Tampa

by Alissa Nutting

  “Do you need help up?” he finally asked.

  My position on the ground suggested I’d been tossed from my seat in a car accident. I took a deep breath and uncrumpled my limbs, pushing my damp hair from my face. Wordlessly, I reached up and grabbed his shirt and pants and my shorts. We dressed in silence and said nothing as we moved back into the front of the car, though the soreness between my legs when I spread them to climb over the console was such a pleasant sort of ache that I nearly swore. A hurried urge to get him back home suddenly came over me—I wanted plenty of time alone with my own fantasied memories of the evening before Ford got off work.

  Two exits outside of town we got milkshakes and burgers and parked in front of a closed appliance store to eat. There was a clear eroticism to every action Jack made—ripping open the ketchup packet with his teeth, taking the top off the milkshake cup to attack the whipped cream with his tongue; I didn’t know if it was an intentional tease or if his actions normally held such innuendoed physicality. “We don’t have this restaurant in town,” he commented. “Their milkshakes are really good.”

  “You’ll see me again, won’t you, Jack?” I’d taken the cherry off the top of my milkshake to suck, holding its stem between my lips as I looked at him with imploring eyes. He used his arm like a napkin on the whipped cream in the corners of his mouth and I smiled. “Besides in class, I mean.”

  He nodded eagerly, then ran his fingers across the grooves in the top of the gearshift, reading it like Braille, turning to me with a hopeful expression. “Can we do this every night?”

  His forehead was still sweaty. I brushed at it with a napkin, pausing to tuck a fold of hair back against the side of his head. “Probably not every single night. Hopefully most nights though.” I started the car but turned the radio down low as I pulled out of the parking lot; from Jack’s tentative expression, it seemed like he had more to say.

  “Should I drop you off at the same place?” I started.

  He gave a small nod. “It’s going to feel really weird being in class tomorrow.” We pulled up to a stoplight and I noticed a shoddy hotel, the Toucan Inn, on my left. I imagined checking into it with Jack and the shroud of anonymity we’d have to function under, the way the coming months would force us to date like criminals on the lam, shirking anyplace public, any activity that might require ID.

  “Want to go to that motel sometime?” I pointed. “It won’t be clean enough to get under the sheets but I’ll bet there’s a nice setup of mirrors in each room.” His face took on a blank expression, like his mind had to unfold new and never-used corners to process what I’d just said. I placed a reassuring hand on his upper leg and squeezed. “Don’t worry about class. You’re always daydreaming in there, anyway. What are you thinking about?” He shrugged.

  “Stupid stuff, I dunno. Whatever comes into my head. I don’t usually even remember. One minute I’m staring off into space and then suddenly a teacher’s calling on me.” He bent over and began putting his shoes back on. “Mrs. Feinlog is the worst about that. She pretends like she’s NASA or something. ‘Jack, Jack, you’re lost in orbit.’ She’s such an idiot.”

  “I’m sorry she picks on you. She doesn’t have many advantages in life.” I pulled back into the Taco Bell lot and felt a deep sense of normalcy: here we were right where we’d started—it had actually happened, and no one else knew. Jack sat casually slouched in the passenger seat and continued to make small talk for a few minutes. He certainly didn’t seem traumatized or the victim of something harmful—in fact his expression was alive with a dewy glow. Far more so than when I’d first picked him up, he looked spirited and engaged. He looked improved.

  “So when are you unsupervised this week?” I asked. He seemed to get the joke, a thin smile spreading over his lips as he thought.

  “My mom lives in Crystal Springs; it’s just me and my dad. Usually he’s home by six but I’m alone from when I get home at four until then.” His face suddenly brightened with the realization of good news. “And Wednesdays he’s never home before nine … he stays late to do continuing education for the new service reps. IT maintenance stuff. He doesn’t really like me to go out on school nights.”

  “Oh? How did you manage to come meet me?”

  Jack laughed. “I told him I had a group project for English tonight. But during the week you could come over any afternoon before he gets home.”

  I felt my crotch seize at the thought of fucking Jack on his own bed with the musky funk of early adolescence rising from his sheets, everything in the room surrounding us related to him in a way that would make his body feel magnified. His home was a better location than I’d ever let myself imagine—I’d been expecting only sex in the outdoors, in my car, perhaps occasionally breaking up the monotony with faraway venues: in darkened out-of-town theaters for a poorly attended movie to which we separately bought tickets. His home meant a bathtub and shower, a pool, a kitchen table, a host of variety. “That would be great but it could be risky. Do any of your classmates live on your street?”

  Jack shook his head. “Some of the guys live close in the subdivision, but not on my same street.” There was a pause as his forehead lifted with memory. “Wait, that one kid does live across the street from me. I’m not friends with him or anything. Frank?”

  “Frank Pachenko?” He nodded and I fell back against my seat, deflated. “His mother is the nosiest bitch in the world. She can’t see me anywhere near your house.”

  “Your car windows are tinted, right?”

  “Yeah, but she could see me walking in or out.” I could picture her thin, birdlike lips leveling the accusation now: And what were you doing at a minor’s house when his guardian was not present?

  “You can park in our garage. I can have it open for you when you’re coming over, then the second you pull in I’ll shut it. She won’t ever see you get out of your car.”

  I knew this wasn’t airtight: she could catch me getting into or out of my car at school and associate it with the mysterious red Corvette seen at the Patricks’ recently; a pinprick of curiosity would be cause enough for her to write down my license plate and wait at home, happy to investigate, ready to match it up. But the treat of Jack in his own bed helped convince me that my paranoia required a long and unlikely chain of events to occur: she’d have to first become suspicious about a car entering another house’s garage. Clearly, the families weren’t close. But even in the worst-case scenario, even if she did determine with certainty that it was absolutely my car, there was no way for her to be certain of motive. What if I was a family friend? A loving relative who just happened to have my third cousin in class this semester? She couldn’t be sure.

  I nodded and leaned in to give him a kiss. “Okay, I’ll come over tomorrow around four fifteen. Have the garage open for me. We have to be really careful though … I can only stay an hour, tops.”

  His kisses had changed already; now there was an unrestrained eagerness, almost a force. But he was still keeping his eyes wide open; they stayed trained on me the entire time. “Try it one more time with your eyes shut,” I whispered. He closed them and suddenly his hands found my ribs; his thin arms wrapped around me and pulled me tight. Several minutes later we unlocked with swollen lips and glossy faces.

  “It’s more intense that way,” he observed.

  I gave him one final kiss, then ruffled his hair the way a Little League coach might—I had the urge to impart a sense of normalcy to our good-bye, make it seem casual. “Right,” I said. “Now get lost. I’ll see you tomorrow.” He opened the door and shut it too softly, then began walking briskly down the sidewalk. I checked my phone for messages I might’ve missed from Ford but there were none. It had truly been a perfect night. When I looked back up, Jack had crossed the street; by the time I pulled the car back onto the road and headed toward home, I could see in my rearview mirror that he’d broken into a run.

  *

  Though I wanted to relish every patch of our mingled odors on my skin, I kne
w I had to take a precautionary shower before bed. But it seemed like an act of criminal vandalism, like I was taking a sanding belt to a priceless oil painting. As I dried off, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d been robbed of a possession of great value; it was so compelling that I actually went to my jewelry chest and looked over its contents as a form of reassurance. I passed out on the bed almost immediately afterward, drunk on my sense of accomplishment. It couldn’t have been later than nine thirty.

  When I woke up it was past midnight; I could hear the television blaring in the living room and was seized by hunger—I’d been too excited to eat dinner and hadn’t touched my milkshake, save the cherry. I hadn’t wanted to corrupt Jack’s taste on my tongue.

  Ford was in the reclining chair, watching a show that featured junked cars getting blown up by a series of impressive weapons. The TV illuminated a bucket of chicken on the kitchen table; I grabbed a leg, then walked up behind his chair and stood there in naked silence, quietly gnawing the meat. Had he looked up at the mirror on the living room wall, he would’ve seen me, perhaps made a little jump and turned with a laugh to declare that I’d scared him, but he didn’t look. His simple brow was still and waxen, his eyes blinking with the flicker of the television in the dark. I ate until I was holding a clean bone, then watched myself in the mirror, standing behind Ford and holding it in my hand like a weapon.

  chapter eight

  The screams echoing through Janet’s class were hard to bear. She was attempting a lecture on the Treaty of Paris while Mrs. Pachenko walked between the rows of desks insisting upon calm, raising a finger to her lips and whispering to individual students to please sit all the way down in their desks. In the back of the room, several kids were cheering as one of them, a young man whose shirt bore a flaming skull, stood hunched atop his desk like a motocross biker, sliding it forward in small hops. Students appear enthusiastic and are communicating well together, I wrote on the evaluation form.

  “Kevin!” Janet yelled, her thick fingers surrounding her mouth in an amplifying oval. “You can either park it on your butt right now, or you can practice sitting still after school in detention.” Kevin momentarily stopped jumping, but as soon as Janet turned around to write on the board, he stood and lifted his desk up with him, tiptoeing toward the front of the room until she turned back around, at which point he’d drop it and sit down as though frozen. Mrs. Pachenko, busy waiting on a student riffling through his backpack in a farce of looking to see if he had his homework, was none the wiser. Janet finally noticed when Kevin’s desk had surpassed the front row of students and he sat islanded just inches from the chalkboard. She looked down at him through the bifocals of her thick lenses. “What is with you?” she asked. “Do you have ants in your pants?” The students immediately began to roar as Kevin, nodding, stood up and began spinning around the room pretending to reach into his pants and itch. It was about this time that I noticed the intricacy of Mrs. Pachenko’s embroidered blue vest, which read VOLUNTEER across the back. Usually volunteers just donned the ID card around their necks that she also wore. The vest was a production from her own imagination. I pictured the sad scene of her making it at home one evening, dutifully feeding its fabric into a sewing machine by lamplight as Frank recited an alphabetical list of SAT word definitions in the background with audible zest.

  Nonetheless, my write-up of Janet had to be positive yet credible. Though occasional classroom management issues did arise, I continued, Mrs. Feinlog was able to use humor and authority to restore student attention. Mrs. Pachenko, the classroom aide, serves as a clear source of calm assistance and organization. By the time the bell rang, Janet had given up entirely and was sitting at her desk with a look of constipated apathy as Mrs. Pachenko, reading aloud from a revised syllabus that they’d decided to institute once she began helping out, stressed how important it was that the students complete their substantial assigned readings each night at home. “If we don’t get to a discussion of the War of 1812 by Friday,” she threatened, a quaver of panic tingling her voice, “we will not be on schedule for our November unit on the Texas Revolution.”

  “Thank you for letting me sit in,” I said to them afterward, beaming. “I think there’s been improvement from a few weeks ago?” During my first observation session, one of the students had successfully used an oversized safety pin to pierce his own septum but hadn’t counted on the prolific blood loss. He’d held the area and waited quietly until most of his hand and lower arm were covered, at which point he’d raised his other hand and asked, in a muffled voice, if he could please use the bathroom; the classroom had turned into an assault of screams and cell phone pictures when he walked from the room dripping a long trail of micro-splatter. As a result, Janet and Mrs. Pachenko had to fill out bloodborne pathogen exposure paperwork and hold classes in the auditorium for the rest of the day as a janitor scoured the boy’s desk and the classroom floor with bleach. Although I had to make brief mention of the incident, I tried to minimize references to leaked bodily fluids and spun the event as follows: Mrs. Feinlog fosters an environment of openness where students feel free to express themselves artistically.

  *

  While things at school continued running smoothly, in the first few weeks after my affair with Jack began, Ford seemed to sense my further mental departure. Desiring shared bonding, he insisted upon a weekend double date with Bill and Shelley, Ford’s partner and his wife, at the bowling alley. “You need to get out once in a while and have some fun,” Ford insisted. “Otherwise you’ll go stir-crazy.”

  The evening was not a success. I found it hard to focus; the place was awash with teenagers. In the alley next to us, several young boys and girls wearing glow-stick necklaces began tossing lightweight balls granny-style through their legs. I couldn’t help but find watching them preferential to the stolid conversation my own party was having. Several times during the evening, I’d snap out of a fantasy—a pantsless Jack standing spread-eagle atop the lane’s gleaming wooden floors, repeatedly bending over and swinging the bowling ball between his knees, his testicles coming alive with motion when he finally stood and released the ball toward the pins—only to find that Ford and the others were waiting on me to comment. I hadn’t even heard the question.

  Displeased, Ford drained pitcher after pitcher of beer. When the festivities reached their natural conclusion, he was drunk and clingy; he stank of stale adult sweat and kept trying to kiss me on the mouth, becoming increasingly irate each time I pushed him off. By the time we called it a night and got into the car he was ready to explode.

  “What’s with you? You hardly even spoke to Shelley. You think you’re too good to hang out with normal-looking people or something?” By this I could only imagine that Ford was referring to Shelley’s unfortunate bulb-tipped nose.

  “I have nothing in common with her. I wasn’t impolite.” Looking over at him, I kept having the disquieting thought that Jack had somehow been sitting in the passenger seat of my car waiting for me and Ford had just climbed in and sat right on top of him. I feared that Jack was now writhing unseen beneath Ford’s large back and limbs, being suffocated as we drove.

  “You seemed like a stuck-up bitch,” he said. He spoke very slowly, as though the words were being sent to him through an earpiece and he was repeating what he’d heard on time delay. “You have to realize that’s what people will think of you if you don’t act friendlier.” His head rolled down and to the side and then raised again, recharged by its own kinetic movements. “And what do you mean you have nothing in common? She teaches high school for fuck’s sake.”

  I then had the optimistic thought that perhaps Jack wasn’t trapped under Ford at all—maybe he was crouched down in the backseat with a generous length of taut piano wire in his hands, about to pop up and strangle the stocky trunk of Ford’s neck while I blew him a kiss and turned up the radio—what a delightful show of initiative that would demonstrate on Jack’s behalf. “Do you have something in common with every cop?” I as
ked him. “Every single one? The deadbeats? The thieves? The traitors?”

  “Enough in common to talk to them over a beer,” he said. “I wasn’t asking you two to go on a road trip together.” I could feel his eyes train upon me at the stoplight, his demeanor softening as he admired my face in profile. “Hey,” he said, reaching his hand out toward my shoulder. But I wanted none of it.

  “Come on,” I said, pushing his hand away. “I’m driving.”

  “Yeah you’re driving,” he said, seething. “The fucking car I bought you. What, you can spend my money but I can’t touch you? You’re better than me, too?”

  “You’re just drunk, Ford.”

  “No,” he said, adamant. “This doesn’t just happen when I drink. This is why I drink.” With that his hand clamped down upon my upper arm. I tried to push it off but he was holding on with all his strength.

  “Ford, you’re hurting me,” I warned him, my voice inflected with actual fear. It wasn’t so much the pain as the act of restraint itself that felt so awful, the knowledge that I wasn’t physically in control.

  “Do you know how you make me feel all the time?” He was yelling, nearly weeping. I slowed down the car and began driving far below the speed limit. I didn’t want to arrive home with him like this. He’d never actually hit me, but he wasn’t opposed to using applied force—a gripping of the wrist when I wanted to leave the room and he wasn’t done talking, a too-firm squeezing of the thigh when I’d said no too many nights in a row. “You’re ice-cold for days, sometimes weeks, then suddenly I come home and you’re so hot for it that you’re greeting me with your ass in the air. Then the next morning it’s like I disgust you again. Do you know what a mind-fuck that is?” His eyes were trained on me, staring; he wanted me to turn and look at him, to see the expression accompanying his painful confession, but I refused. The rest of the drive continued in slow silence; eventually his grip loosened and he retracted his arm. “Fuck my life,” he mumbled.