by Joshua Furst
“That's cool,” said Trent. “That's cool, because at least you fucking didn't just go grabbing shit you didn't even want like those motherfuckers.” He pointed in the direction of Devin and Mike and Little Tornado.
“Who says I don't want these?” said Mike, holding up his earrings.
“Yeah, alright, you're exempt.”
“I took shit I wanted too,” said Devin.
“Like what?”
“Like …” He perused his pile. “I want Tattoo magazine.”
“That's it, though. What are you gonna do with a power drill?”
“A power drill is a useful addition to any toolbox. Every self-respecting handyman should have one.”
Everyone but Trent laughed.
“Look—all I'm saying is, alright, look.” Trent's tone was severe and overblown. “The whole point of stealing shit is that you want to take shit you want. If you don't want it there's no point.”
“You're still fucking up the system,” said Little T.
“No.” Trent glared at him like he was astonished by the immensity of the kid's naiveté. “No. You're not. Not if there's no redistribution of the motherfucking wealth. If you're just gonna throw the shit out, then, you know? I mean, what the fuck is that?”
“I'm not gonna throw this shit out. Look. See?” Little Tornado began unwrapping sticks of chewing gum and shoving them into his mouth. “See?” Saliva trickled down his chin as he talked. “See? I want this gum. And anyway, you're a fucking hypocrite, man. You've already got a jacket like that.”
“Yeah, this is for Betty here.”
Trent threw the jacket into Cheryl's lap. His arrogance was repulsive and appealing, and she'd wanted a jacket like this for a long time. Though she attempted to come off as if she didn't care, she couldn't stop herself from trying it on.
Balancing on the back two legs of his chair, Trent thrust his chin at her.
“S'it fit?”
“Sort of.” She flopped her arms to show how the sleeves drooped over her hands.
“Well, if you fucking don't want it—”
Jarod was furiously chewing his lower lip, staring intently at the parquet table. His ears were red. What was she supposed to do? Give it back? Should she touch Jarod's leg, reassure him? That would be a lie. The thing to do was to forge ahead ruthlessly and pretend not to see the pain she'd caused.
“No, I like it,” she said to Trent.
“Good, 'cause I got it for you.”
The slapping of moths against the kitchen window, the sound of Jarod's heel rattling against the leg of his chair, the motorcycle roaring past outside—all of these noises slowly intensified, began to swirl, a windstorm in her stomach, an unwanted trill. She was disgusted with herself. Sneering at Trent, she said, “I s'pose you think I'm gonna fuck you now?” and hearing these words spurt out of her mouth gave her a further thrill, sent her heartbeat shooting down between her legs.
When I'd started talking to Cheryl about sex, way back when she was in the fourth grade, I'd been frank with her. “It can be pleasure and it can be pain,” I'd said, “but if you get too caught up on the pleasure, if you go seeking physical sensation and lose track of all the emotions underneath, you're liable to find yourself in a lot of places you'll realize you don't want to be. That's where the pain comes in. I'd hate to see you cause yourself pain.” I told her, “Look for love. Go seeking companionship and communication.” I gave her a copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves and let her make her own decisions. I'm not sure any of this did much good. There are times when the adrenaline rush of transgression can propel you forward like destiny, when the changes you want to enact in your own being appear fully formed in somebody else.
That night, while the other boys slept in the living room, Cheryl and Trent scampered upstairs and shut themselves into Jarod's bedroom. The dank aroma of long-unwashed clothes had sunk into the walls and all the soft surfaces. It smelled like Jarod, like Jarod gone stale. A sad smell, Cheryl thought. She and Trent threw the junk piled on the bed to the floor. But once they were squeezing and pulling and slipping, probing and tasting each other's skin, the smell of Trent's breath and his sweat and his hair and the slapping of the chain padlocked around his neck with each violent movement he made inside her overwhelmed any hint of Jarod in the room.
When she heard the front door open downstairs and the distinctive shuffle of Jarod's mom's lame leg, the tap, tap, tap of her cane, Cheryl tensed up. She imagined the woman looking at the boys strewn all over the living room floor, recognizing her son there asleep among them and wondering where his girlfriend had gone. The bed rattled and squeaked and Cheryl was sure the sound carried downstairs. She could almost see the woman standing there, exhausted and sad above her sleeping son, listening to the rhythmic creak upstairs and wishing she could reach down and smooth the boy's hair, stopping herself because her leg hurt so badly and she knew it would hurt more if she tried to bend.
“What's wrong?” Trent said.
“Jarod's mom just came home.”
He laughed. “The ho-bag? Don't worry about her. She's cool. She doesn't give a fuck what we do.”
After it was over, the two of them fell asleep, clutching each other, naked. She was surprised that Trent wanted to hold her all night long. He wasn't so tough. Earlier in the day he must have been pretending—like her—that he could restrict what his heart allowed in.
The next morning, he was cool, but subtly attentive. She'd be in the kitchen, getting a glass of water, and as he walked behind her, he'd twirl one dry finger against the back of her neck, hold it there just long enough for her to notice, before continuing out into the backyard, leaving her just before she could respond. He fumbled periodically at her ass or her elbows, grinning into her face, then tumbling away. His fingers left impressions, pricks of stimulation that tingled and faded slowly from her skin. She found herself waiting for each next jolt, tracking him with all five of her senses as he moved around the house.
There was no way Jarod could have not known. But he watched TV like they weren't there, like nothing had happened, like Cheryl was simply another stranger wandering through this house he couldn't control. Sometime in the afternoon, he stepped into his mother's room and shut the door. They spoke in hushed tones— Cheryl couldn't make out a word they said—but nothing seemed to be any more wrong than it ever was. Jarod's mom hobbled off to work with his help, and the boys all did bong hits late into the evening. They watched Blade Runner and a show about insects on the Discovery Channel, and when Trent scooted up and wrapped his arms around Cheryl, she laced her fingers through his and gave a hidden squeeze. Everything was fine. There were no repercussions.
Later that night, once they'd smoked out the pot and finished off all the junk food in the house, Trent disentangled his arm from around Cheryl's waist. As he stood and stretched, his shirt inched up to expose the wisps of hair around his belly button.
“Later, Jay,” he said. Then, raising an eyebrow, “So, Betty, you coming, or what?”
She shoved her shit into her backpack and sprinted up the stairs to Jarod's bedroom, grinning once she was sure no one could see her. The room reeked of mildew and sex and when she saw the sheet bunched along the edge of the mattress, she vaguely remembered kicking it off her feet during the night. She'd come to find the army jacket Trent had given her, but as she grabbed the sheet with both hands and snapped it straight, what she saw was the stain in the middle of the bed, the evidence—scaly now like dried egg white—that had leaked out of her during the night.
This was real. She felt bold and brave and mean, like she'd passed some marker beyond which she could be anything she wanted.
Jacket in tow, she raced back downstairs and out to the driveway, where the boys were waiting to drop Little T and his car off, all except Jarod—he wasn't coming. He and his dog were staying put to watch whatever showed up next on the Discovery Channel.
WHEN I WAS TWENTY, I lived in Dinkytown in a second-floor apartment above a store called Just La
mps. My two friends, Sammy Theissen and Rose Baker, lived there with me. It was a bad, a horrible time. We'd all dropped out of school and we were hanging around these rocker types who knew how to make themselves look moody and sensitive while tromping all over other people's lives. We were doing drugs. Some scary things happened. I won't go into it. If Robert hadn't appeared to lead me away, I probably would have died there.
I mention this only because it's relevant.
Leaving Little T and his car in the parking lot of the condo unit where he lived, Trent and his friends took Cheryl to a similar place. The Sabotage Café is what it was called, and I'd known all along she'd end up there.
Throughout the nine years it was in business, the Sabotage Café had been an unofficial countercultural landmark, the place where misfits of all sorts met and mingled. This was where the Hare Krish-nas meditated over their tea, where the weathered hippies, still pulling their thinning hair into ponytails, tried for the nth time to settle the debate over whether the walk on the moon had been faked, where the junkies landed to nod out in peace and where the strays hid from the blistering wind. Now it was boarded shut, Trent said, because the cops had clamped down like they always did on anything that challenged the social order—scared, as they should be, of insurrection—but the truth was probably more blasé: shady things going on in the dimly lit corners, a nest of rats found by the health inspectors. The boys had shown up the winter before and taken over the ruined rooms on the second floor.
Cheryl hunkered down with them, that first night, in the large space that served as the living room—the Wreck Room, they called it—drinking beer and killing time. Two-by-fours rose at intervals from behind the jagged plasterboard where the top half of one wall had been partially torn away. The other walls were all dented and gouged, papered in grime and graffiti. There was no electricity, and the boys, even Mike, looked somehow hollow and pale in the weak beams of the flashlights they'd propped in the corners. The place both thrilled and repelled her. It was hardcore.
Speaking, as boys often do, in postulates and hypotheticals, Trent and Devin could have been talking about anything—Doctor Who, comic books, Romulan spacecraft. The topic they'd chosen was revolution.
“Fucking all you need is a couple of pipe bombs and fucking— bang—you fucking smash the window and the place goes up like a fucking hellhole. Piece of cake. Just like they did back in Seattle.” Trent threw his whole body into his words, and Cheryl, seated below him, could feel his emotions pressing into her through his knees.
“Pipe bombs are for pussies,” said Devin. “We should make, like, a dirty bomb.”
Mike threw a bottle cap at him. “You guys are a bunch of assholes,” he said.
“It's called civil disobedience,” Trent spat back. “Fucking fight the fucking power.”
Hunched forward in the beanbag, Mike aimed his beer at Trent. “If you pull that shit at Chipotle, I'll fucking report you myself.” He was intimidating. Muscular and severe. When he looked at her, Cheryl got the feeling that he was seeing through to the parts of herself she wanted to hide. She felt small and exposed, like an impostor, playing at nihilism, caught in the act of doing it wrong.
“What's the big whoop about Chipotle?” she asked.
“I work there.”
“It's owned by McDonald's,” said Trent.
Devin lobbed the bottle cap back at Mike, aiming for the top of his head. “And it's where he picks up his jailbait.”
Catching the bottle cap and spinning it around his fingers, Mike leaned back in the beanbag like a proud king. “Man,” he said, chuckling, “you should have seen the one today. She was like … damn. Maybe fifteen, sixteen, you know, still with the baby fat, and wearing one of those tiny little skirts—you know what I'm talking? Like two inches long? Like those fucking loincloths that start about there.” He drew his finger across his crotch. “Fucking …” His head rolled slowly back and forth, a connoisseur savoring a fine smell. “And no underwear.” He pulled a torn corner of violet notepaper from his pocket, held it high like a coin between two fingers. “You better believe I'm gonna tap that.”
The way the boys all laughed appalled her. She feared she'd made a mistake, letting Trent pull her into this crude den of theirs. Now she was stuck here. Prey. Unless Mike was boasting, putting on a display for his friends' benefit, and maybe trying to impress her as well. She admonished herself: stop being such a girl.
Trent held her shoulder steady with a firmness she chose to read as validation of her alarm. “See?” he said to Mike. “Fucking, you won't get that kind of ass in the Marines.” He let go, but the assurance he'd given her lingered.
“I'll get better than that, man. You know what those Arab chicks look like. Damn.”
She was still spacey, the tiniest bit stoned, and her mind leapt in unwanted directions, following synaptic trails thick with paranoia, rich with police officers chasing her through shadows. Though her father often came across as inattentive, she knew, he would set the system on her. She saw him on the phone, sitting behind a large computer console, telling the cops on patrol where to turn as he followed her movements on the screen in front of him. She had to keep herself off the grid if she didn't want to be dragged back home.
“See, Betty?” Trent popped her out of this nightmare. “Didn't I tell you Mike was a cocksucker?”
The other guys were gone. She gathered Trent toward herself like a comforter, enwrapped his lower lip in her own, but instead of settling onto the floor with her, he led her into the bedroom next door. Mike was crashed out in his underwear, asleep on an army cot, his clothes folded neatly in stacks below it. On the ceiling, where some boys might have taped centerfolds, he'd pasted a poster for the Marine Corps. The line where his space ended and Devin's began was marked by the rise of Devin's mountain of crap. Random cuts of plywood and broken umbrellas; rolled-up posters, yellowed and frayed at the edges; a coffeemaker missing its pitcher. So much junk was piled there he didn't even have room for a mattress. He'd just thrown himself on top of the overstuffed trash bags and dug out a little cradle. Trent's area was bordered by masses of books, stolen by the stack from Barnes & Noble. Using them as a defensive perimeter, he'd confiscated half the room. Behind this low barrier, his space was a near void: a tattered old Minnesota Vikings sleeping bag, a mildewed futon, an ashtray—that was it.
While Devin and Mike slept a few feet away, Trent twirled his hand around Cheryl's belly button. He removed her shirt and inched up her bra. His fingers roamed her body like metal detectors. He slipped one, two, under the lip of her shorts and scraped his nails along the fringe of her pelvis, knocking, can I come in, can I come in? She didn't know what he'd do if she said no, but she kept imagining Mike and Devin watching them.
“You don't want to do this,” he said.
She nodded. Then she shook her head no. Then for reasons she couldn't quite identify, she started to cry and he yanked his hand abruptly away. Her pussy stung like he'd just ripped off a band-aid. He hadn't meant to hurt her. The concern on his face said he hadn't meant to hurt her. He traced the line of her shoulder blade.
Then, tipping his head toward his friends' sleeping bodies, he said, “Is it too weird? Because they're here?”
It was and it wasn't. She didn't know what it was. She felt dumb. Conventional. But the alternative was too vast and overwhelming, filled with dangerous hidden consequences. She pounded her temple with the flat of her hand.
“Betty, if you don't want to do this, you should tell me to fuck off. You know what I'm saying? I'm not a dick. I'm not like Mike.”
This made her cry harder. She pulled him toward herself. She scratched at his arm, clawed at it, hating him, clinging to him. Somehow she ended up on top of him. A pool of her tears was forming on his chest, and for reasons she had no means of understanding, she felt like she was turning into me. Her rage and self-pity had blurred together. She placed her lips to the pool, then her ear to his heart— such a hollow sound, but heavy too; it sounded lik
e drowning.
“So,” he said quietly, “you do like me.” Muted by the lack of light in the room, his expression appeared almost tender.
“Yes,” she said. She couldn't remember what had set her off.
Some confusion shook through him. “But, don't love me, though, okay?” His voice was barely audible. “You love someone and you just get disappointed.” He slid out from under her and went up on an elbow. “You get all caught up and start needing each other and then all of a sudden you're no longer a person. And the other person's not a person, either. You're both just a collection of expectations. Responsibilities, you know what I mean? It's fucked. It becomes all, like, me, me, me.” For a second, he gazed at her. “Once you start to love me, you won't like me anymore.”
She wondered if he was speaking from experience. There was nothing he hadn't prodded with his mind, in search not only of the right answer, but of the hard one, the true one. He was challenging her now to join him in turning away from the world she'd been taught to trust. Here was a boy, she thought, who could help her burn the school down.
“That's cool,” she said. “I'm cool with whatever.”