A Penny on the Tracks

by Alicia Joseph

  DAZED AND CONFUSED played on the screen, and Abbey was lying across my hood, watching the movie and eating her Funyons.

  Jess stared straight ahead at the screen. She had barely looked my way since the show started. I leaned close to her. “I went to Abbey’s house in the middle of the night to check on a chair. Don’t forget that.”

  “So you can be a real sweetheart and then turn around and act like the biggest jerk in the world.” She finally faced me, but I didn’t like the way she was looking at me. “Why do you do that?”

  It was a question that was difficult to answer. Ever since we were kids, I’d always been protective of Abbey. I’d put myself between her and anyone, or thing, that threatened to harm her. Yet, that loyalty never stopped me from trying to trip her while she walked, or from playing practical jokes on her that made her cry.

  “I love Abbey. She knows that.” I motioned toward the front of my car. Abbey was swaying her knees while eating her snack and drinking her Dr. Pepper. “She looks happy right now.”

  Jess smiled. “She looks like a little kid. I feel like we’re a couple parents taking our child to the drive-in.”

  “Would we really let our kid lie across the hood of a car like that?” I asked.

  Jess slipped her hand into mine. “I think we have time to think about what we will or won’t allow our kids to do.”

  I looked at her and thoughts of Jess cradling a baby in her arms as I stand behind her, holding them both protectively in a strong embrace, ran through my mind.

  “What are you thinking about,” she asked.

  “Uh?”

  “Just now. Why’d you look the way you did?”

  “How’d I look?”

  “Serene,” she answered.

  I smiled. “I was having a happy thought.”

  “Was I in it?”

  “We were both in it, but we had some company.”

  Her face contorted into an expression of repulsion. She backed away from me. “That is disgusting and I will never do that.”

  “What won’t you do?” I asked, then understood what she thought I had meant. “No.” I laughed. “Not that kind of company. I wasn’t fantasizing about a threesome or anything like that.”

  “Then what were you fantasizing about?” She stared deeply into my eyes with intense curiosity, and as the movie played loudly, I knew there was no possibility she could have imagined the profound thoughts of commitment running through my mind.

  We didn’t talk about the future. College was looming ahead of us, threatening to take us away from each other, yet we shunned tackling the very sensible conclusion that our relationship may not make it in the end.

  I brought my hand close to her face and circled my thumb gently over her cheek. “I’ll tell you when the time is right. I promise.” I kissed her softly on the lips, and I felt, through the stillness of her breath and the slow precise movement of her lips against mine, that she knew my fantasy of the two of us went far beyond sexual bliss.

  We kissed, and I paid zero mind not only to the movie playing on the giant screen, but also to Abbey plopped up on my hood. Jess cautiously ended our kiss and I deeply wished we were someplace else.

  But this was the bane of our relationship—clandestine glances in the hall, surreptitious kisses in hidden places, a quick embrace, and a secret squeeze of the hand under a classroom desk.

  Abbey’s attention seemed completely content on the movie, and I quickly peered over the people in the cars around us to check if anyone was looking in our direction. But with occupancy of mostly adolescents, no one seemed concerned with what was happening in our car. They were too busy getting action in their own cars.

  But I was deeply conscious that the perceptive awareness of just one person to catch even the most innocent expressions of affection between Jess and I would be enough to expose our secret relationship.

  The consequences of being found out worried me more than it did Jess for reasons I wasn’t completely certain of. Even though my mother wasn’t exactly the free spirit that Jess’s parents were, I knew she would never stop loving me just for being gay.

  Still, the mere contemplation of revealing my true self to my mother filled me with anxiety so severe, sleep eluded my nights until I forced my mind to think about something else. The source of my worry may have stemmed from my near-certain assumption that my mother would relentlessly blame herself over what she’d deem a life of impediment.

  “You stopped kissing me first,” I said. “Yet you claim you don’t care if people find out about us. Why’d you pull away?”

  “Abbey’s right there. All she had to do was turn around and just like that, she’d know. And you made it very clear our relationship isn’t something that’s gonna be easy for her to accept. Do you really want to risk her finding out like this?”

  I leaned back into my seat and watched Abbey munching on her Funyons while intently watching the movie. I turned my gaze to the big screen, where a group of teenaged boys were huddled around a younger-looking boy, bent over the hood of a car. They were smacking the boy in the ass with a large wooden paddle, while letting out boisterous yells with each blow.

  The expression of pain across the young lad’s face made me cringe, and I wondered what he’d done to provoke such a beating.

  I covered Jess’s hand with my own, confident that I could at least hold my girlfriend’s hand, hidden underneath the shield of darkness in my car, without anyone seeing.

  I WAS LYING on the floor, listening to the hum of Abbey’s steady breath as she lay sleeping on the couch next to me. My eyes shifted across the dark room to where Jess’s body was spread across the other couch. With her back to me, it was hard to decipher if she was in a deep sleep or somewhere between a dream and consciousness.

  Jess hadn’t moved since I started watching her twenty minutes ago, but I couldn’t go to her then because Abbey was tossing and turning. But now, I was sure Abbey had succumbed to the late hour as I pushed the blanket off me and quietly propped myself up until I was on my hands and knees.

  I crawled across the floor without making a sound. Every few inches I stopped and turned back and listened to be sure Abbey’s breathing hadn’t changed, until I was finally on the other side of the room, kneeling in front of the couch where Jess lay.

  With her back to me, I kissed her shoulder. She didn’t budge, so I held up her long brown hair and kissed her softly on the back of her neck. She stirred lightly and rolled onto her back. I craned my neck to check on Abbey, who appeared to still be in a deep sleep. Deciding I was in the clear, I kissed Jess on the lips.

  “Wake up, baby,” I whispered in her ear.

  Jess opened her sleepy eyes and looked at me with a dazed, far away expression. “What are you doing in my room?”

  “Shhhh.” I smiled. “You’re in my living room.”

  She picked her head up and squinted around the dark room. Her gaze landed on Abbey sleeping on the other couch. She dropped her head onto the pillow. “That’s right. We’re having a slumber party.”

  I stifled a laugh. “Yes, we are.” I slid my hand underneath the blanket and ran it up her leg. “Let’s go in my room.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “Why not?”

  “Will you put your hormones in check for one night? Your best friend is less than five feet away.”

  “I put my hormones in check every second I’m around you but can’t be with you when all I want to do is fuck you.”

  She glared at me.

  “I mean make love to you.”

  Jess gave me a small smirk and then lightly pushed me away. She clamped her fingers around the heavy blanket that covered her body and pulled it up to her chin. She moved onto her side, facing me. “Go to sleep. We have all day tomorrow to be together.”

  “I’m not wasting a night I can be with you to sleep alone on the floor.”

  “Then go in your bed.”

  “Come with me. We won’t do anything, I swear. I just wa
nt to hold you while I sleep. I don’t get to do that a lot.”

  “You really expect me to believe that once you have me in your bed you won’t try to take my clothes off?”

  “We’re always hiding, sneaking around, worried that someone’s gonna catch us. We hardly ever get the chance to settle down and be in each other’s arms. I know I act like sex is all I want, but it’s not. Being close to you—that’s what I want.”

  Jess pushed herself up. She looked over my shoulder toward Abbey, who must have still been sound asleep because Jess comfortably snuggled against me.

  “That’s all I want too,” she whispered back.

  I AWOKE TO loud shrieks of children playing in the yard next door. I groggily pulled the covers closer to me. I was lying on my side, facing my bedroom wall, when I heard Abbey’s voice coming from another room.

  Fuck! That’s right. Abbey’s here! I opened my eyes and quickly turned over. A deep sigh of relief escaped from my lips when I saw that Jess wasn’t in bed with me. She must have left either late last night or early this morning, even though I’d promised I wouldn’t fall asleep before going back to the living room. But the last thing I remember was lying on my side with Jess in my arms.

  I climbed out of bed, wearing blue boxer briefs and a Hanes white T-shirt, minus a bra. I slipped on a pair of gray sweatpants, and pulled a thick, long-sleeve cotton shirt over my head. I no longer felt so exposed.

  As I headed toward the kitchen, the chatter between my girlfriend and my best friend grew clearer.

  “I liked Dazed and Confused. It was good, but I didn’t like how those boys had to be so mean with those paddles. Do you think that really happened? That seniors were allowed to do those things to freshman? Even the senior girls were horrible. I wouldn’t get down on my knees and squeal like a pig, no matter who told me to do it.”

  Jess laughed. “It was a movie, Abbey. Maybe they exaggerated some things. But don’t worry. I won’t let anyone make you squeal like a pig.”

  “Or cover me in whip cream and then put me through a car wash?”

  Jess laughed again. “That either.”

  I stepped into the room, and Abbey was standing at the counter mixing a bowl of batter.

  “Hey. You cheated,” Abbey said when she saw me. “You went to your bed.”

  “What are you guys making?”

  “Waffles,” Abbey replied.

  “Pancakes,” Jess said at the same time.

  Abbey cast a questioning look at Jess. “Really?”

  Jess nodded coolly. “We’re making pancakes, but we can do waffles, too.”

  I sat down at the table. “I like pancakes better than waffles.”

  “I know,” Jess said in a low voice I was sure Abbey didn’t hear.

  Chapter Sixteen

  IT WAS SUNDAY evening. Jess and I were lying on my bed. Abbey had left a few hours ago when her mom called here looking for her. My own mother had phoned earlier that day to check up on me. She planned to be back sometime late tomorrow afternoon.

  Jess and I had one more night and one more morning to be alone, and I planned to make the most of it.

  “We should go to a Melissa Etheridge concert next time she’s here,” Jess said. “It might be the first public place we could actually hold hands. Amber went to see her a few months back while she was visiting a cousin in Wisconsin, and she said the place was packed with lesbos. She said everywhere she looked lesbians were kissing and holding hands. To her it was gross and awkward, but to me it sounded like heaven.”

  “I’ll look into when she’s coming to town. Hey, have you heard back from your neighbor? The one who said he might be able to get us fake IDs?”

  “I asked him last week about it. Said his guy’s really busy right now. And then he told me the price went up thirty bucks per ID.”

  “Why?”

  Jess snuggled closer to me. “I don’t know. That’s just what he said. I bet he’s gonna pocket the money. He’s so squirrelly. We probably shouldn’t even trust him.”

  “Babe, I don’t wanna have to wait for some lesbian singer to play here in order to be around people like us.” I turned onto my back, and Jess climbed on top of me.

  “Maybe we can find a place that doesn’t card, or at least doesn’t card very hard,” she said.

  “How do we manage that?”

  Jess sighed and dropped her head into the crevice of my neck and collarbone. “I don’t know.”

  “We should probably just forget it. We’ll both be leaving for school in the fall anyway. We’d only have the summer to use them.”

  Jess covered my neck with soft kisses. “I want to slow dance with you in the middle of a crowded dance floor.” She squeezed me close to her, and then popped her head up and looked down to me. “Wait a minute. What’s this stuff about us only having the summer to use them?”

  I squirmed underneath her grip. “Nothing . . . I’m just saying . . .”

  “Hey.” She stared at me. “I told you. We’re staying together. We’ll plan to come back on as many weekends as we can. And we’ll have Christmas and Spring breaks.”

  “I know.”

  “Baby, I really want to dance with you in a dark, packed room,” she whispered so serious and unyielding I knew she was tired of hiding. “Prom was hard. Watching you dance with your date,”

  “Matt wasn’t my date. We all went as friends, as a group, you, Kirk, me, and Matt, a group, which is like going stag, only . . . with a group.”

  “But we were paired-off. And I wasn’t paired with you,” Jess said, her voice drenched with regret.

  “We seem pretty paired-off now.” I kissed the part of her forehead pressed against my chin. “I wish you didn’t care so much about a lame school dance that really doesn’t mean anything. I only went to please my mom. She didn’t go to her prom, but wishes she had. I suppose she thought missing my prom would one day make me as sad as missing her prom seems to make her. She pestered me till I agreed to go. But I don’t know what the big deal is. Is prom supposed to be some kind of rite of passage? To signify that a bunch of teenagers are transforming into adults by dressing in fancy clothes, pinning boutonnieres on suits, and wearing corsages around your wrist, while acting all grown-up, attending an elegant dance. When really, the kids can’t wait to get the hell outta there and head to the after-party, drink their asses off, take off those uncomfortable over-priced grown-up clothes, and get laid.”

  Jess laughed and trailed her finger up and down my stomach. “I just wanted to dance with you so everyone in that fancy hall knew you were mine. Instead, I had to watch you dance with that long-haired fool of a boy.”

  I laughed. “Hey, Matt’s cool. I like him and his long hair. But I sure didn’t like dancing with him. Did we look as awkward as I felt?”

  “You looked beautiful, actually. But I know that was probably the last time I’ll ever see you in a dress.”

  “Got that right. At least Matt didn’t make a move on me the way Kirk did on you. I wanted to bust his face. I swear, we hang out together for years as friends, but the second a girl puts on a dress, the guy forgets he lit his farts on fire in front of you and smeared Bengay all over his dick on a dare.”

  “That’s right. Kirk did that in your garage and then ran to your neighbor’s house with his pants around his ankles and sprayed the hose all over himself.” Jess laughed.

  “And he thought you were gonna give it up for him cuz suddenly he thought he was Rico Suave.”

  “It’s called being horny,” Jess said. “And I handled him, didn’t I?”

  “But I wanted to handle him.”

  “I did just fine without sending him to the hospital.”

  “But I wanted to send him to the hospital.”

  Jess laughed. “Even in a dress you didn’t want to act like a lady.”

  I rolled on top of her, pinning her against the bed with my thigh between her legs. “But you like me best when I don’t act like a lady.”

  Jess fisted my shirt in a
tight grip and yanked me down to her with a deep, throaty moan. “Yes, I do.”

  I WOKE UP with my face pressed against the back of Jess’s head. We’d slept the whole night with Jess wrapped in my arms. Even though my arm snug underneath her had fallen asleep and was completely numb, this was the way I wanted to fall asleep every night for the rest of my life.

  It was Monday morning. My mother was supposed to be home later that afternoon. Jess and I had one last morning together, and I intended not to waste another moment of it sleeping.

  I pulled back the covers and gazed over Jess’s bare legs and smooth stomach, and the rest of the parts of her body not covered by the small T-shirt she wore. I slipped low underneath the covers and crawled between her legs until my head was flanked firmly between her thighs.

  I pulled back the thin fabric of her underwear. I felt her body stir underneath me as she slowly woke up. I pulled her panties down to her ankles, and she clamped tightly onto the back of my head. Her moans turned to shrieks.

  When I was sure she was only moments away from climax, her body suddenly became still, and the grip of her fingers around my head loosened.

  “What are you doing here?” Jess said to someone.

  With panicked curiosity, I felt my heart pound against my chest as I cleared the covers off me with one hand.

  Abbey was standing at my bedroom door with a dazed look on her face. Her eyes briefly met mine before she turned and ran out of my room.

  I jumped out of bed wearing nothing but boxers and a Pearl Jam T-shirt. I grabbed a pair of black sweatpants, hanging on the knob of my closet door, and rushed out of the room. I hurried down the hall, hopping on one foot as I slid my sweatpants on, one leg at a time.

  “Abbey! Wait!” I caught up to her just as she was about to reach the front door. “Hey.” I grabbed her arm. “Stop.” Abbey stood still, but didn’t face me. “I’m sorry you had to find out this way. I wanted to tell you. I really did, but I didn’t know how.” I waited for her to respond, but Abbey remained quiet. I begged her to turn around. “Come on, Ab. Please don’t be like this. At least look at me.”