“Fight against what?”
“Everything and everyone who make you feel small, insignificant.”
“You can fight with poetry.”
“Sometimes words just aren’t enough for the situation at hand.”
“Yeah, but violence? That’s never good.”
“Not good, but sometimes necessary when people try to make you believe you are secondary or that you shouldn’t even exist. Why do you think we study wars in history class? How many months do we spend on World War II alone? When someone evil crosses that line—like Hitler or Mussolini or Tojo or more recently Hussein and bin Laden—it’s time to fight. That’s what they teach us. So why is it okay for our government to drop bombs on people and kill with guns, but we aren’t supposed to use our fists to protect ourselves? This country was founded on and by violence. Our ancestors played the Cyclops when we wanted to steal the land from the indigenous people who were here before us. FDR and Truman both played the Cyclops during World War II. Bush played the Cyclops after 9/11, too.”
I’d never heard Alex speak so intensely. I couldn’t tell if he was serious or just riffing on ideas, like in his poems, so I said, “Maybe so. But you can’t compare middle school kids to Hitler and bin Laden!”
“Both Hitler and bin Laden were once fourteen.”
“And you haven’t been elected president of the United States of America!”
“Not yet,” he said, and then laughed, which made me believe that he was just talking shit—that it was all theoretical.
“You also have to be careful not to make others feel small and insignificant, right?” I said. “You don’t want to become what you hate. You can’t just go all vigilante. What if everyone did that?”
He was quiet for a time, and then he said, “How did it feel to give your soccer team two middle fingers? To say ‘motherfucking’ in front of your coach?”
“Truthfully?” I said, and then laughed. “Motherfucking amazing.”
“Maybe you held back for too long and then you had to explode. Maybe there was no middle ground left. Sometimes we need to get violent with our words because no one is listening otherwise.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t physically hurt anyone.”
Alex looked up at the hunter’s moon, which had turned from orange to bloodred, and when he didn’t say anything in response, I said, “What happened to the kid in the poem? The round one with the glasses? The kid the pretty boys wanted to fight?”
“Oliver?”
“His name is Oliver?”
“Yeah. There’s no such thing as fiction. We actually hang out now.” Alex gave me a devilish grin, like he had been leading me to Oliver all along. Like this whole conversation was planned. “You wanna meet him?”
“Seriously?”
“I’ve kind of been waiting for the right time to introduce you two.”
“You have?”
“No time like the present. Let’s go.”
Alex started the Jeep and turned up his favorite band, Los Campesinos!
“This song’s called ‘In Medias Res,’ ” he said. “It’s Latin. Know what that means?”
I shook my head.
“ ‘Into the midst.’ It’s also a storytelling technique. You start in the middle of things. With action. No setup. Just get to the heart of it right away. Like when a war film opens up in the middle of a battle before you even know who’s fighting or about what. ‘In Medias Res.’ ”
“And it’s how we met. In medias res. At Booker’s. Over dinner,” I said.
“Yeah, it was, wasn’t it?”
I loved talking with Alex about music and writing, mostly because it was so natural—almost like watching a hunter’s moon rise, something I had never even thought of doing before Booker introduced me to Alex. And yet it was all so refreshingly odd, too.
I smiled at him, reached over, and squeezed his thigh through his dark jeans, and then he turned up the song even more and pushed down on the gas pedal.
We drove for about twenty minutes or so before he turned down the radio and pulled up to a tiny house with dirty green siding in a poorer neighborhood I didn’t know.
“Shhh,” Alex said, holding his index finger up to his lips, and then I followed him around to the back of the house. He knocked on the first-floor window three times. The shade went up, and then Oliver’s big glasses were looking at us through a screen, which was quickly raised so that we could climb through the window, which we did.
Oliver looked a lot like Ralphie from A Christmas Story.
“Is this your woman?” the kid asked Alex, trying to sound manly and tough maybe.
“Um . . . what?” I said.
“I’m sorry,” Oliver said from his wooden desk chair, and then looked at his lap.
Alex punched him lightly on the arm and said, “Oliver, this is my good friend, Nanette. Nanette, this is my main man, Oliver. Good people meet good people.”
“Alex talks about you all the time,” Oliver said, and then pushed his heavy glasses up his nose. “You’re even prettier than he makes you out to be.”
“Thank you,” I said, blushing. No one other than my dad and mom had ever called me pretty before.
“But it’s her intelligence that makes me all hot and bothered,” Alex said, and then sort of bear-hugged Oliver, who squealed with delight. It was like they were brothers.
The bedroom door opened and a middle-aged woman stuck her head in. “You’re allowed to use the front door, Alex. And you’re welcome anytime, day or night. You know that.”