That's Us

Kenzie-Lucas

I’ve been thinking about my list of target behaviors again, and I’ve realized that my need for a nickname goes back to my parents. (Doesn’t everything?) Growing up, they never called me by any of my actual names. Instead, I was always Pumpkin or Cookie or Scooter or their personal favorite Jane. My mom started calling me “Jenny” when I was newly adopted just because it sounded cute, like Shnookums or Chubberlupagus, but my dad turned it into "Jay-Jay", like my initials, because he secretly wished he’d had a boy. (It seemed like the captain of the football team always had a name like TJ or JR back then.) I don’t think I even knew my name was Brooke until I started school.

I had a great childhood—no siblings to challenge my authority—just me and a couple of stoned grown-ups who showered me with affection, attention, and nicknames. So, naturally, by the infallible laws of classical conditioning, I grew to associate nicknames with love. Even now, decades later, throw a sweetheart or honey my way, and I’ll instantly assume, This person adores me and would give me a kidney if needed.

Stupid brain. Although I’ve grown attached to Jane, my favorite moniker by far was the one Ken, my boyfriend after Lucas, gave me Lady. I was sixteen, and it just sounded so grown-up and sexy. It wasn’t generic, like baby, nor did it sound like something my parents might coo into the phone when they picked it up after ten o’clock, knowing good and goddamn well that I was talking to a boy. Lady was statuesque. Strong. Feminine. Classy. I was, in reality, none of those things. When I met Lucas, I had braces, weighed ninety-five pounds including my steel-toed combat boots—and had a mostly shaved head. A charitable classmate introduced me to him after I’d been cheated on, humiliated, and repeatedly screamed at in front of the whole school by Lucas. Now, I know what you’re thinking. Lucas, the angry skinhead guy, turned out to be a shitty boyfriend? No way! f**k, I did not see that coming! Yeah, well, as it turned out, tidal waves eventually recede. And when they do, everything that was momentarily upended and twirled about is left

smashed and soiled, miles from where it began. As notorious and well known as Kenzie was, Lucas was a legend. He was the original Peach State High School, bad boy. No one had ever actually seen him since he’d dropped out while my crew was still in middle school, but rumor had it that he’d been squatting in an abandoned house in Atlanta with a band of gutter punks or otherwise engaged in some form of romanticized vagrants. I now know that such a lifestyle is actually referred to as homelessness, but at the time, Lucas was a punk-rock god and thus the perfect rebound. A girl in my social studies class gave me his number after seeing how

distraught I was over my very public and very scary now-everyone-thinks-I-might-wind-up-butchered-and-mounted-to-the-hood-of-Kenzie’s-truck-like-some-f****d-up-pirate ship-figurehead breakup. Undisclosed to me, Kenzie had started taking steroids a few months earlier and had morphed into the goddamn Incredible Hulk. Only, unlike Bruce Banner, he stayed giant and irrational all the time. Yeah, picture an already blood-thirsty Romper Stomper-looking motherfucker and then add fifty pounds of muscles and rabies. He was terrifying, and after the spectacular drama that ensued at Tristan Wally Halloween party, I needed a new boyfriend, stat.

I saw my life flash before my eyes that night. I’d developed a serious crush on Tristan, a new kid at school who’d been allowed to throw a massive Halloween party by his single mother. She was trying to make up for leaving his father and moving Tristan to a new school in the middle of the year by contributing to the delinquency of a s**t-ton of teenagers. Tristan was smoldering hot in a guyliner, black hair, black fingernails, bedroom-plastered-with-The Crow-and-Nine Inch Nails-posters, tells-you-he-takes-

lithium-for-depression-and-cutting-behaviors-the-first-time-you-meet-him kind of way. Ooh, dark and tortured. I had every intention of f*****g the s**t out of him at his party that night. The only problem was that I was technically still dating Kenzie and was afraid that parts of me might wind up in his basement freezer if I tried to break up with him. In a stroke of genius, I realized that the solution to all my problems would be to drop off a break-up note with Kenzie's mom on my way to the party, thus absolving me from any retribution should Kenzie find out that I’d banged Tristan on his bathroom floor that night. We would have been broken up for hours by the time I got around to discovering lithium’s unfortunate s****l side effects. Looky there, Skeletor. Your mom even has it in writing. I should have been a f*****g lawyer because that s**t was airtight. Well, Kenzie’s mom must have delivered the message telepathically because I hadn’t been at the party long enough to finish whatever watered-down filth was in my Solo cup before I heard the unmistakable roar of

Lucas’s monster truck building is in the distance. f**k me. The phrase fight-or-flight should be amended to include freeze, because when my temporal lobes registered the low growl of that particular F-150 my ass froze like Bambi’s i***t mother…right before her head got blown off. Lucas Mzkenzie provided up archfiend from hell was coming for me, and all I could do was silently scream at myself from inside my paralyzed body. Run! Hide! You’re gonna die, you stupid b***h! None of these anemic emo kids can save you! Abort! Abort! But my steel-toed boots felt more like lead…and my slutty tiger costume began to feel more and more like a sick, ironic joke. Who was I kidding? I was no predator. I was a defenseless, doe-eyed little fawn who was about to become roadkill. All I could do was stand there in Tristan's driveway, clutching my shiny red plastic cup, and wait for it—frozen like a deer in headlights before the

headlights had even arrived. Maybe he won’t kill me in front of all these witnesses. Maybe he’ll just almost kill me. Maybe he’ll just almost kill me… It happened so fast that when I replay the events in my head, it comes out

looking like a series of still photos, like a cartoon playing in slow motion. Lucas’s monster truck screeched into Tristan's teenager-filled cul-de-sac like a f*****g bat out of hell. The passenger door swung open before the

roaring monstrosity had even come to a complete stop, and Angel Fernandez, the skank he’d been cheating on me with, flew out toward me, screaming my name and flailing her arms, as if she were on fire. My heart slammed repeatedly into my rib cage as if to say, Stay here and die if you want, but I’m getting the f**k out! My mind oscillated between fear over my imminent death and confusion about why Angel was about to destroy me when she was f*****g my boyfriend. My body became rigid and tense, bracing for impact, as Angel’s red eyes and bared teeth closed in on me. And then my eyes widened with shock as she toppled over the curb and face-planted her seething contorted mug right at my feet, which were still rooted firmly to the driveway.

Before my stupid deer brain could register the fact that I was still standing and in one piece, Angel’s shrieking, kicking, thrashing body rose before me and began moving backward, suspended in midair, as if someone had pressed the Rewind button on my worst nightmare.

The f**k?! It wasn’t until my dilated pupils registered the silhouette of a formidable figure shoving her writhing body back into the truck that I realized that Lucas had scooped her crazy Daisy Dukes-clad ass up off the driveway before she had a chance to lunge at me again. He was now putting those steroids to good use as he wrestled that syphilitic she-devil back into his eight-foot-high monster truck cab. As they peeled away, it slowly began to dawn on me that I was not going to die. Trying to pretend like I hadn’t just pissed my pants, I dramatically chucked my plastic cup onto the ground—once I’d regained the use of my arms—and shouted after them, “What the f**k was that, Angel?” I’ll tell you what that was, Journal. That was divine intervention. Angel

Fernandez was a solid buck fifty of Red Bull-and-crystal-meth-fueled trailer- park scrapper. I wouldn’t have stood a chance. I would have been liquefied on impact had I not been blessed with a guardian angel who wasn’t above tripping a b***h, not even a b***h named Angel. After that little incident, I decided I needed to hook up with someone who could shoot lasers out of his f*****g eyes. I had hoped it would be Tristan, but considering that he wasn’t even able to shoot semen out of his p***s when we fooled around in his hall bathroom that night (f*****g Lithium), I needed a new plan, stat. That plan came together the following week when a girl in my social studies class, who had heard about my near-death experience at Tristan’s party, decided to play matchmaker. Sizing up my partially shaved head, combat boots, and desperation, she told me that Lucas Smith, the Lucas Smith, was staying at his mom’s place for a while. (Oh, transient! How mysterious!) And his mom’s place just happened to be in her neighborhood. She plopped his mom’s number on my desk with a sad smile. At the time, I thought the forlorn look was her way of expressing pity over my current situation. I now know it was guilt over introducing me to the complete and utter disappointment that was Ken Smith. That night, I tapped each digit on my cordless phone with shaking hands. Sitting in the middle of my bed, I clutched my knees to my chest with my free arm and took deep breaths as my other hand clutched the ringing receiver, trying hard to channel someone older, someone cooler, someone who didn’t have f*****g braces. Oh my God, I’m a child calling a grown man from my bedroom in my parent's house, hoping he’ll accept s*x in exchange for protection from my steroid-secreting psychotic Cujo of an ex-boyfriend.

Right as I was about to slam the phone down and hyperventilate into an empty Camel Lights carton, I heard his voice. Despite being deep and rough, Ken's tone was disarmingly relaxed and warm. I now know that he was probably just stoned out of his mind, but it was still a welcome contrast to Lucas's sharpness and intensity.

Charles’s slow, raspy cadence sounded like an old, familiar gravel road. I could almost hear the playful smile on his face and see the space on his lap where I would curl up and let him shield me from danger with his

giant manly arms. lucas’s post-breakup rage had been so apocalyptic that my mother had let me stay home from school for three days after a particularly the psychotic screaming episode he’d initiated outside of my Spanish class. This man, Lucas, was exactly what I needed. In my mind, he was a fifteen-foot-tall Minotaur with devil horns, who breathed napalm and could beat the s**t out of Lucas with nothing more than his giant, veiny c**k, but now that I had him on the phone, he sounded like gritty, crystallized, slow pouring honey. Mmm… Despite, or maybe because of, Ken’s deep, unhurried drawl, my stomach was doing somersaults, and my skin was flushed in pink blotches from head to toe. What was happening to me? I was positively giddy. I felt excited but at ease, wanted but not hunted, and flirty without fear. I hadn’t realized until then how hypervigilant I had become with Lucas. Recently, whenever he and I had been together, I’d found myself subconsciously scanning my surroundings for makeshift weapons and mapping out potential escape routes. It was like being in a relationship with a tranquilized velociraptor—or, you know, a skinhead who had recently started taking hard-core steroids. Thank God Lucas couldn’t see me because I was all goofy grin and blushing cheeks and twiddling fingers and suppressed squeals. After I nervously agreed to meet him for coffee that weekend (Coffee! How grown-up!) and stumbled through my awkward good-bye, Ken delivered the final blow. I bit my lip, trying to hold in all the exciting girlie noses until he said his farewell. I was hoping he’d be quick about it because I could feel the giggles percolating up behind my clenched jaw, but there was nothing quick about Lucas Mckenzie I waited for what felt like hours, listening to what I imagined was a self-confident I’ve-got-her-now smile on the other end, before Ken finally crooned in that sexy gruff voice of his, “Night, night, Lady.”

Swoon!

As soon as I heard the click on the other end of the receiver, I immediately devolved into a giggling, writhing, convulsing puddle of hormones. Ken f*****g James bad-boy legend, the winged mythical griffin of s*x and rebellion had called me Lady! Lady! Of course, in true bad-boy style, my knight in shining bondage pants turned out to be a drug-dependent slack-jawed loser who lived in his mother’s basement and couldn’t manage to sit through a tattoo from start to finish, let alone a GED exam. But since that story isn’t going to make Lucas do

anything other than getting tested for Hepatitis C, this is what I planted for his reading pleasure instead…