by Adam Selzer
With so much to keep us busy, we didn’t have too many chances to do anything I wasn’t sure I was up to, sexually. Kissing and some minor groping were as far as we got until one day in early March, when what we hoped was the last snow of the year was falling, and the puddles that had formed on the ground during a brief thaw that melted most of the snow were turning back into ice.
On that day we were out in Paige’s SUV and pulled into a Kum and Go in Waukee that we hadn’t tried before. Inside they were selling a cherry limeade–flavored Slushee—a new one for us, which by then was a minor victory. We high-fived and took one to the parking lot, where I stepped on a patch of black ice, slipped, and fell on my ass.
The Slushee flew out of my hand, and I felt like I was watching in slow motion as the cup flew into the air, turned upside down, and emptied its dark red contents onto my chest.
Paige turned back and almost screamed as I fell. But once she realized that I hadn’t cracked my head open or anything, she started to laugh.
“Are you okay?” she asked, as I got to my feet and let the goop drip off of me.
“Yeah. Just cold.”
“Oh my God, you look like a murder victim or something!”
I looked down and saw that the cherry limeade Slushee had created a large red stain on my chest. It was spreading and dripping towards new territory by the second.
Paige started laughing as I stood up, and bits of the Slushee dripped down under my collar. I shivered and swore, and she gave me a sort of wicked smile. “We’d better find a place where we can get you cleaned up, baby,” she said. “You’re all messy.”
I wiped myself down with the paper towels they kept next to the donut case, then laid out some of the free Job Finder newspapers over the passenger seat. I thought she’d drive to my place, so I could get changed, but instead she drove us into Oak Meadow Mills and up to her place.
I could hear music coming from what I assumed was her sister’s bedroom, but her parents weren’t home yet.
In the stainless-steel kitchen she took a few pages of the Des Moines Register off the table, set them on the floor, and had me stand on them.
“Okay,” she said. “Now lift up your arms, Mr. Harris, so Nurse Paige can remove your shirt.”
I raised my arms and she peeled my shirt off and set it down on the newspaper. My whole chest was stained red, and still cold. And sticky.
I had never had a naughty nurse fantasy or anything, but hearing her talk like one was totally hot.
She got a paper towel damp with warm water and started wiping down my bare chest, which felt incredible. Water dripped down my body and pooled at my feet. When my chest was reasonably clean, Paige looked up at me with a grin.
“Now, Mr. Harris,” she said, “did any of that Slushee get into your pants?”
I started to panic. I hadn’t been so turned on in years, honestly. There was no danger that I wouldn’t be able to get it up.
But I was still nervous. What if I screwed up completely? What if I went one step too far and she got really pissed off? You can never tell with girls. Every sign she was giving me made me think she wanted my pants and underwear on the newspaper right that second, but what if she really meant for me to go into the bathroom and clean myself up? And what if she got my pants down and didn’t like what she saw?
“I don’t know,” I said.
“I think some did,” she said. “There was a trickle of it that went all the way down, Mr. Harris.” She traced a fingertip from my belly button to the waist of my jeans. I squirmed, because it tickled like hell. She snickered.
“Are you ticklish, Mr. Harris?”
“A little.”
“Well, don’t worry; I’m a nurse. And I think we’d better get those pants off, just to check. We have to clean you very thoroughly so you don’t get cherry lime disease.”
“Isn’t your sister right upstairs?”
“She won’t come down. And if she does, she won’t tell.”
She took hold of my zipper and started to undo it, and I tried to decide whether to move her hand away. Any worries I had that she didn’t really want them down were gone now, and it would be rude, really, if I stopped her. She’d probably be all upset and worry that I wasn’t attracted to her or didn’t like her or something, even though she had to be able to see the bulge for herself.
Still, I wasn’t convinced that I wouldn’t completely disappoint her if we tried anything.
My problems vanished when we heard the sound of the garage door opening.
“Oh, fuck!” she said. “That’s probably my dad.”
She stood back up and handed me my shirt. I started to put it back on, and she rushed to throw the paper towel and newspaper into the trash.
“Should I get out of here?” I asked.
“Probably not,” she said. “It’ll look worse if he sees you running away.”
The door opened, and a middle-aged guy with gray hair and a tan stepped in. A tan. In February. In Iowa.
“Hi there,” he said.
“Hi, Daddy,” said Paige. “This is Leon.”
“Hi, Mr. Becwar,” I said.
“Gene,” he said. “Just call me Gene.”
He shook my hand and smiled. It did not seem like a sincere smile to me. It was an “I just caught you alone with my daughter, but I’ll act friendly to get your guard down” smile.
“You okay?” he asked, looking at my shirt.
“Yeah,” I said. “We just had a little malfunction with a cherry limeade Slushee.”
He laughed a sort of half laugh that was probably fake. “You look like somebody stabbed you.” He leaned closer and whispered, “Which, incidentally, is what happens to boyfriends who misbehave.”
Then he slapped me on the shoulder and offered me a can of Coke.
“We have to go, Dad,” said Paige. “Leon has to work at five, and I’m meeting Leslie to go over yearbook stuff.”
“Well, I’m sure we’ll meet again,” said Gene.
Paige took me by the hand and let me out of the front door and back to her car.
“Did Dad say he was going to stab you?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Pathetic.”
“He never stabbed Joey, did he?”
“Well, he hated Joey. But he never stabbed him. He just threatened him a lot.”
“He’ll probably hate me, too.”
“Probably. But he won’t really stab you, obviously.”
That wasn’t really as obvious as it probably should have been.
Paige hadn’t taken me to the mall and tried to give me a makeover or anything, but now and then, while we were talking during the first couple of weeks of being together, she had worked in some notes for me that gave me some clues on what she expected of me as a boyfriend. Perhaps the most memorable instance was when she told me about one of her exes.
“He lied to me,” she’d said, “and that’s one thing I can’t stand. And I’m pretty casual. I could probably get over it if I found out that some slut got her hands in your pants at a party, you know.”
“That won’t happen,” I told her. “I’m not like that.”
“I’d be more upset if you were holding hands with one of them, honestly.”
“That won’t happen either.”
“But if you ever lie to me, I’ll come after you with a butcher’s knife.”
Then she’d given me a very serious look and started laughing. The laugh didn’t make the look seem like it had been less serious.
That day had been the first time she threatened to stab me. I think it was the first time anyone did in my whole life. But one thing I never realized about adult relationships is that when you’re in one, people threaten to stab you a lot.
The day after Paige first made that threat I ended up getting paired up with Claire Downing, who had been friends with Paige since kindergarten, to diagram the parts of a cell on a worksheet (now there’s an activity that takes two people).
“S
ome people are saying Paige is crazy to go out with you,” she said, “but I think you guys might make a good match.”
“I wouldn’t have thought we would be,” I said. “But she’s really nice, you know? We have fun together.”
“Good,” she said. “But just so you know, if you ever hurt her, I’ll stab you in the eye with a butcher’s knife.”
Everywhere I went there was another threat of being stabbed. By the day of the cherry limeade massacre, when her dad threatened to stab me within the first few seconds of meeting me, I was starting to take it in stride.
I kept listening to Moby-Dick, off and on, all the while. Ishmael was talking about setting out on the voyage, the crew of the ship, and all of the ins and outs of the whaling business. But as much time as he spent talking about it, he seemed like he was leaving out some pretty basic stuff that maybe everyone just knew back when he wrote it.
Like, how did all the whalers have their own harpoons? Wouldn’t those get lost a lot when you used them to fight whales? I would have thought whalers went through harpoons like guitarists go through picks.
And how the hell did they get the dead whales onto the ship, anyway? I got the impression that the way they fought the whales was that they spotted one, then loaded everyone into three small boats to go out and harpoon them. If your harpoon was attached to a dead whale, wouldn’t it sink down and drag you to a soggy grave?
Every now and then I’d just listen and think, Fuck. I don’t know anything about commercial whaling. Maybe Herman Melville could expect readers to know this stuff back in the day, but living in Iowa, the closest thing to a whale I’d ever seen in person was Willy, the whale-shaped ice cream cake. We didn’t use whale oil to light our lamps.
But I picked up the basics over time by listening to Ishmael, just like I figured out the basics of being in a relationship by simply trying not to do anything particularly stupid during my time with Paige.
I was “going steady,” as they used to say back when people dated casually and fucked seriously, instead of the other way around. Steady as she goes. Like the sailors in Moby-Dick, I managed my first weeks on the strange new voyage without having to be dumped into the sea as a mangled, bloody corpse.
I knew that they all died in the end, though.
11. SNOW
Being with Paige didn’t make me stop thinking about Anna. The Slushee hunt, in fact, really only made that problem worse. See, most novelty shaved-ice beverages are about the consistency of snow after someone’s stepped in it with a wet boot. And snow had a tendency to make me think about Anna. Lots of things did, but snow was one of the bigger ones.
When we were first starting to turn into a couple, Anna and I both had the same “move.” We would write plays and scripts and stuff where we’d play characters who kissed. We acted out kissing scenes three or four times in eighth grade before we had one proper kiss where it was really just the two of us, not two characters that we were playing.
That one came on a snowy night when we were hanging around outside of Sip, the coffee shop a few doors down from the Ice Cave, waiting for rides home. I was holding the lamppost with one hand and sort of swinging around it, and Anna was bouncing back and forth to stay warm.
When I saw that she was shivering, I stepped away from the lamppost and dared to put my arm around her. When she didn’t shove me away, like I thought she might, I put my other arm around her too, so we were hugging. Then I looked at her and she looked at me. I wanted to ask if I could kiss her, but I’d read that you should never, ever ask for a kiss—you just move in confidently, slowly enough that if she doesn’t want to kiss you she’ll have time to say, “So, anyway,” and fast enough that you don’t seem too nervous.
For a second I stood there, worrying that she could feel my erection through my jeans, then I started to move in slowly.
She didn’t say, “So, anyway.”
She let me kiss her, and as I kept my lips on hers I felt myself warming up. You know how when you’re cold and you slip into a hot shower you just feel this tingling in your head, like all of the cold molecules in your body have been led there to be burned up?
It was like that.
And I swear to God it started snowing harder the second our lips touched. The next morning there was a ton of snow on the ground and school was canceled. It was the fourth or fifth biggest snow in Des Moines since they started keeping track.
The kiss may not have been as well-executed as the kisses I shared with Paige; we were just a couple of eighth graders who knew nothing about kissing, pushing our faces together and hoping for the best. But it snowed so hard that they closed the schools for two days, and only a hell of a kiss can make it do that.
I couldn’t imagine that I’d ever see snow falling in the glow of a streetlight and not think of Anna again. And the February that I started seeing Paige, it seemed like it was snowing all the time. Even in March, when the snows stopped coming, being around Slushees kept the feeling alive.
Paige seemed to know that she still had to compete with Anna, even though I told her she wasn’t moving back. Sometimes when she kissed me she did this thing where she’d seal her lips against mine and sort of suck the wind out of me. It felt great, but a part of me felt like she was deliberately trying to suck every trace of Anna out of my body.
She even mentioned Anna once herself.
“Brent Flores asked her out in seventh grade, you know,” she said.
“Yeah? I didn’t know that.”
“Either that or sixth. She called him something in French and walked away. And I’m sorry, but that’s just rude.”
I nodded a little. “Well, did he actually ask her out properly, or try to use some lame pickup line?”
“Knowing him, a lame pickup line. But still. Who tells a guy off in French?”
I was about to stick up for Anna, but then we came to a red traffic light and Paige kissed me some more. By the time she was done I had just about forgotten what she’d said.
Just about.
12. SCHEMES
One day in early March, I arrived at the Cave to find George and Stan poring over a large book. A yearbook, from the looks of it. George was chewing on a pencil and looking nervous.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Dustin’s yearbook from last year,” said Stan. “We’re just doing a little work on the store’s mailing list.”
“Yeah?”
George looked up. “Just a new business initiative,” he said.
“We’re matching faces to the names in the database,” said Stan. “Getting into the twenty-first century and shit.”
“Very fancy,” I said.
“All Stan’s idea,” said George. “All Stan. That’s why I pay him the big bucks.”
And he slapped Stan on the back and took off.
I wondered what the hell was really going on. There was no way they were making a database. If anything, George was probably just looking for names to add to a fake mailing list, like a crooked politician filling voter rolls with names from the cemetery, so he could tell his wife or the IRS or whoever that we actually had customers.
I was sure that the Ice Cave was not making a net profit. In fact, with his general encouragement that we eat all the mix-ins we wanted, I was almost certain that George wanted to lose money on the place.
Maybe it was a front for laundering drug money. Or gambling money, more likely. More than once George had come into the store and told us he was heading out to the horse racetrack in Altoona.
Or maybe it was just some sort of tax dodge.
Mine was not to question, in any case. I was just a lowly clerk. There was a chance that I was playing a part in some pretty ugly stuff, in an offhand sort of way, but so is everyone else with a job, if you think about it. Just about everyone who works is earning money for CEOs who may not be the world’s greatest human beings.
While Stan flipped through the yearbook, I pretty much forgot about the whole thing and spent most of my shift te
xting back and forth with Paige. She was working that night too, and whenever she could get away from her tables to the smoking area out back, she’d text me about her dumb customers and how much she was making in tips.
I think she made more off one table than I was going to make all night, but she had to plot and plan and sneak around just to send a text, and I just sat back and messed with my phone half the night. The way I saw it, a relaxing job was more valuable than money, anyway. And if I was only a pawn in George’s game of defrauding the IRS or something, so be it. He was beating the system. Good for him.
When George left, Stan kept browsing through the yearbook.
“You know,” he said, “people at Dowling always said the public school girls were better-looking, but I don’t really see it.”
I looked up from the defrosting.
“We hear the same thing about Dowling girls,” I said. “Catholic school girls have a mystique all their own.”
“It’s just the uniforms. And they don’t issue pleated skirts anymore.”
He flipped to one of the back sections, read for a second, and said, “Who’s this Aaron Riley guy?”
“Doesn’t ring a bell,” I said. “Why?”
“Check out this poem he wrote.”
I walked back to the counter and Stan passed me the yearbook, which was now open to a section of student-submitted poems. The one in question was all about the blood of Jesus. It was really pretty gory—the first two lines rhymed “blood for me” and “Calvary.”
“I thought you guys couldn’t do this shit in public schools,” he said.
“If it went to court, they might say it couldn’t have yearbook space,” I said. “But no one really complained.”
“Noted,” said Stan. “Noted.”
He slipped into the back with the yearbook and the mailing list, and for a while I heard him and Dustin talking and laughing back there. After an hour or so the two of them came back out to the front, and Stan said he had a new assignment for me.
“Yeah?” I asked.
He grinned.
“I want you to ask Paige to get you on the yearbook committee.”