Caring Is Creepy

by David Zimmerman

  “She usually is, but her work called up and said she had the day off. Tomorrow too.”

  “Shit,” Logan said, “I’m beginning to think this wasn’t such a great idea. There’s no way I could slip out without her seeing me?”

  “No way, Jose,” I said.

  “Could I maybe climb out your bedroom window? This is near about emergency mode. In a little while, nothing’s done about it, I’ll explode and you’ll have quite a mess on your hands.”

  “Wounded in the line of duty.”

  “I’m serious.” He pulled a pout.

  “You can’t. The window’s nailed shut.” These were the first lies I told Logan Loy, and even now I’m not entirely sure why I told them. Of course I wanted him to stay for a little while longer, but there was more to it than that. The scary part was I didn’t even think about it. Not till afterward. I just lied and he believed me. “If she sees you, she’ll call the police. The station’s right down the street. You wouldn’t even make it to your car.”

  “Shit,” he said. His sweat smelled strangely spicy in that small, hot room, but I didn’t mind. I kind of liked it. Since he was in my room and I was taking care of him, I thought of it as kind of like my sweat. And your own sweat never smells as bad as other people’s.

  “Look,” I said, “I’ll go get you a can and you can use that. It’s all we can do for now.”

  You’d think it’d make me feel like a servant or something, fetching him stuff and taking away his piss in Coke cans, but I felt the opposite. He really needed me. And this felt as good as, maybe even better than, it did when he touched me.

  Officially AWOL

  “Least you can do is come in here and talk with me some,” he said, giving me his best sweetie-pie look as I set up the screechy old box fan for him. I’d borrowed it out of my mom’s room after she left to see about whatever was going on at work, but I didn’t tell him that. He thought she was lying out in a lawn chair in the side yard. Again, I’m not sure why I kept lying. I was still waiting for something to happen. Just something. I thought I’d know it when it came. Something that’d make all this feel permanent and real after it ended and he had to leave. Right then it still felt like a daydream, some story I’d cooked up to amuse me and Dani one bored Tuesday afternoon in August.

  “Alright,” I said, and crawled over beside him.

  “Do you like me?” he said. “I mean, do you really like me?”

  “I do,” I said. “That’s why I’m keeping you prisoner in my closet. The evil princess keeping the brave knight in her tower.”

  “This is serious, right?” he said. “I mean what we got here. Us.” He didn’t act as confident as he did the day I met him. Today it seemed more like he was my age, maybe even younger, like he needed me to tell him everything was going to be okay. But I liked knowing he’d been thinking about this.

  “Yeah, it feels bigger than anything I’ve ever—” I wasn’t sure how to say it. I wasn’t sure what it was. “More than anyone else I’ve ever met.” I tilted my head away and stared at the wall. “What about you?”

  “Seems like I left the base a million years ago. Here, I made you something.” In his palm was a little orange animal made of paper. “It’s a fox, on account of your being so foxy.”

  I took it. The closer I looked at it, the more intricate it seemed to get. The little beasty even seemed to be smiling. It occurred to me then that under different circumstances Logan and my mom would probably get on famously, them having a shared interest in making normal objects very small.

  He sat up suddenly, his face serious. “What time is it?”

  “It’s almost three, I think.”

  As of eight this morning, he was officially AWOL. They’d probably put him behind bars if he went back. If they discovered I’d helped him, I wondered, would they put me in an Army jail or send me to juvie over in Bulloch County? Thinking this and holding his hand gave me a shiver of happiness.

  He put his arms around my waist then and kissed me. I lost my balance and we fell back onto the blankets, a muddle of sweat-sticky arms and legs. His hands crept up under my shirt. This time I didn’t need to tell him where I wanted them to go because they wanted to go there too. I wasn’t wearing a bra because it was so hot and, to be honest, my breasts weren’t really big enough for anyone to notice if I went without. We rolled over again and I could feel his excitement pressing through his boxer shorts. He took off my shirt and kissed my breasts. An electric tingle wriggled in from the tips of my nipples, through my belly, and down between my legs. When he tried to take off my shorts, I made him stop.

  “Not yet.”

  “Why not?”

  “Wait till later, when my mom goes to sleep,” I said. I wanted to draw this out. I wanted his needing me to last.

  “You’re getting me all riled up,” he said. “Being stuck in this little closet is hard enough without—”

  “You’re a soldier during wartime. The town has been invaded by your enemies. I have to hide you until it’s safe. You ever see that old movie, Summer of My German Soldier?

  “What movie?”

  “It’s old. From the seventies, I think. See, during World War Two this American farm girl finds a German soldier wandering around lost after he’s escaped from soldier prison and she hides him. He’s not really a bad guy. He got drafted and had to fight or they’d kill him or something, but he actually hates Hitler. While he’s hiding, they fall in love.”

  “Yeah,” Logan said, “I can dig that. How’s it end? Does he get away?”

  “Sure,” I lied.

  Nervous

  I looked at the TV with my mom while we ate a Monday dinner of fish sticks and Tater Tots I’d cooked in the toaster oven. She’d come home with a strained face about an hour before, but hadn’t said a word about where she’d been. The six o’clock sun peered through the blinds.

  “Why’s it you keep picking at the sofa cushion and kicking the coffee table like that?” she asked. “Are you worried about school tomorrow? I used to get so worked up before the first day of school I’d get these awful nervous farts. The worst you’ve ever smelled. They just slipped on out. Nothing I could do about it.”

  “Mom,” I said, “when’s all this trouble with Hayes going to be over?”

  She was quiet for a while. “If he’s done what I told him to do, it’s already over.”

  “What’d you tell him this time?”

  She blinked her eyes for half a second and then stared hard at the coffee table. “That stupid man.”

  Finally

  I didn’t notice more than a few speckles. A lot more blood came out when I got my period. Even spotting makes a worse mess. The hard part was getting it in. He almost put it in the wrong hole. It did sting at first, pretty bad, but it wasn’t half as awful as Dani made it out to be. Or as good. Part of the reason I felt scared was because Dani told me the man would have to tear through the fleshy part of the hymen with one hard jab of the penis before things could get started in earnest. She used those exact words—tear through the fleshy part of the hymen. Whenever someone said, I’m going to tear you a new one, that’s what I thought about—losing my virginity. But it wasn’t like that at all.

  It was only in the shower after that I started to shake. As I washed his smell off my skin, I thought about how you were supposed to feel different afterwards, like a woman, and how I felt exactly the same as I did that morning, except maybe a little tender down there. I figured maybe it took a few days for the change to sink in. I studied myself in the mirror to see if I looked any different.

  Logan went on and on so much about the bathroom when I got back that I told him Mom was in the front yard, so he could go, but only if he went quick. I emphasized quick.

  He said, “Alright, farm girl.”

  My mom actually left off someplace while I was in the shower, but I had no idea where she went or when she would be back. That was fine with me. I’d heard stories about how a mother could tell her daughter wasn’t
a virgin anymore just by looking at her, but I doubted my mom would notice anything. I looked the same as ever, just wet from the shower and a little tired. I’d lost my virginity, but I kept the box it came in.

  Before I finished saying, “Fine, you can go,” Logan was jogging across my room headed to the bathroom. He stopped in the doorway as I tried to squeeze past and took my cheeks in his hands and studied my face. I thought he might be angry about something. That was how serious he looked. But he only kissed me and shut the door. I knew then that once he left my house, I’d never see him again. He might think he was going to come back and see me, even really believe it when he said it, but he wouldn’t. This was all I was going to get.

  Luckily, there were no windows in the bathroom, so he couldn’t see my mom wasn’t in the yard talking to Mr. Cannon. I’d of hated to have him think I’d lied.

  I’ve Been Thinking

  “Lynn, princess, listen,” Logan said, his voice sharp and tense, when I went in to tell him goodnight. “I like hanging out with you and all, but I can’t stay in this closet anymore. I’m going crazy.”

  This was so different from what I expected to come out of his mouth, I couldn’t say anything for a long moment.

  “It’s better than jail,” I said. “So just wait. My mom will go back to work tomorrow and you can get out.”

  “I’ve been thinking …,” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’ve got this friend in Macon. I can go there for a while. I could visit you sometimes.”

  It felt like someone had poured Liquid-Plumr straight into my stomach. “That’s so far away.”

  “It’s only about two hours. I can visit on the weekends. There’s a campground near here. I can stay in a tent and we can hang out together.” He brought his knees up to his chest and put his arms around them. All he had on were a pair of blue striped boxers. “At least that’s what I’m thinking right now.”

  “You’ll leave and that’ll be it.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Please don’t leave tomorrow while I’m at school,” I said. “Please. I don’t want to have to visit you in jail.”

  “You couldn’t anyway,” he said. “The place they’d probably send me is in Leavenworth, Kansas.” He pushed a bit of hair off my forehead and tucked it behind my ear. “I don’t want to leave you. It’s only I—”

  “Take me with you,” I said.

  “With the Army chasing after me? That ain’t no life for you.”

  “I don’t care. I’ve never had nothing like this. I don’t expect I ever will again.”

  He turned away. I took his chin and pulled his head to face me. His eyes shone and I kissed them closed, one after the other, and then again for good measure.

  “God almighty, I wish I were someone else. I wish—” He stopped and kissed my nose.

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The Emperor’s New Clothes

  The alarm clock in my brain woke me up at five on Tuesday, the first day of school, even though I didn’t actually have to leave until seven thirty. My real alarm clock was set for six. That’s when I woke Logan up and told him I would wash his clothes.

  “Strip,” I said, and he did, tripping on his filthy boxers and blinking his eyes. He hardly made a peep about it, did everything I told him. I figured it was his Army training kicking in. Always follow orders and such like.

  “It’s not as if I need them in here anyway,” he told me after he’d rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. “It’s a fucking sauna. I’ve probably lost ten pounds from sweating alone.”

  “That’s true,” I said. “What do you need clothes for?”

  My mom was still asleep, so I took his duffle bag and all his clothes and put them in three big triple-ply garbage sacks. Our neighbor, Mr. Cannon, had a huge trash can, the kind with the lid that flips up on plastic hinges. I threw the clothes in there, but I was careful to put some of Mr. Cannon’s trash on top. Mr. Cannon worked for the county animal shelter and was hardly ever home anyway. I didn’t think he’d notice.

  On the bus, I sat next to Sally Bryant and she told me about a trip she’d taken to Jacksonville with her family the week before. I wasn’t really listening. I had on my favorite pair of jeans, the ones with flared legs and rivets down the side, and I was thinking about Logan sitting around in no jeans and no nothing, reading my eighth-grade English Johnny Tremain book, trapped in the secret room behind my closet.

  A Fistful of Trojans

  I didn’t see Dani until after homeroom. She handed me a fistful of Trojans. “You know I am so proud of you. What happened? Tell me everything. Did it kill when he first put it in?”

  I told her about it. She nodded wisely.

  “Well, it ought to last longer than a minute,” she said finally. “I’ll think about this premature ejaculation problem for you. I think we can fix it.”

  “Premature ejaculation?” I said.

  The second bell rang.

  Dani dug in her pocket and pulled out a plastic baggie. “After breakfast I went and checked for footprints myself. In the grass by the flower bed, I found this.”

  She handed me the bag. Inside was an ace of spades. I took it out and held it up to the light. There was a picture of Bugs Bunny nibbling a carrot on the other side.

  Dani snatched it out of my hands and put it back in the bag.

  “You’ll mess up the fingerprints.” She made an ugh yuck face at me. “Fucked up, isn’t it? And that’s not all.”

  “Dani, the second bell rang.”

  “Just look at it.”

  She handed me a second bag. Inside was a computer-printed picture of Dani from last year’s yearbook, but the eyes had been rubbed out with an eraser. It gave me chicken pimples on my arms.

  “Whoa,” I said. “You found this outside your window?”

  She had.

  The Answer

  I didn’t see Dani again until the end of second-period lunch. She had third-period lunch and came into the cafeteria as I left. According to the clock in the cage up above the salad bar, I had exactly three and a half minutes before the bell. We went out on the breezeway.

  “I got an answer for you,” she said.

  “An answer for what?”

  “You know, it being too fast.” Dani poked a stiff index finger through her fist a few times.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “I talked to Barbara Ann.”

  “You didn’t tell her it was me, did you?” I moaned. “Dani. Shit.”

  Barbara Ann Habersham was a bottle blonde with a body that made boys turn their heads as she passed in the hall. Back when she still wore a cheerleader uniform, they’d wait for her in clumps below the front stairs in hopes of a panty flash. I’d heard she dated a frat boy from Georgia Southern. She looked like a college senior, but she was only a high school one. I seriously doubt she even knew who I was. She’d been the youngest-ever head of the varsity cheerleading squad until she got kicked off the first quarter of her junior year. Some people said it was because she got caught smoking pot in her hotel room at a preseason exhibition game over in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, but I’d heard a few other people say it was because she got pregnant and had an abortion. Despite all this, Barbara Ann was still popular. Maybe even more so because pretty people could do shameful shit and not even the teachers seemed to care. These days she was kind of like the queen of the burnouts and baddies. Still, I didn’t much care for her to know all about my private sexual goings-on.

  “Of course I didn’t tell. I acted like I was only curious to know if it was theoretically possible to fix a hair-trigger penis.” She made air quotes around the word “theoretically,” one of her favorite bandying-about words, along with “homunculus” (as in, “we had a homunculus good time at that party”) and “plethora,” which she emphatically believed meant an enormous fat person (like, “look at that plethora on the bike over there, his butt’s gone and swallowed the banana seat right down to the tires”). It did
n’t matter how many times I tried to shove a dictionary in front of her face.

  “ ‘Is there any cure for such a poor, sad condition as this?’ That’s what I asked her. I described your boy as a three-scoots-and-shoot kind of guy.”

  “You did not say that.” I sucked in two lungfuls of air in one breath. “Did you?”

  “Oh, please, tranquilo the hell out.” Dani had just come from Español with Senora Pulawski. “The last person she’d expect it to be is you. She probably thinks it’s me that’s wondering.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “And I wasn’t wondering.”

  “I’m hungry, so I’ll make this quick. Barbara Ann told me to take a hair tie or a scrunchie in your emergency-type situations, and wrap it nice and snug around the bottom of his dick once you’re sure he’s good and hard. That’s key or it won’t firm up in the first place. Are you paying attention?”

  The bell rang.

  “Dani,” I said.

  She ignored this. “Listen, Lynn, this is good stuff. You wrap it nice and tight, but not so tight it starts turning blue. The idea here is this’ll keep the blood in there and the whole thing will last longer. Depending, it could be like two or three times longer. She wrote the instructions on a Juicy Fruit wrapper. Here, I’ve already memorized it.”

  Dani handed me the wrapper. It was folded up into a tiny square. I thought of Logan’s sweet little origami roses and made up my mind to chuck the wrapper as soon as Dani left. As I put it in my hip pocket, she sighed in her most dramatic way. “I wish I could meet him. I hardly know what’s going on and it was all my idea to begin with. You never tell me anything.”

  “He’s probably leaving tomorrow, but he says he’ll come back and visit me.”

  “Why tomorrow? I thought you planned to move him in for good.” She winked.

  “My mom’s going back to work and he’s sick of it in there. I’ll admit it’s pretty hot.”