Punk Rock Troy

It was true.

Five-feet-eight and roughly one-hundred-and-twenty-five pounds, I had always been a bit sickly, my immune system never the best thanks to my heart. That day in the cemetery had really done me in, and during the entire week that followed I coughed and sneezed violently, too sick for school.

The house seemed suddenly huge and empty, full of secret passageways and rooms my cloudy mind invented, and during my first few days home alone I walked around for hours in a daze, trying to find them. On the third day my mom came home from work to find me, half dressed and tearing desperately through the contents of the upstairs linen closet. After that she stayed home.

On Friday, when the fever and chills had subsided, Noah came over with my homework. I was using the guest bedroom by then, my own having been overtaken by that horrible air of sickness bedrooms get. I was sitting up in bed under a stiff, veiny electric blanket when he came in. He set a stack of papers on the bedside table next to the Kleenex box.

A pastor’s kid, Noah tended toward awkwardness, even around good friends and especially when sober. He looked at me quizzically, and I felt self conscious. For the fist time it occurred to me how stupid I must have looked--sitting there in pajamas, all tired-eyed and snotty-nosed like a kid. It wasn’t the Matty he was used to seeing on stage when we played shows, or even in the halls at school.

“How are things at school?” I asked.

Noah shrugged. “Fine, I guess. The same old stuff.”

He couldn’t even look at me. Something was up, and I knew it.
“How’s Meghan?”

“She’s fine,” Noah said. “She’s… back.”
“Is that all?”

“Shit…” Noah rarely swore. “Look, I wasn’t going to tell you about this, since I know you’re not doing that well right now--”

“--I’m doing fine, I just have a cold” I cut in, annoyed, but regardless, I knew that he knew.

“Well since you left her at the hospital that day, she’s been hanging out with that Troy guy from school.”

I coughed. “Troy? With the mohawk?”

I don’t know why I was so upset. I wasn’t in love with her. I had wanted to be free of her, and now she was free of me instead. Free into the arms of some asshole who wore tight plaid pants and spit on people. I wished I could choke.

Noah looked out the window. “Well Matty, you just left her there at the hospital that day. You didn’t even say anything, you just left.”

“I know,” I said, not wanting to talk about it. “I’m a total asshole, okay? But whatever, I don’t really care, I’m just surprised its him of all people.”

“It’s not just that. People are talking.”

“Talking? About Meghan, you mean?”

“Well, yeah, her too, I guess. But I meant about you. People are saying stuff, Matty, and I don’t know what to say to them.”

“Saying stuff? What are they saying?”

“Just really stupid stuff. Like that you’re dying, or that you had a mental breakdown or something. Its so dumb..”

The word dying gave me a sick feeling way down in my middle. I swallowed hard.

“The twins’ parents claimed they saw you lying on your back in the snow, in the cemetery. Just lying there. That’s not true, is it?”

“I was tired,” I muttered. “I only lay down for a second…”

Silence. “Do you want to stay for dinner?” I asked.

“I can’t. My dad wants me home.”

“Okay. Well thanks for bringing me my stuff. I’ll see you when I come back to school. Next week, or whatever.”

But it wasn’t next week, or any of the ones that followed. That night after dinner, I ran a bath. I really do look like a starving kid now, I thought, with my ribs sticking out above my stomach and my spine like a dinosaur out of my back. I felt angry with anyone who had ever starved deliberately, ever chosen to look like this when I couldn’t help it. I got my wish now, I thought as I let my entire face slip down under the water, I hate myself now. I didn’t hold my breath. The next morning I held a pillow to my face until I could hardly breath, but I was caught doing it.

They had heard me choking on my bathwater. They had found the pills that I’d been saving.

I remember once, when I was maybe ten or eleven, having an asthma attack in the backseat of the car while Elliot and I were fighting. He was punching me, mom and dad were yelling at both us to stop it, and I had my face in my lap and my arms up over my head as if it were an earthquake drill at school, sobbing. I thought I really would stop breathing altogether. Elliot had a friend with him in the car, and I had been humiliated. Later on that day, our mother had hugged both of us together and pleaded with us to love each other. I can count on one hand the times I saw my brother cry.


The hospital was stupid. They took away my clothes, and I refused to cry the entire time, even when I was alone. I think that pissed the staff off. The psychologist they sent to my bedside the first night was a robotic woman who seemed to view me as a household pest, like a mouse or a termite. She said in an accusatory tone that she could tell I was very upset because I was on the verge of tears. If I was, I don’t remember it at all.

Noah and the McMenemin twins and their families came to see me, and I was embarrassed. Not because I was there, but because I felt like a phony and an attention seeker. Through all my passive grasps at suicide, I never wanted to die. I was too immature for my own emotions, was all. I’d felt as if I were going crazy, and since I had no recognizable reason whatsoever to be doing that, the only option I saw to make anyone take notice was to try to die in the safest, most ineffective way possible. I feigned normalcy with my friends and family, was pleasant in therapy, and did my school work from my hospital bed so that I’d still be able to graduate with my class.

On my eighteenth birthday my parents came with an outfit of my real clothes from home. I took a shower, combed my hair and put on the blue sweatshirt and black pants, feeling happy. They took me to breakfast at Ihop, where I drank coffee and gorged myself on strawberry pancakes and scrambled eggs. It all tasted so good.

On a side note, I feel I should apologize here for the rather Peanuts nature of the parents in this story. I’m aware that they appear, for the most part, as faceless pairs of legs, vague waa-waa voices who’s sole purpose was to serve me. I was pretty young then. I’m aware also, of course, albeit vaguely, that they think and feel and struggle as they go through stages, just like me, and that all of this must have been just horrific for them. That said, I regrettably can’t say much about it. I’m still pretty young, so waa-waas they will remain.

Anyway, I remember mom making a comment about how healthy my appetite seemed. We returned to the hospital, and I packed my things up and checked out. On the drive home, I felt for the first time the kind of redemption they talk about in church--like being acquitted of some awful crime, set free again into the vast and shining world. I noticed for the first time how storybook the big trees looked, bent and graceful in a way that spoke of much prettier centuries, or how the traffic on a freeway is almost like a song. And there, I guess, was born my innate weirdness. I knew that the songs I wrote didn’t have to be conventionally sad anymore, and with that realization, a part of me grew up.

Hardly anything compares to the wonderful inner lightness of realizing that you had made a huge deal out of nothing. I got pretty good at laughing at myself when once I noticed that the horrible, heaving ache in my chest could be cured by some nice weather and the promise of some new clothes and dinner at a pizza restaurant. Two weeks of my school’s spring break remained, and Noah and I took up a constant state of running back and forth to one another’s houses.

He had gotten new recording equipment for Christmas, and multi-tracking fascinated us. We hadn’t been able to do that with the four-track. I had written an entire album’s worth of lyrics while I was in the hospital, and together we set them to music. They were terribly sad on paper, but the right chords and some whimsical DIY production made a strange kind of light shine through them on tape, one that I hadn’t ever known before that. We became obsessed with the idea of actually producing and marketing it. On one particularly warm day, on our way back from a technically illegal recording session in an old church (we liked the acoustics), we passed the town graveyard, and on a whim we ran through the sprinklers.


By the age of eighteen I had acquired, through the avid knitting of my dad‘s mom, a collection of the most fashionably embarrassing handmade sweaters anyone could ever hope for. Until then, I had walked the halls of my high school dressed in solid-colored pullover sweatshirts with hoods, not baggy but not terribly snug, equally plain tee-shirts when it was warmer, and the occasional v-neck long-sleeve if I was feeling particularly daring. Following my leave of absence, however, I strolled back through those double doors in a hand-knit sweater emblazoned all over with trains, just my size. On chillier days, I defiantly layered with a parka. If people were going to talk about me, I decided, I could at least own it.

For almost my whole first week back I saw no sign of Meghan, though Troy recognized me in the halls. He and his friends were completely unaware of the fact that I subscribed to a counterculture far beyond theirs, and instead just thought I was a dork.

Then, just after sixth period had let out on Friday, I felt a familiar, soft pair of hands on my shoulders as I got my things from my locker. Meghan was dressed in an oversized jacket made of gray-green canvas, and I wondered who it actually belonged to. It looked like it had been made for someone much older and bigger than she was. She bit her lip and said softly, “Hey.”

“Hey,” I said back, a lot more quietly and awkwardly than I’d meant to. “How are you?” I actually did want to know, I realized. I was glad she wasn’t dead.

“I’m alright. Are you okay? I heard you were really sick.”

“Yeah, I got the flu and it made me kind of delirious in the head, so I had to stay in the hospital for a while. I’m fine now, though. It was no big deal.”

“Well that’s good. When you didn’t come back for so long I was worried, and then…what are you wearing, anyway?”

I had on worn black sweatpants that zipped at the ankles, and one of Elliot’s old tee-shirts from middle school with a wolf’s face on it. I laughed. “I don’t know,” I said, “what are you wearing? What do you have that big ugly coat on for? Its warm out.”

Meghan blushed. “It’s my dad’s. I don’t know, I just grabbed it on the way out the door today.”

“Yeah.”

We stood there for a few seconds, saying nothing.

“Hey listen, Meg… I’m really sorry about that day at the hospital. I feel really horrible about it. I was just kind of screwed-up that day, and I think with my brother and everything, the whole hospital deal was just too much. I shouldn’t have left, but I didn’t mean it to be mean.”

“It’s okay… okay, Matty, if I show you something, you can’t tell anyone, alright?”

Meghan shifted so that she was standing behind my open locker door, and she beckoned for me to come closer. When I did, she unzipped that stupid jacket and we both looked down at the little round bulge.

“Holy shit…” I whispered. “What, who? How far…”

“Four months,” she said solemnly.

I felt myself cringe. “Troy?”

“Yeah.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh my God, Meghan, I’m so sorry…”

“Don’t be,” she said, zipping the coat back up. “Just be my friend, okay? You’re like, the only friend I have.”

“Okay. But I’ve got to go now, my bus is here.”

It wasn’t, but I was glad I’d gotten away. I stood against a wall, waiting and trying not to think about anything. Troy and three of his friends were around the corner, about thirty feet away. I didn’t pay attention to their conversation until I heard my name.

“Isn’t he Elliot Madison’s brother?” One of them asked. “Do you guys remember that kid?”

“Yeah, didn’t that kid die?”

“Yeah,” said Troy, “he had some kind of heart defect or something. But I guess his brother has the same thing, is what Meghan told me.”

“But it was more than that, wasn’t it? Didn’t he go jump in a frozen river or something, and that’s how he died?”

“Yeah, when he found out he was dying, or some shit, he did that.” Answered Troy. “And this Matty kid isn’t much better. He just got out of the fucking loony bin. That whole family’s bat-shit insane.”

“Dude, why was she with him for like a year, then?"

“I don’t fucking know. He was all emotional and sensitive and whatever… like I guess when they lost their virginity together, they kept the socks that they had on, and they called them ‘their virgin socks’. I don’t do sappy shit like that, and she knows that. Fuck, man… like I found this notebook in her room the other day and it said some bull about ‘oh, I still love Matty, I’ll always love him’… I told her that shit was about over.” Troy laughed. “She’s got like, no self esteem left. I’m awesome.”

“Yeah, well what are you gonna do if she starts hanging around him again? Kick his ass.”

Troy snorted. “Dude, I’m not gonna hit a fucking dying guy, okay?” he laughed. “God… even I’m not that mean.”

My bus came, and I got on it. It was the worst possible thing he could have said. I wanted him to want to hit me, and I wanted everyone everywhere to stop thinking I was dying.


That night it rained. Around ten I heard a knock at my window, and there was only one person who’d ever done that. When I let Meghan inside, I noticed for the first time that she kept her hair a little bit dirty now, and she’d stopped wearing makeup. Her eyebrows, once immaculately waxed, were a little overgrown.

“What are you doing here?”

“You’ve got to hide me here overnight. Troy is freaking out on me.”

“Why?”

“For talking to you in the hallway. I guess one of his friends saw us.”

“Why can’t you just go home?”

“He knows where my house is!”

“Oh, for God’s sake…”

Meghan lived alone with her father. Her brother and sister were grown-up, and her mother had been dead since she was little. I heard a car go past outside, a loud engine and some indecipherable shouting.

Meghan pulled on my arm, yanking me to the floor with her. “Shit!” she whispered. “He saw me come here. He knows. Come on, we’ve got to go.”

I went, mostly because I didn’t want my parent to wake up and know about the whole scene. She held my arm like we were partners in crime instead of lovers, running, through the wet and the dark, one hand on her stomach.

The abandoned church a few blocks from my house was an obscurely popular spot for neighborhood kids when they were hiding from someone or something, or doing something they shouldn’t, or just wanted to be alone. When we went inside, it was empty. We climbed the rickety steps to the second level, crouching down among what was left of the pews.

“Why are you even with that asshole?” I asked her, the flashlight I had grabbed on my way out the door illuminating the makeshift tent we’d made of her huge jacket. “Meghan, he’s so horrible.”

“I don’t know, okay? At first I wanted to get back at you, but then it got to be more than that.”

“Like what? Was he ever nice? Did he ever even pretend, even for like a day, to be a decent person?”

“No.” And then we both laughed. The whole situation was pretty absurd.

“What are you going to do with the kid?”

“I’ll put it up for adoption, I guess. Troy wanted me to drink it to death.”

“He what? God, Meghan, I hate him. Just don’t even talk about him anymore. It makes me too mad.”

“Yeah, I kind of hate him, too.”

A rock came through the stained glass window high above us, shattering what was left of the design. We jumped in opposite directions to avoid the falling glass.

“I know you’re in there!” Troy shouted from below. “Come the fuck out here! I just want to talk to you, you whore!”

Meghan hissed at me with wild eyes. “Don’t say anything! Just be quiet until he goes away!”

Another rock, bigger this time, came through the window, and I ran across after it hit the floor, both of us huddled in the same corner now. “Meg, he’s going to come hurt you,” I whispered. “We have to get out of here, this isn’t safe.”

“Goddamnit, Matty, just wait until he goes away, okay? God…”

Troy was outside yelling, but I didn’t pay attention to the words. “Meghan, just go home. Why won’t you just go home?”

“My dad molests me, okay?”

“He what?”


“He molests me, okay? He fucks me and stuff. He has since I was nine.”
And then, just like that it all made sense. Every last bit of this, and everything about her, stopped alluding me right then. If it were true, at least. I wasn’t sure what was truth and what wasn’t with Meghan anymore.

“You never told me…"

“Yeah, well…”

We heard a sound like a car being kicked down below, and a last angry exclamation from Troy: “Fine then! You can burn in hell for all I care, you fucking slut! You and your illegitimate fucking kid! Don’t try to contact me anymore, you insane bitch!” We heard the car door slam and the engine start up and then disappear.

I sat down on an old wooden crate and started bawling. Meghan looked at me, confused. For all my hyper-sensitivity, I had never cried in front of her before. She’d done it in front of me plenty, and I’d always appeased her with my shoulder, but now she didn’t give me the same courtesy.

“Why are you crying?” She asked, squinting.

I had lifted the hem of my shirt up and was crying into that. “I’m sorry, okay?” I sobbed. “Fuck… I’ve just never heard anyone say such awful things to anyone else before.”

Her tone softened, and I felt one hand on my shoulder. “Aw, Matty…”

I didn’t say anything more, I just cried. “You know, it’s not totally his fault he’s the way he is” she said. “He really didn’t have a good childhood. His mom was addicted to heroin and left when he was really little, and his dad’s a redneck, and a dick.”

She was crying too now, but just a little--nowhere near like I was. “I feel bad for him, sometimes” she went on, her voice shaky. “And I wonder--I wonder if anyone is really born mean, or is all the way mean, and I really don’t think so…”

“But that doesn’t mean it’s your job to try and bring that out in him,” I managed to say. “If anyone ever talked to me that way, ever,” another sob, “I swear to God I’d never speak to them again. I’d never--I’d never do anything…”

I felt her kiss my hair. “You are a saint, Matty Madison,” she told me. “It’s all okay now, I’m gonna go home.”

She sounded so okay that I let her. I didn’t look up to watch her leave, I just listened to her footsteps until those were gone, and then I cried for a while more, and then I got up and went home and fell asleep.


I didn’t see her again after that. She must have quit school. Troy hung around for a few more weeks, ignoring my existence, and then he quit, too. Graduation came and went, and Ted and Jaime McMenimen quit the band and went off to college in Minneapolis. Noah and I worked jobs and pooled our money to pay for the remastering and pressing of the album we’d recorded, and after a few fruitless weeks of local shows and sending it around to record companies, a decent indie label took interest and signed us. We toured for the first time in the fall.

The van turned into a bus and the venues got bigger, the backing band got more proficient and the agents got older. Noah went to school for audio engineering and didn’t tour with me much anymore, though he still worked on the albums when I was at home. But there really wasn’t much to tell about, from then on, until the day I saw her, in moccasins and playing a keyboard, for the first time.