Almost Kings (3 page)

6.

Two hours later, most of the party had cleared out. Kallea tagged along with Lizzie when she drove Emily home, the car's windows open, the younger girls' heads stuck out the sides to make sure they wouldn't puke on the seats. Hers was one of the last cars to leave.

I walked back through the house and out through the sliding glass door in back to see who was still around. I counted only six of us now. The randoms, the hangers-on, the couples, the football fanboys, the girls, the freshmen, sophomores and juniors were gone. Now it was just me and the Kings.

They sat in Reggie's backyard on logs and old lawn chairs around a fire that lit the Kings' faces red and orange. Everyone was drunk and still drinking. They laughed and threw things in the fire, howling at bad jokes or when beer cans exploded in the flames, and for a moment, I saw them as five different breeds of dog.

Miller: a poodle, pampered and well-groomed.

Reggie: a bull dog, fat and waddling.

Wood: a lap dog, small, forever barking for attention.

Hass: a doberman, sleek, protective, dangerous.

Truck: a golden retriever, the quiet pack alpha.

“What you give this one?” Hass asked. He held my yearbook in his hands, the page turned to my grade, the new freshman class. Reggie bent over to look at the photo Hass was pointing out with a pen.

“Maybe a four?”

“You think anything with a wet hole should get a four. Girl gets a two.”

Hass wrote a two under the girl's picture and handed it to Wood.

“Gina, Gina, Gina,” said Wood. “I would definitely hit that. Sober.”

“That's not a score,” said Hass. “And she's like two inches taller than you. Maybe we need to get you some heels.”

“I'd give her a solid eight,” said Wood, ignoring Hass. “Cherry, I bet.”

Miller looked over Wood's shoulder and nodded.

“Definitely an eight, but Zack told me he hit it already.”

“Fuck Zack,” said Hass. “He probably paid her. Preppy queer.”

Miller self-consciously ran a hand through his hair. He was the only one of them without a buzz cut.

They kept passing the book around the circle, rating the girls. I sat sunken into my chair, watching them and then the fire, then them, then the fire. The knees of my jeans felt hot enough to burst into flame, and I didn't move them.

“Bug!” said Hass. “It's your little friend! What you give her?”

I startled back to full-consciousness as Hass threw the yearbook in my lap. When I looked down, I saw that all the girls up to Kallea had been scored.

“You ever hit that?” asked Hass. “You know if she's got her v-card?”

“No way he's stuck it in her,” said Wood. “But you can tell he wants to.”

“Doesn't mean you can just give her a ten, though,” says Hass. “You got to be objective, you know. Got to see her as part of a spectrum and shit.”

I held the pen over her photo.

“You do have a dick, right?” asked Wood.

I wrote a six under her picture.

“Oh, hi, Kallea!” said Hass, and I almost fell out of my seat. I turned around to see Reggie pursing his lips at me and pressing his man boobs together to make cleavage. Everyone laughed hard, even Truck. I passed him the yearbook, and he rated the next girl. They were almost done.

“Get those last ones finished,” said Hass. “Everyone bring their money?” He took five twenties out of his back pocket, counted them out, and stuffed them into an envelope. “Winner take all. Bug, I'm sure Reggie can stake you if you want in.”

The other guys laughed again.

“What's so funny?” I asked. I tried to stand but couldn't find my feet.

Hass stopped laughing, but he still wore a huge grin.

“Didn't you hear?” he asked. “Little Truck's a man now.”

My brother wasn't smiling. He took a long drink of beer and threw his empty into the fire.

“Let him play if he wants,” Truck said.

They finished rating the last girl, then flipped to the back page, where Hass had written a brief contract. One by one, the Kings read it over, signed it, and passed it along. When it got to me, I found the words written at the top of the page: “I solemnly swear to sleep with as many freshman girls as humanly possible.” Below were a series of rules, but I was too drunk to read them in much detail.

“What is this?” I asked.

“A little game,” said Hass. “Now either sign it or give it to me.”

My head throbbed, and the heat of the fire felt hot enough to eat through me. I imagined a drop of my flesh falling from my forehead like water and dripping down onto the book like bacon fat. The Kings looked at me, waiting. I signed my name.

7.

The next morning, Truck explained the game as we drove home and I nursed my hangover with Gatorade and a Power Bar. The rules were simple: half-points if the girl went down on you, full for sex, double if it was her first time. We'd use the scores we'd written in my yearbook. Every Monday, we'd meet up at Reggie's place to tally up points and see who was winning.

I opened the yearbook on my lap and looked through the scores. Some were lower than I would have awarded, some higher. I'd talked with friends about which girls I thought were hot before, but I'd never seen it laid out this way: formal and precise. Reading over each number, they became true. Meghan Childress was an eight; Carrie Newman, a five.

Looking back, it’s hard to understand the sense of reality that those numbers took on. My roommate now dates nothing but short, fat, brown-haired girls—ones I’d never ask out. But to him those girls are nines and tens. In high school, though, the numbers were as entrenched in my reality as the hours of the day or the names of the streets: as real as any manmade system laid over the world.

Everything was too bright. Light bounced off the dashboard and down the tunnels of my eyes, no matter how hard I squinted, and Truck's cheap silver engagement ring caught the sun each time he made a turn.

“What about Lizzie?” I asked.

“I'm not playing,” he said. “This is something for the rest of the guys.”

He explained more: arcane rules for threesomes, anal, Dirty Sanchezs and Glass Bottom Boats and Abe Lincolns—sex acts I'd never heard of but whose names and explanations made me laugh. The winner would get the envelope full of cash, but that wasn't the point.

“This is about senior year, last chance to do this kind of shit,” said Truck. “Next year, half of those guys'll be working at ranches. The other half'll probably be training for Iraq or pumping gas. But this year, we really are Kings. Last year of that. So we're going out on top.”

I nodded.

“No one's actually expecting you to play,” he said. “Don't worry about it.”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“And remember, no one can know. Not that little girlfriend of yours, not anyone.”

At school on Monday, I saw the numbers everywhere. I'd always thought Taylor Hanson was hot, but now wherever she walked, a “10” seemed to float in the air above her head like a halo. Girls I'd thought were cute became “1”s and “2”s, practically untouchable. I couldn't see any freshman girl walk through the halls without thinking “3”, “8”. Hass later told me that he came to imagine the numbers as tattoos inscribed on each girl's lower back or below the bellybutton, handy labels to remind him of their values as he went inside them.

When I saw Kallea that first day, the “6” I'd given her was stitched onto her jeans, written in sloppy pen across her hand, hanging as a pendant from her neck. Of course she deserved better. So why had I written that number? Was it just the shame of knowing my desire was so transparent to my brother and his friends, or was I trying to protect her, low-balling her score so she wouldn't be a target? I still don’t know.

“What's with you?” she asked, and I apologized for spacing out. “You're not still hungover are you?”

“I'm fine. How was the ride home?”

“Pretty cool. Except Emily threw up again. Your brother's fiancée was cool about it, though. We just hosed down the side of her car when we got to Emily's house so the throw-up wouldn't dry.”

“Sounds like fun.”

“How was it after I left?” she asked. “Did you get in some solid 'bro-time'?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Something like that.”

“So when's the next one?”

“The next party?” My heart was beating faster now. “I don't know.”

“Well, when you find out—” she said, trailing off, and reached over to squeeze my hand under my desk.

Kallea wasn’t the only one who wanted to come to the next party. At lunch, Melissa Hernandez and Annie Collins came by asking if I could get them invited next time around. The three of us had become friends during a field trip to the Redwoods when Kallea hadn’t been able to come.

Over the course of a five-mile hike through the dark underbrush, the girls had forced me to confess my crush on Kallea before revealing their own: Melissa’s on a shy ninth grader at a nearby town’s high school, Annie’s on Joe Green, the soccer team’s star goalie. I’d been good at putting girls at ease in middle school, like a puppy or a gay best friend.

“I heard you got Kallea invited to Reggie’s party,” said Melissa. “You forget my number or something?” A curl of her dark hair had pulled loose from her headband and curled into a “6” around her neck. She’d lost twenty pounds over the summer since her yearbook photo was taken, and I wondered if the Kings would adjust her score. No, they’d written everything in pen, not pencil.

“Are you two going out now?” asked Annie, smiling, revealing the purple rubber bands around her braces. I imagined Hass cutting his tongue on the metal.

“We’re just friends.”

“Too bad,” she said. “You’d be cute together.”

“Look,” I said. “I’m not even sure my brother’s friends having another party anytime soon.”

“Sure,” said Melissa. “Just, you know—if you hear anything.”

Other people I knew, guys and girls, would also ask for invitations over the next week: Sam Moon, who couldn’t wait to see the short skirts I told him about, and Amanda Sylar, who hadn’t realized who my brother was until now. I held them all off, especially the girls, with promises of “we’ll see” and “I’ll let you know.” Every time a girl asked for an invitation I saw her number—half, full, double—and pictured Hass, Wood, or—god forbid—Reggie on top of her, pressing her chest down with one hand, unbuttoning his belt with the other.

When I imagined sex in those days, it was never how it would feel for me, but what it might be like for the girl. The overpowering weight of a guy on top of you, the sting of your flesh breaking as he went inside, and the pain dulling as he pushed in over and over. I was younger then, and thought of most sex as a kind of violation.

Even when I imagined myself with Kallea, the act was tinged with violence: the image of her face twisted in pain and pleasure or the feeling that she was trying to struggle out from under me and I was pressing her down with all my strength.  Nights, after Truck left with his friends, I imagined Kallea over me, in front of me, beside me, the warm wet of her breaking for me. I wanted it, and hated myself for wanting it.

Only Truck and Lizzie seemed to exist outside this brutal world, not because of the rings they wore, the baby she carried, or how long they’d been together, but because Lizzie was Lizzie. She talked dirty and pushed the Kings around, and if I ever thought of her and my brother in bed, she was always the one on top, not hurting at all, just riding him until she got the pleasure she was after and rolling off him like a tired husband.

After school on Thursday, I headed over to the auto shop where Truck and Hass worked. It was a part-time thing, an off-the-books apprenticeship that paid just over minimum wage, but Truck had talked to his boss about moving up to manager once he was out of school and the baby came. For now, the extra money helped: Dad’s disability barely covered rent and groceries.

The shop looked like it had been built in 1990 and lain untouched since. A sun-faded cardboard cutout of Clyde Drexler stood next to old bikini calendars and Keystone Ultra posters with foamy girls nuzzling beer bottles. Every time I went in, they seemed to have the same old Chevy propped up on the pneumatic lift, a steady drop of oil echoing through the big, empty space. Their only customers were returning customers, old ranchers who’d been coming here for two decades. Everyone else used the Jiffy Lube or the dealerships a town over.

The place belonged to Hass's uncle, but Hass himself didn’t want to be there any longer than he had to. He was all for getting the hell out of Jefferson as soon as high school ended. He'd already talked to an army recruiter, and he'd worked on Truck to join up too, until Lizzie saw the “+” on her pregnancy test.

Truck was under a beat-up black Jeep when I walked in, his work boots sticking out from under the frame. Bad rock-rap blasted from a worn-out boom box: Truck and his friends always sang along to Linkin Park and stuff like that on the radio, but they were too big for anyone to make fun of them.

“Hey there, little player,” said Hass as I walked into the garage. “You put any points on the board yet?”

I shook my head.

“Too bad. Only the first week, though. And that little girly of yours seemed ready to ride. Shouldn’t be too long now.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Hope so.”

“Don’t hope so. Make it so. I saw you around some girls at school. They your friends or something?”
“I guess so. They’re in my classes and stuff.”

“They’re kind of hot, right?”

“Sixes and sevens,” I said.

“Yeah, but those chicks are definitely cherries. And they’re tired of it. You get them to come out to one of our parties, I can fix that for ‘em.”

Truck pulled himself out from under the car and nodded hello. He set a muffler on a table and wiped his fingers on an old rag. Truck had always been comfortable with mechanical stuff. Like me, he was good with numbers, but he preferred to work with his hands. Back when Dad still worked at the ranch, he'd shown Truck how to fix water systems and riding mower engines. If not for Dad’s accident, Truck might have ended up working there too.

“Bug here’s gonna get some of those hot little freshmen out to party with us,” said Hass. “I’m definitely gonna stick that little redhead. I think Wood gave her an eight.”

“What you doing here?” Truck asked me. “What you want?”

“There’s pretty much nothing in the cupboard,” I said. “I was thinking of making grilled cheese and tomato soup for dinner. You want to go shopping after work?”

“Screw tomato soup,” said Hass. “We got plans for tonight, right Truck? We’re thinking about cruising out to the lake. Bug could call up a couple of his friends and bring them along. Isn’t that right?”

“Sorry,” said Truck. “I’m actually heading over to Lizzie’s, and I’m sure Ted’s got some homework to catch up on, especially after he wasted all last weekend hanging out with us or hung-over.” He dug around in his pocket with a grease-black hand. “Here. Bike to the store and fit what you can in your backpack for now. And try not to let Dad drink more than a couple.” He found a roll of bills, peeled off two twenties, and held them out to me. I took the money and put it in my pocket, careful to avoid the smudges from his fingers. “Who the Giants playing tonight?”

“Padres.”

“Good,” he said. “They’ll probably win that one.”

That night, the Giants went down by eight runs early, and Dad was three glasses of whiskey in before I even finished heating the soup. When the Padres knocked in another homer in the fourth, he slammed his glass down so hard that it broke in his hand, and he started bleeding everywhere.

“What you looking at?” he shouted. “Get me a god-damned towel.”

I handed it to him as he pulled a shard of glass from his skin.

“Worthless sacks of—we’re supposed to be all about pitching. We damn sure don’t got any kind of offense. Sabean needs to read a goddamned copy of
Moneyball
or this kind of horseshit is just going to keep—” He took a deep breath. “Sorry about that.” He held the towel tight around his hand. “Maybe I’ll turn in early tonight. Listen to the game in my room.”

He rolled his chair back from the table and then down the hall. With his hand messed up like that, he winced when he gripped the right wheel, but I knew better than to offer help. I took some paper towels and cleaned the glass and blood from the table, then set a place for myself and started eating. I put the game back on and took up my dad’s notes, marking each pitch: inside, outside, high, low.

When some ads came on, I ran a load of laundry, moved it to the dryer in the seventh, and started folding it in my bedroom once the game was over. I felt like I was doing laundry for the three bears: everything small, medium, and large. It was easy to tell whose was whose.

The door creaked open behind me, and I turned to see Lizzie. She smiled and whispered hello.

“I let myself in. Didn’t want to wake your dad,” she said. “Your brother here?”

“He’s not with you?” I put a massive clump of Truck’s socks in his drawer.

“No. He must be out with Hass and them again. He didn’t say anything?”

“No,” I said.

She stood there awkwardly, watching me fold t-shirts. She laughed softly.

“Who taught you how to do that?”

“Dad.”

“Yeah, well, you’re going to leave a wrinkle in the collars that way. Here, let me show you.”

She took a shirt and folded the sleeves behind the chest.

“There,” she said. “You’ll look much better. I’m sure your little girlfriend will appreciate that.”

“You hungry?” I asked. “You want a cheese sandwich?”
Lizzie patted her belly.

“Dude, I’m always hungry.”