Sometimes We Tell the Truth

by Kim Zarins

  My jaw drops. She read Paradise Lost? Why are we not friends? Why didn’t I take her to prom last week instead of that junior Kaitlyn Rush? We could have talked about devils and Death, and the evening wouldn’t have been so painfully awkward.

  “Is that Shakespeare?” Frye asks.

  “Milton?” She sounds shy, correcting him with a question in her voice, like she wants to sound unsure so he won’t feel stupid for not knowing.

  After Sophie picks up a pencil she’s dropped, she notices Mace leering at her. He holds out his phone. “That was a great view down your shirt. So should I post this pic of you online, or do you want to give me forty bucks?”

  Sophie’s heart pounds. “What? Please don’t. But I don’t have any money.”

  “Sure. Right.” His thumbs run all over the phone.

  “Hey, please! Stop!” Her eyes fill with tears.

  “Last chance!” Mace sings.

  “I only have enough change for the bus home. Please, Mace!”

  Mace laughs and works his phone. “Three, two, one . . . uploaded.” He scratches his chin carefully, so as not to make his pimples bleed, then snags her bag. “So what have you got in that purse?”

  “Hey, give that back!”

  But she doesn’t jump up and grab it. She’s scared.

  Green has been sitting next to her this whole time, looking admiringly at her copy of Paradise Lost. He says to her, very softly, so Mace doesn’t overhear, “Do you want him to go to Heaven?”

  Sophie glares at Green like he’s crazy. “Um. Nooo . . .”

  “If not Heaven, then where would you like him to go?”

  “Huh?”

  Their eyes meet. Eyes pleading, Green doesn’t inflict demonic whispers on Sophie, but she shivers, sensing something about him. “Humor me. I need you to say it. I know you feel it, deep down.”

  Meanwhile, Mace dumps out Sophie’s purse and paws through her makeup. He acts out the revolting seventh-grade bully tactic of waving her tampon in her face and laughing about it.

  Then Sophie finally snaps. “Go to Hell, Mace! Go to Hell and take that tampon with you!”

  “I owe you one,” Green says, giving her a quick kiss on the forehead.

  Mace is so clueless, he doesn’t fully understand. Not until that cheap library carpet rips in two and reveals a hole straight to Hell. The devil, now bat winged and leathery skinned, takes zit-faced Mace in his talons and flies him down, down, down. And the tampon comes too, as promised. The end!

  Reiko pulls Frye down for a kiss, while Rooster loudly sings, “And the tampon goes to Hell!”

  MACE’S TALE

  Frye levels his confident gaze to Mace as the laughter dies down, like he’s got Mace where he wants him.

  Meanwhile, the backs of Mace’s fingers absentmindedly stroke his cheek—gently, on account of his acne. I guess he’s feeling the uneven stubble, since shaving over his cratered skin is almost impossible. Even if he is a jerk for wrecking Pard’s hat, I can’t hate him. There’s something too vulnerable about seeing him touch his own face. I wonder if he even knows what it’s like to be touched by another person there, even once.

  Frye makes a big show of stroking his own cheek, and Mace puts his hand down fast.

  But Mace doesn’t whine like Reeve or even threaten like Pard. “You forgot the epilogue.” And he dives right in.

  Sophie had a special friendship with Green. And Green owed her. So she summoned him one night, when her parents were out of town.

  Sophie looks completely freaked out about where this is headed. Frye is one thing, Mace a whole different species.

  “Watch it, Mace,” Mari growls. “My story’s coming up too.”

  Mace doesn’t smile, or reassure the girls, or even look at them. He’s got his dark eyes on Frye, who’s mock-stroking his face again, like a matador taunting a very deadpan bull.

  “You’re really here,” Sophie said, a little breathless. Green wore one of his most pleasing human shapes.

  He sat on the couch next to her. “Of course. What do you need?”

  Sophie touched Green’s wrist. “It’s about Frye. He’s missing. Do you know what happened to him?”

  “I know exactly where he is.” Green laughed bitterly.

  Sophie gripped him even harder. “Where?”

  Green hesitated. “You really don’t want to know, especially if you’re one of his conquests. Are you?”

  Sophie cleared her throat. She had a crush on him, yes, but he was working a long list of girls and hadn’t gotten to her yet. “Um, no, we‘ve never dated.”

  “Well, where he is, his days playing the field are over.”

  Sophie trembled. “He’s in Hell?”

  Green looked everywhere but at her. “Yes. He’s here. With me.”

  This answer made no sense. If Frye was with Green, he couldn’t be in Hell at the same time. And if he was with Green, where was he?

  “Well . . . can I see him?”

  “Not a good idea,” he said flatly. “Please. Ask me for anything else.”

  But Sophie still had her crush on Frye. She had to see him.

  “I do owe you one thing, but this . . . I can’t show you here. It’s too exposed. Let’s go to your bedroom.”

  Green looked around wildly at the pink bedroom, like he was trying to figure out how to reveal Frye properly.

  “Listen. You know I don’t have a real human body, right?” She nodded. “So, he’s inside me. I can bring him out, though, for a minute. It’ll look mind-bending for a human to see. Do you want to wait outside or stay as I retrieve him?”

  Sophie paused to think it over, but finally she said, “I’ll stay.”

  He gave a quick nod.

  Then he took off all his clothes. Sophie had never seen a guy naked before, so she just stared. Green had chosen a very pleasing shape.

  He smiled. “You sure you want to see Frye? We could just hang out instead.”

  Unable to speak, she shook her head. She needed to know the truth.

  “All right. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  He flopped onto her bed, facedown, with a pillow shoved under his stomach. And then things got really weird.

  Green writhed a little, and then he farted with barely a sound, but Sophie could see the gassy cloud coming out of him. It had substance to it, jiggling and alive. The cloud quickly stretched over six feet, growing scrawny limbs and a long chicken neck. It had little wings that helped it to flit about like a butterfly. Or a virus.

  Sophie felt a scream in her throat. She recognized the freshly hatched thing.

  “Frye?”

  The creature smiled at her flirtatiously and opened his arms for an embrace. Sophie stepped back.

  Green looked over his shoulder and rose from the bed. Frye floated to the opposite side of the room, clearly not keen on being near his captor. “That’s him. A real pain in the ass. But it’s symbiotic. He gets a little place to live, and I get his soul, which helps me digest the other souls that pass on through my bowels. Sorry if the sight is a bit much. Have you had enough of him?”

  Watching Frye repeatedly wink at her, Sophie said she’d had enough.

  “Right, then. I guess I better head out.” Still naked, he put his back to Frye and his hands on his knees, like an athlete at rest. Then he whistled, and Frye, after blowing a good-bye kiss, zipped back right where he came from. With a farewell and a quick snatching of the clothes on the bed, the demon was gone, with nothing remaining but a strong whiff of Frye.

  And that is how Frye’s story really ends.

  “Eww,” Briony says, and Mouse and Saga scrunch their faces in disgust.

  “Some surprising slapstick, but not as developed as it could have been,” Mari pronounces. “I do like this demon stuff, though.” Sophie nods.

  But Mace isn’t looking at them. He’s looking at Frye with a hint of a smile at one corner of his mouth.

  Frye isn’t a deadpan sort of person. He’s sneering and barely containing
himself. He gives Mace the finger. “Your story matches your face. It’s a mess.”

  Mace gives his dark, unflappable stare. “That was just an epilogue for your story. Now for my story,” and he begins.

  Frye’s summer job was working at Massage Splendor.

  Frye thought it would be this dream job where he’d get to rub down hot girls, but in reality he was working the backs of women his mother’s age. The only good part was that he got decent tips from some of them. Some, but not all. You’d think rubbing down a whiny sixty-four-year-old grandma for an hour would get you at least ten bucks, but those ladies seemingly grew up in the Depression. They’d tip two bucks, like he’d just brought around their vintage Lincoln Town Car.

  He’d vent online. He had to be clever about sneaking pics of the old hags—facedown, gray or brightly dyed hair puffed like a growth from the face pillow—but the images really drove home his point that ugly people needed to tip properly.

  And then, one day, this super old guy comes in. Like, eighty years old.

  “Bet you’re used to pretty women and not some geezer like me,” said the old dude.

  If this dude only knew how bleak Frye’s job was.

  But it was about to get bleaker.

  “You’re no geezer,” Frye said, but his voice was fake, and as they shook hands, all Frye could stare at were the tuffs of hair exploding from the guy’s collar. This geezer—Tom, we’ll call him—was a wolfman. It was going to be like rubbing down a giant, wrinkled old rat.

  In fact, it was worse than that.

  Tom had so much curly gray hair that Frye got the willies when his fingers made contact. He put on extra lotion, braced himself, and went for it. The dampened hairs were practically glued to the guy’s body fat. At one point Frye’s fingers got tangled in them.

  “Ouch!” Tom yapped.

  Frye carefully extracted his fingers from the gray tangles of back hair. “Sorry.”

  “I guess I have a lot of hair there.”

  Frye didn’t respond.

  “Too much testosterone, maybe,” the man said, his love handles jiggling with a deep laugh.

  Frye wondered if testosterone also gave a guy moles, because Tom had plenty of those, too.

  When it was time for the guy to roll over, faceup, Frye realized what the dude really meant by having too much testosterone. There was total tent action.

  “Nasty,” Saga says.

  The effect was subtle, because of Tom’s big belly, but still.

  Frye quickly finished massaging Tom’s neck and age-spotted scalp and said that the time was up. He got the dude the complimentary cup of water and handed it to him once Tom was presentable.

  “That was a great massage. Thanks!” Tom waved good-bye and headed to the register.

  Frye just nodded and went in to strip the bed, and when he did, he found two twenty-dollar bills on the bed.

  What a tip! The money changed things. That dude could set up enough tents for a Boy Scout camp, if that’s what he wanted.

  Frye was thrilled when the guy started coming in weekly. He came in for lower back pain but also, it seemed, for companionship. Besides snarling his fingers in back hair, working his way carefully over the minefield of moles, and dodging flagpoles, Frye thought it was worth it. Forty dollars, every time. The old fart was loaded, in every sense of the word. Or maybe Tom just didn’t realize that no one else tipped this high.

  Mouse has been squirming wildly during the back-hair episode, the way people do during a horror movie. Now she cuts in. “He has to stop seeing Tom. It’s too gross.”

  Mace lifts a scaly eyebrow.

  “How do you know so much about massage parlors anyhow?” Briony asks, all suspicious, like it’s impossible to imagine people letting Mace massage them.

  Mace shrugs and doesn’t mention what I’ve just remembered from freshman year—that his older sister, Melanie, was planning to work as a massage therapist to help pay for college. I knew her during her senior year. She was sweet, almost painfully nice. Melanie had Mace’s acne, but she caked on makeup to try to hide the damage. That spring Mace bragged about all the colleges she got into, including Georgetown. The bragging was oddly affectionate of him, since he didn’t seem to otherwise care about school. I guess she must have gotten that job, and now that I think about that back rub during my asthma attack, I’m pretty sure Mace knows a lot about massage. More than Frye does, with his YouTube videos.

  Let’s get on to the good part. Frye was having a blast posting online about the old guy and all his other hideous clients, and he was making good money.

  But one day Tom seemed unwell. Tired.

  “You okay?” Frye asked.

  “Ah, it’s just old age,” Tom explained.

  Frye finished working Tom’s lower back. It was time to do his glutes—not the most fun. Granted, Tom’s ass was covered in a blanket, and he was wearing underwear, but, no matter how you cut it, Frye was still working an old man’s ass.

  “I’ll move on from this life, soon,” Tom continued.

  “I’m sure you have a lot of life left in you yet,” Frye said, just to pass the moment. It was creepy, squeezing a guy’s ass while he talked about his upcoming death. Not your typical heart-to-heart.

  Tom sighed. “I‘m not long for this world, sadly. But these massages have been a real gift, and not only for the relief from pain. I feel like you’ve helped ease me toward my next life, what with your gentle hands and gentle words. Frye, I’m truly thankful.”

  “It’s my pleasure to help in any way I can, Tom. You know that.” Squeeze, squeeze. Squish, squish.

  “I’d like to give you something from my estate to remember me by, when I’m gone.”

  Frye froze mid-squeeze. This—this was the opportunity he’d been waiting for. Get the old man’s fortune and live the good life. Oh yes.

  “I’m . . . wow, sir. I’m amazed you’d be so generous to think of me. What with me saving up for college and all . . .”

  “Let me think of how to do this,” Tom said. “I have lots of scheming relatives after my money. I don’t know if I can—or should—put you in my will officially. They might find a way to write you off. Maybe I should bring you something of value off the books. Something for your college funds. And it will be fun outsmarting my heirs.”

  Tom laughed. Frye didn’t know if he should laugh too. It seemed greedy somehow. So he just said, “Thanks,” and worked that guy’s glutes like never before. Tom’s butt cheeks were like two fluffy clouds by the end of the session.

  Finally, on the fateful day, when Tom had promised to bring the gift, Frye was jumpy. How much would Tom bring?

  When Tom appeared for his appointment, he didn‘t let on that anything was different, and yet, everything went differently that day.

  For one thing, Tom wanted to start by lying on his back. He kept his eyes open and studied Frye’s face. “I must be your ugliest client.”

  Frye smiled as he shook his head. “No way,” he lied. “You’re the handsomest dude here.”

  Tom smiled innocently and puffed out his chest from the blanket as if to show off that bear-rug mat of gray chest hairs. “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Thanks. That means a lot to me.” Tom rolled over onto his stomach. “Legs first, then feet, okay?”

  “So many changes to our routine,” Frye ventured, working up from the calves to the man’s thighs.

  “True . . . might mean something big is happening, you think?” Tom lifted his face from the doughnut face pillow and winked. “And don’t forget my toes,” Tom added. “I love how you do my toes.”

  Frye did his toes.

  As Frye worked on Tom’s back, he couldn’t help but sigh. Maybe nothing would happen today.

  With his head down in the pillow, Tom chuckled. “I heard that! Poor boy, you have nothing to worry about. You’ll get your little gift from me. I feel jazzed just thinking about it!”

  That got Frye’s heart pumping. He finished Tom’s sho
ulders and then went down, down, down. Finally, he got to where Tom’s elastic waistband should be. This is normally where he’d straighten the blanket and do the glutes.

  Only, Tom wasn’t wearing any underwear, it seemed.

  “Another change to schedule,” Tom said, facedown, but Frye could hear him grinning.

  For a moment Frye was freaked. Was Tom going to proposition him, like he was a male prostitute or something? Could he go through with it? How much money were they talking about here?

  But, instead, Tom yawned. Sometimes he fell asleep in sessions. So he probably didn’t want to have sex, Frye reasoned, or he wouldn’t be on the verge of conking out.

  Tom sighed and said sleepily, “I hid the jewel.”

  Frye’s mouth went dry. “Jewel?”

  “My scheming family is keeping my money out of my reach, even searched my clothes. Heh, I outsmarted them! I stuck the jewel right where the sun don’t shine, and it’s all yours. . . .”

  Oh. So the old geezer had shoved a gemstone up his ass. Brilliant.

  “Why don’t you extract it, and we’ll take it from there?” Frye offered.

  But Tom was fast asleep. “Tom,” Frye whispered urgently. “Tom!”

  He was out cold.

  Frye pulled the blanket down, farther and farther. Tom really was stark naked. And there was his ass. The crack boasted as many snarly gray hairs as his upper back. And beyond that forest, nestled away, lay the object of Frye’s desire.

  “Oh my God,” he whispered, because he knew he was going to do it.

  He looked at the door—closed, not locked, because locks gave a massage parlor a red-light feel. This wouldn’t take as long as a hookup, though; it would be a faster in and out. He’d have to be gentle. Wouldn’t want the old man to bleed. Wouldn’t want him to wake up terrorized that fingers were prying a stone from his ass either.

  So Frye lubed up with lotion, which he hoped could be applied internally. Then he parted the gray forest and launched himself up the cleft, all the way to Tom’s inner sanctum.

  He felt around inside. Was that the stone? There was something . . .

  Then the most nuclear fart erupted from Tom’s ass, knocking Frye off the table, where he’d been perched like an ass-pecking vulture. The fart was so loud, all the other massage therapists heard the thunder and felt the walls vibrate. But the sound didn’t hold a candle to the smell of all that gas. Frye’s nasal passages were permanently scarred from the burns.