by Kim Zarins
Lupe smiles like an evil Mona Lisa.
Meanwhile, Pard looks a pale shade of green, with all the fight gone out of him. Lupe is strong stuff, and she nailed him in his coffin with his own pencil, and no doubt Rooster and Bryce will have Cold One jokes at his expense for the rest of the school year. He wouldn’t really have drawn Lupe naked, but he mouthed off the wrong thing, and she called him out, and now he looks forgotten and fragile.
But then Pard takes a deep breath, squares his shoulders, turns toward Alison, and in less than a minute, he has her laughing. He’s impossibly brave. I’d never tell, because it would give the wrong impression, but there are times I miss him.
DOUGHNUTS
The bus turns off the freeway for a bathroom break and surprise doughnuts. I learn about the pit stop first, being in the front with the teacher, but the fun happens minutes later, rows behind me, when Mr. Bailey announces the treats. All those cheers.
When the bus parks, Mr. Bailey says we can get out. “But, Saga, Cookie, Mace, Pard—sit tight a moment.”
I freeze, because the only thing they all have in common is the front row experience of my asthma attack. Saga will be annoyed she’s missing part of her smoke break, then Bryce will be angry too, and before I know it, everyone will hate my asthmatic ass.
I get out first and don’t know who I’d even wait for, so I just act like I need to go to the bathroom right away. I feel like everyone’s looking at me.
After I take my time in the bathroom, I buy a doughnut with sprinkles, because I need some sprinkles right now.
Reiko, Frye, Lupe, and Marcus are crowded in a booth, so there’s no room, and I don’t dare bother anyone else. If anyone wanted to make eye contact with me, my face is up and ready, but no one tries, so I take my doughnut outside, walk a ways, find a corner I can hide behind, and, in case anyone’s looking, look busy on my phone while I eat.
No messages, and texting Cannon again would appear a little clingy.
Eventually, I get up and walk back. Mr. Bailey has treated the class to doughnuts. He’s inside with a giant pink box. He’s like a bird lady, but surrounded by teenagers instead of pigeons. I don’t go inside. I wouldn’t mind snagging a free doughnut, but I don’t want to hear from him how nice it is that I’m feeling better. Because I don’t.
“She’s cute,” I hear Pard say.
I turn, kind of shocked he’s checking out a girl, but it’s a cat he’s scratching behind the ears. He has a rapidly disappearing doughnut in his other hand.
Parson is with him, doughnutless, and I’m thinking maybe I should go back inside, but it’s too late. Parson waves me over, smiling like he’s found a stack of Bibles. He wants only to make sure I’m included, the way he includes all the losers at his gospel-happy lunch table.
“Aren’t these stories amazing?” Parson’s tail is practically wagging, and it’s cute to see this tall, blond guy fangirling in that clueless way he has. It’s like no one ever told him that sitting that close to female armpit hair on the nerdy side of the bus should depress him or that wearing a pink Jesus shirt was social death.
A pink Jesus shirt that he fills out in ways I never could.
He notices me staring and gets this look on his face like he’s about to invite me to youth group or something. Worse, Pard notices me staring. Pard’s smile goes up a thousand watts, like we’re a gay threesome.
I clear my throat, turn the focus onto Parson. “So, is pink your favorite color?”
Parson tilts his head, and it’s like a cartoon question mark appears over him. After an awkward moment, his eyebrows launch up, he looks down at his shirt like he’s detached from his own completely ripped, oddly dressed body, and his chin snaps up to the sky as he roars with laughter.
“Oh, that! Oh my gosh! Well, no, I’d never buy a pink shirt. It’s my own fault. The shirt was white, and it just came out pink in the wash. I was so embarrassed, I wanted to throw it out!” He’s smiling, his brown eyes so warm and mirthful. Even his lashes are long and kind of curly.
Pard’s grin speaks volumes of mockery. As in, Admit it, he’s hot.
Parson rests both his hands on his pecs—well, on the name of Jesus—and now even Pard stops smiling. His pale face shifts and stills with artistic concentration, like he’s clicked the video record button in his brain. We both stare at Parson’s man-hands on his sculpted man-chest.
And Parson is oblivious to this fiery subtext. He beams at us while we gape at him. “After praying about it, I learned something. I never throw away a Bible, and I would never throw away a shirt with my Lord’s name on it. Jesus taught me that it’s not about the color of the shirt. This isn’t a fashion statement. This is what it’s all about. This.” And Parson runs his hands over his pecs, twice, and Pard lets out a shivery sigh.
“This?” Now Pard has a hand there too, brushing the curvy letters running across Parson’s chest. He takes his time with his caress, fanning exploratory fingers over the muscle, over the nipples.
Jesus.
I look around me in case anyone’s watching and take a step away from this ludicrously Christianized homoeroticism.
Pard’s smile broadens, dimples showing. He’s yanking Parson’s chain. But Parson is too naive to know what’s being yanked. Reminds me of how clueless I was when Pard and I were friends and doing all kinds of things together, and I had no idea.
Parson beams, all joy, like he got Pard to think about the Lord and lay hands on His name. “Exactly, Pard! Does Jesus really care what color we’re wearing, so long as we’re glorifying Him?”
Pard gives me a shifty sideways look, but then drops his hands in a sort of lingering, finger-trailing way.
Bryce, Saga, Frye, Reiko, Lupe, and Marcus walk outside with their doughnuts. I want to walk up to them and bail on this scene, but I can’t walk up to people who don’t look at me or signal me over. I can’t just appear in front of people that way, because it will kill me, worrying if I’m bugging them.
I steal glances at Bryce, at all of them, hoping for eye contact I don’t get. So instead of walking up to them, I’m stuck on the edge of Pard and Parson’s sphere. This is the worst kind of social situation: when you’ve semi-ditched one group without hopping onto the next. Parson’s so soft-hearted he would have reeled me back, but he’s too wrapped up in the Jesus conversation that’s getting deeper by the second.
I’m just listening in when Pard asks, “Would you wear a dress if it said Jesus on it?”
Parson looks shocked for a second, and it’s quiet enough to hear Bryce going on about airport security and some asshat who got caught smuggling hummingbirds by hiding them in his underwear.
“What about the beaks?” asks Reiko.
“Acupuncture time!” Bryce grins.
“No way!” Frye shivers, and Reiko cuddles up to him. Bryce follows up with a similar smuggling story on lizards also hidden in a guy’s pants. He pulls out his phone; he has pics.
They’re having more fun than we are, but I want to look like I’m fun too. Like I’m not hating standing with these two guys having a Bible-thumping, homoerotic prayer meeting. Parson’s got a simple, sunshiny smile.
“You know, if Jesus wanted me to wear a dress, I would.”
The others are passing around Bryce’s phone, gushing over the images.
“Don’t lizards like to stay warm?”
“Guess they like it there, then!”
“Wait. How do you keep hummingbirds in one place?”
Bryce takes back his phone. “He bound their wings to their bodies and sewed them into his underwear. Here, check out this one.”
Meanwhile, Pard asks, “Would God ever wear a dress?”
Parson shrugs. “That’s up to Him.”
“Or Her.”
Parson opens his mouth as if to correct him, then his face softens, and he says, “I guess the Him or Her is just like the color of the shirt. Secondary.”
Pard’s smile looks almost pained. He says, “You’re all right, Parson,”
all quiet, and when our eyes meet, I can’t hear the others talking. I look back at Pard, and something in his face squeezes me and spills me out.
He’s probably yanking my chain, and I can’t make sense of how much he’s changed. There was the boy who used to sit on his patio with a hummingbird feeder in his hands; he taught me to hold still, and when they drank, you felt the vibrations of their wings on your fingertips. Now he’s the kind of guy who makes out in buses, dates narcissist actors, draws people naked, plays poker, drinks, parties, smokes, feels up, gets felt up, runs his fingers over the Christian youth group leader’s pecs, and does stuff in unsuspecting people’s laps.
It’s all too much. His face is trying to tell me he’s still that boy I knew, but I back off fast, without a word.
For once I don’t feel awkward approaching the popular kids, because I’m too panicked not to. I don’t even know how I got to Bryce’s elbow. One second the world was narrowed to nothing but Pard’s eyes, and then, after a blur, I surface for air in a different conversation. I force myself to act surprised, and it’s like acting in a fog. “Whoa. You have pictures of what?” And I give all the suitable oohs and aahs such images of critters and underwear demand, and I squirm like they might expect, but not because of the pictures.
MARCUS’S TALE
“I saved these for you,” Mr. Bailey says as I board the bus. He hands me two doughnuts, and they’re good ones—ones with holes, because ones without holes only masquerade as doughnuts. Bear claws and rectangular pastries taste great, but they are not doughnuts.
Maybe he sensed I felt like the odd guy out and wanted to make it up to me. “Thanks.”
But, no, he wants to chat.
“Look, Jeff—no sitting with Cookie and Saga. In fact, go sit with Pard again. He said he’d save a seat for you. He seems really reliable.”
“Okay,” I say, but it’s not. “Reliable” doesn’t really sound like the right word to describe Pard, unless he means reliable at messing with me.
“Can I have one?” Pard asks right away when I squeeze past him and take the window seat again.
I don’t know how someone that skinny can eat so much. “Forget it.”
“Please?” he begs, and he gives a puppy dog look with his butterscotch eyes.
I do not share my doughnuts. Puppies be damned to a vampire hell.
“All right, everyone,” Mr. Bailey announces. “I forgot to share your room assignments for the hotel, and that’s just as well, since I made some last-minute changes. It’s all in the e-mail I just sent you. Remember, for security reasons, I need you all to stay in your assigned rooms.”
The bus rounds a corner, and everyone whips out their phones—except Pard, who’s trying to draw despite the turn. He’s crosshatching and shading in Lupe, that exact pose of her chewing him out. She looks powerful and terrifying and gorgeous and furious all at once, and I wonder if he’s just torturing himself with his art. I do that too.
Then my e-mail loads, and I stop pitying him.
I can’t believe it.
Group 3: Mace-Pard-Jeff
Mr. Bailey must think he’s done me a favor. Like, maybe he had me in with Marcus, Parson, and Frye, but then seeing me today with Pard made him think I’d rather be with him. Or some other screwed-up adult logic. I picture a room with two queen beds, one with Pard in it and the other with Mace. Hell is real.
Pard looks over my shoulder at the e-mail and shrugs like he’s not that thrilled either, but he’s evading my eyes.
I snap, “What piece of information am I missing here?”
“Give me a doughnut, and I’ll tell.” But he still looks guilty, and after I give him the silent treatment, he fills the void. “I dealt out your medicine for you. He thinks I’m your nurse now.”
Everything makes sense when he says this. I should thank him for paying attention to my Diskus and albuterol back in ninth grade, and then using that knowledge today to potentially save my life. He even made Mace rub my back. But I scowl, because now he’s my escort and roommate and nurse. I’ll be able to breathe, but I need some air, if you know what I mean.
Mr. Bailey plows ahead. “Remember, we were going to work Marcus in for the next story, and then I’ll draw names for two women to present next. Sounds fair?”
Cece nods. “That’s what we voted to do.”
“I don’t mind waiting,” Marcus says, and I don’t blame him. Having a girlfriend like Lupe must be amazing, but she’s one tough act to follow.
Mr. Bailey tells him to just go ahead. Marcus clears his throat.
Then my phone vibrates. Finally! It takes a second to understand Cannon’s text, because I forgot complaining about having to sit with either Mace or Pard. That text feels like a lifetime ago.
That sucks. U sat w Mace? He’s OK.
I feel like I failed some kind of subtle test. Maybe we owe Mace because of the whole Georgetown connection—didn’t Cannon say once that Mace’s sister helped connect him with some fraternities? Was that it? Or maybe Cannon just hasn’t been on friendly terms with Pard in years.
I’m with Pard.
Micro-dick? Change seats.
Of course, nosy Pard sees my screen and glares at me.
I don’t know what to write back, so I change the subject.
What’s the plan?
Get wasted, get u laid. Hot girl :)
What?
I don’t like plans made around me, like I’m his experiment. He’s the one who decided that I had to get drunk at Franklin’s end-of-summer party. I thought I’d been drunk before, but no. The next morning I was hungover and hating life and looking back on it all, and there was nothing but a blank. Nothing. And if you’re the type who analyzes everything, and you remember nothing, that’s damn scary, and you’re going to obsessively analyze the nothing and all the laughter and hints of what went down that night. You’re going to be grounded with heaps of time to analyze your mom’s report that Pard drove you home, and he’s such a sweet boy, and why couldn’t you be friends with him again, he could have saved your life, Jeff. You’ll be too freaked out and chicken to ask him or anyone about it, because you don’t want to admit you know nothing.
I never got wasted again.
Marcus, still in pre-story warm-up mode, is literally blathering about Harvard’s philosophy department, which he can’t wait to experience next fall, whoopee-do, while Pard holds very still, fully attuned to my face and body, like he can feel my angsty thoughts.
Or maybe it’s just because he read my phone.
“Don’t go with Cannon,” he warns, his eyes surprisingly full of worry—fear, even. “If you get wasted, if you get an attack, whatever, he’s not in any position to look out for you. You can’t trust him.”
I weigh my trust issues toward Cannon, who should have taken me home after that party, against my issues with Pard, and I wonder for the millionth time what really happened between us that night.
“It’s none of your business.”
I don’t exactly trust Cannon, and he’s no nurse, but maybe I’m flattered he bothers with me at all. I know him better than most people do. Not just the glamorous things, but the shitty ones, like his mom’s addiction, and him moving out last year. It makes him more grown-up than the rest of us. In spite of all that, he makes time for me.
I text back to Cannon, How hot?
That’s when Pard swipes one of my doughnuts. I reach across him and into the aisle, and I know tackling Pard is completely wrong and weird—tackling for the last cookie was one of the late-night games I regret playing as an innocent freshman—but I make sure my knee grinds his thigh and my skull crushes his head against the back of his seat, so he knows this is not flirtation. This is war. For my doughnut.
“Gentlemen?” Mr. Bailey says, just when I’m about to reach it and win this evil game of Twister.
Demonically fast, Pard runs his tongue across the length of my sugar doughnut he’s holding, thereby ruining it forever.
“Sorry, Mr. Bailey,”
I say, and I stuff down the rest of my other doughnut in two bites—which is a shame, because now it’s gone—and Pard just smiles and takes little cat bites of his stolen doughnut like he has all the time in the world.
“As I was saying,” Marcus continues, “I’m interested in Lupe’s story about fidelity, and I want to utilize my story to broaden the discourse to gender and class disparities in marriage.”
Seriously. That’s how he talks sometimes.
Since antiquity, we’ve wondered what makes a perfect marriage—specifically, what makes a perfect wife.
“What about the perfect husband?” Cece snaps. “Oh, I get it. All husbands are perfect already.”
Blinking like a poked owl, Marcus blathers something about the Renaissance, like a textbook. Only drier.
My phone vibrates. I check to see Cannon’s message, but there are no words. Just a picture. From the waist up.
She’s hot—very hot—but it’s not like I’m looking at her face. It’s not the kind of pic that draws your attention there. An absence of clothing does that, and her carefully placed hands just make you stare more.
She’s a perfect ten. I want to touch her, but it bothers me that I don’t know her name. Like, what kind of creep am I? Believe me, I’m ready to shed my innocence. But I want to do it innocently, if that makes sense. I’d wanted to, anyhow.
Nice, huh? Nikki.
What do I say? Ask for more information? He’ll just send a pic of her ass. And how’d he get this photo anyway?
The phone vibrates, but it’s from a new number.
Hey, asshole, get off the fuckin phone and listen to the stories.
My head snaps up. Pard pops a bit of doughnut into his mouth and reads my screen. I don’t know who’s on my case.
Then I do. Mari glares at me. Then back down at her phone.
You think ur better than us.
She’s so wildly wrong, I don’t know how to answer except:
NO WAY
You never even read the journal I published you in. LISTEN to us. We might be good, asshat.