Illustration by Shaina Cohen

Brian wanders—barefoot when he can get away with it—through the school every day with his head in a cloud. He has a narrow face with delicate features and wounded-looking hazel eyes with dark lashes. Black mascara. Long stringy hair that he eventually stops washing altogether. It is widely known throughout the school that he carries a human femur up the sleeve of his trench coat. The kids call him Phineas Freak. In the summer he wears a rayon skirt with purple paisleys. He has two friends, Moody and Cash, who are Iranian and thus automatically weird, in a school where 96% of students are Scottish and Catholic. Girls are afraid of Brian. Boys think he’s gay and one night they beat him up, breaking his perfect aquiline nose.

Roddie calls Carmen up. “So what are you at tonight then, Carrmen?” he asks in his Cape Breton accent. He’s not putting it on; this is how he talks, how his whole family talks. She can picture him in his little room at his mother’s, a slight nineteen-year-old boy who looks about twelve and dresses like an eighty-year-old. “Like an old man personified.” He wears shiny black dress shoes and wool slacks. He has a lot of longish hair, which he wears slicked back with bryllcream.

“Oh, I’ve got some friends over and we’re having a barbeque.” She stands in the kitchen, twisting the phone cord.

“Well I haven’t a barrbeque.” Pause. “But I’ve a whole piahno under maih baed.” Pause. “Ahll ehty-eht keys.” Carmen feels the backs of her knees go deliciously weak.

Peter Norman stands outside the Student Union Building with Rose, waiting to get into Buck Sixty-Five. He has black hair under an old man’s tweed cap, long white hands, and he weighs about 95 ponds. He can’t stop moving around, shifting his weight from foot to foot, fumbling with cigarettes. “Janette, Clem. How’s it going, what’s up?” The words are impeccably normal but his voice is unmodulated. It’s up, it’s down, the words come out in a rush, then stall. Then spill out again. “So, hey, you like Buck Sixty Five?” He is as skittish as a cat. He has been pursuing Rose for weeks, had called her twice that day to make sure she was going to show. Twenty minutes later Rose comes in, alone, fuming. After waiting in line with her all night, he’s decided not actually to come to the concert.

Tom sits across from me in a poetry workshop. I don’t know him. It’s the second day, and he has largely avoided people at breaks. He has a sudden brief smile which he directs at the floor. He’s wearing sunglasses indoors, and a leather jacket. There is a large-faced watch on both of his wrists, and a third timepiece, a pocket watch, hanging from a chain attached to his plaid trousers. There are in fact about twenty-seven items of paraphernalia hanging from his waistband, at the left hip. From where I slouch I can see up the sleeve of his jacket to where there is the tip of a very serious-looking scar on his forearm. A tattoo. He hasn’t said much since the workshop started. Now it’s his turn to read and he opens his mouth and delivers slowly, deadpan: “Trees are weird in Washington…We know why this is…” I grab the edge of my chair and sternly remind myself I’m married.

Rose is at a party and suddenly finds herself standing next to Tim Paugh.

“Nice jacket,” he says. “What kind of fur is that?”

“It’s fake.”

“Ah, yes. Fake. Fake fur is known to be the warmest and most durable of all the faux family. Somewhat difficult to trap though. My brother Jean-Guy and I used to trap fake along the Sagenay in the nineties back in Lower Canada.” His brown eyes regard her seriously. “Those were cold winters, following the fake on their annual migrations. Jean-Guy had more patience for it than I did. He was a true coureur de bois. Me, I was just an amateur. I was in it for the money, and there wasn’t much of that. Plenty of fake trappers out there, not enough fake.” Tim shakes his head mournfully. As he goes on, the furrow of concentration deepens on his brow and the monologue becomes increasingly absurd until he can no longer sustain it and he stops, mid-sentence, with a little smile, and moves away.

Contents of Peter Norman’s backpack: bag of rice, spoon, spray paint, shoes, peanut butter, book on biology.

Antonio does cannonballs off the high diving board. He is sixty-seven. He teaches Quantum Physics, using the stump of the thumb of his right hand as a blackboard pointer. All of the fingers were blown off in the lab forty years ago, in experiments for a seminal article on the electron. He has never learned to drive a car. He regularly trawls the university dumpsters for computer parts, causing one student some consternation when she arrived for her first meeting with her new physics professor, at having the office door opened by a man she’d assumed was the town bum.

A boy named Ed sits alone in a corner of the school library, drawing. Djzzzzzz, djzzzzz. He is making soft noises through his teeth as he concentrates. He has reddish-brown hair and his face was completely covered in freckles. Impossibly thick glasses that make him look like he had at least four eyes. And that is in fact what the kids call him. Four-eyes. Or, “Eddie Spaghetti with the meatball eyes!” He wears brown Toughskins corduroys that don’t quite come to his ankles and a snorkel-hood winter coat. Army boots. His cousins call him “Cos’n Ed,” affectionately, but it sounds like “Cousin It.” Ed is in grade twelve. He has just purchased fifty acres of land.

Field Notes

The weird boy category overlaps with the shy boy, the little old man, the geek, the drug addict, and the misfit, of course, but a boy can be all of these things but still not weird. Then there are the boys, usually well after high school, who catch on about the sweet, smart girl and try to be weird. But the weird act is easy to spot. The true weird boy simply is weird.

Findings

Shamefully, all across the continent of North America, at this very moment, a disparate legion of weird boys is being systematically ignored. They are in laundromats across from you, obsessively folding their whites. In Starbucks stirring eight packets of sugar into their coffee. Subsisting on Lucky Charms. They are forgetting their longjohns on restaurant tables. Inscribing “Choose Death” on the t-shirts they wear to Thanksgiving supper. “I’m a drug addict,” they are intoning into the receivers of rotary phones. “Sometimes what I think I need or want isn’t really what I need or want.” “What kind of fish do you like?” they are asking at parties. They are dashing up to your ice cream stands and dropping spatulas off without saying a word. Neatly stuffing veggie dogs, upright, into their breast pockets for safekeeping. If you keep your eyes and your mind open, if you’re lucky, you’ll notice one. If you ask him out, maybe he’ll get up from the table at the restaurant, push his seat in, walk around to you and kiss you solemnly on the mouth before returning to his seat to resume a conversation about language. “I think I kind of sort of maybe love you a little bit,” he might eventually tell you. Hearts melting all across the continent.