That's Us

Lucas and I

There were five billion people on the planet in 2018. Lucas McKenzie hated four billion nine hundred ninety-nine million nine hundred ninety-nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine of them. He hated his parents. He loathed his friends. He intentionally intimidated strangers. But, for some clandestine reason, Lucas decided that he liked me. And being the only human the scariest boy in the universe liked was a heady thing.

When I first met Lucas McKenzie I was a waifish, doe-eyed, freckle￾faced freshman with a shoulder-length mop of wavy reddish-blonde hair and a devastating crush on the King of the Punks, Lance Hightower. I’d been

cutting my hair shorter and shorter, adding more and more safety pins to my hoodie and backpack, and inching my way closer and closer to Allan at the elite punk-goth-druggie lunch table, which he’d presided over since the first day of school. (As it turned out, Allan was completely and devastatingly gay, something I wish I had known before shaving most of my hair off and getting multiple body piercings in my increasingly extreme efforts to get him to make out with me.)

Lucas, who was a sophomore at the time, had landed at our lunch table by default. With no other skinheads to hang out with, the punks kind of adopted him as their pet rattlesnake. Day after day, he would sit there with his brow furrowed and his head down, gripping his fork hard enough to bend the metal and muttering the occasional, “Go f**k yourself,” whenever anyone dared to address him. One balmy day in late September, I happened to overhear some upperclassman at our lunch table say to her spiky-haired pierced boyfriend that it was Skeletor’s birthday. (I don’t know how anyone would have known

unless Lucas had just thrown it out as proof that his life had somehow gotten even worse. I imagine it would have sounded something like, “I can’t f*****g believe my f*****g w***e mom stole all my cigarettes and went out of town with her faggot husband on my f*****g birthday. Hey, what the f**k are you looking at, asshole?”) So, naturally, I bought him a chicken sandwich while I

was going through the lunch line.

Bouncing over to our table and sporting a big grin (I should explain that I have always been disgustingly hyper and enthusiastic, and I would have made an excellent cheerleader if I weren’t both anti-establishment andclumsy) I thrust it into Lucas’s face and chirped, “Happy birthday In return, Lucas lifted his ever-scowling head and pinned me with what felt like two searing blue laser scopes. I stood, in a breathless state of suspended animation, realizing a moment too late that I might have just poked the rattlesnake. As I braced myself for a barrage of expletives, I watched Knight’s perma￾scowl melt and slide off right before my eyes instead. His brow, which had been tightly furrowed, smoothed and lifted in

surprise. His glacial eyes widened, and his lips parted in a soul-bearing silent gasp. It was a heartbreaking expression of gratitude and disbelief. It was as if the boy we called Skeletor had never received a gift in his life. I could almost hear his armor clatter to the floor as I peered into the face of someone vulnerable, aching, and alone. I couldn’t speak. Couldn’t remember how air worked. Once my lungs began to burn, I finally tore my eyes away from his and sucked in a deep breath, pretending to admire my new white Dr. Martin's (yet another purchase made in the name of seducing Allan Wilbert), but it was too late. In those few seconds I had seen it all. A lifetime of pain, a longing for significance,

and a tidal wave of love waiting to crash down on the first person brave enough, or stupid enough, to wade in.

I’d expected him to recover his armor and return to his brooding, after all, it was just a dumb sandwich but much to my surprise and mortification Lucas stood up, pointed directly at me, and shouted to everyone at our table,

“This is why Jane is the only f*****g person on this planet that I can f*****g stand! None of you motherfuckers gave me s**t for my birthday!” Making

sure to give each and every terrified zit-faced misfit a murderous glare, he finally finished with, “I f*****g hate all of you!” Skeletor had a flare for the dramatic.

I was too stunned to react, I watched helplessly as he slunk back into his seat with the smug, lazy grace of a just-fed lion, obviously satisfied with the scene he’d just caused and the shocked silence that had fallen over the cafeteria. I was the only one standing, and all eyes were now on me, including Lucas's, which were regarding me with a broad, rapacious Cheshire Cat kind of grin. Suddenly, I wanted my money back. You see, all I’d thought I was buying was a chicken sandwich and maybe, if I were lucky, a spot on the good side of the guy voted Most Likely to Kill Us All with a Two-by-Four Full of Rusty Nails. That’s itI did not like Kenzie. I did not want to be friends with Lucas, (assuming that were even possible). He was scary and angry, and all I’d wanted was forhim to like me enough not to scream at or murder me. Who knew that a stupid dollar fifty would buy me the singular obsessive, undying devotion of the town’s only skinhead? As I stood there, my big blinking green eyes caught in the crosshairs of Lucas's savage blue stare—it became clear that he was going to make me his whether I liked it or not. And in the beginning, I definitely liked it not.

Calvin was the only guy I’d ever kissed before high school. He was a devilishly handsome spiky-haired little bad boy I dated in eighth grade. And by dated, I mean that we talked on the phone, held hands at school, toilet￾papered a house together, and made out once. Calvin reminded me of a male fairy—not like in a gay way, but in a pointy-eared, wild-haired, wicked

gleam in his eye kind of way. Wait. s**t. I might be thinking of Peter Pan. Yes, Calvin totally reminded me of Peter Pan, in a sexy, mischievous King of the Lost Boys kind of way. Calvin lived, off and on, with his bedraggled sad single mom, Karen, who worked, like, four jobs. Karen was skinny as a rail with scraggly long dishwater-blonde hair and could still fit into her entire skintight, high-waisted stonewashed wardrobe from 1983. Her long shaky fingers were never without an equally long Virginia Slim between them, and her voice was so hoarse that

it sounded as if she’d probably gone for days at a time without speaking to anyone. Karen had former eighties hair-band groupie written all over her, so for all I know, Calvin’s dad was one of the founding members of Whitesnake. Whoever his dad was, his place in Las Vegas had to be a hell of a lot betterthan Karen’s shithole. That’s probably why Calvin never stuck around for

more than a few months at a time. During Calvin’s last stint at Karen’s place, he and his mom kind of adopted Lucas in part because they felt bad about how shitty his home life was, but also, I suspected, because Lucas had a car. Then, per his usual, Calvin up and boarded a Greyhound back to Las Vegas just two months into our sophomore year, leaving Karen all alone again. Since she needed a son and Lucas needed a new mom, he just kept

going over there every day after school, as if Calvin had never left. It was kind of sweet really. Lucas would let Karen’s geriatric German shepherd out and patch up all the rotten, mildewed concave places on the house while she was off working one of her forty-seven part-time jobs. He never asked for anything in return, but what he got…was a key to the house. It was badass—not the house, obviously. The house was a dilapidated piece of s**t. But Lucas had the place all to himself and would actually let us hang out there after school. Peg kept the fridge stocked with Pabst Blue Ribbon, we could smoke inside, and she had cable. It was a teenage utopia. Every afternoon, the entire punk-rock lunch table crew would head over to Karen’s, cram ourselves into her itchy shapeless 2000s couches (me vying for a spot next to Allan), crack open some beers, and scream at the top of our lungs at whatever legless transsexual or little-person biker gang or kung fu hillbilly pimp happened to be on Julian Spring that afternoon. All the while flicking Camel butts at the already overflowing ashtrays. Lucas usually spent the first hour or so letting the dog out and patching

the place up, which gave me just enough time to get a good buzz on and work up a nice little flirt with the owner of whichever lap I was sitting on—not that it mattered. As soon as Lucas finished his rounds, he’d flop into Karen’s

tobacco-colored steel-wool upholstered recliner with a PBR in hand and pin whichever poor fucker I was talking to with a glare so murderous that he’d be out the door before my bony ass even hit the ground. This routine continued for weeks until, one day, I realized that it was just Lucas and I.

I knew the crowd had been dwindling, but I hadn’t realized just how much. I always rode with Lucas to Karen’s house because (A) Iwas fifteen and had no car, and (B) whenever anyone else had offered me a ride, l Kenzie would immediately twist their arm behind their back and smash their face into the hood of the nearest car until they took it back. I couldn’t even ride the bus home because I technically didn’t live in that school district. By November of my sophomore year, Kenzie had single-handedly made himself my only means of after-school transportation without me even noticing it.

Every day after the final bell, whether I liked it or not, I would be sucked into the crowd of eager teenagers fleeing the building, twirled and tossed along like a spindly leaf in a stream, and deposited onto the front lawn, right at lucas's feet. Leaning against the flagpole with his arms crossed, he looked like something out of the skinhead version of The Outsiders—tight white T-shirt, classic Levi’s 501s held up with a pair of thin red braces, black steel-toed combat boots, and a felonious gleam in his eye. The only thingsmissing were a pack of cigarettes rolled up in his sleeve—and, of course,

hair.

Even though there was something unmistakably sexy about his iconic style, self-confidence, and potential for violence, I still wasn’t attracted to Lucas mostly due to my subconscious awareness that he might possibly kill me but I had to admit, I liked the attention. Knowing that the entireschool saw this modern-day Leonardo Decaprio waiting for me, day in and day ut, madeI feel like I was a little bit of a badass, too. I had always just been this quirky, perky, artsy chick who had crazy hair and dressed like Mia Khalifa. I was somebody that everyone knew—

because I stuck out like a sore thumb with my bright red or orange or purple waves, glittery eye shadow, and leopard-print velour stretch pants tucked into white Dr. Martin's—but I was nobody of any real consequence.

But now…now I was untouchable. I was also slowly becoming Kenzie’s precious. His attention to me was so

focused that I felt like an ant sizzling under a magnifying glass whenever he looked at me. It was as if he were memorizing the exact size, shape, and location of every freckle and zit on my virginal face. God, it made me squirm. I never had a problem making eye contact with people until I met Lucas. Sixteen years later, I still catch myself talking to people’s shirts.