by Adam Selzer
I forced a smile. “Isn’t that usually the guy’s line?”
She sighed again. “I just feel like . . . if you really like me, you should want me to touch you.”
“I do,” I said. “I’m just . . . I’m nervous, is all. I’m afraid I’ll disappoint you or something.”
“You won’t,” she said. “I promise.”
I kept driving along. For a second I thought I heard tornado sirens going off, but it was just an ambulance going by on a road up ahead.
“You told me you had a lot of experience with girls when we first started going out,” she said.
“It wasn’t a lot of good experience,” I said.
“Who all have you been with?”
“Did you ever meet that girl Brenda?”
“The one who dropped out and moved to Council Bluffs with an older guy?”
I nodded. “Her and Mindy. That girl who was back there today.”
“And it was bad?”
I turned the Moby-Dick CD off and just drove down the road to the next stop sign, letting the car hit some big puddles to make giant splashes. Even being in the car didn’t feel private enough for a conversation like this. I wanted the windows covered with water so no one could see in. It didn’t work very well; the water hit the sidewalk instead of the car. But the rain did the work well enough.
“I guess you could say that,” I said. “Brenda was pretty mean, and Mindy made it very clear that her old boyfriend had left . . . uh . . . some big shoes to fill. That’s why she was saying things like ‘a tube of cookie dough’ in free-form Dead Celebrities back there. That’s how big she said he was.”
“Bitch,” said Paige. “For the record, guys who make a big deal out of how big their dick is are usually terrible in bed.”
“I always hear it doesn’t really matter.”
She nodded, but looked like she was choosing her words carefully. “Every girl I know says it matters,” she said. “But it’s more about how you use it. And, like, the rest of your body.”
It occurred to me that I didn’t really know how many guys Paige had been with. I knew from little things I’d heard her say, mostly to her girlfriends, that she’d slept with Joey, and I knew that he wasn’t her first. Any sex ed teacher would probably tell me I should find out her whole history if we were going to go any further than we already had, but how do you ask a girl something like that without seeming like you’re calling her a slut or something?
She kept her hand on my inner thigh. Her pinky finger, and just her pinky finger, was tapping ever so lightly between my legs. At the next traffic light she kissed me hard on the mouth, then pulled back and licked gently at the corner of my mouth with the tip of her tongue. I forgot to watch for the light to change and got honked at by the person behind me. The rain kept coming down, and her face was lit by lightning.
“Where’s that place we could go to that’s private?” I asked.
“Behind that hippie store between Sip Coffee and the Ice Cave,” she said.
“Earthways?”
“Yeah. They have this nook thing.”
“A nook?”
“It’s, like, two brick walls jutting out from the back. You can just barely fit a car between them. It blocks up the windows so no one can see.”
“Okay.”
And as we drove along, I hit another big puddle, and Paige moved her hand behind me and started rubbing the nape of my neck, which gave me a bit of that tingling “just got warmed up” feeling I had gotten with Anna that night in the snow. Maybe it was never really anything more than acupressure or something in the first place.
It was about a five-minute drive back to Cornersville Trace from where we were normally, but it took twice as long to navigate my way through the hard rain. Sure enough, back behind Earthways, the hippie store that sold candles shaped like wizards and stuff, there were actually a couple of random brick walls jutting out from the back of the place, serving no practical purpose that I could figure out, and far enough apart that when I pulled the car in between them, there were walls on either side of the car. It was like a miniature garage without a door or a roof. A cubby hole for cars.
“You’re right,” I said. “It’s a perfectly car-sized nook.”
“Supposedly they actually built these walls just to make a place for people to park and fool around,” said Paige. “Because, you know. They’re hippies.”
“Sounds like the kind of thing hippies would do,” I said. “Looks more like a place to keep a Dumpster to me, though.”
“Don’t mention Dumpsters now,” she said. “It’s not a turn-on.”
“Sorry.”
I also didn’t mention just how badly I had to pee right then.
“Almost everybody I know either lost their virginity here or in the cemetery,” she said.
“The cemetery?”
“There are some secluded spots there, too. But it’s in the dirt, so it’d probably be too muddy today. I don’t want to have to call my dad and explain how we got stuck in the mud on somebody’s grave.”
I tried not to look like I was nervous about going any further than we’d been. Or intimidated by the fact that Paige seemed to know all the semipublic places to get it on. I almost wondered if she was just making stuff up, like when I pretended to be on the crotch-kicking team, and I was supposed to laugh, but she seemed pretty serious. For a second I thought up all the perfectly good excuses I could think of for being in a cemetery if we got stuck there, but I forced myself to focus on the moment for a second.
I looked over at her. “Was this where you first . . .”
“Oh, no,” she said, with a laugh. “My first time was with Mark Hatfeld. We were watching Mean Girls on his parents’ couch.”
“How was it?”
“The sex or the movie?”
“The sex.”
“Not as good as just watching the movie would have been. Not the first time, anyway. We got better at it later.”
“Well,” I said, “I’ll take a couch or a cemetery or right here over my first place any day. Mine was on the floor of a laundry room, two feet away from a pile of Stan’s dirty underpants.”
She laughed out loud. “Oh, you poor baby,” she said. “Come here. Nurse Paige will make it all better.”
I did love it when she called herself Nurse Paige.
She leaned over and kissed me, then took my hand and guided it under her shirt.
Then, without moving her face from mine, she undid my pants and put one hand inside, and with her free hand she undid her own jeans and slipped my other hand inside of them. I moved over and kissed her neck while I tried to concentrate on doing different things with each hand, which took my mind off having to pee, at the very least. The sound of water rushing down a nearby drain pipe wasn’t helping at all.
We didn’t go to the backseat. I didn’t even unbuckle. We just kissed and touched. The only time we paused was when she pushed my pants and shorts down just enough to have them out of the way, then took a minute to examine what she could see by the flashes of lightning coming in through the back windshield. She couldn’t see too well, probably, but she seemed to approve. Brenda hadn’t exactly disapproved, but she hadn’t bothered to look, really. The novelty of seeing naked guys had long since worn off for her, I guess, and seeing another dick was all in a day’s work. It was nice to be with someone who seemed to be enjoying herself, for once.
And everything worked just like it was supposed to. We didn’t really do much that required it to, just kissed and touched, but still. I didn’t have to apologize or assure her that it wasn’t her, it was me. We just had fun.
We fooled around until the rain stopped and (though I didn’t tell her this part) until I got to the point where I had to stop making out and start taking steps that would lead me to getting to a bathroom soon. After I dropped her off at home, I drove to the first grocery store I found and went in.
I was clear back to my car before I realized that the Beatles song playing in the grocery store ha
dn’t made me think about Anna at all.
14. HELL
The next time I convinced Paige to come to the Ice Cave, the only person in the whole place was Big Jake, who was leaning on the counter, and sipping something from a plastic cup.
“Where is everyone?” I asked.
“Got too crowded,” he said. “So they all went to Stan’s.”
I looked over at Paige. “You want to go over there? There’s probably a party going on.”
She nodded, but there was doubt on her face.
It wasn’t exactly misplaced, either. Stan’s basement could get a little crazy when enough people were there. As we drove over, I tried to warn her about what might be going on there—public drunkenness, perhaps the odd live sex act, etc.—but she didn’t seem concerned.
“I’ve seen it all before,” she told me. “It can’t be worse than what goes on at football parties.”
I was almost offended by this. I’d never been to a football party, but I took it as a matter of faith that a heavy metal vomit party was a very, very different sort of atmosphere. At the very least it would feature dimmer lights, different music, and a decidedly different odor. No one in Stan’s basement wore half as much body spray as the people Paige hung out with.
Some of them probably could have stood to try some, though.
When we arrived, Stan, Dustin, and Jenny were sitting at a table, smoking pot and playing Dungeons & Dragons. About eight more people, only about half of whom I recognized, were lounging in front of the TV, watching one of those “wild college party” porn videos where a bunch of guys in backwards hats pound girls who are supposed to be real students, but are probably really porn stars, in dorm rooms. It was Stan’s old, boxy TV that we’d played video games on years before; it still got all the colors wrong, which made the porn sort of psychedelic. It was like watching overgrown, douchey Smurfs do it.
At least two more people were in the laundry room, presumably acting out scenes from the DVD. You could hear them moaning over the Megadeth CD that played on the stereo.
Paige surveyed the place like a prairie dog who’d just tunneled up out of the ground into a toxic waste dump, but she squeezed my hand and managed a weak smile.
Mindy was sitting on the couch. For no reason that seemed obvious, she had stripped down to her underwear, which probably should have made the place seem a bit more debauched, but somehow it just made her look sort of stupid. She wasn’t wearing fancy underwear or anything; just a very plain bra and a thong that looked kind of like a jock strap and gave her the general air of a person who was too lazy to put clothes on in the morning. Looking at her and remembering having been with her made me feel kind of sick.
She was the first one to notice us, though.
“Hey,” she said, when we walked in. She sat upright and sort of showed herself off. I ignored her and led Paige through the room, past a cooler full of beer bottles, to the table where Stan was sitting.
“What’s happening?” I asked.
“Not a lot. Help yourself to some drinks.”
Paige, ever the social butterfly (at least compared to everyone else there) did her best to make conversation.
“What are you guys playing?” she asked.
“D and D,” said Stan.
“Is that the game where you, like, roll dice and kill goblins and stuff?”
“Yeah,” said Dustin. “That’s what we’re doing. We’re rolling dice and killing goblins and stuff.”
“That’s pretty much it,” I said. “In a minute someone will fire a cannon at Dustin’s character point-blank, and he’ll roll the dice to see if it hurt.”
“My character can handle it,” Dustin said. “He’s an eight-hundred-year-old warlord.”
“And now that you’re playing him, he’ll be dead in six months, tops,” I said.
“That’s true,” said Stan. “You guys do realize that your characters were better off without you, right?”
Dustin looked at me. “Stan is the most evil dungeon master ever,” he said.
“Well, yeah,” said Stan. “I’m the fucking devil. Go get some drinks.”
We wandered over to the open cooler that sat against the wall, but there was nothing in it that Paige would drink, so the two of us ended up just standing by a wall.
“This isn’t good party music,” she said.
“It’s good for this kind of party,” I said.
For a while the two of us just stood there, watching the crowd milling around, idly banging their heads to the strains of early Megadeth in the dim light of the oddly colored porn, charming faces all aglow. One of the guys who was watching the DVD got up and said he had to take a piss, and the girl who was sitting next to him on the floor followed him into the bathroom.
Mindy, meanwhile, kept looking over at Paige and smiling, like she was just waiting for her to freak out and shriek or something. Paige completely ignored everything that was happening. Soon, she was looking through her phone, and I figured that she was desperately checking social media sites for some other gathering we could go to. After a few minutes, right when I think we both realized at the same time that the guy and the girl hadn’t come out of the bathroom yet, Paige got a message saying a bunch of people were going to Leslie’s to watch a movie, and asked me if we could go.
Having subjected Paige to seeing Mindy in her underwear, I figured I owed it to her to go someplace she’d like better.
“That wasn’t nearly as shocking as you said it would be,” she said as we left. “It was just kind of gross down there. Your friends are kind of disgusting, you know.”
“They aren’t so bad,” I said.
“And what’s Stan’s thing with pretending to be Satan all the time?”
“He’s been doing that since he was at least nine or ten,” I said. “And I’m not really even sure he’s pretending. His hangover cures defy science. And I don’t think I’ve ever seen him fall asleep.”
“Are his parents out of town?”
I just shrugged as I got into the car. “I haven’t seen either of them in years. I only ever saw his mom once, and that was just for five seconds when I was about nine.”
She shook her head. “Weird.”
I didn’t much want a lecture on how bad my friends were, so I put Moby-Dick back on as we drove off to Leslie’s, where about twenty people had gathered in her living room to watch a really awful comedy that was still in theaters, but that someone had downloaded off a torrent site. It was a camera recording that looked like shit, and you could hear people talking in the background, but I don’t think a better quality file would have made the movie any better. The one thing it had going for it was a scene where an old lady gets diarrhea and says, “Oh, merciful Heavens!” while she explodes. It was stupid, but I laughed.
And when I did, some asshole turned back to me and said, “Do you know that is the only time I’ve heard you laugh at this entire movie?”
Some guy on the other side of the room looked over towards us. It was dark and he couldn’t see me, but he said, “Is it that Leon guy? I told you, man, all this guy ever talks about is turds! I’m just saying, bro.”
I laughed along with everyone else—you’ve got to be able to laugh at yourself when someone makes a realistic point. I’d brought it on myself. I was the Poop Guy.
At the end of the movie Paige and I drove off to the nook and did a little more fooling around. I noticed that sometimes she didn’t seem to be kissing back, like what she really wanted wasn’t to make out, but just to be kissed. That was all right.
Once I dropped her off at home, I headed back to Stan’s place, where everyone was watching a Japanese horror movie. These were my people. And no matter how good I got at hanging around with Paige’s friends, they probably always would be.
This, of course, made me wonder again what the hell Paige saw in me, beyond the fact that I had the sense not to go around sending people pictures of my balls when they hadn’t asked for them. But she saw something. Out of all the
guys at all the restaurants and living rooms in town, she’d chosen me. The Poop Guy.
In fact, the next morning she asked if I’d like to have dinner at her house and meet her parents.
15. DANCING
Paige had never tried to get me to shave the pubelike whiskers that I’d cultivated on my chin. I suspected that she liked them, actually. They gave me sort of a rugged air that I think some women are biologically programmed to dig—it’s a mental remnant of the days when tough-looking guys could bring home more woolly mammoth meat or something. But the day I was supposed to meet her parents, I shaved them off using disposable razors and shaving cream that I picked up down at the dollar store. I looked about twelve years old without them, and even less like I could ever kill a woolly mammoth, but I wanted to be halfway presentable.
When I knocked on the door, Paige opened it up and immediately covered her face with her palm when she saw my smooth face.
“Oh my God,” she said through her hand.
“Go ahead, you can laugh,” I said. “I look ridiculous.”
She put her hand down and just chuckled, then did this thing where she put her hand on my shoulder and traced it down my arm before holding my hand.
“You look nice,” she said. “But now I feel like a cradle robber.”
“I’m older than you,” I said.
“Girls mature faster than boys.”
I shuffled my feet and took off my shoes. The carpets were all white, and everything about the house made me want to rethink any plans of cleaning myself up. When I get a house, I’m getting brown carpet so I can track mud around, spill stuff, whatever. I’d be afraid to fart in a room with white carpet.
A man should be able to fart in his own house. I’d rather live in some hovel, like the pirate guy from the Hickman Avenue Kum and Go probably did, than live in Oak Meadow Mills.
“Is that him?” came a voice from the kitchen—Paige’s mom, I assumed.
“He has a name, Mother,” said Paige.
Her mom emerged in the hallway, smiling. She was rich, all right. Most of my friends’ moms look like brutally normal women in their thirties and forties in their mom jeans and sweatshirts. Paige’s mom looked like she’d spent a lot of money putting herself together. I imagined that she was probably a Botox user.