Aaron became very good friends with Pepper Conklin. At first it was just meeting for lunches and then after a few weeks it became an occasional night meeting. It took a couple of months for it to get to the point that they were "best" friends and they were together all the time. From what I could see Pepper was very definitely the leader and Aaron, the follower. Aaron seemed to idolize the guy and very gradually he started to become like him.
It was fairly easy to see the changes at home. Mom was crying a whole lot more and was paying more unwanted attention on me. The fights between my Dad and Aaron had grown to the point that they hardly ever wanted to be in the same room with each other. My mother tried to patch things up all the time and so gave in a lot to the "new" Aaron.
One of the first things Aaron had given up was his swimming. He told me the coach had caught him smoking and told him if he wanted to remain on the team he would have to quit. He quit. Mom didn't seem too upset by that, but Dad ranted and raved for a couple of nights.
It looked as though Aaron was going to fail three of his second semester courses as well. It was quite a while before he managed to get some "work" out of Pepper and he hadn't had enough money to smoke a pack a day. Of course, that took a toll on his studies! Mom even managed to calm Dad down about that one, with the promise that Aaron would do more studying and get out of this "rut." He just managed to squeeze by and pass everything.
The thing that was hardest for Mom was Aaron not going to church anymore. What she didn't know, of course, was that Aaron didn't need to go to church because he had his own direct line to God. Besides, Aaron was proud enough and close enough to Father Mulchahy that he could never have confessed real sins to him anyway. Mom used to get down on her knees every night and pray that he would come back to the church and would get ordained. To tell you the truth, some nights I even felt sorry for her, but then she would start driving me crazy again and I soon forgot about being sorry.
Also, of course, there was the arguments about the hair. When Mom first suggested he get a haircut before his father had a fit, Aaron really blew up at her. He told her there was no way he was going to get a haircut, that he had gotten one for seventeen years whenever they asked him to, but it was time he expressed his own personality a little, and if she didn't like it it was too bad.
***
By the time Dad noticed it was getting a little more than shaggy, they had a real screaming match. Dad started calling him a fag, and no son of his was going to look like that, and the next thing he'd be wearing earrings - but Aaron held his ground. And the hair kept getting longer.
Everything I had tried with Aaron had worked. Even some of the little things I tried just for the hell of it over the last two months seemed to take. I changed the brands of cigarettes Aaron liked, had him smoking filterless cigarettes, had him liking cigars, trying pot, had him hating foods that once he liked, had him picking up all sorts of porn magazines that then I could look at. It all took.
Dad was sort of made the villain. Not that he wasn't a kind of one in the family on his own, but he was a good scapegoat to get Aaron focused and angry. By the time summer came around, Aaron just hated the man.
At the start of summer Aaron wasn't talking to God too much because God couldn't find him. He was always out and most often didn't come in until well after I went to sleep and that was usually very late.
I would see him occasionally when I went downtown. He was dressing like Pepper now and his hair was parted in the middle and hanging down like a short pageboy haircut. He almost always had a cigarette hanging from his mouth (that was another little touch of mine by way of James Dean, my favourite) and he did most anything that Pepper wanted him to do.
I did question him one night about what Pepper was into and how he was managing all of a sudden to have as much money as he wanted or at least needed. I wasn't surprised to hear that he was pushing, but Aaron assured me that neither he nor Pepper ever did any of the stuff. It just sorta "passed" through them. Aaron seemed to make his money by dropping off stuff at various locations which he said he loved because he got to use Pepper's car.
Oh yeah, the other change about Aaron was that he had grown stronger. I know that sound crackpot but what seems to have happened was that as he felt himself getting stronger and stronger, he decided to test it out on weights and he had been doing a lot of weight training. He had always been on the thin side - a swimmer's body, but now he had really filled out. I was kind of jealous of that, being a kind of scrawny looking kid.
The only thing that remained the same about Aaron was his shyness. He was still basically a shy person, not at home of course, but out in public. He still didn't have a girlfriend, though he had talked a lot about Pepper's girlfriend early on. He hung around Pepper and that seemed to be about it. He had given up many of the friends he had had at the beginning of the year in high school.
***
When school was out we again had a big argument at home. Dad wanted us both to get jobs and stop freeloading off him. Actually it wasn't the fact of getting a job that irritated either of us, it was Dad's attitude about us. I thought Aaron was going to move out for sure, but I think he didn't because he didn't want Dad to know how much money he had been stockpiling, and that he could probably afford to get his own place. To shut Dad up he finally told him he had a job in a record store.
As for me, I got a job as a packing boy at the neighbourhood supermarket. Big deal, eh? But it would serve to keep me in cigarettes and keep Dad off my back. After about two weeks of it, I was getting pretty bored and I was getting brave enough to try some bigger things out on Aaron.