by Nick Burd
“You’re sweet,” she said. “And my middle toe tingles.”
She reached up to touch my face, but I stood before she laid a hand on me.
“I’ll be back with water,” I said.
I moved down the hall, skillfully recovering from a small stumble over someone’s purposefully outstretched leg.
“Where you going, Dade?” a voice called from behind me as I reached the top of the stairs. “Getting your girlfriend another drink?”
I didn’t turn around to see who had said it. I just raised my hand and gave them the finger as I headed down the stairs. Of course, Jessica and Judy were standing right there at the bottom. They were scanning the crowd casually as if they were too cool to be there. They heard me coming down and both turned to see who it was. When they saw it was me, they each cocked a nostril and squinted at me in disgust.
“What were you doing upstairs?” Jessica said. “Upstairs is off limits.”
“I’m sorry,” I said slowly. “There were other people up there. And I was talking to your sister.”
Judy let out a noise of disapproval and rolled her eyes dramatically. Judy was pretty enough, but her beauty was completely ruined by the fact that, like Pablo, she was always scowling unless there was some adult or authority figure that she needed to butter up. She had a pointy nose and shiny brown hair that reminded me of something from a shampoo commercial, a wave of silk in constant motion. She also had huge breasts. Pablo had once told me that sucking on them was his favorite thing in the world other than pot and football. The sight of her right then sent a pang of defeat through my chest. She had Pablo, and I didn’t. I never would. For a one twisted moment I wanted to be her. I wanted to get in her skin and lead her life and have all the things that she had.
“Are you my sister’s friend?” Jessica asked.
“Your sister has friends?” Judy said with a smirk.
Jessica knew who I was. We’d had several classes together, and we saw each other on almost a daily basis at Food World. She was just being a bitch.
“It’s Dade,” Judy said. “You know. Dade.”
“Oh,” Jessica said, lowering her voice. “Pablo’s Dade?”
Judy clicked her tongue. “Don’t say that. It’s not true.”
“Oh,” said Jessica. “Sorry.”
“Great party,” I said.
Judy moved closer to me. She smelled like vanilla perfume and the mall.
“Listen,” she said in a serious tone. “I don’t know why you’re here, but if I catch you talking to Pablo or even looking at Pablo, I’ll have Bert and every player on the team beat the living fuck out of you. Do you hear me? The living fuck.”
Jessica covered her mouth in a poor attempt to hide her laughter.
“You’ll be toast,” Judy said, as if it was the most simple equation in the world. “Consider this your one and only warning.”
Jessica smiled brightly and thrust her empty cup at me. “Dave, will you be a gentleman and get me some more beer? Keg’s in the kitchen. And not a lot of head, please.”
Judy and I traded death glares. I grabbed Jessica’s cup and made my way to the kitchen, where I immediately tossed it on the counter in a sea of empties and half-empties. The kitchen was just as crowded as the living room. Pablo and a couple of football players were manning the keg, filling their friends’ cups first, and constantly overlooking the empty cups of the kids who weren’t as cool. I watched him for a bit, thought back to us in his room that afternoon. All of that seemed so far away. I stood there wondering if there was any space in his mind that was occupied by the thought of me. I thought of what Judy had said she’d do to me if I even looked at him, and averted my eyes, but after a few seconds I was staring at him again, reaching for him through the crowd with my gaze.
“Who do I have to blow to get a beer?” someone called loudly.
“Me!” Pablo yelled into the crowd. “You have to blow me, fag.”
“Yeah!” said one of the other players standing at the keg. “Settle down. We’ll get to you soon enough.”
I found a coffee mug in the cupboard and filled it up with tap water for Fessica. I told myself that Pablo wasn’t there, that I didn’t know the guy handing out the beers. I ran into Judy and Jessica on my way back upstairs to Fessica.
“Where’s my beer?” Jessica asked.
“Keg’s dry,” I mumbled. I brushed passed them and went upstairs.
Everyone had vacated the upstairs hallway except for Fessica. I kneeled down in front of her and held out the water. Her eyes were closed.
“Hey,” I said. “Drink this. You’ll feel better.”
She slowly opened her eyes. She looked at me, then at the mug, and then back at me. I sensed that she wanted me to put it to her lips and help her drink, but I wasn’t about to do that.
“Come on,” I said. “Take it.”
She took the mug and downed the water in loud slurps. When it was gone, she let out a dramatic “Ah!” and handed it back to me. I set it on the floor.
“Take me to my bedroom,” she said. She nodded to the door across from where she was sitting. “Right there.”
I pulled her up and dragged her into her room. The pink canopy above her bed sagged in the middle, and the walls were covered with posters of horses in nature and posters from horse movies. On the far wall at the foot of the bed was a large table and a vanity mirror whose edges were decorated with pictures of Fessica riding a horse at what appeared to be various competitions. There was a white dresser across the room, and on top of this was a mirrored tray covered with bottles of drugstore nail polish and pop star concocted perfumes, fragrances with names like Forever Girl and Galactic Kiss.
She fell onto the bed with a sigh, her eyes still half closed. I turned off the light and stood in the middle of the room and watched her for a while, the low-hanging Pluto on a mobile of our solar system sometimes brushing across the top of my head. Above us were the sounds of people skidding down the roof, laughing.
“Do you want to get in with me?” she asked.
Her voice was small and narrow, the voice of someone who spent a good portion of her life trying to not draw attention to herself. I’d sensed the same thing in my own voice at times, and it occurred to me that there were people downstairs who thought I was just as sad of a case as Fessica Montana. I moved slowly across the room and lay next to her. Our shoulders touched as we stared up at the sagging canopy, at the shadows that came through the window. They shifted whenever a car passed by before finally settling back into their primary pose.
“Remember when someone wrote faggot on your locker after that thing in the lunchroom?”
“Yeah,” I said. “What about it?”
“That was my sister. I heard her and Judy laughing about it on the phone.”
The thought of it caused an ache in my chest that blossomed like a firework and then faded.
I let out a sigh. “Yup. That makes sense.”
She turned onto her side. She was staring at me, her eyes so wide, they seemed to give off their own light.
“I heard the strangest conversation down in the kitchen,” she said.
“Yeah?” I asked. “What about?”
“These two guys were saying that they were smoking pot on the golf course the other night and they saw that girl who disappeared. Jenny Moore. They said she walked out of the woods right by the seventh hole and then walked right back in. Like she was stepping out of the house to see what the temperature was like.”
“Really?” I said. “And what do you think about that?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “People see things.”
“People lie, is more like it.”
“That too,” she said. “I bet you never lie.”
“I lie every day,” I said.
“About what?”
“About everything. Sometimes I lie about the lie itself. That’s where things get tricky.”
“What’s that mean?”
I shook my head. �
�Never mind. I’m being stupid.”
She swallowed. It made a wet, foreboding sound.
“Dade?” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Can we try something?” she asked.
“Try what?”
Her response came in the form of her hand working on the button of my fly.
“Whoa,” I said. I tried pushing her hand away, but she resisted. “Not cool.”
She kept at it. She even sat up a little bit to get a better handle on it.
“Stop,” I said.
I jumped off the bed, falling onto the ground in the process. I checked my fly and fixed the top button that she’d somehow managed to undo.
“What are you doing?” I said. “Are you crazy? Are you out of your mind?”
“I’m sorry.” She sat up quickly and backed against the head-board as if repulsed by what some outside force had just made her do.
“Not cool,” I said. “Not cool at all.”
“It’s just—”
“I should go.”
“Please don’t,” she said. “I’m sorry. That was stupid of me.”
“I gotta go.”
I was out the door before she could respond. A girl at the end of the hall was sobbing uncontrollably while two of her friends hung on either shoulder. I stumblingly ran down the stairs into a sea of people bouncing in unison to some hip-hop track that had been popular two summers before.
“See ya later, Vagisil!” someone shouted as I made my way to the door.
When I reached the porch I was out of breath and my heart was racing. It was as if I’d just saved myself from drowning. I bounded off the porch and walked quickly down the shadowed sidewalk, my eyes on my shoes as I passed the row of darkened houses. My mind was a chorus of voices all telling different reasons why I shouldn’t have come.
“Party this way?”
He caught me off guard. I looked up from my shoes and saw a boy in a sleeveless black hoodie coming toward me on the sidewalk. I noticed his arms. They were tan and toned. He stopped walking, but I kept moving past him.
“Back there,” I said.
“You need anything?” he called two seconds later.
I stopped and looked back. “What?”
His hood was up. His face was all shadows.
“You need anything?” he said again. “You know. Smoke?”
He lifted his toes and balanced on his heels for a second in a pose that was decidedly aw-shucks, something to match the straight-armed way he had his hands jammed in the pockets of his black skinny jeans.
“Do you need a cigarette?” I asked, confused.
“No, no, man,” he said. “Do you need anything?”
“Do I need a cigarette?”
He laughed and sauntered over toward me. He pulled his hood back as he came over. He put his hand on my shoulder and leaned in. He had perfect stubble, the kind I could never grow, and huge brown eyes that were wide and a bit wild, like he was up for anything. His hair was a mess of black triangular pieces jutting out in every direction. I couldn’t stop staring at his full upper lip. He looked like the kind of guy who had a banged-up electric guitar and a sticker-coated skateboard and a lucky lighter that he never left home without. He was beautiful.
“Weed, man,” he said. “Do you want. To buy. Some weed?”
“Oh.” I stopped to think. There was a stirring in my pelvis, only partially due to the butterflies in my stomach. I didn’t need any pot, but I definitely wanted to keep talking to him. “I think I’m cool.”
The right side of his mouth stretched out into a sideways grin. It was pure charm, something he probably kept in his back pocket for frequent use.
“You sure?” he asked.
I had thirteen dollars on me. It didn’t matter if I wasn’t.
“I’m sure,” I said.
We stood there for a few seconds, waves of something awkward and unspoken passing between us. He looked up toward the party, then back at me, and he gave a polite but curt nod good-bye.
“See you around, man,” he said.
And he headed on toward the Montanas’, leaving me there on the sidewalk, speechless.
Chapter 5
My father had already left for work when I woke up the next day. I found my mother mopping the kitchen floor in her housecoat. The air reeked of bleach and Lysol. Jenny Moore’s parents were on the refrigerator television. They were pleading into the camera, describing what their daughter was wearing when last seen—denim shorts, a pink T-shirt with a cartoon giraffe on it, canary-colored flip-flops. They talked about how sweet and special she was, how much she loved school, Jesus, and her new puppy Oscar. Her mother said something about how it was never too late to do the right thing. I thought of what Fessica had told me the previous night about the stoners supposedly spotting her on the golf course. Of course it wasn’t true. People were messed up.
“Do you need help?” I asked my mom.
“No,” she said without looking up at me. “I have it under control.”
I went back upstairs and put on a Vas Deferens album and stretched out on my bed. I reached over to the drawer in my nightstand and pulled out an envelope that Fairmont had sent me the previous day. It was filled with literature about the university. The campus looked idyllic, like something from a movie about college. The dormitories all had stately names like Ford House and Butler Place. I imagined myself in one of their rooms, autumn simmering outside my window while I read Dostoevsky or Pynchon or some other author I was still too scared to touch. I even inserted a hot roommate into a fantasy, a detail that quickly led to me locking my door, turning up my music, and jerking off. Afterward I lay there on my bed in a sea of Fairmont brochures and booklets and stared up at the ceiling.
“I’m gay,” I said to the ceiling fan as if it didn’t already know. “I’m a fag.”
I thought about what my dad would say when he found out. I’d have to tell him someday. I was sure he’d make some comment about me always having to do things the difficult way and then tell me that I’d better find a way to still have kids, as if that was the only way to save my life from being a complete waste. My mind wandered to Vicki, the woman my father had told me about at the country club.
A poetry class, I thought. A fucking poetry class.
I tried to imagine my father sitting at a table with a group of middle-aged adults while they listened to each other read their writing. What did my father write about? Did he write about me and my mother? Was his poetry praising us, or we were the root of some misery that he exorcised through awkward rhymes and bad metaphors?
I went down the hall to my father’s den. I opened the door slowly, nervous about entering a space that was so singularly his. I imagined him in his office across town, looking up from some contract and sensing that someone was trespassing on his domain. The walls were lined with bookshelves that housed leather-bound volumes of classics that most likely had never been opened by anyone in this house. His giant oak desk sat facing the window that overlooked our backyard. This was the one room in the house where he was allowed to smoke his cigars, and the scent hung heavy in the air as if he’d smoked one there that morning before heading to work. I sat in his leather chair and marinated in the residue of his aura for a few moments before going through his drawers.
In the bottom drawer I found a black leather portfolio with “Ned’s Poetry” embossed in gold letters on the front. I sniffed the cover, took in the leather smell. There was a photograph of a woman glued on the first page. It was an eight by ten with a waxy surface, the kind of photograph one gets taken in one of those department store portrait studios that always seem to be located down some depressingly narrow hall with scuffed floors and bright fluorescent lights. The woman in the portrait was black, probably about forty or so. She had a wide mouth and a slim face, and she wore a relaxed smile that made me think she was one of those women who always spoke in a low, controlled tone, a woman who prided herself on being a soothing presence. She wore a purple tur
tleneck and silver hoop earrings, and her hair came past her shoulders in wet ringlets. The backdrop behind her was a blue and white marble pattern, a weak suggestion of sky. There was a message written under the photograph in purple pen.
For my darling Ned. In a world of danger, a safe place for your thoughts.
XOXOXO Vicki.
I turned the page, read the first poem in the book. It was written in my father’s obsessive miniature handwriting.
So maybe last night
I was not your husband.
Instead I was the burglar
hiding in our bathroom
with the lights out and his shirt off
Attentive to only your breathing
In the hollow heart of our bedroom
I read the lines over and over. I imagined my father standing in the darkness of their bathroom as my mother’s breathing steadied out into sleep. Perhaps he was the same as me, someone with the word escape flashing in his mind like a neon sign advertising an opportunity. For a moment I felt sorry for him, but then I flipped back to the picture of Vicki and I was angry all over again. I turned the second page to read the next poem, but there was nothing else. The remaining pages were all blank.
I put the book back in the drawer. I didn’t want to know anything else about my father or Vicki or his poetry. Some small part of me took pleasure in his apparent confusion, in the fact that he’d come to a fork in the road of his life and wanted to somehow take both paths. It just proved what I’d always suspected, that he didn’t know anything more than anyone else.
I sat there slowly spinning in his office chair and making myself dizzy. I thought of the guy I’d seen the previous evening when I was leaving the party, the one with pretty eyes and messy hair and sexy arms. The idea of him set off a whirlpool of desire in my chest. I wanted all of him. I wanted to know his name, his birthday, his favorite color, what he liked to have for breakfast, what his favorite bands were, the size and brand of his favorite pair of jeans. I wondered if everyone felt such urgent desire for people they hardly knew, if mine was actually unremarkable. I wondered if Fessica made a mental diagram that divided me into my tastes and smells and mannerisms and possessions, all the little things visible from the outside that made me who I was.