fic about clyde, sad old clyde
It was just Clyde’s luck to end up in detention on his birthday. It would have been ironic, maybe, if Clyde had been having the best day ever, only to find himself detained after school. Likewise, if Clyde had been waiting to get home for some birthday celebration, that would have been annoying. But the sad fact was that not a single person had remembered his birthday, and if they had, they hadn’t mentioned it. He had only been 20 minutes late to English because he’d slipped on an empty tampon wrapper in the hallway, hit his face against an open locker, and ended up visiting the nurse. Even with awkward bandages plastered against his cheek and a split lip, Clyde ended up in detention, because he’d forgotten to get a note from the nurse. While his teacher had been writing him a slip he grappled with bursting out, “It’s my birthday!” but he restrained himself. Why would this woman care if it was Clyde’s birthday? No one else did.
Clyde had enjoyed detention in the past. His single previous visit was at the end of freshman year, when he and Craig were caught cutting to smoke in the parking lot. At least detention with Craig was fun. He had an amusing sense of detachment about the whole thing, pretending to be more affronted than he really was: “Gosh, fuck, an hour of supervised homework in the library. This is going to teach me not to smoke.” This was the funniest thing Clyde had ever heard. He rushed home from detention and called Token to report it back to him.
“That’s not that funny,” Token had said.
“I guess you had to be there, like maybe I’m not telling it right-”
“I’m sure you’re telling it fine. It’s just not that funny.”
Well, fuck Craig and Token anyway. They hadn’t even wished Clyde a happy birthday.
So Clyde sat there, in the library, head in his hands, wondering how long this hour could possibly seem. He checked his watch; he’d only been there for three minutes. Shit, would this never end? Clyde hated reading, but he took out his bio textbook. Why not? It couldn’t possibly go any slower, could it?
After reading what seemed like the most laboriously written paragraph on lactic acid ever, Clyde checked his watch again. Now he had been there for four minutes. The next paragraph had a vocab term, krebs cycle, in bold. What the fuck was that? Clyde decided to get a pen out of his bag. And a notebook. He’s better write this down. What else was he going to do? He found his favorite pencil, from the pirate exhibit at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. Everyone had gone for Tweek’s birthday last year. Then they had cupcakes in the park by the lake. It was such a beautiful day. Stupid fucking Tweek. Stupid fucking Tweek’s idyllic fucking birthday. Clyde just wanted to hold his favorite pencil. It was married with teeth marks, but Clyde liked that it fit snug between his teeth.
A few weeks ago in trig some moderately adorable girl had been sitting next to Clyde. She had smiled; Clyde smiled back. “Can I borrow a pen?” she had asked. Enormous eyes. He liked that.
“Yeah, totally,” Clyde had said, reaching into the front pocket of his backpack. He found his favorite pencil and set it on the desk for her. “Here you go.”
She had glanced at it, developed a look on her face as if she were ill, and said, “That’s sick.” She got up and changed seats.
Now Clyde was in detention on his birthday and no one was even sitting next to him. He buried his head in his arms, figuring it best to just sleep through this.
It was the slamming of the door and the beginning of an argument that roused Clyde. How long had he been sleeping for? He checked his watch; about two minutes. Great.
“But I’m only two minutes late,” a contrary voice was saying. Clyde knew that fucking voice anywhere. It was Eric Cartman’s.
“You’re 10 minutes late,” the librarian was saying, “and for the last time, go sit down.”
“This is an affront to justice,” Cartman argued. “Everyone knows that detention runs from 4 p.m. to 5 p.m., on the dot, no exceptions. Refusing to let me leave at 5 p.m. is against my Constitutional rights. Or did you forget that the Park County public school system is subject to the laws of this land? Because for your information, I am sick, and I am tired, of my country being hijacked by liberals who are willing to play hard-and-fast with the rules. Does it not say in Article 10, um … Section B-”
“All right, Mr. Cartman, fine,” the librarian muttered. “Just stop talking already and go sit down.”
So Cartman did sit down, right next to Clyde, wiping the sweat from his brow and pulling a week’s worth of Rockstar energy drinks from his backpack.
“Teachers, Clyde, am I right?” he said, opening a can.
“I don’t know.” Roused, Clyde put his elbow on his desk and his chin in his hand. He tucked his pencil between his legs. “What are you in for?”
“Oh, I have detention every day,” Cartman said. “Yeah, I’m just badass like that. It’s no big deal, dawg.”
“No, really,” said Clyde. “What’d you do?”
Cartman shrugged. “I was videotaping the girls in the shower.” He said this like it was the most boring thing ever, people just spied on teenage girls in the shower all the time. “Apparently that’s against school policy! Well, I was shocked, I tell you. Utterly shocked. Apparently the girls in this school are allowed to - to just throw their used tampons away. Right in the garbage!”
“So?”
“So?” Cartman rolled his eyes. “Do you really not see the problem with that, Clyde?”
“Not really.”
Cartman gulped down the rest of his drink. Then he said, “Do you really not know what tampons are for, Clyde?”
Clyde blushed. “Of course I know what tampons are for.” He blinked. “They’re for periods, right?”
“That’s right,” Cartman confirmed. “Periods. And do you know what a period is, Clyde?”
“It’s when a girl bleeds for like four days.”
“And do you know which life-threatening disease is sometimes found in blood?”
Clyde had to think for a moment. “AIDS?” he guessed.
“That’s right, Clyde.” Cartman nodded. “Hepatitis B.” He cracked open a new Rockstar can.
“Well, what’s the big deal?”
“The big deal. The big deal? What’s the big deal? Yes, what is the big deal. Indeed!”
There was a moment of silence for a moment. Then Clyde asked, “So, what is the big deal?”
Cartman smacked his forehead. “Oh my god, are you blind?”
“No.”
“If the girls are allowed to just - just go around throwing their bloody hepatitis B-infected tampons in the garbage in our school, Clyde, any one of us could just, just - end up with hepatitis B!”
“Do you even known what hepatitis B does?”
Cartman didn’t blink. “Do you?”
“Well, I mean - I can’t say that I do-”
“Well, then who are you to judge? Are you going to be an enabler, Clyde? Are you going to sit here in detention and tell me that my tampon disposal monitoring system that I set up in the girls’ locker room isn’t an effective means of hepatitis B prevention? Are you really that blind, Clyde? Because that’s what the school said. They said I was just videotaping naked girls for my own sick pleasure. But tell me this, Clyde - if my tampon disposal monitoring system prevents just one student from getting hepatitis B, just one, haven’t we all won?”
Clyde couldn’t say that this made good sense. However, he also couldn’t say that it did not make good sense. Then again, when was the last time he’d been tested for hepatitis B? “I guess so,” he said.
“That’s right,” said Cartman. “So that’s what I’m doing here. Me, I’m a political prisoner.” Cartman raised his voice: “But I’ll do my time,” he yelled, trying to get the attention of the librarian who, rather than watching them, was reading a copy of Tatler. “I’ll do my time until every last bloody tampon is collected and properly disposed of and this school is safe for upstanding men like my good friend Clyde here!”
The librarian licked her thumb and turned the page.
“So,” said Cartman. He opened the tab on his third energy drink. “What are you in for?”
“I was late to class and I didn’t have a hall pass or a note from the nurse.”
“Man, that’s totally lame. This school is run by fascists, Clyde. Complete fascists. And not the cool kind of fascist, the kind that would take one look at Kyle and see his scrawny arms and realize he was useless and wasn’t even good for medical experiments and send him right to the gas chambers. I mean the lame kind of fascist, the Eastern European kind with the whole ‘oh, equality for all, there should be national healthcare, we have nukes but we’re too fucking pussy to use them’ kind. This school is like that, Clyde. The kind of fascist that wouldn’t even send Kyle to the gas chambers and wouldn’t even give you a hall pass.”
“Yeah!” Clyde shocked himself by suddenly being motivated to agree with this fucked-up agenda. “And you know what else? I fucking slipped on a tampon wrapper on my way to class! And I hit myself, see?” Clyde pointed at his bandaged wound and his split lip. “And that’s why I was late! I fucking, like, fell on a tampon and no one even cared.”
“And, uh - well, that’s pretty lame, but yeah, that’s totally what I’m talking about. That’s seriously fucked-up, Tampons are just killing everyone. You’re lucky you’re still alive, Clyde.”
“Yeah, and - and…” Clyde was so excited he barely knew what to do with himself. “And it’s my birthday!”
“It’s … your birthday?”
“Yes! My fucking birthday! I’m 18, godammit, and no one even remembered. I mean, no one even cared. And then I slipped on this, this fucking tampon, what sort of sick bitch just leaves a tampon in the hall, and then I’m in detention, and you’re so right, so right about the fascists, man, the Soviets - I mean, Stalin wasn’t that bad-”
“No, you misunderstand me. Stalin sucked, Clyde. He wasn’t awesome like Hitler. But you know what, Clyde? At least people always celebrated Stalin’s birthday.”
“They did?”
“What? Of course they did. Fuck yes.”
“Oh.” Clyde blushed and began to roll his pirate pencil between his fingers. “I mean, did you know I can legally smoke today?”
“What? My mom buys me cigarettes all the time.”
“Yeah, but mine doesn’t. My mother didn’t even remember my birthday.”
Cracking open a fourth energy drink in 20 minutes, Cartman burst out laughing. “That’s the saddest fucking thing I’ve ever heard,” he managed, once he’d stopped. “That’s fucking hilarious. Don’t you have friends?”
“Well, yeah-”
“No one remembered your birthday? Not even one person?”
“Not even one person,” Clyde confirmed.
“Well, fuck, man, that blows.” Cartman turned away, seemingly done with the conversation.
A few moments passed, and Clyde tried to find out if he could remember what the krebs cycle was. He couldn’t. Miserably, he buried his head in his arms on top of his textbook, wondering when this detention would be over.
Then he heard Cartman say it: “I mean, seriously, if I were in your position, and no one remembered my birthday, I would probably just kill myself. I’m seriously.”
Clyde wasn’t stupid. He knew Cartman was an idiot, just said things without thinking. But Clyde also knew that Cartman was a magnanimous, highly effectual idiot. If things hadn’t been going so poorly to begin with, Clyde probably would have ignored this comment. But while his lip throbbed, scabbing over, and his long fingernails bit into the wood of his tooth-marked pencil, Clyde figured that maybe, just maybe, Cartman’s advice could be counted on for one thing, and that was making a scene.
~
Though he considered himself a failure at life, Clyde was surprised to learn that he was no good at death, either. Or at half-hearted pleas for attention.
Clyde woke up to a tall man shouting, “Good god, son!” in his face. “Whatever possessed you to put that plastic bag over your head?”
Clyde considered saying, “I was trying to kill myself.” Instead he just shrugged. “Seemed like a good idea.”
“And in a rainstorm, too!”
Clyde didn’t remember that part. So he asked, “What happened?”
“Well, from what I understand,” said this man in dingy scrubs, “you were sitting on the roof with a plastic bag over your head in a thunderstorm! What kinda crazy kid does that?”
One who’s trying to kill himself. “Uh. One who’s trying to stay dry?”
“Well, now that just doesn’t make any sense! If it’s raining out, son, you want to go inside the house, not sit on the roof with a dry cleaning bag on your head!”
“I’ll be more careful next time,” Clyde promised.
“If you insist on sitting on the roof you might at least tell someone you’re going up there. Why, you could have told your parents or a friend.”
“I don’t have any friends,” Clyde said without thinking. Then he shook his head. “I mean, my parents just would have told me not to go up there.”
“Because they wouldn’t want you falling off the roof, right?”
“I don’t know,” said Clyde, “but did you know today was my birthday?”
“Really?” The doctor blinked. “How old did you turn?”
“I’m 18 now.”
“Well. You’re pretty stupid for an 18-year-old.” Clyde’s doctor patted him on his head; because Clyde had recently fallen on his hit, this hurt.
After he was discharged, Clyde’s parents spent the entire car ride yelling.
“That was a stupid thing to do!” his mother yelled.
“You could have killed yourself!” his father added.
“I know,” said Clyde.
“Then why’d you do that?” his mother asked.
Clyde shrugged. “I dunno.”
“How could you not know?”
“I just felt like it.”
“Were you masturbating up there?” his father asked. “You know, were you pleasuring yourself?”
“No. Why would I be doing that on the roof?”
“Maybe you wanted some privacy,” said Clyde’s mother.
“Yeah, I do, that’s why I do it in the bathtub.”
“Jesus, Clyde!” She whipped around and yelled at him over the seat. “I just had your bathroom remodeled last year!”
“Well, you told me not to do it in bed because my sheets were nice and the thread-count was too high.”
“Well, find another place!”
“What if I jerked off on the roof, would that be okay?”
“No!” both of his parents responded, in unison.
“Okay.” Clyde crossed his arms. He slouched against the window. The ride home from Hell’s Pass was long and bumpy. His head hurt. “What did you get me for my birthday?” he asked.
“Clyde, it’s almost 2 in the morning,” his father said. “Is this really the time to be thinking about presents?”
“He doesn’t deserve presents,” his mother said, staring out her window. “We have the stupidest child alive.”
“He’s not even a child anymore. He’s 17!”
“I’m 18.”
“Sitting on the roof in a rainstorm. What the hell?”
“I think it goes without saying that you’re grounded,” Mrs. Donovan announced.
“Fine, I didn’t want any presents anyway.”
“Maybe when your birthday comes we’ll get you something,” said Clyde’s father, “provided you’ve developed some common sense, young man.”
“My birthday-”
“His birthday’s not for months,” Clyde’s mother said. “Why are we even having this discussion?”
When they got home, Clyde took 12 Advils. His head hurt, it hurt a great deal, and he felt that this would serve to either cure his headache and help him go to sleep, or he’d slip into a coma and wake up in eight months, to his parents’ massive relief and delight.
To Clyde’s abject horror, though, when his father pounded on the door at 6:15 a.m. to get him up for school, his head was still pounding, and his bare chest was smeared with half-dissolved flecks of orange-white Advil tablets. As he washed vomit off of himself in the shower, he contemplated jerking off, splattering the tiles everywhere just to subversively if surreptitiously put one over his mother. But then, just as Clyde was taking his half-hard dick in his hand, his mother slammed on the door and screamed, “You’re going to be late for school!” Clyde certainly didn’t care if he was late for school, but like a flower at sundown, his partial erection wilted and shrunk. With shampoo stinging his eyes and without having conditioned, Clyde turned off the water and got out of the shower.
~
Eric Cartman was elusive. Strange, because he was loudest, fattest, most conspicuous kid in school. Cartman and Clyde shared no classes except functions, in which they were of course having an exam, for which Clyde had of course failed to study. Clyde raised his hand into the air, feeling nauseated, until his math teacher waddled over and said, “Yes, Clyde?”
“I couldn’t study last night,” Clyde explained. “I was in the emergency room.”
The teacher looked down at Clyde, through her ovular wire-framed lenses and over her big, fat nose. “Do you have a note?”
Of course he didn’t have a note. But now he had what surely amounted to no higher than a D+ on his most recent functions exam.
To Clyde’s good fortune, he was able to get Cartman’s attention after the test by grabbing one of Cartman’s back pockets and repeating, “hey, hey, pay attention to me, hey,” until Cartman made it to his locker, hit Clyde in he face while whipping off his backpack, and barking, “What?”
“I tried to kill myself.”
Cartman blinked. “Okay. I don’t see what that has to do with me, but hey - whatever, Clyde, okay.”
“No, not okay! You told me to do it. You told me to kill myself!”
“All right. I’m … still not totally following but, okay, nicely done, Clyde, you clearly failed at that. Nicely done.”
“Well, yeah. You said, ‘why don’t you kill yourself,’ and I figured, how difficult could that be? The worst thing that could happen would be I’d get some attention! But now I’m back here at school, and I still have a headache, and did I get anything for my birthday? No. So why, godammit, why do I do this shit?”
“You know, Clyde, other people have problems. If you can’t deal with your problems and you don’t like how I tell you to deal with your problems, you can get the fuck out.” Cartman pointed to the left, at some abstraction all the way down the hallway.
“What, what are you pointing at?”
“I’m just pointing out. If you can’t deal, Clyde, you can get the fuck out.”
“Get out to where?”
“I don’t know, home?” Cartman shrugged, dropping his arm. “It’s not my problem where you go when you get out. Unless you want to let me copy your functions homework, in which case I suggest you hand over your functions homework.”
“I was in the emergency room last night and didn’t know we had functions homework!”
“Ohhhh, okay. Well, I wasn’t in the emergency room last night, and I did know we had functions homework, but I couldn’t do my functions homework, because it was the season finale of Top Chef Masters, and what if I didn’t watch it, then Kyle would just tell me the ending, who won, like he always does, he’s such a fucking know-it-all, gawd I hate Kyle-”
‘I don’t care!” said Clyde. “I don’t care about Kyle, or Top Chef, or functions. Everyone forgot my birthday, and I can’t masturbate in the shower, and I don’t care, I don’t even care about anything anymore! “
Cartman looked Clyde right in the eyes; they had never locked eyes before. Cartman had narrow, squinting eyes; it made Clyde feel like maybe he should steer clear of Cartman from now on.
With an absolutely straight face, and no trace of sarcasm or irony, Cartman said, “If you don’t care about anything anymore, Clyde, maybe you should just kill yourself.” Then he slammed his locker shut, pushed Clyde out of his way, and began lumbering to his next class.
~
On the last day of school, there was a carnival. There always was. It was one of those rent-a-carnivals, the kind that shows up in church parking lots randomly one weekend for fundraisers. Somehow, Clyde found himself standing in line for the ferris wheel, wondering what the fuck he would do when he graduated from high school next week. Well, yeah, he was going to graduation, and then he was going to Token’s graduation party at his parents’ vacation house in Vail. This was only marginally exciting, and whatever shred of excitement Clyde felt in attending a catered open-bar affair at a ski chalet was neutralized by the threat of having to drive an hour through the mountains with the world’s absolute worst driver, Tweek. Because Tweek’s parents had given him a car for graduation. Because they cared. So, yeah, next week Clyde was graduating and going to Vail. The week after that, he had to enroll in community college and like, get a job or whatever.
Whatever.
The line for the ferris wheel moved slowly, slowly. The tired old thing did not glide, but creaked around so gradually that it took 18 minutes to do a full cycle. And this was not, mind you, a big ride; it towered maybe 30 feet into the air. Three storeys was high-up for Park Country, but there were so many sweeping elevations on Clyde’s ride to school that a ferris wheel in the school parking lot promised no real thrills; that was why Clyde was waiting to get on. He no longer expected his life to be thrilling, or even interesting. He’d just sit on this thing by himself for 30 minutes, see what he could pick out in the landscape down below.
About four people back from riding, and Clyde noticed a sign hastily tacked to a post stuck into a painter’s bucket of mud:
ALL RIDERS MUST BE IN PAIRS
“Well, son of a bitch,” Clyde muttered, glancing around. He considered leaving the line, but no, he wanted to get on the ride. He’d waited all this time, all this fucking time - so, okay, it had only been 20 minutes, or 25 minutes, but his feet ached and he could feel how hot the asphalt in the school parking lot was under the thin rubber soles of his sneakers, baking all day in the sun. All Clyde wanted was to lift off the ground, watch his feet dangle from three storeys up. His head still didn’t feel right from falling off the roof, and the last time he didn’t feel dizzy or slightly nauseated he was up there, on that roof, in the rain. Clyde didn’t know if there was any way to recapture that feeling, the feeling that his destiny was in his control. So he tapped on the shoulder of the guy in front of him, who whipped around.
“Yeah?” Stan Marsh; of course, his constant shadow, Kyle Broflovski, turned around as well to gawk down at Clyde, too. “Can I help you, Clyde? What’s up?” There was no malice in his voice, just slight impatience.
“Do, um.” Clyde never talked to these guys. Never. “Do either of you guys need someone to ride with?”
Kyle blinked. “What?”
“You know, on the ride.” Clyde made big circles with his hands. “The sign says I need someone to ride with.”
A benevolent, sympathetic smile developed on Stan’s face. “Sorry,” he said. “We were kinda planning on riding together.”
“Oh,” said Clyde. “Sorry.”
“No need to apologize,” said Kyle. He pulled at the hem of Stan’s shirt, and they both turned away.
Clyde let his posture slack, crossing his arms, wondering what he was going to do when he got up to the front of that line.
“I’ll ride with you,” a voice offered from behind. Slowly, Clyde turned to face Butters Stotch, cheeks red from the sun, tongue blue from a snowcone he was holding. The paper cone wrapped was soggy and blue-and-red rivulets of syrupy ice water ran down Butters’ knuckles. He grinned, raised the snowcone to his lips, and slurped.
“Sure,” Clyde said, shrugging as nonchalant as he could managed. “Whatever.”
“Great!”
~
They lifted up, up into the air, painfully slow and steady. Clyde tried to sit as far away from Butters as possible. There was nothing wrong with Butters, per se, but that blue snowcone kept dripping, even as Butters slurped away at its melting core.
“So how’re you doing?” Butters asked. He kicked his legs out, rocking the seats. The rickety old bucket swayed and creaked, and Clyde didn’t care. Maybe they’d drop. Whatever. Like a mantra: Whatever, whatever, whatever.
“I’m fine.” Clyde rolled his eyes. This wheel was moving so slowly. “What about you?”
“I’m great! I’m real excited for graduation. Are you excited for graduation, Clyde?”
“Not really.”
“Aw.” Butters sounded sincere when he said this. “Why not?”
“Um.” Clyde looked down. They were only six feet up, maybe. This was so pathetic. “The only stable thing in my life is ending and I’m going to be jobless and probably homeless and my parents are fed up with me and I’m fed up with them?”
“That sounds rough,” said Butters. “But you know, if you’re feeling down right now, there’s probably something good around the corner.”
“Like what?”
“Are you going to college?”
Clyde gaped at Butters. “Maybe?”
Butters frowned. “It seems like you don’t have much direction, you know?”
“I know,” said Clyde.
“So what are we going to do about it?”
“What? I don’t understand.”
“Well, don’t you have some kind of plan?”
Clyde looked Butters up and down; here was this kid, this sad kid who was even shorter than Clyde was, his chin dripping with neon blue sugary water, his lips blue, his tongue blue, his teeth blue, grinning a big purplish grin while he tried to prompt Clyde into admitting that life was grand. Wasn’t life great, just up here in this rusted old piece of crap ferris wheel? Wasn’t it just...? Butters clearly expected an answer, an affirmation. He was wearing neon green booty shorts and a button-down pinstripe oxford. It had taken Clyde this long to realize it, but Butters looked retarded. His hair was all stuck to his forehead like he’d been sweating rather precipitously, and yet his hairline was so high that this made him look so much older than he was. It was out of place on Butters, whose eyes were big and water-blue, not like brilliant royal fountain-pen ink but reflective of a big, gray sky. Not really any color, just shifting from aquatic to steely as Butters turned and shrugged as the light caught his face at a new angle. So he was squinting now, as it was bright out, but he was still smiling. In fact, he hadn’t stopped smiling since they’d gotten on this ride.
He was still kicking his legs around, as the ferris wheel inched them slightly higher. In one predictable sweep, a flip-flop went flying off of Butters’ foot. His cheeks pinkened, and he turned to Clyde. “Oh, shoot,” he said. “That always happens.”
Oh my god, Clyde realized, looking at Butters. This kid is a hot fucking mess. More than even Clyde himself, if it were possible. Damn.
And Butters was still trying to lecture Clyde on life lessons. “You need to, like, go to the guidance counselor and talk about what you’re gonna do next,” he was saying. “I didn’t know, either, but she’s pretty nice and she told me I should try to make a life out of what I’m good at. But not to make it too difficult! So to save money I’m going to begin with community college. But then I plan, when I’m done, to transfer to art school. I always make these little things, so I figure, why not?”
“I guess that’s what I’ll try,” said Clyde. “I mean, starting with community college. I dunno, I might not get farther. But not art school. I’m … I’m not so good at art.”
“Well, what’re you good at?”
“Uh.” Clyde was thinking. He was thinking really hard. He was thinking so hard that he squeezed his hands together and knotted his brow.
“You look funny like that,” said Butters.
“I do?”
“Yeah, kinda.”
“Oh.” A moment of silence passed as they were raised a few feet higher. Then Clyde shrugged and said, “Man, I’m not good at anything. I’m okay at most things, maybe, but I don’t know what I’d really want to do everyday, all day. I’m not good at a lot of stuff, really. No talents. Maybe - maybe that sounds sad, but I guess it’s true. Sorry, Butters. Sorry.”
“Okay, well, don’t apologize. Let’s think harder.”
Clyde felt that if he thought harder he might just have an aneurism. Still:
“What do you like?” Butters asked.
“What do you mean, what do I like?”
“You know, what do you enjoy? What are you passionate about? What do you like to do?”
“Nothing, really,” Clyde answered without thinking.
“That is such a bad answer, Clyde!”
“Well, I don’t know. I like tacos?” As soon as Clyde had said this, he felt miserably stupid. What the fuck kind of answer was that? He liked tacos? For fuck’s sake, who didn’t? That was the one thing he could come up with that he liked, fucking tacos. In all the universe Clyde had no other words to describe what he looked forward to on a daily basis. Now he was doomed to be forever that fucking kid who liked tacos. And he didn’t even like tacos that much.
Butters was studying his face. “I’m trying to figure out if you’re being serious,” he finally said.
“Well, I was,” said Clyde. “But I wish I could give you a better answer.”
“Well, there’s nothing wrong with tacos.”
“I know, but-”
“You could maybe open a taqueria.”
“A what?”
“You know,” said Butters, “a place where they sell tacos.”
“I’ve never heard that term before. And I don’t want to sell tacos. What kind of life would that be?”
“You’re so silly. I’m not saying that’s what you should do, I’m merely saying that’s the sorta thing you could do - the sorta way you gotta think. Tacos, puppies - heck, a, uh, a strip club, it really doesn’t matter. You just have to figure out what you like, what you like to do, and there’s a way to make it your life, I’m sure.”
“I could open a strip club?” Clyde asked.
“Sure, I guess.” Now Butters was a fantastic shade of scarlet; Clyde wondered if his skin, his opalescent skin, maybe wasn’t too pallid to be exposed like this, especially not his nice, soft thighs. But maybe he was wearing sunscreen?
They had just reached the very peak of the ride; this was when the entire ferris wheel ground to a halt. A woman shrieked. From behind and below, Stan Marsh screamed, “Oh my god!”
Turning around to glance at the bucket behind them, Clyde caught Kyle covering his mouth and shouting, “You bastards!”
Stan was glancing down, so Clyde looked down, too, to see what Stan was looking at; protruding from the gears of the ride, visible through a gap in the loading platform, was one long, spindly leg. Everything was smeared with blood. Clyde slouched back into place, feeling sickened.
“Poor Kenny,” Butters said. He patted one of Clyde’s hands. It felt … convincing. “What an awful way to go.”
Clyde felt numb. He was staring straight ahead.
“Clyde?” Butters asked. “What’re you thinking?”
“Eh.” Clyde shifted. He suddenly felt so exposed, so far from comfort. It was only three storeys, but he felt suspended miles above the Earth. “When we got on the ride, I was thinking - well, I was thinking, what if I fell off?”
“On accident? My gosh, that’d be something awful.”
“No.” Clyde shook his head. “Not on accident.”
“Clyde!” Butters gasped, dropping the soggy wrapper of his melted snowcone; it flitted down to the gears, where it landed on the back of a mechanic trying to pry Kenny from the machinery. “That’s an awful thing to say!”
“Maybe, but it’s true.”
“Don’t talk like that! Do you know how awful it would be?”
“Not very, I’m sure. Why do you care, Butters? You don’t even know me!”
“Well, sure I do. You’re Clyde Donovan! You don’t complain when everyone forgets your birthday, and you don’t expect nothing for it, neither.”
Clyde narrowed his eyes. “How do you know when my birthday is?”
“Eric told me.” Butters shrugged. “He told me he saw you in detention, that you were sad ’cause no one celebrated and he told you you might as well kill yourself. I was hoping you wouldn’t, actually, because … well, I guess because that’d be awfully sad.”
Clyde snorted. “No one’d notice. No one would care.”
“I’d care.”
“No you wouldn’t. You didn’t even say anything to me when you knew it was my birthday.”
“Well, I just assumed you didn’t want me to ruin it by talking to you or anything,” said Butters. In a very soft voice, he added: “I mean, when was the last time I got invited to someone’s birthday? I just figured you didn’t want me inserting myself or something. That’s all. But we’re talking now, right?”
“I guess so.”
“Do you know when my birthday is?”
“Um.”
“It’s September 11.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. Well, no one ever celebrates my birthday, either. But you could celebrate my birthday this year, if you wanted. With me, I mean. And, um - well, with other people, maybe. If they weren’t too busy worrying about their own problems.”
“I’d like that,” Clyde said. “I mean, if you wanted me to.”
“I would.”
“Well, okay.”
For a while, maybe 10 minutes or so, while they were paused at the top of the ferris wheel, Clyde and Butters did not speak at all. The sun beat down, but it was breezy, and 30 feet below Clyde could see the long, long line for the ride dissipating, and hear snatches of the conversation as a man from the midway rides company explained to the crowd that, due to the tragedy, the ferris wheel was closed until further notice.
“It’s nice up here,” Butters said, finally. “You can see the entire parking lot. I like it. You can almost see the whole town.”
“But why would you want to see any of this town?”
“It’s a decent place.”
“No,” said Clyde. “It’s empty and it’s monotonous and it’s the worst place ever.”
“Well, sure,” Butters agreed, “but it’s got the best people in it.”
Clyde scoffed. “Like who?”
“Well.” Butters batted his eyelashes. “Like you.”
“Me? I’m-” Oh. Shit.
Butters leaned over and planted one very chaste peck on Clyde’s lips, right at the corner. Then Butters pulled away, with a look on his face like he was going to have to lean over their safety bar and spew all over Kenny’s corpse down there.
Clyde had never thought about kissing anyone - let alone a boy; let alone Butters. But without pausing to consider the ramifications, he grabbed Butters’ ears and yanked him into his own mouth. This one was open-mouthed, but reticent, lots of lips but no tongue. Butters pulled away, bit his lip, and said, “Was that your first one?”
“My first what? My first kiss?”
Butters nodded.
“Um.” Clyde fidgeted, and their bucket rocked. The last thing he wanted to seem was virginal. This was Butters, after all. If anyone was going to be the man on this ferris wheel, Clyde understood that it was going to have to be him. So with a rather haphazard burst of confidence, he stretched out, and pulled Butters into his side, hand grasping territorial-like, into Butters’ far shoulder.
“Yeah,” Clyde said, trying to let this just roll off of his tongue. “But, whatever.”
“Oh, good.” Butters settled his head onto Clyde’s neck, his hands searching for something to grab onto. “Mine too.”
Clyde grabbed one of Butters’ hands and pulled it into his lap.
“Happy belated birthday,” Butters said.
“Thanks.” Clyde licked the artificial blue-raspberry flavoring off of his bottom lip.
“Yeah,” he said. “This is okay."