by Rowan Massey
“I think Zander just got a date,” one of the goth girls in the room said in a sing-song, teasing tone. I didn’t know her that well and couldn’t tell if she was trying to flirt, but I didn’t care, so I just grinned and went back to my phone.
Lottiedahs: My dad is vegetarian but my mom isn’t but they’re both supportive even tho my dad is a douche lol
Zando11: Maybe you can get your dad to convert.
Lottiedahs: I doubt it. He’s set in his ways. I cook for him when I go to his house tho and I’m always vocal about the vegan cause so he knows all the facts.
Zando11: That’s what I can’t understand. When people know all the facts and still won’t do it.
Lottiedahs: Right? How can they stand the cognitive dissonance? He just tells me that there’s a certain amount of cruelty in the world and we can’t stop all of it.
I carried on the conversation, getting closer to my goal with every practiced response, but I needed to bring it back to her—our—dad.
Zando11: What do your parents do?
Lottiedahs: Paralegal mom and my dad is an editor and he writes about books. Yours?
I skipped it and asked another question.
Zando11: Why do you say your dad is a douche? I get along with my mom mostly.
Another lie for the Lottie list.
Lottiedahs: Omg his whole life is about books and he thinks he’s sooo smart all the time but he’s a dork.
Zando11: Aren’t all dads dorks? Lol
Was he a douche or a dork? To me, they were totally separate definitions of annoying person subtypes. I needed more. What kind of annoying stuff would I need to deal with in order to get between his bed sheets? I shuddered a little at the thought, like always, but my mind was learning to move on quickly, and it was already easier to think about than it had been a couple days ago when I’d started on the plan.
Lottiedahs: He hoards books and says he has to for his job but he doesn’t. Super embarrassing.
Zando11: oh man that sounds bad. He’s a hoarder?
A hoarder? Fuck. Was he was some kind of mental case? All those TV shows about people who didn’t have room to sleep in their own homes anymore flashed in my mind. The hoarders in them always seemed like such miserable people. Maybe he was basically like my mom. Maybe that’s what had attracted them to each other and what had separated them.
Lottiedahs: He’s all like, I’m not a hoarder I’m a bibliophile! lol
Zando11: What does that mean?
Lottiedahs: It means a person who is addicted to books.
Zando11: That’s weird. How do you get addicted to books?
Lottiedahs: I mean, I like reading a lot but Dad reads a book every day. Sometimes more. That’s crazy shit.
Zando11: Does he even sleep? Jesus.
Lottiedahs: No he actually doesn’t! lol he sleeps like four hours every night. He reads and writes for eight hours for his work and then just switches rooms and picks up another book and keeps reading for fun.
Zando11: Holy shit.
That sounded demented. Was she exaggerating? People tended to exaggerate about how awful their parents were.
I couldn’t deal with it. It was becoming too real. Lottie and Clay had been abstracts. It felt like the moment I’d looked down and saw Killy the Knife reaching his goals. This was a man I was determined to have sex with, whose life I could probably manage to fuck up even if I didn’t get as far as that. And I now felt bad for what I might end up doing to my sister. She didn’t deserve the misery of a severely-depressed parent. That was, if he wasn’t already severely depressed. What if he didn’t just go away horrified, leaving me alone once again and forever; what if he couldn’t let it go because he’d already been mental and I tipped him over the edge into dangerous? That hadn’t occurred to me before.
Standing abruptly, I barged into the smoking circle and grabbed the bong.
“Whoa, what’s your deal?” Greg asked, but he was grinning while I sucked the pungent smoke down into my lungs. “He’s back, everybody!”
“Did you lose your date?” The goth girl patted my arm and gave me an attentive look, which caused Greg to start laughing. She apparently did like me.
“Done with the stuff I needed to do sober today,” I said. “Where’s my one day chip?”
They laughed a little, and I took another hit before passing it along. On impulse, like another sort-of-addiction, I opened my hook-up apps and started browsing and receiving my complementary, unsolicited dick pics.
People are more generous about continuing to include you in their smoking circles if you’re nice and friendly about it, so I kept up with the inane, rambling conversation around me, and let Goth Girl keep touching my arm, until I was ready to leave. It wasn’t hard to find a ready lay. I’d hooked up with one particular weirdo before, and chose to grant his request for another blow job.
It wasn’t until I was in the driveway pressing the Unlock button on my key fob that I remembered being high was an issue combined with driving. I stood there for probably a telling amount of time, freezing my ass off and trying to grasp how stoned I was. I tried to think of it as a scale of one to ten. Looking down at a crack in the driveway, I followed it in small footsteps. Well, I was walking straight. I stopped again after starting towards my car to make sure the crack was a straight line and not a crooked one. It was. I got in the car and started it.
He was twenty minutes away, probably closer with no traffic. The road was doing funny things out of the corners of my eyes. It started making me think the road was wet. I should have been able to tell if it’d rained, even in the dark, but when I focused on it, I only saw blackness and flashing divider lines. Just before I arrived, I was losing my ability to see the road at all, but only in split seconds. It would all turn pitch black, come back, and eventually go away again. The buildings and trees around me kept their illumination. I didn’t know what was causing it. Weed had never made me experience anything like it. But I didn’t care because I was used to weird shit. I didn’t need to overthink the stupid things my brain did.
Pulling into a stranger’s driveway was always the point hardest to get past when it came to nerves. I used to pull up, put my hand on the stick to put it in park, and end up in reverse instead, too cowardly to go through with it. But I was used to pushing myself to get out of the car, and I managed it even while still a little high.
Instead of knocking on the door, I went to the porch swing where I knew he’d left a black ski mask. I examined it and sniffed it. It smelled like laundry detergent so I pulled it over my head, returned to the door, and knocked. How many random men had worn the scratchy synthetic knit against the skin of their faces, all too willing to humiliate themselves?
The door opened. He was wearing a mask identical to mine. We were around the same height, but I was nowhere near as built. He gestured for me to come in, and I did. The place was dark except for a dim light coming from a room down the hall that I assumed we were headed for since I remembered going there last time. I went in that direction ahead of him, but his meaty hands grabbed my waist, and he pushed me in the opposite direction. We were going towards a door beyond the living room and kitchen. I opened my mouth to ask but stopped myself just in time. No talking. That was one of his rules.
When we reached the doorway, I saw that there was a lamp on inside the room and that it was exactly like last time. I’d been mixed up. False memory. He roughly pushed me into the wall, hands on my chest and shoulder, and I knelt down. Looming over me with one hand on the wall, he undid his pants, and I got to work.
His dick wasn’t as beefy as the rest of him. It was a nice fit in my throat. The mouth of the mask immediately got soggy and gross from saliva. Down in the weirdo parts of me, I enjoyed the nastiness of it.
He was noisy in his own way, huffing into the space over me, breath hot. I was reminded of a bull, and it really turned me on. My hand left his hip and rubbed at the front of my jeans. I wasn’t allowed to jack off until I left. And he took forev
er, biding his time, slowing me down whenever I got him close. Whenever I needed a break and pulled away, he would only give me a few seconds, then take my face in his hands and bring my lips back to his cock.
I loved it, and I wanted to jerk off already, and loved that I wasn’t allowed to. When he was ready, he took the back of my head in both hands and started fucking my face. He was choking me. I was getting instinctively freaked out, but he kept me in place until he was done. Cum hit my face, but I couldn’t feel it because of the mask. He chuckled when he got me in the eye. He’d been aiming.
God, what an asshole. But I’d gotten exactly what I’d come there expecting. He stumbled over to an easy chair and plopped down, sighing. I stood and let my aching legs adjust, then went to the coffee table where he’d left a damp cloth for me, same as before.
He watched me, already getting impatient to see the last of me. I wanted to take the mask off, tear his off, and lick his face. Or just say “see ya later, bitch!”. Or both. Just because it would be funny to see his expression when I broke his rules.
I wasn’t allowed to take the mask off in front of him, so I left the room and pulled it off in his kitchen, left it on the counter by the sink, then cleaned my face, rubbing cum out of my eyelashes.
When I opened my eyes, I didn’t know what I was seeing at first. From inside the first room I’d tried to enter, a light was changing colors, slowly shifting from green, to orange, to red, and so on. It reminded me of the rotating night light I’d had as a little kid. Was there a child in there?
I headed for the front door, by necessity getting closer to the light. It went out, then went back to a soft white. Had it happened at all? As soon as the colors were gone, I was unsure of my memory of it.
In the car, I quickly masturbated, thinking about the way I’d panicked when he’d held my head in place. Why was I so fucked up that I’d both hated and enjoyed something like that? The two emotions had happened on different levels, overlapping each other. Maybe I just liked experiencing a lot of emotions at once, even if it meant I was dead right after.
Many times, I’d walked away from my sexual experiments with urges played out, trying to locate origin points or answers to all the things that had gone through my head, and I usually failed to break through the numbness that inevitably ended my night. Frustration, risky behavior, then emptiness—that had been my pattern for quite a while.
The road was dry as a bone going home, and I was just as sober. I’d been drunk the first time I’d seen the guy, stoned the next. Maybe that was part of why I could seemingly put up with anything from any given guy in the moment—I was always drugged or having a bit of an insane episode, or both.
Of course. That was it.
I needed drugs to get through sex with Clay. I could do it if I got hold of the right pills. Drinking wouldn’t be enough and was too unpredictable. Smoking, I might end up with too much of an edge on my high and just start getting paranoid. Greg would hook me up with something. He had an almost academic interest in recreational drugs.
Yet another puzzle piece had fallen into place. It was a significant one. My night had gotten some closure after all.
Chapter Six
Zander Age 18
THE MORNING AFTER my first taste of alcohol, I hit the snooze button a handful of times, then turned the clock off. Mom hadn’t come in and forced me out of bed, so she was sleeping in too. That meant she was depressed.
I got up when I couldn’t doze off anymore. It was almost noon. I had to call Toni, Mom’s best friend. She was always available to help, since her husband made money and she stayed home all day keeping house “like God intended”. It always made me nervous to call, but I had to or else Mom would lose another job, then we would run out of all the good food in the house, and she’d say we didn’t have money for more.
I made myself a bowl of colorful cereal first and ate it in front of the TV, enjoying every bite instead of focusing on the screen since I didn’t know if it was one of my last bowlfuls for a while. Watching cartoons in the middle of the day when everyone else was dying of boredom in class was exhilarating. Why did it have to be because of Mom? I wished it was because I was sick.
Toni had put herself on speed dial on the kitchen phone. My finger hovered next to the button. It was one o’clock, and I wondered if I could get away with waiting to call her for a few more hours. Probably not.
I pressed the button.
“Hey, sweetie. What’s up?” she said. She called Mom sweetie and talked her like she was a child.
“It’s Lysander.”
She was silent a moment. “Want me to come over?” she asked.
“Yeah, I guess. Sorry.”
“It’s no problem. Be there in a jiffy, baby.”
She hung up.
Toni was such a broken record that I felt as if she’d already told me to get a bath because I smelled funny, and to put on jeans that weren’t saggy like a punk’s. Next, I’d brush my teeth and have them squinted and frowned at, then I’d either eat boiled vegetables, or oddly opposite to that, go with her to get ice cream. Since Mom seemed to have gone off the rails the night before, and she hadn’t even known about Killy yet, I figured I was getting ice cream so long as I behaved and nobody found out about Killy.
I went in my bathroom, shut the door and started running a bath. Fifteen minutes later, I was ready for inspection and could hear Mom and Toni talking in her room. The door was cracked. I snuck in that direction but failed to keep my footsteps silent on the creaky floorboards.
“Lysander? Come in here.” Toni’s voice.
I went to the door and pushed it open with my fingertips another few inches so that I could see in. The room stunk like vomit on top of the stale smell the room usually had. I made a face at the sour stench. The blinds of the small window were closed, but I could see the two women inside. Mom was laying on her side in bed, blankets and sheets tangled around her legs. Toni sat beside her.
“Well, look at you!” Toni said, and reached an arm towards me. I didn’t want to go in.
“Are we getting ice cream?” I asked quietly.
She dropped her arm and gave me a look of pity.
“Get your shoes on,” she said sweetly.
I ran to get my shoes from my room and took them to the front hall where I dropped them to the floor before sitting beside them to put them on. By the time I’d tied my laces and was ready to go, Toni was wandering in my direction with her cell phone to her ear.
“I know what you’re dealing with, and I’m telling you, you need to get over here and do some damage control. If you’re starting to take responsibility, then you need to act like you’re responsible for what happens to her now.”
She gestured for me to follow her into the living room and sit on the couch. I did.
“I’ll deal with him. I think people are just starting to gossip. There’s probably no truth to it. You know how kids can be.” She glanced at me.
I ducked my head. She knew. I gulped and crossed my arms. My stomach filled with butterflies.
Noticing my reaction, she put a firm hand on my shoulder and squeezed. She picked up the remote and gave it to me. I turned the TV on and she waved her hand for me to turn it down. I did. I was becoming confused about whether we were going.
When her conversation was done, she hung up, patted my leg, told me to wait half an hour, and went back to my Mom’s room. I spaced out, mesmerized as usual by the TV, until there was a knock on the door. Since Toni was already there, I took notice, but I didn’t answer it myself.
Toni came in hurriedly to let someone in. Thick, warm air puffed through the doorway, and bright light blinded me. There was a rustle of grocery bags when he stepped in, and my heart sank.
“More in the car,” he said, and Toni went to get more bags.
I crossed my arms once more and slouched, refusing to look him in the eye. Pastor Julian was a tall, thin man with sharp facial features like Abraham Lincoln. He wore jeans all the time, but with
a button-down shirt tucked into them. The mix of casual and church clothes always looked stupid to me. The awkward smiles he had for me every time he showed up made me want to punch something, but I couldn’t put my finger on why until years later.
We don’t want your dumb groceries! I thought to myself and almost muttered it out loud. People from church always seemed to know about it when we hit hard times. Receiving charity—especially store brand groceries that we would never choose to eat otherwise—never failed to infuriate me to the point of tears. Sure enough, my sinuses tingled, but I held back the waterworks.