The Guidance Counselor - Chapter IV (Patreon)

I spent the rest of that day in a haze. I glided through the hallway between my classes on Cloud fucking 9. I replayed that hiccurp in my head over and over. It really happened, right? I even still smelled her rank breath from that burp – thick with pasta and Coke. The smell had singed my olfactory nerves.

I had to draw her.

The first thing I did when I got home was tear a page from my notebook and start drawing a scene where she was sitting at a table in the cafeteria with a bloated belly, pants unbuttoned with the belt unbuckled. I drew that shit faster than anything I ever drew. My brain exploded with neural connections, shooting directly to my hand, the edges of my fingertips. I didn’t think about it then, but that was the first time I drew someone I knew.

I kept that drawing in my folder. Every day my senior year I would look at it during a free period and thought about my fantasy.

She burped. She fucking burped. Practically in my face too!

The fact that Ms. Johnson knew who I was now felt surreal. We were on smiling terms when passing by each other in the hallway. Tom caught me once and hissed in my ear, “She’s fucking hot man, right?”

For some reason that turned me off. Even though I was as horny as he was, if not even more, his apparent aggression over Ms. Johnson rubbed me the wrong way. I wanted to hold her, kiss her, feel her. Whenever Tom talked about her, it sounded stupid. It didn’t sound sexy to me at all. It sounded juvenile and stupid. I didn’t understand exactly how or why but it reminded me of when my parents suggested I danced with this girl Alice at a wedding we went to. Alice was a close friend of our cousin who had gotten married. We sat with Alice and her parents at the reception and I kept stealing glances at her – blond hair with bangs, a plump body, a tight blue dress. She looked way past sixteen. When they played a slow song on the dance floor, my mother tapped me on the shoulder and, in front of everyone, asked, “Why don’t you dance with Alice?”

Alice heard her, and we started dumbly at each other from across the table.

Well, Mom, now that you just said that I suddenly don’t feel like going out with her.

I hated when my parents did shit like that. Despite the fact that, yes, I did find Alice attractive and thought about many fantasies with her during that reception, my mother’s sudden insistence on stepping in ruined the mood. I’m sure Alice felt the same way, because her parents also fancied the idea and prodded her to dance with me. Instead, she disappeared from our table most of the night.

It didn’t take long for my art notebook to be filled with drawings of Ms. Johnson. I even dared to draw smut during class, so long as nobody was really paying attention. Development on Mimi the Witch suddenly went on hiatus. I drew Ms. Johnson bending over in a classroom letting off a nasty, raucous fart that blew the students away. I drew her eating too much at the cafeteria, the buttons on her blazer almost popping off. I drew her burping out loud while driving. An influx of scenarios and ideas sprung to mind. Ah! Ms. Johnson farting in the library. Ms. Johnson farting while counseling a student. Ms. Johnson farting and the smell is so bad that the flowers in the school garden withered. Ms. Johnson farting so goddamn loud that she blew a hole in her pencil skirt, and she put a hand to her mouth going, “Whoops!”.

The second session I had with her was right before the last weekend of the month. Unfortunately, Halloween fell on a Wednesday that year. Of all days for it to land on. A fucking Wednesday. Therefore, festivities shifted to the last weekend of October, and they were going to host the Halloween Dance that Friday. I know what you’re thinking, “How can an all-boys school have a school dance?” Well, dummy, they invited girls from other school. Obviously. I only ever went to one school dance in my entire high school career. Back when I was a sophomore, I dared myself to give the party scene a try.

Boy, was I in over my head.

They packed the gym to the brim with students. It was hot, sweaty, disorienting, and I hated every second of it. You were constantly nudging shoulders with someone and easily lost track of your friends. I think that night set me off about the notion of drinking and intoxication because of an experience I had in the bathroom stall. I mostly went there to take a moment to breathe and not have my sense assaulted. I then noticed Kevin Lu. This Asian kid never said a word in class. He mumbled a lot and evaded questions. He was in my world history class with Mrs. Carroll, and I asked him once if he remembered what section the midterm was going to cover. He mumbled incoherently and I gave up trying to decipher what he was trying to say.

Well, Kevin was a completely different person that night at the school dance. I jumped in shock when I heard him yell, “YEAAAAAAAAAAH MAAAAN!”. He was with Tom Rizzo and another dumb jock named Andrew, along with some annoying kid named John Culver. Kevin was in rare form that night, hooting and hollering and hopping around. I knew he was drunk because his face was beet red and I could smell the alcohol off of him. I didn’t like it one bit. I didn’t like how he acted so differently from how he normally was in class. It made me feel like I couldn’t trust anybody.

Tom was also shitfaced and patted me on the back. I felt very uncomfortable since I was pissing in the urinal but that apparently didn’t faze him. He said, “Come on, man. Let’s go find you a chick!”

“Nah, I’m good.”

“What? Are you gay or something?”

“No. I just--”

“Then what’s the problem, man?”

He tugged at my arm. There was a moment when I thought, “Hm, maybe I will go.”But Kevin then started banging on all the stall doors and hollering like a monkey. His erratic behavior really threw me off and got me worried. Tom eventually got the message and said, “Tch, fag.”

Five minutes into my meeting with Ms. Johnson, and she asked me, “Are you excited for the dance?”

“Not really. I don’t go to those things.”

“Why not?”

I shrugged. “Not my scene.”

“What is your scene?”

Man, she really picks at you, doesn’t she?

“I don’t really know. Hanging out at a friend’s house. Video games.”

“You know, I always tell students who are too scared of dances that if there’s one dance they should go it’s the Halloween dance.”

“How come?”

She smiled. “You can wear a mask and nobody will know how embarrassed you feel.”

I never thought about that before. She seemed to be pleased with herself as I very clearly considered the idea with a dumbfounded look. I tried to shrug it off again by saying, “I don’t really dance and I don’t really do well in those things.”

“I’m hardly sure anyone there really dances. Lord knows what kids really do there. The priests do their best to make sure kids leave room for the Holy Spirit when they dance.”

I smirked. I did remember a funny moment when Father John separated this guy and a girl from making out by the bleachers during that dance. He did it so casually like he was tidying up the place, not even creasing his eyebrows in anger.

Ms. Johnson then talked more about parties, to my surprise. “Are you worried about college? There’s no doubt going to be a lot of socializing, and a lot of peer pressure.”

“I don’t give in to peer pressure.”

She made a face like she was amused that I was so confident in my apparent invincibility. “So you avoid it all together then.”

I shrugged. “I guess. I don’t know.”

I knew what she was getting at though, partially. In a way, I never really fully tested my ability to reject peer pressure. Sure, I rejected Tom’s call to “go find me a chick”, but it wasn’t like he was asking me to drink a beer or smoke a joint. I was avoiding the situation altogether by not going. I was afraid of rejection like any other boy, or any other kid my age really. But I felt like I had so much more to be afraid of because of my deviant sexual interests. That was the unspoken subtext underneath all of this.

“I’m saying this,” she began, “because if you end up somewhere like Rutgers University then there’s going to be a big party scene. Lots of young adults drinking. Lots of young adults smoking. I’m not saying this like I’m condoning it but it’s a reality, whether you agree with it or not. You will find yourself feeling uncomfortable, and it may be difficult to hole yourself up in your dorm all the time.”

“I could commute then. Save money on room and board.”

She shrugged this time. “Yes, that’s a solution. There’s a downside to that too. Commuter lifestyles are very different from the life of a student who lives on campus. The boarding aspect of college greatly enhances a person’s social development.”

An awkward silence, and she detected that I was becoming more uncomfortable with this topic so she tapped her pen on her desk and said, “Anyway. I think you feel Rutgers is too much of a typical choice. I’ll have you know that it’s still pretty renown. There are many research institutions that have--urp--that have--”

I held my breath that very moment.

That slight guttural noise she produced just then – was it really what I thought it was? A strained effort to keep that beast inside? A painful, gaseous little burp, the ones everyday people dismiss during conversation with a quick grunt and placing of the hand over the mouth, and then it’s over and back to the conversation as if nothing happened.

She had continued talking but I had not listened to a single word. I found myself dumbfounded when she left a question open.

“Sorry?”

“Independent research. Does that sound something that might be up your alley?”

“Yeah. It’s in the name so that sounds nice to be doing something on my own.”

Ms. Johnson nodded. She looked over my current grades. “Is calculus going okay for you? I know you’ve had some problems in the past with math.”

“Yeah—no, it’s fine. Just this week has been feeling uh, pretty, pretty slow, you know?”

She smiled angelically. “Of course, especially now that the days are getting darker faster again. Winter weather makes people slow down—urp—excuse me—you know what’s also been really slow? This lunch. Sometimes the lunchroom here can be really horrid. Is it just me?”

My heart absolutely, irrevocably, stopped beating.

“No!” I half-barked.

She was taken aback by my outburst.

I laughed awkwardly, very awkwardly. I wanted to slap myself. “No, sorry, it’s not just you. Yes, the food is terrible, real terrible. Especially the stuffed shells. Yeah. They’re not stuffed—well enough. Stuffed. Ahem. They—they have them really watery and it’s horrible. Absolutely horrible. Worst meal I can ever have here.”

Ms. Johnson chuckled. “Well then, Jason, I didn’t know you felt so strongly about cafeteria food.”

“Oh, yes,” I said, taking a deep breath, staring at her own stuffed stomach, “very strongly indeed.”

After the meeting ended, I of course had to draw more. I drew well until I returned home and held myself up in my room.

At dinner, mom brought up the dance. She did so like she was trying to remember a dream, a tactic I noticed by then that she used in order to get me to think about something without being annoyed that she was the one who brought it up.

“Isn’t there something going on this weekend at your school?” she said.

I shrugged. “I dunno.”

“Yes, something about a dance?’

I shrugged again.

Mom was weird like that. On one hand, she was appalled by the thought of sex or me knowing about sex. On the other hand, she kept pushing me to find “a nice girl” to be with at an early age. What did she think would happen when I found a girl I liked? I didn’t understand it at the time but then again, it’s hard for a high schooler to detangle an entire history of patriarchy, Catholicism, traditional family values, sexism, and societal standards. I could hardly pay attention in class after all.

After dad finished his meal and went to his office to do whatever, mom dropped the act and gave it to me straight. “Jason, are you having trouble making friends? It’s already your senior year and you never brought anyone home over to play.”

“Mom, it’s ‘hang out’. Nobody says ‘play’. Not unless we’re five.”

“Whatever, you know what I mean. Are you still drawing those weird things?”

I let my utensils clatter on my plate. “Mom!”

“They say that kids your age are becoming more obsessed with the Internet. Dr. Phil had this interview—”

Oh my fucking God, I wanted to die. She said shit like that all the time. Bringing up Dr. So-and-So from the TV and Oprah and an article she read from one of her magazines peddling some sensational bullshit. She spent more time listening to people she never met than her own son. All of it, of course, under the name of “doing what is best for our kid”.

But that day my mom had done something that, I hate to say it, actually helped. If not directly then indirectly. She had bought me a Halloween costume for the dance, even though I had told her a million times that I wasn’t going. She picked out The Phantom of the Opera. It didn’t exactly cover my entire face but well enough that I thought back to what Ms. Johnson said.