Love and Death with the In Crowd

by Jessica Anya Blau

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  Copyright © 2014 by Jessica Anya Blau

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission.

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  Published by Shebooks

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  “Beautiful” was previously published in Washington Square Review. “Mute” appeared in the Sun magazine.

  Table of Contents

  Beautiful

  Mute

  Reading Guide Questions

  About the Author

  Beautiful

  1978

  I am in my karate class, leaning over the freestanding drinking fountain, sweat falling off my face and swirling anonymously down the drain. My hair is wet and sticky, but it doesn’t show because the curls hold the moisture close to my head. I lean over the spout and lap up the water like a dog. Master Viktor, who only left Russia three months ago, tells me that I am very beautiful and coordinated.

  His accent is so strong, it takes me a second to understand what he’s saying.

  “I not only third-degree black belt,” he adds, “I master photographer, too. I know what a beautiful girl looks like.”

  “Oh yeah,” I say. And I wipe a puddle of fresh cold water from my chin. His eyes are unbalanced, and I cannot decide which one to follow when I speak to him.

  Left, I think, stick with the left eye, it doesn’t wander as much.

  “Where I come from, the red hair girls are all Jews,” he says. “You are not a Jew, are you?”

  The way he puts it makes me think the correct answer is no. That’s the true answer, but I want to say yes to defend my best friend, Tiny, who is just about the only Jewish girl in town.

  “Well, that was a great class,” I say, ignoring the question. “I’ll see you later.” Master Viktor nods his head in a way that reminds me of a karate chop in the air. I awkwardly wave, and then I run out of the studio.

  It’s 9:00 p.m. when I get home. My mother is lying on the family room couch reading Sunset magazine, my father is sitting at her feet watching a news-journal show. Dad grabs my mom’s bare foot, shakes it, and says, “Can you believe these people? Can you believe these people could be such idiots? It’s unbelievable.” Then he starts to explain the show to my mom, who peers up over the top of her magazine with batting eyes that let me know she’s just waiting for him to finish speaking so she can get back to the magazine.

  “If only you could run the world,” she finally says, without emotion. Then she continues reading.

  There’s a commercial break, so Dad looks over at me and smiles.

  “Let’s see what you learned in karate,” he says. So I do some kicks, leap in the air, and even try to do some stuff that I haven’t learned yet.

  “Boy, Annie, when did you become so coordinated? I thought your brother was the only coordinated one.”

  “Annie’s always been coordinated,” my mom says, still staring at her magazine. “She was just never interested in sports the way Ben is.”

  “Frances, do you see her?” my dad asks, shaking Mom’s foot again. “Do you see the way she kicks and jumps and kicks?”

  “Master Viktor told me that I was very coordinated, and beautiful, too,” I tell them. I am looking at myself in the black oval mirror hanging near the couch. I punch the air and breathe out, making eye contact with myself, admiring the way the sweat makes my skin glow and my hair glisten like wet pennies.

  “You certainly are,” my dad says. “I’m sure Master Viktor doesn’t know what to do with a beautiful girl like you.”

  The show resumes, and Dad is immediately hypnotized. Mom turns the page of Sunset and laughs without looking up to tell us what’s so funny. I silently fight with my mirror image, making sure not to jump in front of the television or make too much noise.

  The next day at school, I run into my boyfriend, Matt, before first period. We make out next to my locker, and he reaches around and squeezes my butt.

  “Matt,” I say, “someone will see.”

  “No one will see,” he says, and he pushes his groin into me and squeezes my butt even harder.

  Matt is 18, I am 15. He’s had sex with five girls; four from our school and one whom he met in Argentina when he was there for a semester abroad.

  We dated for one month before I let him take my pants off. The next month he took his pants off, and I saw an erect penis for the first time. It was shocking because I had never realized that they stand straight up. At first I thought there was something wrong with him.

  “Oh my God,” I had gasped, “it’s sticking up.”

  Matt laughed. “They always stick up when they’re hard,” he said. If he had told me that the earth was really flat, I would have been less surprised.

  After the bare-penis encounter we progressed to oral sex. I wasn’t sure what to do, so Matt explained, “Pretend you’re eating a lollipop or licking a Popsicle.”

  I did, and everything seemed to go OK. The first time he performed oral sex on me, we were in his dad’s Cadillac parked next to the beach. It was a black night and the ocean was rocking with big, crashing waves, as if there had been an earthquake. Matt lifted up my skirt, pulled my underpants down to my knees, and began licking me. I didn’t quite understand what I was supposed to feel. It seemed like he was overlooking the essential spot that should have been licked and was simply lapping at me like a dog at sweaty toes. I wondered if he could detect my boredom, my awkwardness.

  “OK,” I said, when I suddenly feared that I’d start peeing or something.

  Tonight we are planning to move on to intercourse. A group of us—me, Matt, his two best friends (Mark and Jimmy), and their girlfriends (Kathy and Susan)—are going camping at the beach. We’re leaving straight from school, all our stuff packed into Mark’s Pacer, Jimmy’s VW Bug, and Matt’s dad’s Cadillac. I told my mom I was sleeping at Tiny’s house with my other best friend, Jill. It would never occur to her that I’d lie about this.

  We all lie on the beach as the sun melts toward the horizon. The guys are in and out of the water, surfing in 30-minute intervals. Kathy and Susan and I watch them as they catch the waves; admire their sinewy bodies. They rarely look back toward us on the beach. Mostly they stare straight ahead, an arm pointing in the direction of the board, their knees bouncy and loose like springs.. In between waves they sit upright on their boards, bobbing with the waves like ducks floating on a pond. They are talking to each other, and we can tell by their arm movements that they are discussing the waves.

  It’s evening now. We gather our towels, magazines, and empty Diet Cokes and walk up to the campsite that is buried in the trees on top of the cliff that meets the water. It costs $15 for the campsite for the night; the guys paid for the campsite and beer, and the girls brought all the food. Somehow I think we girls came out behind in the deal, as Kathy went overboard at the Von’s and bought $53 worth of food for a one-night excursion. There are a few other people camping, and we can hear their radios playing in the background and smell their fires burning, the freshly gathered driftwood with the occasional paper-wrapped Duraflame on top.

  In the evening, we sit around the campfire drinking Löwenbräu Dark and eating barbecue chicken, corn on the cob, and thick, buttery garlic bread. We laugh a lot, mostly about things that don’t seem funny five minutes later. I decid
e that I will for the first time in my life drink more than one beer. I drink three.

  “I’m ready,” I say to Matt, when I’m burping up garlic and my three bottles are empty. He stands up so quickly, he almost stumbles backward. Then he grabs a blanket and takes my hand, and we walk down to where the rocks jut out from the cliff, almost but not quite meeting the pounding waves.

  Matt finds a dark niche between two giant rocks; I feel like I am walking into a crack in the earth that is sure to swallow me up. It is dark and I have to hold on to the back of his shirt to feel where we are going. Matt flaps the blanket in the air, like he’s airing it out, then gently lays it on the sand. It doesn’t seem to come out straight, so Matt picks up the blanket and flaps it again, and again, until three corners lie flat, and he pushes the fourth down with his foot.

  It is April and it has been scorching hot all day, with the bright sun blanching everything so that the whole world appeared to be a washed blue and calcimined white. But now it is cool, the thick ocean fog swallowing up the day’s heat.

  Matt lies down on the blanket and waits for me. I stand over him, surveying the scene as my eyes adjust. Suddenly, my teeth are chattering and I am shivering all over. The movements must seem exaggerated, but I’m not faking it.

  “There’s broken glass in here,” I say.

  “Don’t worry, we’re on the blanket,” Matt says. “Just don’t roll off.”

  “What if you put the blanket down on a jagged piece of glass and it breaks through while we’re doing it and stabs me in the back and kills me, and you don’t even realize it because you’re so caught up in the moment?”

  “Then I guess I’d be a necrophiliac,” Matt says.

  I don’t move. I just stand there, each of my hands holding the opposite arm. I look around and study the crumbling sides of the rocks and the bumpy sand, littered with leafy orange strands of kelp that remind me of hair off a giant mermaid.

  “What if there’s an earthquake?” I ask. “What if there’s an earthquake and the whole side of this cliff collapses on top of us and we’re smashed under these rocks, but we don’t die right away? What if we’re just stuck here and we can’t wedge ourselves out, and sand crabs creep into our underpants and our butt cracks and we eventually bleed to death from our bashed-in heads?”

  “There won’t be an earthquake,” Matt says, and he kind of sighs like he’s getting angry or impatient. “There hasn’t been an earthquake in months.”

  “All the more reason there’d be one now,” I say, and I start to turn and run out from the rocks when Matt stands up, grabs my arms, and starts kissing me real hard, like he’s drilling for oil with his tongue.

  We take our clothes off and I try to be in the moment, I try to think things like, I’m on a beautiful beach, with a gorgeous, popular guy, and this should be the most beautiful night of my life. But instead I am thinking that my stomach feels full from all that beer, and I wish that Matt would leave for a couple minutes so I could burp, and I really hope that there isn’t an earthquake now, and I really hope that there are no dangerous shards of glass or used hypodermic needles hiding under this blanket.

  Matt climbs on top of me and says, “OK, I’m totally going to do it now. I love you.”

  I say, “I love you, too.”

  Matt pushes, and he pushes, and he bangs himself against me. It’s like trying to pop a balloon with a spoon. And then his penis is a little ways in, not halfway, maybe a third, or a quarter even. As he pushes I can tell it’s not working, I have this feeling that his penis is bending back and forth while Matt goes up and down.

  Matt has his mouth on mine, pretending to kiss me, but really it’s like he’s pinning me down with his lips, and my gums start to get sore from the pressure. He is grunting and sweating and squinting like he’s trying to read an eye chart; and I just lie there, thinking about the burp in my stomach, wondering if it hurts him when his penis bends, thinking about earthquakes, and then wondering if the building discomfort in my stomach is from his weight on top of me, or if I am really getting nauseous.

  And then I know that I’m really nauseous. I wedge my head out from under Matt so I can speak. “Matt, I think I’m gonna be sick,” I say.

  “Huh, what, huh…” Matt keeps pumping away, trying to get past some barrier in my vagina.

  “I’m gonna be sick,” I say, and I push him off me and run toward the water.

  A wave rolls up and covers my feet, icy cold. I lurch forward and begin to vomit. It is one foaming stream, the color of beer, the consistency of Chunky Soup, the smell of unaired garbage. I cough and sputter a bit, then clear my throat the way my dad does during allergy season. For a moment I hope that Matt can’t hear me, but then I feel so weak and drained that I don’t really care.

  The ocean water is too cold to splash on my face, so I wipe the vomit from my lips with the back of my hand and then quickly dip my hand into the lapping water, rubbing my forearm against the gritty sand.

  When I return to the blanket, Matt puts his arms around me and pushes me down so I am on my back again. He sticks his tongue in my mouth immediately and resumes the pummeling.

  My eyes are watering, and a chunk of vomit dangles in the back of my throat. I wonder how long this will take. I wonder if he can taste my barf. I wonder what is the big deal about sex if this is it.

  Matt groans and releases a thick stream of sticky liquid on my belly. I am so relieved that it is over that I immediately sit up and put my clothes back on, ignoring the white puddle dripping from my belly button.

  “It’ll get better,” Matt says. “It’ll be easier next time, you’ll see.” He leans over and kisses me again just as I’m swallowing down that wayward chunk of barf.

  “Let’s go back to the others,” I say, and I stand and wait for him at the edge of the rock.

  Matt puts his arm around me as we walk back to the campground. Our steps are out of pace, and I bump into his side as I attempt to move us forward. I try putting my arm around his waist so we can feel like a couple, like new young lovers. But it’s awkward and my hand bounces around uncertainly. We are both quiet and I am wondering if I should say something; if I should make small talk, or if this is supposed to be a time of meditative reflection.

  Back at the campsite, Matt drinks so much beer that he trips on a rock and falls into the fire. We all jump up in a panic, and Matt rolls in the sand, even though the flames failed to catch him. Everyone acts real excited, as if we had lived through a near-death experience. Kathy opens a new box of Screaming Yellow Zonkers, and the guys start doing hurdles over the fire so they can feel a surge of manhood as they risk burning their balls, their legs splayed in a leap.

  Kathy and Susan and I talk about other girls at school: who’s a slut, who’s a bitch, who’s anorexic, who’s fat, who thinks she’s hot shit, and who’s a dork. Susan says that she heard from Megan Rolf that Tracy Sunder slept with all four of the Peterson brothers in the same night. Even the one who’s away at college, because he happened to be home that weekend. They ask me if my two best friends, Tiny and Jill, are virgins. I say I won’t answer that question, but I do tell them that Debbie Radcliffe had an abortion, even though I promised Debbie that I would never tell a soul. They are amazed that I have this inside information and try to pick my brain for more, but I’m not in the mood. No one has anything nice to say about the people who aren’t lucky enough to be with us.

  Around 2:00 in the morning, we unroll our down sleeping bags, the exposed parts of which are already wet with a velvety layer of dew. Susan and Mark zip their bags together as one, forming a sleeping bag double bed. Kathy and Jimmy gather their bags up, like giant polyester jelly rolls, and walk down to the beach. Matt pees on the fire, stretches, burps, and then climbs into his sleeping bag, which is right next to mine, and slips into unconsciousness.

  Staring across the neon embers, I can see that Susan and Mark are having sex. I try to make out Susan’s face; I want to know if it feels good to her.

  The
fire turns to dust and the night settles cold on my nose and cheeks. Matt snores and gurgles in his sleep. Susan and Mark are a giant, still mound, like a green and brown waterproof bear. I want to go home and lie beneath my patchwork quilt and stare at the light wedging itself under my bedroom door, reminding me that my dad is awake and wandering around the house in his pajamas, eating cheese and apple slices in his office while he works.

  I want to lie there with my eyes shut, only half asleep, while my mom comes in my room and checks on me before she goes to bed, even though I’m 15 years old and there’s nothing much to see.

  The next day is Saturday, and the waves are huge. Matt, Mark, and Jimmy get up before breakfast and go down to the beach to surf. Kathy and Susan pretend they’re married women and start cooking the kind of breakfast that even their mothers wouldn’t take the time to make.

  “You sure are hungover,” Kathy says to me.

  “Yeah,” I say, “I think I’m just gonna go home. I can’t get over this nausea.”

  “Oh, don’t go, stay, drink some more beer,” Susan says. And I think about it for a minute because I know this is supposed to be the greatest time of my life, and I know that there are at least 50 girls at school who would love to be camping on the beach and drinking beer with Matt, and I know that I’m supposed to feel lucky to be hanging around with this “in” crowd.

  “Nah, I’ll just go,” I say, and I’m flip-flopping back and forth in my mind, go, stay, go, stay, go.

  “Tell Matt to call me when he gets home,” I say. I hoist up my backpack, hold the rolled sleeping bag against my chest like a shield, and walk in the direction of the beach store where there’s a pay phone. Susan and Kathy wave good-bye but don’t ask me how I’m going to get home. Their thoughts are probably about whether or not I’m fat, or thin, or a slut, or what.