by Polly Frost
Naomi and I have known each other since we were in day care. I know her foster parents and she knows Alice, my foster mother. I feel sorry for people who care for Viagra babies. Naomi’s foster parents have taken in several. They’re religious. They used to adopt crack babies. Alice only has me. Still she often says, “I didn’t know how much I was taking on when I got you.”
Alice cries a lot. I try to be even quieter than the medication makes me. I help around the house. I take out the garbage, I cook dinner, I mow the lawn. In the last month Alice has been crying even more. I find her head down on a cookbook open to cake recipes. The page is wet with her tears.
“For your eighteenth birthday I’m going to make you your favorite chocolate layer!” she says. “Eighteen. It’s all happened too fast, don’t you think?”
I say yes although I can’t wait for my life to be over.
“Granger,” Naomi says, “do you realize you’ve been staring at me for three whole minutes? Why don’t you just come over here?”
But we’re interrupted.
“Naomi, it’s time for your pills,” Nurse Kohler says, appearing in her high-buttoned blue uniform.
In a minute, Naomi walks out of the nurse’s office. She gives me a look before going through the door.
“Your turn, Granger,” Nurse Kohler says.
I follow Nurse Kohler into her small treatment room, sit down, and she hands me my meds. She picks up a clipboard, pushes back her glasses.
“Forgive my questions, but it’s the first of the month so I have to ask them. Have you had any violent outbursts?”
“No.”
“Trouble concentrating?”
“No.”
“Wet dreams?”
“I wouldn’t know what one is.”
“Fantasies of a criminally sexual nature?”
“No.”
“Have you been approached by any blood-drinkers?”
“No,” I lie.
She finishes scribbling on the official report and has me sign it. “You turn eighteen in a week. Naomi turns eighteen a few weeks after that. Did you know that?”
“Don’t feel bad,” I say. “Mr. Jason was just telling us how he’s funding the best specialists to find a cure. You heard him. Maybe I’ll be okay.”
None of us Viagras has ever made it longer than six months past our eighteenth birthdays. I’ve heard that over fifteen hundred Viagra babies have died in our area. But I don’t know the actual number for sure. It’s not like other disasters where a shrine is built for the unlucky dead. Everyone’s embarassed by our existence, so they want to forget about us once we’re gone.
Nurse Kohler gives me an emotional look. “Sam Jason is your hero, isn’t he?” she says.
“Yes,” I say. “I would like to meet him. I’ve never been closer to him than forty rows away in the auditorium.”
It’s between classes and the school corridor is crowded with Normals.
“Fuckin’ Viagra babies,” one girl says.
“Yeah,” a guy says. “Round ’em up and nuke ’em all!” He high-fives a buddy.
I let them pass, then move along and turn left. Halfway down, Naomi opens her locker and drops her books. The Normals jump aside. I go over and pick her books up.
“Follow me,” she whispers. She gives me a very direct look and walks off down the hall.
I let a few seconds pass and follow.
A girl steps right in front of me and stops. Her midriff is bare, her breasts move behind her light blue top, her lips sparkle pink. It’s Kristie, the most popular girl in school. Behind her, Naomi disappears around a corner.
“Hey, Granger, I was thinking,” Kristie says. “You’re gonna die soon, right?”
“I am.”
She looks around, then says breathily, “I thought I could do something really nice for you first. I’ll let you see me naked. Of course, you’d have to take your clothes off, too. I want to see what a Viagra baby looks like. I hear it’s really something to see.”
Viagras know not to get involved with a Normal, especially one as popular as Kristie.
“I’m sure you’re very attractive. But I don’t think so.”
Kristie frowns and her face starts to turn red. “What did you just say?”
“You’re really nice, but—”
“Listen to me,” she whispers harshly. “Nobody rejects me. Especially not some freak.”
Her boyfriend, Clayton, is suddenly beside her.
“Listen, you mutant. I told you not to talk to my girlfriend.”
“Sure,” I say.
“He’s always coming on to me,” Kristie says.
Clayton puts a fist in my face.
“Hit him!” Kristie says. “Hit him now!”
Clayton draws his arm back.
“Do you really want to risk touching me?” I say calmly.
“Nurse Kohler says we have to have sex with you to die,” Clayton says.
“But you never know, do you?”
Clayton and Kristie look at each other, then he looks at me with a sneer. “Get the hell out of here, weirdo.”
I turn down the next hallway, look for Naomi, turn right, left, then left, right. Finally I see Naomi leaning against the wall in an empty corridor.
“Did that Kristie slut come on to you?” she says. She takes my arm and leads me to a door that says “Janitorial Supply Room,” pulls me inside, and swings the door shut.
It’s dark—there’s only one of those red emergency bulbs on. Naomi’s face is near mine. “I can see why she does. You’re awfully cute,” she says. I shrug. It means nothing to me.
“Look at this,” she says, digging something out of her pocket and holding it up under the red bulb. Her palm is full of dark and light pills of many different shapes.
I’m stunned. “Where’d you get them?” I feel terror for her sake.
“I haven’t taken my pills for two days. I put them under my tongue and only pretend to swallow.”
“Two days? But aren’t you—”
“Dangerously oversexed?” she says. “You bet!”
She moves towards me. I feel her breath on my lips as she kisses me. I feel her hand on my crotch.
“Wow,” she says. “There’s some real potential there.”
“You know this doesn’t do anything for me.”
“But it’s doing something for me,” she says.
She backs away from me and slowly lifts up her skirt. She isn’t wearing panties. “I want you to feel it,” she says. “I don’t care what it’s like for you. I just want you to feel it.” She takes my right hand and presses it against her soft pubic fur, and then my fingers sink into her wetness. It’s slithery and hot.
“What are you doing? That’s your vagina.”
“I want you to call it my cunt. Repeat after me, Granger: ‘cunt.’ Feel it, taste it, smell it.”
I shake my head. “It’s disgusting.”
“That’s your medication talking. I want you to stop taking those pills,” she says.
“That’s crazy.”
“Think about it, Granger. Do you really want to live your life as a medicated eunuch? Touch me again and say it. Say it!”
I slither my fingers through her hair and flesh and fluids. “Cunt,” I say.
Naomi places her lips on mine. It’s as if she wants to breathe my breath. She puts her hand over mine on her cunt and rubs faster and faster. She’s writhing and moving her hips.
Then she gasps. “Oh, I knew you’d make me come really good. I’m only sorry you couldn’t share the feeling. But you will if you do as I say. Remember: the pills go under your tongue, not down your throat.”
“They’ll kill us.”
“We’re going to die anyway!” Naomi says. “Face it, Granger, we’re being punished for the sins of our parents, whoever they were! So let’s go out in style. You and me, Granger. Let’s fuck our way to the gates of Hell.”
“What about your foster parents?” I say. “Don’t you care about
hurting them?”
She rolls up her sleeve, and I gasp at the sight of slash marks.
“This is what they’ve done to me,” she bitterly says. “I have to hide my arms all the time. Yet a couple of people have spotted my scars. I’ve made up a pretty good story about cutting myself because I’m so depressed. But you know as well as I do that these are wounds from blood-drinkers.”
She bites her lip in anger. “Yeah, Granger, you think of my foster parents as nice people. But they’ve been bleeding me and drinking my blood ever since I can remember. Why do you think they kept adopting Viagra baby after Viagra baby? So they could swing.”
“Your parents? They must be forty-five.”
“Of course they’re too old! But they can’t give it up. The Viagra addiction hasn’t gone away, Granger, it’s only gone underground. My foster parents hide it behind their religious devotion. That altar you’ve seen in our living room? It’s where they conduct their orgies. And they use my blood to supercharge their sex drive.”
“That’s horrifying.”
“They take just enough of my blood to make them turned on like they were teenagers. They stop bleeding me when I pass out. They’re timing it to make sure I have enough left so I die from natural Viagra-baby causes.”
“You should report them.”
“I’d be the one blamed for it. Now, you tell me about your experiences with blood-drinkers.”
I shake my head.
“I don’t believe you, Granger.” I give in as she pulls up my shirtsleeves, yanks up my T-shirt, then searches under my pants leg. Her eyes glitter as she finds the long scars on my calf.
“Tell me about the people who did it,” she says, running her fingers along the scars.
“You know how tourist blood-drinkers are always coming to town?” I say.
Naomi nods.
“The police say they discourage it, but somehow the drinkers get past them.”
Naomi snorts. “The police are in the pocket of the tourist industry. They tell the visiting blood-drinkers where to find us.”
“What?”
“Granger, wake up! Sheriff Milnes is a blood-drinker,” she hisses.
“No way,” I insist.
“Viagra red is his favorite brew. He took a cup of mine before entering my parents’ last orgy.” She runs her fingernails up and down my calf. “You must tell me how this scar came about.”
I sigh at the memory. “A month ago, two women stopped me while I was walking home. They were in a van. One had black hair. The other had red hair.”
Naomi is licking my scars now, looking up with glittering eyes.
“Are you okay?” I say.
“Oh yes,” she says. “I’ve never been better, in fact. Tell me the rest.” Her tongue returns to my leg.
“They said they’d driven thousands of miles to our town to find themselves a Viagra baby and did I know of any? I walked away. I knew I had to, but they drove up alongside me.
“‘You’re one, aren’t you?’ the redhead said.
“The next thing I knew, the van stopped and they wrestled me into the back and roared off. We drove up to the lake. They threw me out and pushed me down between two logs. Then the black-haired woman pulled out a long knife and sliced my leg.
“The two women pushed my calf so the blood spurted out like it was a catsup bottle. They licked up every drop. Their mouths were smeared with blood, and then they kissed each other. It was like some fever took hold of them. I escaped while they were writhing on the ground together. They were animals. I just ran away.”
There are footsteps outside the closet. Naomi pulls down her skirt, I adjust my pants, and we walk out as though nothing was strange.
“Meet me at the pool at eight P.M. on Thursday,” she whispers, and walks away.
For two days I hide the pills under my tongue, take them out after I leave Nurse Kohler’s office, and put them in my wallet. I notice no change.
But Thursday morning I wake up with my first erection. It’s huge, heavy, and hot. When I touch it I can’t help groaning. I wait for it to go away but it doesn’t. I can’t take a leak standing up. I can’t go to school with an erection. I can’t even go downstairs to breakfast with an erection.
I call out to Alice that I’m sick and spend all day in my bedroom. Wild thoughts about violence and girls and beasts and creatures from video games swirl through my brain. I stand in front of the full-length mirror. My erection reaches farther up than my navel. Perhaps I can bring it down if I give myself one of those things they call an orgasm…but my knees buckle when I touch my cock. In torment, I throw myself down on the bed and nap. When I wake I find myself humping the pillow.
I wait until I know that Alice is snoring in the recliner with the TV news on. I emerge from my room, take a shower, and put on my best jeans and a clean shirt. I remove a couple of hundred dollars and the car keys from Alice’s purse.
It’s a quiet, small-town Thursday night. I stop at a minimall and buy flowers for Naomi. I don’t know why—I just feel the urge. Then I go to a record store and choose CDs of music I’ve heard Normals listen to. Music—it just seems like the moment for doom metal music.
At the cash register I hear familiar voices.
“What are you doing here, Granger?” It’s Kristie. She stands with Clayton and a bunch of their friends. I hold the flowers in front of my crotch to hide the erection.
“Where are you going with these?” Clayton says, handling the CDs. “You know you can’t listen to music. We could report you to the police if we wanted to.”
Kristie grabs the flowers. “How nice, Granger.” She spots my erection. “What’s that there?” she shouts. Clayton and the others point at my crotch and gasp.
I grab the CDs and boom box, run out of the store, and jump into my car.
Kristie and Clayton are right behind me in his convertible. I turn left down an alley, right onto a back street, and then floor it through a red light. I’ve lost them.
I drive back streets to school, where I pull into the empty, dark parking lot. Sodium-vapor lights illuminate patches of empty asphalt. Around back, I see Naomi in the doorway to the gym’s pool, and I hurry to her. She’s dressed in jeans and a long-sleeve T-shirt.
“I wasn’t sure you’d have the guts,” she says.
“I ran into Clayton on the way here. Let’s go someplace else—”
“You and I deserve to have fun the same way and at the same places the Normals do,” Naomi asserts.
And then her arms are around me and our tongues are in each others’ mouths and our hearts are thumping like we’ve just run around the track.
We break apart, panting, and I hand her the flowers.
“The roses look amazing next to your pale skin,” I say. I don’t know how I know to say these things.
She beams. “I bet you’ve had that hard-on since the middle of last night. Come here.”
She leads me over to an open window. I help her climb through it. Moments later, she opens the door to the gym pool. The blue light from the swimming pool plays against the walls and ceiling.
I move close to her.
She reaches for my pants and it makes me jump. I don’t know why. “Steady now,” she says with a soft smile on her face. “It’s okay.”
I relax a bit, and she unzips me. I groan as she reaches inside and takes hold of my cock. “My god but that’s big, firm, and hot,” I hear her say, but then there’s blood rushing through my ears and eyes and brains, and I’m gushing my soul out onto her hands in throbs of angry passion.
I catch my balance and try to breathe. She licks her hand and looks me in the eye.
“Is that okay?” I ask as my cock settles down.
“For a start,” she says.
Naomi strips off her T-shirt.
“Where’d you get that pink bra?” I stammer.
“I steal lingerie from the other girls’ lockers during gym,” she says.
She slides off her jeans. She’s wearing a G-s
tring! My cock is enormous again. She walks over to me, and holds it.
“Wait,” I say. I want to last longer this time. I put a CD in the boom box. It’s a slow song. I hold out my hand and we start to dance the way we’ve seen Normals do. We kiss, long and slow. We swim together naked for a few moments, then I lift her up onto the edge of the pool and part her legs. She pushes my hand into her pussy.
This time it doesn’t feel anything like it did before. When my finger parts her folds and slips inside, I want to explore every bit of the slickness.
“You’ve got a major-league cock. And I’ve got a major league pussy,” she laughs. I feel her muscles tighten and pulse and twist wetly and snakily around my finger. Her cunt is dancing just for me.
“There they are! I knew they’d be here!” We look up. It’s Kristie.
She and Clayton and their friends have brought the police. They point their guns at us. We know enough not to fight. We put on our clothes and let them handcuff us.
“They think they’re Normal or something coming to this pool to fuck. Like there’s any other place in town to do it,” Clayton says.
Kristie gives him a dirty look and I hear her loudly whisper, “Shut up, asshole, or you’ll give our secret place away.”
Naomi and I are behind the bars of Sheriff Milnes’s jail. We’re separated.
The fat, gray-haired sheriff leads Naomi down the hallway to his office. She stares at me as she passes by. I’m afraid for her, and I try to make eye contact.
The sheriff barks at her, “Keep your slutty eyes on the floor!”
The prisoners across the hall lick the bars of their cells.
I feel a punch on my arm. I turn to face my cellmate.
“I just got arrested for murder,” he tells me. “So I don’t care if I’m caught sipping the last blood out of you.”
He throws me against the wall, tears off my pants. I feel his teeth on my left butt cheek. I clench my teeth from the pain.
I hear a loud clank.
“There’ll be none of that,” Nurse Kohler is saying.
Sheriff Milnes is at her side. “You won’t tell Sam about this?” he asks worriedly.