Alexis
I had a habit of rolling the lint in the depths of my jean pockets into pill-sized balls. But I only did it when I was nervous, or when the whole eye-contact thing just wasn’t possible and I had to focus on something else.
Laura skidded up to me, thumbs hooked onto the straps of her backpack. Her hair wooly and rusty colored, was pulled back into a bun, a few unkempt coils brushing the freckles near her eyes. She was about as close to a real friend as it got in 7th grade. Sometimes I wondered which was worse, being part of the crowd who spends weekend playing in band competitions in various high school cafeterias or being stuck in Jr. High limbo purgatory with no one. At least Laura had a group to sit with at lunch, at least she seemed happy whenever I saw her. I liked that she was excited every time she spotted me in the hall waving furiously to get the attention she already knew she had. I usually ate lunch alone in the art room, all of those half creations, creatures reaching from their canvases. It smelled like acrylic paint and the patchouli perfume our art teacher Mrs. A. doused herself in. Whatever, I needed to concentrate on my digestion anyway and what did it matter that more than half of the time I left with some odd turquoise stain on my forearm like a birthmark.
The lint ball I was already pinching between my thumb and forefinger felt soft and alleviating. Though I liked Laura, sometimes her energy made me uneasy. But I was in no position to be picky about companionship.
“Alexis! Did you here about Nora? She hooked up with John at the football game on Friday under the bleachers.” She whispered close to my face, so close I could see bits of blueberry stuck in her teeth, probably left over from breakfast. She was into blueberry muffins like no one else I knew. Sometimes, if I was lucky, she’d let me have one from the little Hostess packages she kept in her locker. I swear to god she horded those things. “How far do you think they went?” I could smell her breath now, definitely blueberry muffins.
I wanted to tell her there was no reason to whisper, that being the first people at school to do extra credit for Mr. Anderson’s enrichment class didn’t exactly make us the most desirable girls at our school. And who would care if we knew anyway? It wasn’t some huge secret that Nora was “experienced.” Though we all spoke about her if she was some enigma anyway. There wasn’t anyone around except the janitor, who was planted underneath the drinking fountain near the trophy case, water spraying him in the face from some invisible pipe. Most of the classrooms were still dark and the principle wasn’t even there yet. My locker was closest to the office, which was situated at the center of our Jr. High, almost like a prison, so the most important faculty members could keep watch over us in their glass cube. There was no hiding if you found yourself there, one way or another. The secretary was there, though, holding something steaming in a large ceramic mug painted with fat orange cats. She blew and sipped gingerly, then jerked her head back, the brown liquid sloshing onto the front of her while button up. I could see her mouth the words “Shit.”
Laura leaned against the lockers and sighed dramatically. “Earth to Alexis? Are you listening to me?” She waved a hand in front of my face.
“God she’s so pretty,” was all I could say.
“I know, right? If I had blonde hair that always looks perfect like hers I bet I could get a junior to get in my pants too.” Laura swiped at the curls loose around her face. I couldn’t argue. We all knew who he was.
Derik
Nora was so hot, the kind of girl that guys like me used as a reference to prove we were experienced. If you hooked up with her, or even girls within that hemisphere of attractive, you were either set for life, or accused of just getting lucky. Either way, I tucked her into my back pocket as a redeemer when John decided it was my turn to take the brunt of the shit talking. “Yeah, dude, but I hooked up with Nora, remember? Fuck we even kind of, went out.” After that, the guys would stop ragging on me for a while until they found something else to give me shit for. In hindsight, I have no idea why I cheated on her. I mean, I was just a freshman in high school so it’s not like we were getting married or anything, but that other broad I cheated on her with wasn’t even attractive. At least with Nora, I could talk to her. But I wouldn’t ever admit that to anyone. Not even her.
I remember when I first met her. My boys and I, we’d go to that pizza place in the mall, Segreto or something equally Italian sounding. Our town was too cheap for a food court so we had our choice of Aunt Annie’s Pretzels, Ruby Tuesdays or Segreto. There wasn’t even any decent Chinese. The closest we got to that was the nail salon adjacent to our spot, the Asian women with those flimsy facemasks, hunched over, shellacking the nails of old women with puffy hair like cotton balls. We could smell it as soon as we walked in the mall entrance, the tangy sweetness of pizza sauce and that briny unctuous smell of melted cheese, mixed with whatever chemical was wafting from next door that they used to make women’s hands prettier. It reminded me of my mother, her coral nails clicking on every surface she touched. Somehow that sharp scent like permanent marker made me even hungrier.
Segreto was convenient spot, situated right at the front of the mall so we could just lounge in that same booth and watch all the girls walk by until the owner started screaming at us in broken English about how we were costing him by just sitting there. “This not your living room, this my place of business!” He wasn’t even Italian, as far as I could tell he was Indian, so what right did he have to tell us to leave? We’d hassle each other to dig around for a few extra bucks for an order of breadsticks and marinara sauce to dip it in and maybe a few slices of pizza or a calzone. We were growing men, had to keep our energy up to check out those long legs strutting back and forth, to and from the mall entrance. The only breaks we took were to refill our sodas that we’d mix together from the fountain. You know you did it too, mix the Dew and the Orange Crush and maybe the Hawaiian Punch together. It was so damn sugary, enough to make your gut hurt but it was our rocket fuel. Yeah that’s what we named it, later Pimp Juice or something like that.
It turned into a weekly ritual. We’d go to the mall, assume our usual positions at the same booth and watch all the girls walk by in their little groups of four or five, all that long hair, different colors and textures. I always wondered how they got it so shiny like that, like oil spilling out of a bottle. Their skin was even had this sheen to it and they never skimped on their lips, as if they constantly ran their tongues over them. We’d watch them approach the counter, and order their pizza, fill their cups with soda, their mouths puckered around straws. Parishville was such a shitty little town. I felt like I existed in this space where it was always overcast and heavy, browns and grays that stretched on and on. Everyone had circles under their eyes. The girls were this slap of color like candy, those pinks and peaches and reds that made you salivate and squint a little. Sometimes I felt like I was the only guy who thought these things, that I saw people, or objects in a way that other guys didn’t. And I wouldn’t ever say any of it out loud. Fuck no, I would get towel whipped for life if those guys knew I sometimes read poetry and saw the world that way.
John would sit there leaning back in his chair so only two of the back legs rested on the floor. Sometimes, the way he watched those girls, it creeped me out, kind of made my stomach do something funny, and not a ha-ha funny. The rest of us would banter on about the girls who walked by, picking at the leftover pizza crusts, tearing into breadsticks like rabid dogs, spewing off about which girls’ tits were too big and what we thought they looked like naked. Sometimes we’d guess what kind of underwear they wore. That day, it was the usual exchange. Girls filed in an out of the pizza joint. It was near the end of September and there were still a few days we could get away with wearing summer clothes, before the cold cloaked our bodies for several long months. The mall was always crowded on Wednesday nights. It was the middle of the week, there were no games to go to and it was the night most of us seemed to blow off homework, if we even cared enough to do it at all.
“Dude, thong for sure.” Rick nudged his chin in the direction of a girl at the soda fountain; her back to us, wearing tight black pants slung low, her tan skin showing across her back. “She’s a bad girl. Look you can even see the strings when she bends over.” Sure enough as she reached for a straw across two other people, the thin purple lines of fabric curved over her bare hip. I shook my head. Thongs weren’t my thing.
“Yeah but dude, look at her, lacy briefs for sure.” I motioned toward another girl who had just crossed then re-crossed her legs at the booth next to us. She wore a black skirt. “And she’s wearing that skirt that’s not too short but shows just enough thigh. Gymnast legs, man.” Rick frowned.
“I know her, she’s a uptight bitch.”
“Yeah but that means she takes control in the bedroom.” Rick threw chewed piece of crust at me.
“You don’t know anything about it.” I distracted myself with my soda. I couldn’t lead on that I was a virgin.
“Ugh, what about her?” Josh chimed in, which is funny because he more or
less just nodded his head most of the time. We all looked in the direction he was gazing, past the entrance and into the center of the mall near the fountain. It was Laura, one of the band girls from school.
“Granny panties,” we all said in unison. John laughed like it was the most hysterical thing in the world.
“Waste of fucking time.” It was the first thing he said in two hours since we arrived, then sighed like he was bored with all of us. John was constantly shooting off his mouth about everything but when he watched those girls, really watched, he sat real still and didn’t say a word. I didn’t like the way he stared at them as if he was reading some secret that they didn’t want anyone to know, as if he was choosing one of them to follow home and watch them from his jeep parked across the street. I wouldn’t be surprised if he actually did. He didn’t act the same around girls as he did around us. It was as if girls weren’t even people to him, just things to look at as material for his one on one sessions with his left hand.
When I looked over at him I had this unsettling image seep into my head: John, alone in his room with the lights off, his hands down his pants, an iridescent glow from his laptop making his skin look radioactive as he got himself off looking at photos of girls he’d taken without them knowing. He caught me looking at him too long but ignored me, took out his iPhone and pretended to scroll through a text as he snapped the shutter button, zoomed in on the girl with the black skirt as she stood up from the booth with her friends. The camera captured her ass and backs of her bare thighs just at the right moment. I wondered if he could read my mind.
We hung out with him because he kind of led us all. He had an older brother who built up John’s reputation before he graduated from high school so by the time John got there no one questioned him about anything. The truth is we thought he was cool. He was cool for blowing cigarette smoke just out of the periphery of the principals face when he lit up just outside the school’s double doors, he was cool for ignoring the teacher in study hall after she told him to take his feet off the chair in front of him. He was cool for saying, “you’re a cunt” to her face, loud enough for everyone to hear.
After awhile, there were only so many detentions and suspensions that could be doled out. He never did anything serious enough to be expelled. And we were a public school, a place where the faculty was either older than dog shit dried and solidified in the sun or too inexperienced to deal with our teen angst. They turned a blind eye to most of social dynamics that occurred. Once I heard John call a girl a slut, shouted it out in the hall, stretching out the word like a rubber band before letting go. The principle was right there. I thought he was done for sure, but Principal Janitski went on talking to one of the teachers posted outside of the classroom, acted like he hadn’t heard a word. I remember the girl left there crying. The bell rang and she just stood in the wake of students meandering into their next classes. I wondered what it felt like to be that invisible.
The other guys thought he was cool for grabbing girls asses. They thought he was cool for dropping little details about the layout of a certain girl’s pussy and how bad she was at giving head. They though he was cool for making them cry and want him all at the same time. But I never did. There was always this impending doom feeling, that eventually something really catastrophic would happen. I guess that’s why I hung out with those guys, to try to hide it all.
We were getting antsy. John seemed to be in a bad mood that day, telling us to fuck off more than usual when we tried to get him to say something about the girls we were checking out and by then the nail salon smell was making me nauseous. Just as John rested the other two legs of the chair he was leaning back in on the floor, Nora stepped into my line of vision. She was alone; her typical get-up on, a pair of destroyed jeans with tears in just the right places and a white t-shirt with a black bra. I don’t think she ever wore makeup and if she did, we couldn’t tell. John noticed her too and motioned for all of us to stay put. He didn’t take his eyes off of her as she approached the counter, pointed at a calzone and retrieved a fold of cash from her back pocked, wedged between her index and middle finger. She counted out a few bills, handed them to the cashier and reached for a rubber band around her thin wrist, pulling her hair into this messy blonde knot at the base of her skull. God her neck was so long, I swear it made her collarbone look even sharper. I wanted to put my teeth there, feel her bones between them. John noticed me staring, we all were, but for some reason it mattered more that I was. He snapped his fingers in front of my face.
“Dude wake up. Stop being so fucking obvious.” With that, he turned in her direction and let out a short loud whistle. She instinctively turned in the direction of the noise and noticed us, flicked John off and grabbed her tray of food. I thought that was that but she headed over to our booth and stopped in front of us. She looked pissed; her bowed lips pressed in a tight line, making her cheekbones stand out more. She was all limbs, that girl, and her skin was the color of cake batter. She had these eyelashes like quotation marks that loose strands of her hair got stuck on. I imagined if you were close enough you could feel those eyelashes on your face.
“I’m not a dog, John.” She cocked her hip and blew air out of her nose. I could see the outline of that black bra and the protrusion of her belly button ring through the thin material of her shirt. She didn’t have to deck herself out like those other girls with all that fake orange tan and rings of black around their eyes. She was effortless in the way she looked. She was untouchable.
“Well, you came right over didn’t you?” We all knew he had slept with her, or that they were seeing each other, whatever that meant. But he slept with other girls too. He had already marked his territory with her. The rest of us knew not to bother, as if we had a chance anyway.
“You’re such an ass.” She balanced the tray on one hand and pulled her phone from her back pocket with the other, punching buttons with the pad of her thumb. “So what do you want?" She continued texting and didn’t look at him. If she cared about what he wanted she didn’t show it.
“You still having people over this weekend?” He leaned back in his chair again, absorbing her like a sponge.
“Yeah, not sure about the details but my parents are gone again, so I guess it’s my place after the game this time. Can you get the beer?” Nora looked at him then with a raised eyebrow, her bottom lip tucked under her front teeth. Most of us had stopped breathing at this point.
“Yeah, whatever, as long as I can bring who I want.”
“I don’t care, I just don’t want them trashing my place like last time.” John rolled his eyes and jabbed at the tile with the toe of his shoe. Nora put her phone on the tray and held her hand just above the calzone. “My food is getting cold, John.”
“So relax for a second and sit here.” There was a good 10 long seconds before we all pushed our mess of half eaten scraps and soiled napkins out of the way in a frenzy. Being the smooth man that I was, I knocked over my drink, and the neon liquid doused her bare sandled feet. She jumped back and John grabbed her tray just in time. I nearly pissed myself.
“Holy shit. Holy shit. I am so sorry. Fuck, here, let me help.” I grabbed a wad of napkins from the dispenser and kneeled at her feet, sopping up the liquid. The other guys snorted behind me. John didn’t move, but cocked his elbow onto the back of his chair.
“Nora, Derik. Derik, Nora.”
Alexis
“I think a few of her friends were talking about it in the lunch line yesterday.” Tracy, Carli and Sarah were whispering to each other the day before, huddled in a little blonde, brunette, shiny haired bundle, giggling with their empty, plastic lunch trays tucked under their slim arms. When Carli caught me staring, she held her tray up horizontally resting the base on the shoulders of the other girls. My ears weren’t deemed worthy of the conversation, nor was my blatant curiousness. I would learn throughout my adolescence and teenage years that the popular crowd would never welcome me, even if I pretended not to give two shits about them.
We were in 8th grade and most of us only knew what it was like to kiss a boy in a dark movie theater or hidden under throw blankets in our basements. I caught my reflection in the magnetic mirror on the inside of my locker door. I had just gotten my braces off and still refused to show my teeth. Thin eyelashes, pale skin, a purplish tone near the slopes of my nose. My dusty brown hair was straight and symmetrical but it fell in one boring length just to my shoulders. I tucked it behind my ears, which I thought were a little on the large side. Cherry lip-gloss didn’t do much and I had to keep re-applying it. I couldn’t help licking it off. It tasted good. The lint ball grew between my pressed fingertips. Maybe it was the unusual softness of it that calmed me, or maybe it distracted me enough to actually find enough lint to do so.
I slammed my locker door shut and started down the hallway to our classroom, Laura close behind. It smelled like a hospital. Someone must have just mopped. The lockers that stretched down the length of the hallways were the colors of baby food. Laura jabbered on about Nora. Frankly, I was sick of talking about her.
“What do you think happened? Do you think she gave him a blow job?” Laura and I stopped outside our classroom. The lights were on, the only room lit at this time of morning.
“Laura, I don’t know. It’s none of my business.” My voice caught for a second and I was surprised that I nearly started crying. This happened more often lately.
“Are you ok?” I swallowed and closed my eyes. It was the easiest way to calm myself down, shut out the world even if it was only a blink of an eye.
“I’m fine. I’m just sick of talking about her and those girls.” I thought back to the lunchroom the day before.
~
I had paid for my peanut butter and jelly and ice cream sandwich and headed toward an empty table. The art room was being used for a meeting so I had to endure the cafeteria.
“Hey Alexis, come here.” I looked around as if there was another Alexis that Carli was talking to. The other girls smirked into their salads. The empty table was my safe heaven just in view. Once I sat I knew no one would join me, and that was fine. I’d rather had been alone anyway. I hesitated at first and shoved my free hand into my pocket, then approached the girls like an abused animal. They were all lined up like Kewpie dolls on either side of the table and it smelled like vanilla and lavender body mist. I stood at the head. There was no escaping. Carli leaned forward onto her elbows. The thin metal bangles on her wrist slid down toward the crook of her arm.
“So Rick told me that he thinks you’re cute. You should go talk to him.” I looked over to where he was sitting, with the other soccer players at the far end of the cafeteria. The lint ball in my pocket had somehow vanished.
“What? When did he say this?” I said, just barely looking at her through my hair. Rick was tall and lean with muscles that looked like someone had spent hours molding him from clay. He belonged in the art room next to all of those sculptures. When he smiled, one dimple appeared in his left cheek. He was single and there wasn’t a chance he was interested in me. But for some reason, there was always faint speck of hope that these girls were telling the truth. I believed them every time, inevitably
“Yeah, he told me today in math, said that no one gives you enough credit, that your super smart and even kind of cute. Seriously, go talk to him. Guys love confident girls.” She looked serious. None of her friends were laughing or even paying attention. Makeup was being applied, lips pursed, doodles drawn on hands with Sharpies. I couldn’t even hold their attention for a full minute. Carli tore a piece of bread from the crust and dipped it into her side of Italian dressing. “So are you going to go or what. C’mon put yourself out there. I’m trying to help you.” She put the bread in her mouth and pushed her honey colored hair out of her face. I looked back over to Rick’s table. He was looking right at me and I looked away as if I had been caught doing something wrong. Carli motioned with her head towards him. Reluctant, I made my way over, looking back at her every few steps until I approached Rick’s table. I wet my lips a bit before saying anything.
“Uh, hey Rick.” His back was to me then but he turned, resting his forearm on the table. He wasn’t smiling. My lunch tray suddenly felt like I was carrying all of my textbooks on it. “How was your game last night?” The easiest thing to focus on was the rubber toe of my converse sneakers. I ground my toe into the place where one tile met with another. There were unidentified foodstuffs mashed into the floor.
“Huh?” I heard the other guys stifle laughs and clear their throats.
“The game, your soccer game,” I said a little louder, still talking into my chest.
“I’m sorry, I can’t hear you when you’re mumbling, did you say that you want me?” Rick cracked his knuckles one at a time. “Well thanks, Alexis but uh, you’re not exactly my type.” He looked at me briefly, sized me up then went back to his roast beef sandwich, ripping a chunk out of the center, his jaw muscles working against the grain. Grease lined his mouth. My stomach lurched into my throat as I looked over my shoulder, back to Carli’s table. They were all doubled over in their seats, their sheathes of hair shielding their faces from what was probably unrestrained laughter. Rick and his friends couldn’t contain themselves anymore and howled too. There was no point in running, so I walked as coolly as possible from the cafeteria. In the wake of it all I heard one of them yell, “Yo, Alexis, you might want to lay off the peanut butter and ice cream for a while, your jeans are looking a little too tight these days!” As I shouldered my way out the door, I collided with Nora, my food flying off the tray and into the hallway. I didn’t bother to pick it up or stop as she called after me. There was no use in crying. There was nothing left in me to let out. The laughter echoed.
~
Laura and I dropped our binders and books off at our desks, checked ourselves in on the signup sheet and headed to the bathroom, pencil cases in hand, before starting on our extra credit.
“Are you sure you’re ok? You’re really quiet today.” Laura put her face close to the mirror, and examined her reflection as if under a magnifying glass.
“Yeah I’m fine, just tired that’s all.”
“Grab a Mountain Dew or something before class.” We heard the door open and slam against the wall and found ourselves face to fact with Nora. She didn’t pause for a second before situating herself in front of the mirror, extracting a compact case of powder out of the clutch she carried with her. It looked like a black leather envelope. I wanted a black leather envelope to sling over my shoulder. Laura and I didn’t dare stare, but instead went to work on our own faces. At least here, we were all the same. Nora always smelled like sandalwood, clove and burning candles.
It was around the same time every day, right before class in the morning, then once again after lunch. The girls gathered around the bathroom mirror that took up the entire back wall. We left our houses with our faces bright and clean, with the skin we were birthed in. We stepped off school buses and out of our parents’ sedans. We bypassed our lockers and headed straight for the mirrors, tugging at our shirts, showing a bit more skin, more chest less midriff or the other way around if we weren’t endowed with breasts yet. We carried our eyeliner and lip-gloss with our pencil pouches, mixed in with the multicolored Bic pens and highlighters. We rimmed our eyes in black, shading the edges and corners as if perfecting a sketch, used the tips of our pinkies for precision, smudging the dark into bedroom eyes. We reflected women’s facades, faces our parents wouldn’t recognize. Laura and I watched other girls with their angles and sinuations, lustrous hair, and lean arms, bodies of 20 year olds that wound up under the bleachers, and the backs of cars, in our friends’ basements when their parents weren’t home. Girls like Laura and I wanted their white teeth void of braces, hair falling in long waves, bouncing, flitting around their cheeks with invisible air when they existed the bathroom.
We were fourteen, pinching our cheeks for color, biting at our bottom lips to make them fuller, the way Nora’s looked after she appeared from the passenger seat of some boy’s car. We blinked against our own reflection in the harsh fluorescent light. We didn’t know who was starting back at us, wide-eyed, black blots of ink with nothing behind them.
Laura would tell me that hide I behind my bangs, that it made it harder for people to talk to me when they couldn’t see my face. My reflection in the mirror only proved her point. I was fourteen and more and more my life felt like I was in one of those movies where the director chooses to use fancy camerawork; that technique where everything in the background seems to be moving at the speed of sound and the person you are suppose to focus on is standing there in the middle of it, sharp against a stream of passing colors, caught in some bizarre rainstorm. Who was I supposed to be? I rimmed my eyes in black; next to me Nora blotted makeup on a red blotch on her neck.
Derik
Nora was the only girl I’ve ever fucked. And it was because of John.
It was the Friday after I met her at the mall, if you consider drenching her feet in a puddle of rocket fuel officially meeting someone. John told me I should come with him to the party at her house. Nora’s parents never seemed to be home. I don’t think I ever saw them pick her up from school or ran into them at Target or the local grocery around town, which was nearly unheard of. Our town was so small it seemed you were always running into someone you knew at least four or five times outside of school.
I wasn’t as seasoned when it came to parties as John was. I didn’t want to be over dressed but I didn’t want to just throw on a shirt either, so I settled for a plaid button up, rolled the sleeves to my elbow, and unbuttoned the shirt to mid-way down my chest. There was this leather necklace my mom had gotten me for my birthday that summer with a circular medallion at the center that I wore. It made me feel a little rugged, and made up for the lack of whiskers on my face.
“Fuck, I still look ten years old.” I had said to my reflection.
“Derik, are you ok?” My mom was excited for me, I think, that I was spending more time outside of my room. She just wanted me to be happy. My dad wasn’t around anymore and we never really talked about it. Mom and I were close; she was hip, laid back. She looked out for me and it felt like she was more of a big sister sometimes than a mom.
“Yeah, Ma, just getting ready,” I had yelled over the music, through the bedroom door I left half cracked. She nudged her face into the room.
“Jesus, easy on the cologne big guy.” I pulled the shirt away from my body and sniffed. She stepped in. I didn’t really care if she was in there. There wasn’t anything to hide except the mess of clothes on the floor and strewn papers from class with a few collections of Bukowski. She appeared behind me in my reflection in the mirror, her hair dark like mine, wound into a loose bun. She didn’t wear a ton of makeup but had these deep green eyes with long eyelashes like some exotic insect or butterfly. She patted my hair down that I had spend so much time trying to make tousled and messy. Girls liked that, I knew, I was great at eavesdropping near the lockers at school.
“Ma! It’s supposed to stick up like that.” I messed it up again with my fingers. Besides the fact that I couldn’t grow a beard I thought I was a halfway decent looking guy, tall, lean, leftover tan from the summer, good skin and dark, nearly black hair that curled just enough. I was pretty active, played soccer and messed around outside with a football or went for a run when I needed to not think about anything. It wasn’t my looks I was worried about. I just seemed to choke on every sentence when it came to trying to act cool or talk to girls.
“My little stud muffin.” She kissed my cheek and I wiped her lipstick off with the back of my wrist. “Be careful. Have fun. Don’t stay out too late. I love you.”
~
John had picked me up because I couldn’t drive yet. It was still warm out and as I opened the door to his jeep the smell of soap, tobacco and beer hit my nostrils. He already had an open bottle waiting for me in the cup holder; all dewy on the surface like the girls’ stomachs looked when they climbed out of the pool in the summer. Perkins township cops weren’t all that strict but I still didn’t feel good about it. As I climbed in and pulled the door shut, John looked at the beer that I hadn’t reached for then looked at me, then back to the beer. I didn’t want him to think I was ungrateful.
“Man, isn’t it illegal to drive with an open container?” I only knew that because I was in driver’s ed. at the time. John looked at me as if I slapped him. I fidgeted with the leather band around my neck.
“Jesus Derik, stop being such a pussy all of the time.” He rummaged around in the cabin of the car for something. “Help me look for an empty Gatorade bottle.” There were old receipts, a few crumpled McDonalds bags splotched with grease, a flask of some cologne in the other cup holder. I reached around to the backseat where his football gear was. He had quit at the beginning of the season but obviously wasn’t worried about getting the equipment back. I tossed him an empty bottle. It was sticky. He threw the cap on the floor and spit tobacco juice into the bottom.
“Dude, that’s so gross, why don’t you just smoke?” John shook his head and shifted, accelerating backwards out of my driveway.
“No wonder you can’t get laid. “ He flicked the collection of lacy underwear and neon thongs that hung from his rear-view mirror like Mardi Gras beads. We drove in silence for a while, the beer still untouched. I watched out the window thinking of how to bring up Nora without seeming like I was interested. We grew up in a rural world that dispersed at you drove further from the center of it like light hitting a prism, all those colors strewn about as the light expanded. We drove past Fast Food Row as the last of the daylight snuffed out. There was one joint after another following the main road that stretched through the center of town, Wendy’s, Burger King, McDonalds, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and, behind that, the sorry excuse for a mall where everyone meandered around like dazed farm animals.
The houses got more and more spaced apart and the cornfields grew. I imagined getting lost in there, those long stocks towering over you spaced just enough apart where you felt like you were in a maze. It reminded me of The Shining.
“Dude, don’t waste the beer.” John looked at me and I reluctantly reached for it. There were no houses now, just all of that corn and John pressed the accelerator. We flew down a straight-away that wasn’t paved. I heard rocks ricocheting off the side of the Jeep. The beer tasted awful, like an old sock.
“So…what’s the deal with that Nora girl?” Beer burned in my nostrils as I burped. John kept his eyes on the road.
“You know, she’s hot, really hot, and does just about everything. I don’t know man what are you asking for?” The truth was, I had no idea why I was asking.
“She’s hot that’s all. Not like the other girls.”
“You want a piece or something?” He spit into the Gatorade bottle again, a little pile of brown sludge collecting there. He laughed to himself. It sounded more like a growl. “Man, you have got balls beating around the bush. Be straight with me. You want her?” I was very careful about choosing what I said next.
“I mean, are you dating her or something?” John snorted.
“You, out of all people, know I don’t date. Seriously man, you want her you can have her.” The pebbles hit the windshield now. I couldn’t tell if he sped up or I was gripping the seat for another reason. “I can make that happen man, just say the word.” He put the lip of the bottle to his mouth again, brown squirting from between his front teeth.
“She doesn’t even know me though. And I made an ass out of myself spilling that shit on her Wednesday.” I chucked the empty bottle of beer out the window.
“Whatever man she won’t say no to me. Plus, why are you being such a little bitch? This is Nora we are talking about. Do you realize, if you get laid by her, you’re set? Once you’ve lost your virginity its like you’ve been doing it forever, so you might as well just get it over and done with now. If all else fails, at least you’ll get a great blowjob. She’s great at sucking dick.” He settled back in his seat, a look on his face like he was imaging her on her knees in front of him.
John and I had know each other through most of elementary and middle school. We were in the same homeroom year after year and his older brother looked after both of us, made sure none of the older guys gave us too much shit but tried to toughen us up so we could take it too. He was always polite to my mom, said hi to her if he came over but I could tell she didn’t like him. “He just makes me a little uneasy, all that freedom those boys get in that house,” she told me once. But she never prevented me from hanging out with him. I think I was a project to John; sometimes I wasn’t sure if it was a friendship or an elaborate experiment. The bottle of tobacco muck was making me sick.
“Dude, I don’t want your sloppy seconds. Are you serious? What do you mean she never says no to you?” We had come upon a few houses again, out in the middle of bum fuck nowhere. This was where the craziest parties were because the cops didn’t touch the outskirts of town. John wiped saliva off his shaven chin.
“First of all D, no matter who you fuck, you will always be getting my sloppy seconds. And second, why the hell do you think Nora has the reputation she has? Now do me a favor, be a little more thankful that I’m hooking this up for you and grow a bigger pair of balls before we get there.”
Nora
I was 15 and had never touched myself; never let my hands wander between my legs, just over my breasts because I hated how small they were compared to the other girls who were already fitting into C cups. I hated how far apart they seemed to be, no supple line and cusp of breast peeking from a v-neck shirt. I was never written a pink slip in school for a plunging neckline. After swim team practice there were some girls who stripped off their bathing suits after showering, baring all, full developing chests and pink nipples the size of quarters, erect, sitting below their collar bones, perked up and full as if someone just pumped them with gelatin or pudding. I looked at my own body in the mirror at home, pushed my breasts together to form cleavage that didn’t exist otherwise. When I let go, the mounds of skin there fell closer to my armpits, sagging and sad. I pouted and looked down past my waist. If other girls touched themselves no one talked about it. Masturbation was mentioned in health class and no one wanted to listen to their gym teacher with his tight, royal blue, nylon gym pants, talk about sex. It was disturbing; watching his handlebar mustache move above his upper lip at he annunciated the word. Mast-er-bation.
“Now you all giggle and everything but you all should know it natural to be curious at your age.”
The school nurse mentioned using a pocket mirror to examine the vagina, become friendly with it because, after all, it was a part of your body, but really if you knew where everything was it would be easier to learn how to use a tampon or how sex worked. I was familiar enough with my body, and hated it.
~
My older sister who was 25 told me to “fake it until you make it.”
“It’s the only way you’re going to survive that hell called high school. You’ve got to prepare now.” We were laying in our hammock in the backyard, a stretch of field so far you couldn’t see anything but green and brown. Gabby was visiting the summer before I started my freshman year. She lived in New York City, got out of town as soon as she graduated. She never belonged here and I knew I didn’t either. But I had to stick it out until it was time for me to leave. Everything changed when I turned 15. No one would have guessed how self-conscious I actually was. And it all started when Gabby gave me my first cigarette.
“Even if you hate it, just pretend and don’t suck it into your lungs. I’m telling you, nothing is sexier that a girl like you with one of these between her fingers.” Gabby sprinkled the dried tobacco into the thin rolling paper, her black nails like the shell of an insect. She licked her lips in concentration, stained with red from her constant application of lipstick. When she finished, she held the thin cigarette out to me and put it between my lips, lit her metal lighter, inscribed with her initials, and I inhaled.
~
Cigarettes had this mysteriousness about them that I could only account for by their sheer forbiddances. My father was an ENT and may as well have been a walking no-smoking ad. But I watched the high schoolers that year before I became one of them, walking the peripheries of the parking lot, leaning against cars, the chain linked fences that outline the practice fields and the guardrails. I watched them cup their hands near each other’s faces, their hair in their eyes, whipping dangerously close to the flame. They flicked ash this way and that, bits of smoldering tobacco and paper flitting, hovering, and floating into space, disappearing with the smoke exhaled from young lungs. I watched them, out of breath, chests rising quickly, sucking in extra air, their book bags slung over their shoulders rushing to class, cigarettes still tucked between their fingers like pencils. They stomped the frail things out before hitting the double doors, crushed them against the side of the brick building leaving a trail of ash, blackened soot like the makeup that rimmed their eyes.
I watched all of those lissome creatures drift around like some fairytale sprites. It made me want to smoke before I even tried it with Gabby, watching them stand around, retrieving packs from their purses or back pockets, extracting the long, thin rolled tobacco and holding it between their fingers or pinched between their thumbs and index fingers. I though, then, that you could draw a portrait of a person by what their carton looked like, crushed or neatly square. I watched how they each held their lighters and matches, flicking orange light near their shadowed faces. I thought about how the way a person smokes shows how they makes love (or fuck). If they stood or sat, if they took long drags and savored each inhale or they huffed through it hungrily only to extract one after another. I remembered the cool kids who laid themselves out on the bleachers like drying laundry, rolling joints with fingers that moved so quick it was as if they weren’t attached to their bodies. They’d lie there and I watched the girls lean into the boys with open mouths and share the smoke as if sharing oxygen, disappearing before it hit the pink of their tongues.
After Gabby taught me, after she was gone again like that dissipating smoke, I took up cloves, long, black spicy things that tasted like chai left on a burner too long. But I liked the way it crackled and the smell it left on my hair afterward. I thought about the way the smoke traveled over the angles of my body when I sat in the dark with hardly anything on. The blue gold of it looked like something taken out of those photos of the Milky Way. Those nights I felt extraterrestrial and wanted someone to touch me to see if I was still real.
~
I saw bits of myself in the ash I flicked away that day in the hammock, tapping the edge of my cigarette with an unpainted nail. But Gabby had smoking down to an involuntary muscle movement, her cigarettes an added limb or extremity, lodging itself between her index and middle finger, housing itself there until the last nub of burning ember faded into a red-yellow smudge, pulsing there in the blackness. Gabby inhaled as if trying to suck some sense of excitement and purpose to live into her. Sometimes I envied Gabby’s pain and sheer annoyance or disappointment with the world, as if mediocrity was worse than being unhappy. I knew where her scars were hidden, lines drawn into her translucent skin where she let herself bleed. In bed at night I’d lay awake biting my nails down past the pads of my fingers, so low they’d ache in the morning, raw near the nail bed. I wanted my fingers to look like hers, just as thin and somehow mature, the hands of a woman who worked long hours in a diner, skeletal, used.
When my dad found Gabby’s cigarettes the first he slapped her. Once. Across the left cheek. When he saw the stud in her nose he raised a hand and she crumpled to the floor covering her face, snot running onto her shirt, hair stuck in the makeup running down her face. Soiled. I knew why Gabby eventually left.
