Stick

by Andrew Smith

  So I didn’t really get the Sex part of the name, but I realized there wasn’t very much about sex I understood in the first place.

  No matter what, I knew I’d never be able to wear the shirt around my parents’ house, and that made it even more attractive to me. And if I brought the Sex Wax home and attempted to hide it in my room, it was a sure thing Mom would find it and throw a fit about me jacking off or something. So I was just a little bit sad thinking that my new favorite shirt, along with that amazing-smelling Sex Wax, would probably both have to be left in Aunt Dahlia’s care when Bosten and I went back home to Washington.

  * * *

  She didn’t make us get out of bed, either.

  The only reason I woke up the next morning was because I had to pee.

  And when I came out of the bathroom, Aunt Dahlia and the smell of bacon stopped me, and she took me by the hand and made me sit down at the kitchen table—barefoot and in my underwear—so I could eat breakfast while she cooked and talked to me.

  It really was as opposite to Washington as I could ever dream.

  Maybe things were supposed to be this way.

  “Do you like coffee?” she asked.

  “Uh. No, thank you.”

  “I guess it probably is bad for you, at your age, anyway.” Dahlia opened a fresh carton of milk and poured a glass. Then she put a full plate of bacon, eggs, and toast down on the table in front of me.

  “Thank you, Aunt Dahlia.”

  She scooted out a chair and sat beside me. “Oh, don’t be so formal, Stark. Just call me Dahlia. Everyone does.”

  “Okay.”

  She smiled. She looked so happy, just sitting there, watching me eat.

  I decided that being in California wasn’t so bad, after all.

  “What do you like to do?” Dahlia asked.

  “Huh?” I took a bite of toast.

  Dahlia frowned a bit, then stood up and moved around so she could sit next to me on my left side. She put her hand on my bare thigh. It felt almost funny, like being tickled. I thought it was maybe something real moms probably did all the time in California.

  “I heard you okay,” I said. I thought about it. I decided it probably wasn’t a good idea to tell her that I liked taking baths with Emily Lohman. I’d save that for another time when I didn’t have something to say. Because I got the idea Aunt Dahlia would probably be completely okay with me taking baths with a girl. “Uh. I don’t know what I like to do.”

  “Well. It’s a glorious day. I think after your brother has breakfast, we should all go out and explore the beach.”

  “We never get to stay in bed at our house. We might not see Bosten till tomorrow.”

  “Ha!” Dahlia laughed. A genuine, warm laugh.

  How could I not smile back at her?

  “There’s someone you might like to meet. Evan and Kim, the twins. I told them about you. They live two houses down. It’s important to make friends with people your own age, after all. You don’t want to be hanging around with me all the time.”

  “It’s not so bad,” I said.

  Just then, Bosten came into the kitchen, fully dressed, with a tucked and buttoned shirt.

  Dahlia hitchhiked a thumb at him and rolled her eyes for me, smiling.

  And Bosten said, “Stick, do you realize you’re sitting at the table in just your underwear?”

  Dahlia laughed, and I said, “I know. Pretty cool, huh?”

  Bosten looked at us both like we were crazy.

  I chewed a piece of toast. “I told Dahlia that in the State of Washington, thirteen-year-old boys make the rules in houses. I proclaim no pants at breakfast. Ever.”

  Aunt Dahlia nodded.

  And my brother dropped his pants and kicked them out into the living room. Then he sat down like that’s how you do things.

  I tapped his hand with my finger. I pointed at his shirt collar and shook my head disapprovingly. He grinned, made a ball with his flannel Washington-State collared shirt, and threw it out the kitchen door.

  Then I announced, “Now you may eat.”

  Bosten was the best person in the world at playing California.

  EVAN AND KIM

  We went through the gate in Dahlia’s fence and walked barefoot, out across the sand toward the jetty.

  “That’s Evan and Kim.” Dahlia pointed at two black figures bobbing like seals in the waves near the end of the rock breakwater. “I’m going back to clean up our breakfast. You two just sit and wait for them. I told them you’d be here. They’ll come in when they see you.”

  Bosten sat down next to me in the sand. It was so warm, we took our shirts off.

  “They surf here,” Bosten said.

  Behind the two kids on surfboards, miles out in the water, I could see the hazy outline of islands.

  I kicked my brother’s foot softly. “This is about the most bitchin’ place in the world.”

  “Stick?”

  “What?”

  “Do you ever wonder what—”

  Bosten began to ask something, but I cut him off. “No. Never.”

  Because I knew what he was going to say, and I wondered it all the time—what it would be like to live away from Mom and Dad. He knew it, too. He didn’t have to say it out loud.

  A swell came in. The deep green water rose up beyond the top of the jetty’s point, spitting white blobs in the air over the toothy rocks. I watched as the kids in the water both flattened out on top of their boards and began paddling diagonally toward the peak of the wave.

  I wondered if they used Sex Wax.

  One of the black figures nosed the surfboard back and spun out of the wave at its top, while the other pressed up, back bent, with straight arms, kicked into a squatting position, and, just like that, glided down the churning face of the wave, turning at the bottom, cutting back up, and then down again, until vanishing, completely swallowed in a tumbling froth of foam.

  Moments later, they both appeared, standing up in knee-deep water, walking out onto the beach toward me and Bosten with their boards, dangling cords that attached to their ankles, tucked under their arms.

  They nudged each other and nodded their chins at us. They looked like frogmen or something, wearing those black wetsuits, with just their tanned feet, hands, and faces sticking out from them.

  “Are you guys Dahlia’s nephews?” Evan asked.

  I looked at Bosten. He said, “Yeah. Hi.”

  “Hi.” Evan dropped his board on the sand in front of us, then bent down and unfastened the leash from his ankle. His sister unwrapped her leash from her foot, too. Drops of water from the girl’s board flicked onto my legs.

  Evan and Kim Hansen were fifteen. They looked like pictures of California kids you’d see in a magazine: bronze-skinned and lean, with long hair streaked golden from all the hours they obviously spent in the ocean. It took me a while to realize that my mouth kind of hung open when I looked at the girl. In fact, I wouldn’t have been surprised if I actually drooled. There was something about how that tight wetsuit clung to her body and made her look naked. I couldn’t help staring at the shape of her breasts, wondering what the salt water on her skin might taste like if I could lick her neck.

  I tried to think about anything else, but I couldn’t. All I could do was hope that proper etiquette would not require me to stand up any time soon. So I was happy when the twins sat down in the sand, cross-legged, in front of me and my brother.

  We introduced ourselves and reached across the gap between us to shake hands. Their palms felt cold and wet, and I could smell the ocean on them.

  Kim looked from me to Bosten.

  I think, at that precise moment, I became fully aware of how much things had changed inside me since the day Emily and I had taken that walk together, catching crabs on the beach back home, just a couple weeks earlier. Kim was the most attractive girl I’d ever seen in my life, I decided. Even sexier than Paul Buckley’s mom, and for me, that was admitting an enormous truth.

  “You have inter
esting names,” she said.

  “Everyone calls me Stick,” I said. I thought Bosten didn’t feel like talking, anyway, and I wanted Kim to look at me. I even stretched my foot out in the sand until my toes got daringly close to hers.

  “Why?” Kim asked.

  “Because of how tall he is,” Bosten explained.

  That totally ruined the moment.

  I felt myself stupidly getting jealous of my homosexual brother for talking to a girl who seemed like she wanted to flirt with him. And I knew, in horror, what was going to come next …

  “How tall are you?” Kim asked. “Stand up,

  Stick.”

  I felt like I was going to throw up. I tried thinking of any medical affliction—like a seizure or something—I could fake, just so I wouldn’t have to stand up in front of her and contend with the unforgiving boner that sprang up inside my shorts as soon as I saw Kim get out of the water, all glistening and smooth.

  That was the only time in my life that I was thankful for my missing, ugly ear.

  Because Evan leaned around to that side of me and said,

  “Cool,” when he noticed it, like it was a biker tattoo or something.

  I looked down at the sand between my feet. “I was born that way.”

  I didn’t want Kim to look at me anymore.

  But she laughed lightly, and said, “That’s nothing. Evan was born with three nipples.”

  I lifted my face. “Oh.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Show them, Ev.”

  Evan smiled and shrugged. “Whatever.”

  He snaked his arm behind his back and unzipped his wetsuit. I noticed he was a little embarrassed, and I kind of felt bad for him, too. I mean, I knew what it was like to have people look at you because you were born with something different about your body. But I was so relieved that the suggestion of having me stand up in front of Kim had been forgotten; and Evan seemed to tolerate our watching him as he peeled away the top half of his suit and kneeled before us in the sand, stretching the skin on his left chest tight with the fingers of one hand, and pointing out the extra nipple with his other.

  “See?” he said.

  “That’s kind of cool,” I said. “I think it’s a lot better to be born with spare parts than missing ones.”

  They both laughed about that.

  “Maybe we’re aliens,” Evan said. “From another planet or something.” He sat back, relaxed, with his knees bent and his arms propped on his surfboard.

  “Yeah.” I smiled at him, and then at Bosten. I felt like being here was okay, that Evan and Kim had instantly decided that we weren’t freaks or something, and I knew we would be friends. “A couple weeks ago, Bosten and me made people think there was a UFO attack.”

  * * *

  We sat there on the beach with them, telling our stories about Washington and listening to theirs about California, too. And both of them habitually kept looking out at the ocean, studying the waves.

  Finally, Kim said, “Do you guys ever surf up there?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. I sounded really stupid and decided I’d better shut up.

  “If you want to try and learn how, we got lots of extra stuff you could use,” Evan offered.

  “That would be really cool,” Bosten said. I looked at him, and thought he was finally beginning to snap out of his gloomy mood.

  “Bitchin’,” Evan said, and pushed himself to his feet. His butt was powdered white where the sand glued on to his wetsuit. The upper half of his suit hung down in front of him, a lifeless, headless, spineless, flopping extra black torso. “Let’s go to our house and get you some boards and wetsuits.”

  We started walking across the beach, following Evan and Kim. They left their boards, upside down so the wax wouldn’t melt, lying in the sand.

  And Kim asked, “Are you goofy or regular?”

  I was horrified.

  I glanced at Bosten, wondering what he was going to say to that. I was convinced that Kim’s question was just the slang, surfer way that California kids asked other kids if they were gay or not gay—since California kids were obviously so comfortable and open with things like extra nipples and Sex Wax and, I guess, being gay, too.

  Thank God Bosten was so cool about stuff like that.

  He said, “I don’t know what that even means.”

  Kim laughed and brushed her hand on his bare shoulder. I hated myself for feeling like Bosten and I would end up being in some kind of competition with each other. I never competed against Bosten for anything, and the thought made me mad.

  She said, “It means left- or right-handed.”

  At least that was a relief.

  “Whichever one’s left is me,” I said.

  “Goofy,” Evan said. “Like me.”

  “Oh. Yeah. I’m goofy. That makes Bosten regular.”

  * * *

  “If you need to pee, just do it in your wetsuit. It makes you warmer,” Evan explained.

  The four of us had paddled out beyond the shorebreak, near the end of the jetty.

  “Boys are so gross,” Kim said.

  “You’re a liar if you expect anyone to believe you don’t do it, too, Kimmy,” Evan said.

  “Well, I don’t.”

  “Are you really supposed to do that? Just pee in your suit?” I asked.

  “I do it all the time,” Evan said.

  That kind of made me feel a little bit weirded out, as Emily would say, since Bosten and I were both wearing wetsuits that belonged to Evan. And, before we put them on, Evan explained to us that we were supposed to be completely naked underneath them, too, which made me feel especially exposed, and peed on at the same time, in front of his sister.

  Good thing the water was so cold.

  After he told us that, I actually did consider peeing, just to see if it would warm the inside of the suit up a bit, but I was too nervous to get anything out.

  I’d never been in water like this before. It felt dangerous and thrilling at the same time, kind of like I was flying.

  They used Sex Wax, too. I took particular pleasure in smearing that wonderful-smelling, gooey stuff on the flat deck of my board before following Evan and Kim out into the surf.

  Evan showed us how to sit on our boards, straddling them with our feet below us. Bosten was good at it, but balance was always a tricky thing for me. And after we had squeezed our naked selves into those skintight suits at the twins’ house, Evan and Kim taught us how to get up onto our feet. They laid our boards across Evan’s bed, so we could practice snapping our legs up quickly beneath our chests.

  It seemed easy enough.

  I was goofy-foot. My left foot always wanted to be in back, just like Evan told me it would—just like Evan’s was. They showed us how to look out at the humpback lines of swells stacking up on the horizon of the sea, how to find a peak and paddle with it.

  But sitting out on the surfboard made the waves look monstrously bigger than they’d appeared from the warmth and safety of the sand.

  “This is how you do it.”

  Evan caught the first wave. I watched him stand and drop down, entirely vanishing in front of the wall of roiling water, riding it backside, goofy-foot, as the wave broke down the shore away from the jetty. And I saw him come back up to the top of the wave, the nose of his board breaking up into the air like the fin on a shark, spraying an arc of water droplets, as Evan held his arms out and twisted his hips sharply, to ride his board back down the face.

  It was beautiful and terrifying.

  I didn’t know whether I’d have the guts to try it myself. I was content with just sitting out there and watching everyone else, but then Bosten paddled into the next wave that came. It carried him away, so fast, and I saw him push up to his feet for no more than a second before wiping out, face-first, into the whitewater.

  He howled with joy, a sound I’d never heard coming from my brother before.

  It was pure.

  Real.

  I was alone out there with Kim.


  “He’s really cute,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  I mean, what was I going to say to that? No, he’s ugly. And he’s gay, besides.

  I loved Bosten too much to screw with him like that.

  “Does he have a girlfriend in Washington?”

  She put me in a terrible spot. There was no chance of doing a good thing for either one of them, no matter how I answered her. I saw Bosten and Evan in the wash near shore, struggling to paddle back to our spot against the stacked waves.

  “Yeah. He does,” I lied. Well, it was a 50-percent lie, if there is such a thing. And then I winked at her and added, “But it’s always worth a try, Kim. You never know with my brother.”

  Then she put her hand on mine and smiled. “Thanks, Stick. I think you’re cute, too.”

  * * *

  I am ugly.

  * * *

  We stayed out in the water until the sun went down.

  Bosten caught on fast to the technique of surfing. He looked like he’d been doing it all his life. And after many attempts, I finally managed to stand up twice before the day was over. It was a rush; it was terrifying, and I think I swallowed ten gallons of the Pacific Ocean. But at the end of it all, it was one of the best days I ever had.

  Carrying our boards, wiping forearms across noses that leaked a continuous stream of seawater, we walked, the four of us—wet, barefoot, and sandy—down Ocean Avenue, the street that ran parallel to the beach.

  It felt like my brother and I belonged there.

  And Bosten, Evan, and I all had our wetsuits unzipped, tops peeled down to our waists so they flopped in front of our knees. But I had to hold on to mine with my left hand to keep it from falling past my hips. I was skinnier than Evan, so every few steps I took Evan’s wetsuit would slip down and show my scrawny, white, Pacific Northwest butt to anyone following behind, which happened to be Kim.

  “Maybe tomorrow we could go to C Street,” Kim said.

  I didn’t care if C Street was a leper colony where they tortured you, if Kim wanted to go there, she could count me in.