Мэтью Квик - Forgive me, Leonard Peacock

I always wonder if that’s what Linda looks like riding home from New York City in a car—so utterly miserable, zombie-faced, cheated.

Does she look like the mother of a monster?

I’ve taken dozens of practice-adulthood days, followed so many suits, but only once did anyone notice me.

It was this beautiful woman wearing huge 1970s sunglasses on the train, even though most of the ride is underground. I could see her mascara running down her cheek, but she was really beautiful otherwise. Like, I was sort of attracted to her.

Long, bright blond hair.

Red lipstick.

Black stockings.

Gray pinstriped skirt suit.

You could tell that she was an authority figure just by the way she sat and dared anyone to say anything about the runny mascara. The vibe she sent out was menacing and it definitely said, “Don’t fuck with me.”

Regardless, on that day, this woman was by far the most miserable person on the train. You could tell she was upset, but it also looked like she’d rip your face off if you said anything to her.

All the other adults pretended not to notice, which seemed cowardly.

As she was the obvious target for the day, I got off at her stop and followed.

I remember the sound of her high heels clicking on the concrete like cap guns firing.

She walked up the escalator; I did too, trying hard to keep up.

When we cleared the turnstile I started the mental telepathy, saying (or thinking?), “Don’t do it. Don’t go to that job you hate. Go skydiving. Buy a star on the Internet. Adopt a cat.” And I continued with my routine for a city block or so. She turned into a back alley, and when we were halfway down it, she spun around tornadolike and pointed a can of Mace at my nose.

“Who are you and why are you following me?” she said. “I will destroy your day. This is top-grade stuff too. Illegal in the United States. I squeeze this trigger and you won’t be able to see for months. You might go blind.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I put my hands up in the air, like I’ve seen criminals do in the movies whenever they want to surrender, when some tough Bogart-type guy points a gun and says, “Reach for the sky.”

It surprised her, and she took a step back, but she didn’t spray me.

“How old are you?” she said.

I said, “I’m seventeen.”

“What’s your name?”

“Leonard Peacock.”

“That’s a fake name if I ever heard one.”

I said, “I can show you my school ID.”

She said, “Let’s see it, but real slow. If you try anything funny, I’ll shoot you in the cornea.”

I lowered my hands super slo-mo and said, “It’s in my pocket. May I reach into my jacket?”

She nodded, so I produced my school ID.

She took it, glanced at my name, and said, “Well, I’ll be damned. You really are Leonard Peacock. What a stupid name.”

I said, “Why are you crying?”

I saw her trigger finger twitch and I thought I was about to get maced, but instead she put my school ID into her purse and said, “Why are you following me, really? Did someone pay you? What do they want?”

“No. It’s nothing like that at all.”

She moved the Mace a few inches closer to my face, pointed at my left eye, and said, “Don’t fuck with me, Leonard Peacock. Did Brian put you up to this? Huh? Tell me!”

I put my hands up again and said, “I don’t know any Brian. I’m just a dumb kid. I dress up like an adult and skip school every once in a while to see what being an adult is like. Okay? I just want to know if growing up’s worth it. That’s all. And so I follow the most miserable-looking adult to work, because I just know that’s going to be me someday—the most miserable adult on the train. I need to know if I can take it.”

She said, “Take what?”

I said, “Being a miserable adult.”

She lowered her Mace. “Really?”

I nodded.

She said, “You’re absolutely crazy, aren’t you?”

I nodded again.

“But not dangerous, right? You’re a lamb.”

I shook my head no, because I wasn’t a threat back then. And then I nodded, because I wasn’t a wolf or a lion or anything predatory at the time.

She said, “Okay. Do you drink coffee?”

She took me to this coffee place close to the alley where she stole my school ID. It was mostly old people eating bagels and slurping joe.

She started talking about how stressed out she was and how there was this guy at her work named Brian whom she had screwed once and he was now using that against her because they were up for the same promotion. Her mother was dying in some hospice center in New Jersey, which was where she had spent the previous night. She had really wanted to stay with her mother because her mom was close to the end of her life, but this woman knew that—while no one would tell her she couldn’t be there for her mother’s passing—Brian would use her absence from work as a way to beat her out for the position.

Or at least that’s what I understood.

She was rambling and slurring words like she was drunk and she kept waving her hands and she wouldn’t take off her sunglasses even inside the coffee shop. She talked for an hour or so, and I was beginning to think she was a great big liar because if she left her dying mom to get ahead at work, why the hell would she waste her time with me at the coffee shop? Wouldn’t Brian use missing work—for any reason at all—against her?

I was thinking about all of this when she said, “So what have you learned following around adults? Spying on us?”

I said, “I don’t know.”

“Don’t lie to me. You owe me an explanation, Leonard Peacock.”

And so I swallowed and said, “I’m not finished researching, which is why I followed you today.”

“What have you learned today from me?”

“Truthfully?”

She nodded.

So I said, “You seem really unhappy. And most of the people I follow are the same. It seems like they don’t like their jobs and yet they also don’t like going home either. It’s like they hate every aspect of their lives.”

She laughed and said, “You need to follow people on the train to figure that out?”

And I said, “I was hoping that I had it wrong.”

And she said, “Don’t all the kids in your high school seem miserable too? I hated high school. HATED it! ”

And I said, “Yeah, most of them do seem miserable. Although they try to fake it the best they can. Kids fake it better than adults, right? My theory is that we lose the ability to be happy as we age.”

She smiled. “So if you’ve got it all figured out, why follow adults like me?”

“Like I said before, I was hoping that I’m wrong, that life gets better for some people when they get older, and even the most miserable people—such as you and me—might be able to enjoy at least some aspect of adulthood. Like those ads where gay guys talk about being picked on in high school but then they grew up and discovered that adult life is like heaven. They say it gets better. I want to believe that happiness might at least be possible later on in life for people prone to sadness.”

She swatted my words out of the air with her hand and said, “All ads are lies. Life doesn’t get better at all. Adulthood is hell. And everything I told you about myself was a lie too. I made everything up just to see who you were because I thought they paid you to be a spy. But the joke’s on me because you really are just a crazy, sad, underfed high school student who follows random people. That’s sick. Perverted. I’m keeping your ID and if I ever see you again I’m pressing charges and getting a restraining order.”

She stood up and glared down at me through her huge sunglasses.

“This little prick follows women into dark alleys and asks them intimate questions. He’s a true pervert. Do with him as you will,” she said loudly to everyone eating breakfast, and then her heels clicked out of the shop— POW! POW! POW! POW!

I could tell everyone was still looking at me and so I shrugged and said, “Women!” too loudly. It was supposed to be a joke to break the tension, but it didn’t work. Everyone [23]in the coffee shop was frowning.

I figured the woman was really deranged—I had simply picked a femme fatale to follow, there were surely better case studies to find, happier adults prone to sadness, and she was just an unlucky fluke—but the problem was that she sort of reminded me of Linda, who also thinks I’m a pervert.

And what the 1970s sunglasses woman had said was so mean, public, and maybe true, that I started to cry right there, which made me really SEEM like a pervert.

Not big boo-hoo tears.

I pretty much hid the fact that I was crying, but my lips trembled and my eyes got all moist before I could wipe them away with my sleeve.

“I’M NOT A FUCKING PERVERT!” I yelled at the people staring at me, although I’m not sure why.

The words just sort of shot out of my mouth.

I’M!

NOT!

A!

FUCKING!

PERVERT!

They all winced.

A few people stuck money under their utensils and left, even though they weren’t finished eating.

This huge muscle-inflated tattooed cook came out from the kitchen and said, “Why don’t you just pay your bill and leave, kid? Okay?”

Just like always I could tell I was the problem—that the coffee shop would be better off once I was no longer around—so I pulled out my wallet and handed him all my money even though we only had a coffee each, and in a normal speaking voice, I said, “I’m not a pervert.”

No one would make eye contact with me, not even the cook, who was looking at the money now, maybe to make sure it wasn’t counterfeit, which is when I realized that the truth doesn’t matter most of the time, and when people have awful ideas about your identity, that’s just the way it will stay no matter what you do.

So I didn’t wait for change.

I got the hell out of there.

I went to the park and watched the pigeons bob their heads and I felt so so lonely that I hoped someone would come along and stick a knife into my ribs just so they could have my empty wallet.

I imagined all of my blood flowing out into the snow and watching it turn a beautiful crimson color as Philadelphians walked by in a great big hurry, not even pausing to admire the beauty of red snow, let alone register the fact that a high school kid was dying right in front of their eyes.

The thought was comforting somehow and made me smile.

I also kept oscillating between wanting that crazy 1970s sunglasses woman’s mom to die a horrible painful cringe-inducing death and wanting her mom to live and start to get healthier—younger even, like the two of them might even begin aging backward all the way to childhood—even though the femme fatale probably made the entire mother-dying story up just to mess with my head. But she had to have a mother who was either dead or elderly, and so it was nice to think of them getting younger together rather than older, regardless of whether they deserved it or not.

It was a confusing day, and I felt like I was in some Bogart black-and-white picture where women are crazy and men pay hefty emotional fees for getting involved with “the fairer sex,” as Walt says.

I remember skipping four days of school after my encounter with the 1970s sunglasses woman just so Walt and I could watch good old Bogie keep things orderly in black-and-white Hollywood land.

My high school called a hundred million times before Linda checked the home answering machine [24]from NYC, and, to be fair, she actually had a driver bring her home that night and stayed with me for a day or two, because I was really fucked up—not talking and just sort of really depressed—staring at walls and pushing the heels of my hands into my eyes until they felt like they would pop.