by Nikki Pink
Bottle raised his hand up and made a circling motion with his finger. Even I, who knew nothing about bikers, could recognize what it meant: it was time to roll. The other bikers started their engines and the quiet neighborhood was filled with the sounds of powerful engines and the smell of petroleum fumes mixed the acridity of the smoke pouring out of my home.
We rolled slowly to the intersection at the end of the street a few yards away. I looked back over my shoulder and shook my head slowly as I took a final look at my former home. I had been so excited a couple of weeks ago when I’d happily signed the lease. Now it had, quite literally, all gone up in smoke.
We turned at the intersection and my house swung out of view. Bottle let his motorcycle loose and I gasped as we soared away.
Flying down the streets of Farmington I realized that I now had nothing. No friends, no home, no car and almost no money. I had nothing. I was nothing. And I felt strangely liberated by this fact.
On the edge of town we passed a fire truck, blue lights spinning as it headed back the way we’d come. It paid us no mind as we soared away, my untamed hair whipping in the wind as I headed toward my uncertain future.
The clubhouse was more lively when we returned. There were more motorcycles parked outside as well as a couple of pickup trucks. A couple of girls who looked to still be in their teens were leaning against a truck sharing a cigarette. I saw them eye Bottle as we headed toward the double door entrance, their lascivious desire easy to read as they pushed out their chests and showed off their legs as he passed.
I trailed just behind Bottle, and one of the girls caught my eye. She gave me an unimpressed look and blew a stream of smoke my way, obviously annoyed to see me, a new face, trailing behind ‘their’ man.
“Come see me later, girls,” I heard Twist say behind me as I entered. I didn’t hear their answer but I could sense their derision even from where I was. I knew why - they wanted fully patched members of the club, not hangabouts or prospects.
Bottle, Gauge, T-Bone and I sat down at a table for four while Twist hovered over us.
“Twist. Four beers. Crazy-eyes, give us a description or something to work with. We’ll put the word out. Then you can tell us about him in detail.”
Crazy-eyes huh? He was probably right, I barely recognized myself in the mirror any more. As I had turned from a girl to an adult I’d found the person I saw in the mirror less and less recognizable. As my situation became less stable and my behavior more erratic I’d avoided looking into mirrors, avoiding my eyes when I was forced to use a reflection to apply makeup to my stranger’s face.
It was time to get down to business. “His name is Dewey Roland Finklestein—”
I was interrupted by laughter.
“For reals?” asked Bottle.
I nodded. “I know, he sounds like a dork...”
More laughter. “We’re supposed to take him seriously, with a name like that?” asked T-Bone.
I nodded again, a little exasparated. He was dangerous, no matter how dorky his name. “Do you want me to finish or not?”
In a low voice Gauge said, “Let her finish.”
The laughter subsided.
“He’s twenty-eight years old. Sandy blond hair, in a side parting. He’s fit. Really fit. He runs and lifts weights, he used to wrestle. He’s not massive like a bodybuilder, but he’s strong. And he looks like... a good guy.”
“A good guy?”
“I mean, like a good church going guy or something. Well dressed, never a hair out of place, shirt always freshly pressed.”
T-Bone let out a noise that might have been a chuckle. “A real boy scout, huh?”
I nodded. He most definitely was not a boy scout, but he had the look.
“Well, he’d stand out in this town. Ain’t too many people dressed like that around here.”
I nodded. Although I’d only been there a couple of weeks the only time I’d seen anyone as well turned out as Dewey had been a few young men heading to Sunday morning worship - the rest of the time this town was more redneck casual than preppy boy scout.
Twist came back with five beers and set four of them down. Bottle raised his eyebrows at him. He didn’t need to say anything. The young man gulped and set the last beer down on the table in front of us.
“You’ve got shit to do, Twist.” Bottle relayed a description of Dewey. “Put the word out everywhere. Check every motel, hotel, halfway-house and fuckin’ campsite within twenty miles of here, and tell every last prospect and hangabout that if they ever want to have a chance of getting patched they better be out with their eyes fucking peeled. I want this boyscout-fuckhead found. And soon.”
Twist nodded. “I’m on it.”
He began to turn away. “Wait,” I said, “He’s dangerous. He may look preppy, but he’s strong, and vicious. Be fucking careful. Okay?”
Twist let out a derisory snort. “He don’t know about me.”
The other men looked at each other as if in momentary confusion. Then, T-Bone smacked his thigh, Gauge shook his head in disbelief while Bottle gave out a kind of shrieking half-laugh. “Don’t know about you, huh? Tough guy Twist?”
Gauge’s gravelly voice was serious. “Listen to the woman Twist. No offense, but I saw you fly fifteen feet when a breeze picked you up last week.”
There were chuckles around the table at Gauge’s obvious exaggeration.
“You fuckin’ call if you find him, no heroic shit. Got it?”
Twist nodded and shuffled awkwardly. “Right.”
The men laughed again. “Alright, fuck off!” said Bottle good-naturedly. He clearly had a soft spot for the younger guy, even if they were somewhat mean to him. It was because he wasn’t a fully patched member yet, I guessed.
Twist scurried away to a group of long-haired hangabouts lounging around a table, where he began to speak in earnest. The club members’ watched him for a moment, before turning their attention back to me.
Bottle looked me in the eyes, “Alright, give us a bit more to go on. Why the fuck is he after you so bad? You’re a good looking girl, don’t get me wrong, but still...” his voice trailed off.
A good looking girl huh? Not bad yourself bike-boy. “It’s going to take a while. I need to tell you it from the start, from when we met. So you can understand what he’s like.”
“Alright, get to it. Hopefully we’ll be able to use some of this information.”
I took a big sip of beer as repressed memories began to flow back. I felt myself shivering lightly as I began to tell them about Dewey.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Karen
I was a happy girl. I was a happy girl. We weren’t rich, but my home life wasn’t bad. I had a Mom and a Dad, and a sister five years older than me. Mom wasn’t even sick back then, when it started. We had a house, nothing fancy, but the neighborhood was decent, my school was as safe as any building full of dumb horny teens can be, and the local community was friendly. Was friendly.
In the summer before our final year of junior high we got new neighbors, and of course I was excited at first. Would there be a girl I could be friends with? Would there be a cute older guy I could sneak out at night to see?
I was disappointed when I saw what the moving-truck-fairy had bought: a chubby, sandy-haired boy who talked about video games as a substitute for a personality.
“Hi, I’m Dewey, you play Halo?” he had asked me, looking down and shuffling nervously. We were in my back yard, being forced to socialize by parents who love to inflict that kind of torture on their adolescent offspring. Mom and Dad had invited the new neighbors over for a welcome barbecue and beers. Beers for Dad, anyway. The neighbors didn’t drink.
We sat drinking sodas while I tried to be friendly, but we had almost nothing in common then. We liked different movies and different music. He didn’t read, I did. He played video games, I played the occasional game of Tetris. And his name was Dewey which immediately made me think of the weird younger kid from Malcolm in the Middle.<
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“How’s school? You’re going into eighth grade too right?” he asked me. I blinked at him in confusion. He couldn’t be the same age as me, could he? This harmless chubby boy looked to be at least three years younger than me. I couldn’t believe he’d be finishing up junior high with me.
In stunned disbelief I told him about the school, about the teachers, about the cliques. I wondered how he’d fit in (turns out, he didn’t. Not at first.) I told him about just how god-awful the cafeteria food was. I couldn’t help him when he asked about a video game club.
And that was it, for the next year or so. Sure we saw each other passing in the hallways at school, or around the neighborhood, but that’s all we did - pass each other and exchange a quick greeting. We weren’t friends; barely even acquaintances.
But what I didn’t realize was that something was happening to him. Something amazing - at least at first. When puberty finally hit him it was kind. No ugly acne or gangly limbs for him, instead the chubby boy turned into a golden young man. Over the course of a few months he shot up in height and his voice deepened. As his shoulders broadened his fat seemed to turn to muscle and his nervous grin turned into an infectious smile.
The fat didn’t just disappear on its own of course; as his body changed, so did his mind. His interest in video games waned and instead he became interested in fitness. I’ll confess I laughed the first morning we saw him running outside.
Mom and I were sitting by the window on a Saturday morning when we saw him half-shuffling, half-jogging down the street past Dad’s pickup which was parked in the driveway.
“Uhoh, zombie invasion” Mom had said, and we’d laughed. But it wasn’t a laughing matter for long. He kept it up. Day after day, week after week, he was out there every morning or evening. Rain or shine, snow or sleet, he’d be pounding the pavement, a look of grim determination on his face.
Mom’s somewhat unkind comment on the first day later changed to an impressed cry of “Look at him go!”
He started wrestling too, and he applied the same grim determination to wrestling as he did to running, always first to practice and last to leave, always looking for someone to grapple with one last time before calling it a day, and even asking older students for extra coaching.
Although the transformation was rapid, it took some time for me to catch on. Even though he developed into a good looking young man before my eyes I didn’t recognize it at first; he was still the chubby, geeky Halo-kid to me.
We only see what we expect to see, so while he bloomed right in front of my eyes I was blind to it
I had one real close friend then. Katie. We called ourselves blood-sisters, like blood brothers, only we were girls. My real blood sister was away at the state university by then, and she was much older than me anyway so Katie was much more like a sister to me than my real one.
It was Katie who pointed him out to me, or at least pointed out what he had become. It was a warm day late in the spring and we were in my bedroom chatting and gossiping.
I was lying on my bed holding a Seventeen magazine while she was staring out the window. “Yu-mmy”
I looked up at, a quizzical expression on my face. “What?”
“Not what dummy, who.”
I pulled myself up from the bed and went to investigate, peering out of the window. My room was on the second floor at the back of the house, and it commanded a view over not just our yard, but also that of the neighboring two houses as well.
When I saw what Katie was looking at it was like a veil had been lifted from my eyes.
I sucked in air in surprise as I realized that my dorky little neighbor had turned into a bona fide hottie. He was shirtless in his backyard, a dumbbell in each hand, doing bicep curls, his skin slick with sweat.
“I could eat him up,” she announced.
I hadn’t quite grasped this new reality of the transformed dork next door. “Uh, yeah.” My voice was weak with hesitation.
Katie turned to look at me, her hazel eyes twinkling with mischief. “What? You don’t think he’s de-lish-ious?” she asked, emphasizing each syllable
“Well—”
“You don’t just wanta eat him up? Huh?”
I laughed and gave her a little push. “Shut up. He’s a dork.”
Katie raised her eyebrows. “Doesn’t look like a dork to me.”
“And he looks like a twelve year old.”
Katie turned and looked pointedly out the window at the boy who most certainly didn’t look like a twelve year old, before turning back to face me. She had a concerned look on her face as she raised a tanned hand to my face and waved it in front of my eyes. “Kaz,” she said, her tone serious, “can you see my hand? Have you gone blind?”
I laughed and swatted her hand away before turning around and diving back onto my bed.
I rolled onto my back and spoke again. “I guess he’s changed a bit. I swear last time I looked at him he was a pudgy little pig boy.”
My friend laughed. “You need to pay more attention to your surroundings. You need to be more observant. You’ll never make CSI!”
I laughed, though I was a little offended. Back then, I wanted to be a crime scene investigator. I had my whole life ahead of me then, it was certainly a possibility. Was, a possibility. That changed though, he saw to that.
“Come on. Let’s take him something to drink.”
She really seemed keen on getting to know my neighbor. I felt a little embarrassed though, since I hadn’t spoken to him in months. It would look so obvious if we showed up offering drinks. Wouldn’t it? “Why don’t we go to the mall or something?”
Katie came and stood over me. “Nuh-uh. No way. The mall’s boring. The guy next door though?” Her look turned lascivious, and she slowly licked her plump limps as she leaned over me.
“Eww, you’re gross.”
She grabbed my hand and gave it a yank. “Come on.”
And that was that. We were going to see Dewey, the ex-dork-turned-studmuffin next door.
We walked around the side of his house to his back yard. He didn’t see us at first, and we stood watching him from behind as he lifted his weights over his head, exercising his shoulders, letting out gasps and quiet grunts as he pushed himself. He was only wearing basketball shorts and bright white sneakers, his upper body bare and glistening and golden in the afternoon sun, his young muscles visibly contracting and straining under his tight, lightly tanned skin.
Katie leaned over, her breath warm in ear “I could just eat him up,” she said for the eight hundredth time since she’d spotted him. She seemed to have an obsession with eating him it seemed.
I couldn’t help but giggle, and gave her a dig in her side with my fingers. This caused her to giggle too, and a moment later he was turning around to find two teenage girls, t-shirts tied up to expose bare midriffs, laughing and clutching cans of soda.
Katie composed herself. “Hey hon, we thought you looked thirsty.”
Hon? It was one of the weird and endearing things about Katie that she seemed to start to speak like an old woman when she tried to flirt.
“We brought you a soda,” I said as I proffered a can of cola shyly. How the tables had turned since our first meeting a little over a year ago, when he was the awkward one, and I was the confident ‘older’ one. Now he was a good head taller than me, and as he stepped towards me I saw the muscles of his abs ripple. I bit my lower lip as his hands closed over the can, his warm fingers touching mine as he did so.
“Thanks, Karen.” His voice was warm and rich, so different to the squeak he used to put out. I didn’t realize it then, but Katie was annoyed that he’d only thanked me, not her. His simple thank you was the first chink in our friendship.
He wiped a hand over his brow and a couple of droplets of sweat fell to the brown grass below. His eyes bore into mine and he gave me a grin — the first time I noticed that infectious smile — as the can popped and hissed as he cracked it open. I couldn’t turn away, couldn’t if I’
d wanted to, and I didn’t want to. It was game over for me.
“I appreciate it,” he said as he lifted the can in thanks before raising it to his lips and tilting his head back, our eyes finally breaking contact as he closed them against the bright sky. As he gulped the drink down greedily I felt a jab in my side and turned my head to see my friend raising her eyebrows and staring at me open mouthed. She didn’t need to speak, back then I could read her face like a text message, and it was broadcasting He is so into you!
He lowered the can with a smile. “That was great, I needed that.”
I was grinning too, and I continued to grin when he asked if I wanted to go and see a movie with him the next day. Of course, idiot that I am, I accepted, and that’s when it began.
***
I hadn’t finished telling them everything. Hell, I’d barely started telling them everything when I started to sob. I couldn’t help it, it just happened. I’d avoided thinking about those early months and years for so long, and it hurt so bad it just overwhelmed me.
Those early days. Shit. When I thought I was in love with him, when I thought he was in love with me. God. I was so dumb. But when the memories came rushing back I couldn’t control myself, I just started sobbing, unable to continue.
When Bottle offered me his hand I couldn’t help but take it, and before I knew it we were both standing as he awkwardly wrapped his arms around me and I sobbed into his chest. It wasn’t long, just two or three minutes, but it was the first time I’d had someone hold me like that in years.