Stick (2 page)

I couldn't look at her; I was too embarrassed.

And she was perfect.

*   *   *

There was nothing
between me and Emily that wasn't held steady by the anchor of our friendship.

I didn't think about girls the way other boys did. I didn't know that either of us was ready for that. We liked catching crabs and hiding in Bosten's fort.

Kids in eighth grade liked nipping at you. Worse than cornered crabs, even if you weren't missing any parts.  

And for some reason, Emily wasn't like that. She never put up with the kids with claws.

But that day, Emily planted a miracle in me.

BOSTEN

“What are you all smiles about?”
Bosten whispered. His eyes squinted when he wanted to joke around or play tricks on someone.

I didn't realize I had been smiling. I'm sure it wouldn't look like a smile to anyone else but my brother.

“Nothing.”

He glanced back over his shoulder. He was looking for Mom. I stood, shivering and wet, barefoot in the mudroom. Bosten's cheeks were red. He skated toward me across the polished floor in his thick white socks.

“I should have come in the secret way. It was too muddy, though.”

“That's why you're       happy?”

“No. Don't be dumb, Bosten.”

I took off my beanie. It dripped in my hand.

We called the storm doors on the side of the house our secret way into the basement. Sometimes, on summer nights, we would escape through them. We would only come back when the sky began to lighten.

Bosten said it was like being vampires, and I always liked that.

“Come on,” he said.

We snuck down the dark and narrow stairs to the basement.

They creaked, no matter how softly we'd step, but she didn't hear us.

I was the only one in our family whose bedroom was down there.

“Take your clothes off. I'll see if I can put them in the dryer              without her busting me.”

Bosten carried my wet things, all wadded up in a heavy and twisted mass, across the open expanse of the basement's concrete floor from my bedroom to the little laundry alcove beneath the staircase.

I could smell the cigarette smoke drifting down from above us.

*   *   *

“Can I use the car tonight
to take           Sticker     to the game, Dad?”

Whenever Bosten called me Sticker, I knew he was planning on doing something crazy. It was our code, the only thing Mom and Dad hadn't figured out yet.

We had finished dinner. It was my job to clear the dishes from the table.

“Not the Pontiac. The Toyota.” Dad smoked a cigarette and still wore his tie. The Pontiac was the work car, for his realty clients.

Mom said, “Which one of you boys          was using            the dryer downstairs?”

She knew it was me.

She placed a lit cigarette in the ashtray beside her napkin.

She was not happy.

I looked at Bosten.

He said, “I did.”

“No.” I shook my head. “It's my things. I got wet walking home after school with Emily. Bosten just put them in the dryer for me.”

My father exhaled smoke through his nostrils.

“Now there's dirt in the dryer.” Mom looked disappointed. This was how she usually began tirades.

“It's a waste                                  of electricity,” Dad said.

I turned on the water and rinsed our plates so I couldn't hear. But some                                    sounds don't get killed easily.

“I                              don't                            work seven           days a week…”

I felt vibrations of footsteps on the floor coming up through my legs. I didn't turn around. It was better to play deaf sometimes.

My mother reached over and shut off the water. Then she put a white spray bottle of 409 and a rag on the counter beside my hand.

She held her cigarette backwards between her index and middle fingers. I liked how she did that. I always thought if I ever smoked that I would practice holding a cigarette like that, too.

“You'll have to                    clean out the dryer before Bosten and you

can go to the game.”

“Okay,” I said. “Sorry.”

“Don't do that again.” Her voice was tough, cold, like leftover meat.

“I won't.”

“Maybe they don't need to go,” my dad said. “They're both big enough that we shouldn't have to be treating them                               like goddamned

                                                                         babies all the time.”

Bosten began to plead, “But, Dad … Paul's                 playing.  It's Friday night.”

My dad inhaled. “You're not allowed to go anywhere else.               I'll be checking on you two.”

“We're just going to Crazy Eric's with Paul after the game. And his         mom and dad,” Bosten added.

I knew he was lying. Crazy Eric's was the burger place where the high school kids hung out. I knew we weren't going there.

My mom grabbed my shoulder, like she didn't think I was listening.

“And do something                        with your wet things,” she said.

Mom and Dad liked everything to be perfect.

*   *   *

My wet clothes lay on the floor
in front of the open dryer, scattered. I shook them out, carried them into my room to find corners, shelves, anywhere I could hang them so they'd dry. So they wouldn't make her mad at me.

The spot on the floor where they'd been dropped was covered with a cold, wet mark. I thought it looked like a map of Greenland.

I had to kneel down in the middle of it to clean the dryer.

There were dark rings on the knees of my jeans where they'd gotten wet on the floor, and I smelled like the bathroom at a gas station. The 409 made me sneeze when I put my head inside the dryer to wipe it down. I couldn't see any dirt in it, but I cleaned it anyway.

“Want any        help?” Bosten stood at my bedroom door and watched.

“Naw.”

I brushed off my knees and looked apologetically at my brother. I didn't want to make him late.

“You    need        to change your pants?”

“It's water, not piss.”

Bosten smiled. “Okay. It'll dry. I'll                    crank the heater on you.”

*   *   *

In the dark,
with the driver's door open and his feet hanging out in the gravel on the side of Pilot Point Road, Bosten bent backwards with his head up beneath the dashboard and grunted.

I knew what he was doing.

We always did it.

It was the exact distance from home as a round-trip to his school.

And I couldn't hear the sound at all, but knew by the way Bosten's shoulders tensed and then relaxed that he had slipped the odometer cable out from the back of the dashboard.

We were free.

Dad never knew where we went after Bosten found out how easy it was to rig the car. The only risks were that my brother had no way of telling how fast we were going, because the speedometer would sit flat, and, sometimes, we'd forget to reconnect it and one of us would have to sneak out of the house in the middle of the night and slip the cable back into place.

Bosten climbed back into the driver's seat, slammed his door, and started the Toyota. Then he leaned all the way across the gear shift and said, “Let's rip it up, Stick.”

“Okay. Let's.”

He pulled a U-turn right across the wet highway and we headed back toward the high school, David H. Wilson Senior High.

I don't have any idea who David H. Wilson was.

Bosten grinned and reached his hand down under the seat between his legs.

“Look what I found.”

He pulled up something thick and heavy, and dropped it in my lap.

Thud.
               

“Where did you get this?” I asked.

Bosten slapped the steering wheel and laughed, loud. “I found it in the  

                             Pontiac. It's Dad's.”

There was something exciting and terrifying at the same time in holding on to the cool slickness of a
Penthouse
magazine. One that belonged to our father.

I opened it and flipped through the pages.

“Bitchin', huh?”

I gulped. My throat felt tight. “Yeah.”

Bosten laughed again, and he kept looking over at the magazine in my lap as he drove.

My hands shook and my mouth hung open. I thumbed the glossy images back and forth, one after another. They showed everything, without shame, and the pictures were so big.

I saw a layout called “Three in a Tub.” Two men and a woman were taking a bath together. The bathroom was real nice, like something you'd only see in a movie. I could almost feel the steam rising up in that room. The woman lay back in the tub. Her tanned breasts glistened with droplets of water, and her dark pubic hairs swirled beneath the surface like seaweed; naked men stretched out in the water on either side of her.

I didn't even have any pubic hair at all, except for a few under my armpits.

It was just one more thing that made me so self-conscious at school, because Mr. Lloyd, our PE teacher, would stand in the shower room and check off names in his roll book as he handed out towels that weren't even big enough to wrap around the smallest boy's waist, making sure every one of us took a shower after class. In eighth grade, most boys except for me were already getting hair around their nuts. And while just about every boy would dangle that school-issue towel in front of himself to cover his privates, I'd use mine on my head, over my hair, to hide my biggest embarrassment.

Then there was a picture, after the bath, of the men standing beside the woman, drying her off, their penises hanging right beside her hips, almost touching her. I knew what having sex was, but I never saw anything like this before.

I wondered if everybody took baths in threesomes after they got pubic hair.

I was curious about how the men got their penises inside her, too. They didn't look like they would go. I couldn't see anywhere on her where they'd fit. And I wondered if the men were on tranquilizers or something, because how could you stand next to a naked woman who looked like the one in this picture and not get a boner?

My pecker was already so hard just looking at her in a magazine.

Suddenly uncomfortable, I shifted, turned the page, awkwardly aware of what was happening to me. It kind of hurt, and I had to pull out the front of my jeans to make some room.

I was scared and thrilled at the same time.

Bosten kept laughing at me.

“What are you going to do with this?” I asked.

“Ha!” Bosten said. “What do you think      I'm going to do? I'm going to                            keep it.”

“Mom will find it.”

“I'll put it in my locker at school.”

“Dad's going to get mad.”

Bosten giggled. He almost doubled over the steering wheel. “What's he going to say? ‘Which one of you bastards took the             magazine     I bought for jerking off at work?'”

Even I laughed at that.

I flipped some more pages. I hoped Bosten might let me read it later, but I was afraid, thinking about being caught with it at home (they caught just about everything we ever did); and I needed to see more pictures first.

Bosten looked at me with a sneaky expression on his face.

“Do you ever     masturbate?”

“What?” I said, like I didn't know what he was talking about. It just startled me that he asked.

“You know … jack off, dumbshit?                    Do you?”

“No,” I answered quickly.

Bosten burst out laughing again. He slapped my shoulder so hard I nearly hit my face against the side window. “You're such a liar,     Stick!”

I closed the magazine.

My hands shook. I knew I couldn't lie to my brother. It was stupid, anyway.

“Okay. Well, sometimes I do.”

“Sometimes?” he said. “Ha-ha! I jack off at least two times every day.”

Bosten grabbed the magazine from my lap and flipped it open. He steered with his knee. “‘Three in a Tub.' That's so               nasty. One time I jerked off  so many times in one day that I got a road rash. It was raw and bleeding.”

“On your hand?”

“No.” Bosten looked proud, completely unashamed. He was always fooling around with me and acting like this. “On my dick.”

I laughed. “You're stupid.”

“I'm not kidding, Sticker. I thought it was going to get infected or something. I was scared. I thought I'd have to        go to a doctor       and tell him I've been jacking myself off too much.”

He slipped the
Penthouse
back under the seat. “But I had to stop doing it for a few days. Quitting was almost impossible,               but then my dick finally got better. Relief.”

The high school was just up ahead. I could see all the headlights from the other cars as they pulled into the parking lot in front of the gym.

“I'd rather die than have to go to a doctor for jacking off too much,” I said. “And, anyway, haven't you heard you'll go blind, or it will stunt your growth?”

“You don't  actually believe that, do you?” he asked. “That's just what old people tell us so we don't               jerk off  all the time. How many blind kids did you ever see in your life?”