Smile This Out

I was the dorkiest dork to ever dork through the double doors of George Washington High School.

But after a while, it didn’t really matter. I had my intentions in mind; I was going to wow the whole school with my art, and that would make up for the crappy grades I’d probably get in classes like geometry and biology where I wasn’t too interested. Despite the excitement that my too-optimistic self held for the future, there was also a panging nervousness – the lingering feeling that high school was going to be the worst four years of my life plagued by constant failure and all of that bad shit.

And let me tell you folks, it really didn’t help that my dad had emphasized the fact that I’d have to kick it up a notch to survive in the advanced classes I was taking. I got by on the skin of my teeth in junior high with those smart-people classes, but if I wanted to amount to anything beyond just being some loser with a pencil, I’d have to actually work and not scrape by on a little studying in between episodes of Rocket Power.

It really is painful to think of my freshman yearbook picture and how unbearably 2001 it was, with my pimpled chin and chain necklace and my stupid haircut that was party in the front and business in the back. Paired with my stupid smile, it was a wonder how I made any friends in high school – who would voluntarily talk to that idiot who carried his portfolio with him everywhere and laughed at the most immature topics?

Hell, I wouldn’t even want to befriend myself.

Well, okay, I can’t say I’ve changed much since that loser freshman who sat in the back of math class and doodled Spongebob and random characters of my own creation. On the tour bus with my band, instead of sleeping I draw a lot of the time. Of course I get hell from one person in particular about it, but it keeps me sane, even if he doesn’t see it like I do.

It’s funny, thinking about it. That same person’s first words to me were, “Whoa, did you draw that?!”

I’d known of him since junior high, since we had a few classes together, though we never talked. He always kept to himself and he’d done so for that first week of high school, and I could tell since like in seventh and eighth grade, we had geometry, English, gym, and history together – a handful of classes. We didn’t say one word to each other, not even that first day of school where all of our teachers made us do that dumb shit where we had to introduce ourselves to each other. He had a mean look on his face and I stayed out of his way.

So I have to admit that I jumped a little bit when I heard his voice coming from over my shoulder as I was doodling a sporadic chick with a sword. I got to geometry early that day and was killing time with my passion, totally and completely absorbed. It’d be an understatement to say that I wasn’t expecting him to be right there, hovering for a few moments before speaking up, especially since I’d been sitting right in the doorway to be as incognito as possible, and when I snapped my head up to look at the source of such shock, I met his eyes.

He still had long hair, even when he was 14, and he still tucked it behind his ear to keep it out of his face. He wasn’t looking at me, but at the notebook in front of me where my rough pencil lines had conveyed the character, and his deep-set eyes were fixated on it for a second more before we looked at each other.

“Uh, y-yeah,” I kind of stuttered, spooked.

He glanced back at the art; his face hadn’t changed into anything more expressive. “That’s awesome, dude.”

“Thanks,” I half-smiled. I hate to be cocky, but I was used to getting compliments on my art. Somehow it meant a little bit more coming from somebody who never seemed to smile.

“No, seriously,” he added, slipping off his backpack and taking the seat in front of me. “Are you in art class? ‘Cause you could ace it.”

I could have gone on forever at how uninteresting art class was at that point at the beginning of the year, what with us sketching fruit and how quickly I grasped what the teacher taught; I was feeling polite, though, so I spared him the monologue. “Yeah, I’m in art. I don’t know if I’m acing it yet, though.”

He kept looking at the drawing. “And it’s not even anime.” (Everyone back then drew anime. Trust me on that. For some reason people latch onto it and start out drawing big-eyed Japanese people, but I’d gotten over that in junior high.)

I chuckled quietly, still not used to him being friendly – or talking, for that matter.

“Your name’s Andy, right?” he said like he was just trying to be certain. “I know you from junior high, kinda.”

“Yeah,” I nodded along. I already knew his name; good thing I did, because I’d be hearing it, saying it, and yelling it a lot over the next ten years of our lives.

That was the first time I’d ever spoken to the kid known as Anthony Alvarez, and God knows it wasn’t the last. We ended up passing notes to each other during geometry that day, and later on he even sat by me in history class and we continued passing notes. I’m not sure why he liked talking to me or why it was just a drawing that had sparked us becoming best friends and staying that way for a decade to this day. Our favorite video games and cartoons were discussed in those notes, and I think somewhere in our apartment I still have those first little milestones, buried underneath old sketchbooks and yearbooks we signed.

He was a pretty sour person as time went on, yeah, but I figured out that that was just who he was. Anthony liked cartoons; he wasn’t wired to make them like I was, but that was perfectly okay, because even if he told me to shut up if I got too excited about something, both of us knew that there was a spark there that had ignited that day and has yet to go out. In a way, he sort of balanced me out.

And yeah, he lit the match. What got it really burning, though, was the day of our first geometry test of the year – one that the teacher straight-up told us would determine our grade for that first quarter.

Of course my dad found out about it, and of course he made me study for it, burning equations and variables into my head so thoroughly that I think I dreamed about numbers that night. I had a history with my father that I could go on about forever, but since I’m on a much happier subject, I’ll just say that my mom skedaddled outta our lives when I was younger and he still drowned his sorrows in alcohol. That was why I had slept at my desk that night with a calculator as a pillow, and it was also the reason why I was too on-edge that day to do anything that could remotely relieve my stress.

All my life, I never wanted to be a failure. Especially not in high school, where I could actually make up for all the screw-ups I pulled off in middle school – to me, it truly felt like a fresh canvas, and there was no way I was going to let my lazy side kick in so early.

Plus, my dad told me he’d throw away my sketchbooks again if I got less than an A. Since he’d already gotten rid of my bedroom door from a D in science in seventh grade, I didn’t take his threats lightly.

I really did try to chill the fuck out during that test. I’m not kidding when I say that my hands were sweating so much that I could hardly hold my pen or click the numbers into my calculator, and I’m sure Anthony could hear my shaky breaths from behind him. He probably thought I was a nutcase and was fighting back the urge to just turn around and tell me to shut the hell up. Nowadays he would, at least.

I double-checked my answers, and then I checked them again. There were twenty minutes left in the class and that was just far too much time to spare – something had to be wrong with me. Only two other kids had turned in their tests. I knew everything we covered in class and I knew the answers were right. But something just wasn’t in-line and that thought had nagged at the back of my head for about five minutes. There was nothing else I could do. My answers were down, and if they were wrong, then I sure as hell didn’t know, and well, there wasn’t anything I could do to fix that.

So what if I was wrong about every little thing on that damn test? What if I didn’t know I was wrong and I ended up getting it back with a big fat F written in bold red ink at the top? What the hell was I gonna tell my dad?

The finished test sat in front of me, and unintentionally, my breath picked up the pace.

Fuck, no. Not here. Not now. This hasn’t happened since last goddamn year and it can’t happen again. Not in front of everyone, I thought to myself harshly.

Tiny black dots were fluctuating in the corners of my visual field. Flickering and reappearing, it was a painful reminder of a weakness I’d had since I was in fucking kindergarten. At least twice a year it would happen. Normally it’d go on later in the school year, maybe around Christmas time. But that early? The first few weeks of school?

Never before had I gotten a panic attack that early.

Like I said, something was wrong. It just wasn’t the answers on my test.

Feeling my chest tighten, I leaped out of my seat and heard it scrape across the tile so loud that nearly every head in the class glared at me in unison. Anthony even jumped in surprise and stared at me when I went to the teacher’s desk with my work in hand, already giving up on quadruple-checking and just wanting to get out of the room.

She took my test with a smile and I just had to ask – “May I use the bathroom?”

She nodded, a look of concern rushing past her face for just a second.

I ran out. I didn’t care who saw or what they thought about how weird I just acted, being the overly artsy kid who didn’t seem confident enough to speak up a whole lot. All I needed was an environment without pressure for a few minutes, and then I could go back and just act like myself again.

If only it was that simple.

The bathroom door slammed against the wall when I ripped it open and darted into the nearest open stall, bolting it shut and leaning on the plastic dividers that kept everyone from looking at each other pooping. My knees got weak and I slid to the floor, probably sitting on the grime brought on by high schoolers dragging their shoes through dirt and piss, and the dots lining my eyesight got denser.

I held my breath, hoping to stop it.

I covered my face, freaking out about how I was freaking out and how nothing was working to calm myself.

Steadying my breathing didn’t work and seemed to only make me shakier.

At that point, there was nothing I could do. I’d end up dying in a fucking bathroom. That was such a dignifying way to go, right?

My blood rushed up into my ears and I could hear my own pulse intensifying, and damn it if it wasn’t the scariest thing I’d ever heard, and God knows it certainly wasn’t helping my situation. After trying to hold my breath again, I inhaled a mouthful of oxygen that warbled as it entered my nose, sounding more like a choked sob.

Just as I started to cry, the bathroom door swung open and I looked down under the stall to see whose feet it was.

Low tops and socks that went halfway up his calves. Anthony.

I held my breath again. He couldn’t see me like that. No way.

“Andy?” he asked aimlessly, starting to walk around. “Are you in here?”

He walked toward the stall I was in, and at that moment I would’ve given anything to be invisible and hide my fat ass from his view, my dark jeans standing out against the light linoleum that tiled the floor.

“Mrs. Creole says you’ve been gone for fifteen minutes. Class is almost over,” he continued. “I – well, she wants to know if you’re alright.”

I kept my eyes glued to his shoes, covering my mouth so I wouldn’t breathe and cause a scene. There was already enough of one inside of me.

And I think he was about to go out and leave and just tell our teacher that he couldn’t find me, but he must’ve caught sight of my rump slumped on the floor of the very first stall, because he stopped dead in his tracks.

He knocked twice on the stall door.

“Andy, are you okay?”

I nodded, being a stupid fuck who didn’t realize he couldn’t see me. Speaking was out of the question. I could hardly breathe.

“Andy, I know you’re in there. I see your feet and your ass,” he said bluntly. “What’s going on?”

Taking my hand off of my mouth, I sighed, my throat still rattling the air coming from my lungs.

“Are you sick or something?” he asked, sounding genuinely concerned.

I scrounged up a, “No,” but he obviously didn’t buy it from the way he leaned all his weight on one leg.

“The way you just whimpered lets me know that you’re lying to me.”

That was the deadpan Anthony I was just starting to get used to, and even back then I knew that there was no way to reason with him without compromise. As scared as I was of failure on all angles, one more thing I was scared of was losing the only person up to that point in my life who seemed to give a shit about me.

“I’m having an issue,” I whispered, unable to speak any further. I was already crying and that was bad enough.

“You mind letting me in?”

Took me a second for me to realize what he meant by that, but after heaving a sigh and closing my eyes to try to mute the blood flow in my ears, I reached up with a trembling hand and undid the latch.

I’m sure I was a sight to Anthony, sitting on the floor with disheveled clothes and mussed hair and snot running down my face, and the look of shock that enveloped him caused me to curl into myself again. I didn’t even want to glance at him – it would hurt too much. I wouldn’t have been surprised in the least if he had just turned around and laughed as he walked out, telling the teacher I was just being some dumbass crybaby.

But he didn’t do that. He never has, even when I still get those panic attacks that send me reeling through the night in fearful worry that I’ll never amount to anything. He kneeled down next to me and calmly put his hand on my shoulder, leaning over to get a good look at my blubbering face.

“What’s wrong, dude?” he asked, closing the door behind him.

“Nothing,” I said out of instinct, my voice cracking like popcorn only less delicious.

“Don’t give me that shit when you’re sitting by a toilet crying. You hear me?” he said sternly, his grip tightening. “You don’t have to tell me why you’re crying unless you really want to. I expect you to at least let me sit with you and try to help you.”

We went quiet and I stared at my shoes. There were certain things I just didn’t have a lot of control over, and my friendship with Anthony has always been one of them.

Still with the freckles in my eyes doing backflips, I held my breath again and tried not to cry. I pulled my knees up to my chest and felt it tighten again from a lack of oxygen, the tears coming anyway. There I was, fucking up in front of someone who cared – classic me.

He didn’t care that I wasn’t talking, though, and saw me retract; he put his arm around my shoulder, pressing himself against me in a weird kind of security blanket. It’s odd, witnessing someone so abrasive have a moment of softness where they show at least a little bit of give in their harsh ways. Don’t get me wrong. I’ll probably never forget the gesture and I always compare it to when he feels a brief moment of mushiness and hugs me nowadays, and it was the first time he’d even touched me.

It beat going through it alone. Even though the bell rang twice and it meant we were late for our next class, and even though we didn’t say a word to each other during it, after a while I was ready to stand up again and continue with my day.

Panic attacks were a weakness of mine that hardly anybody knew – not even Mick and Chance, our eventual bandmates. It was just Anthony at that point who was aware of my downfalls and still had the capacity to help me through it, sticking by my side all throughout high school as we learned more about each other and our irritating qualities. It was an unspoken thing. I don’t know what drove him to do it, just like how I don’t know what drove him to compliment my art that day. I’d love to ask him eventually but sometimes I don’t even know if he remembers any of it.

And I know this whole thing was cheesy, but this part has got to be the cheesiest: when we fight and I have those doubts about whether or not he still gives a shit about me like he did that first panic attack, every time we make up I’m reminded that he still does.

I’m still the dorkiest dork to ever dork around onstage when I’m singing with Put’emup, Put’emup, and Anthony points that out to me anytime he can. Who cares? I love that dude.