.

  When Kat and I finally managed to see each other at the mall a week after school got out, we held hands and walked a sober lap past the food court and jewelry stores like players in an ultraserious form of Japanese theater. Later, we made out in the back row during a matinee, after which our parents picked us up in their respective vehicles. We both had strict curfews and expectations about our physical locations, both answering to the strategies of animals regulating the fertility of their young.

  Kat's parents were divorced. Her mother worked for a company that made yarn for craft stores, and her father repaired septic systems on the other side of the state. Kat also complained about her mother's boyfriend of two or three years, an older man who sounded like he had a lot of money.

  Kat's mother forbade her from meeting me in any place that was not public. One night I arranged to stay at Paul's while she arranged to stay a block away at Margot's house. Paul had a detached garage with an upstairs where his pack-rat family stored beaten-up furniture they meant to eventually reupholster and resell, including a couch large enough for two people to stretch out on if one was on top of the other.

  At one o'clock in the morning Kat emerged from a rhodedendron hedge, and in the bluish indirect light of a street lamp I helped pick sticky flower petals from her hair. I didn't know if I was supposed to kiss her at this point, so I offered her a piece of Big Red.