Tenderness

After the First Death

Beyond the Chocolate War

The Bumblebee Flies Anyway

The Chocolate War

Eight Plus One

Fade

Frenchtown Summer

Heroes

I Am the Cheese

In the Middle of the Night

The Rag and Bone Shop

Tenderness

Tunes for Bears to Dance To

We All Fall Down

Me, I get fixated on something and I can’t help myself. Sometimes it’s nice and I let myself drift to see what will happen. Like with Throb. Sometimes it’s not so nice, but I still have to go with it and can do nothing to stop. That’s the scary part, when it’s not nice at all. But even when it’s nice, it’s scary. Anything that takes over your life is scary, although there can be pleasure in it.

With Throb, it was nice in the beginning, the music, and his voice on the CDs and, of course, the words, and the way he sang them, his voice rough, like gravel in his throat, but the words, thrilling:

Dark music, I call it. Music that speaks to me. Dark and black from the pits of night:

I had to listen hard to make out the words, closing my eyes, pressing the earphones tight against my ears, thinking at first that he sang
rotten love
instead of
rotting love
, which is another thing altogether.

Anyway, it was nice sitting in the library next to the CD player, the earphones on, people coming and going at the circulation desk and me listening, like on a private island in the middle of all that activity, and I would close my eyes and listen to him, his voice filling my ears and the inside of my head:

I didn’t get fixated on Throb until I saw the actual hole in his mouth on
Entertainment Tonight
, the missing tooth, his spiky hair the color of salmon, his freckles and that terrible clown outfit: baggy pants and green plaid suspenders and no shirt, his nipples like old pennies stuck on his chest. But most of all that missing tooth, like a black cave in his mouth. And that was when I got
fixated on him, staring at the black cave and knowing that I had to press my lips against his lips and put my tongue through that hole in his mouth.

I copped the CD at Aud-Vid Land at the mall even though the CD player at home is broken, like everything else in the place. I didn’t exactly cop the CD, which would be impossible because of the security gate, but I didn’t pay for it, either. There’s this guy, the assistant manager, who’s like forty years old, and he opens the door of the stockroom and I slip inside and wait for him. He likes to look at me. I close my eyes. He tells me to stand this way, then that way. I hear him breathing. Finally, he says, “Okay.” I open my eyes but do not enjoy looking at him. His complexion is terrible, and he wears bright yellow socks.

At home I remove the CD and look at Throb’s face spread across the entire booklet, which opens out like an accordion. I Scotch-tape it to the wall, after taking down the picture of me and my mother posing in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Lincoln is my favorite president. I feel bad for him because he looks so depressed all the time and his face is on the penny, the cheapest coin of all.

Gary watches me from the doorway.

“Lori,” he says. “Your mother’s gonna feel bad, taking that picture down.”

“I’ll put it up someplace else,” I tell him, stepping back to look at Throb there on my wall, with the hole in his mouth.

Gary’s not like some of the others my mother brings home. He’s been with us for, like, six months. He doesn’t use bad language and he works steady, the night shift at Murdock’s Tool and Die. He drinks too much sometimes, which makes him fall asleep all over the place, which is a nice change from Dexter, who got mean and nasty when he drank and hit my mother once in a while.

Gary looks at me as I look at Throb’s picture. I can
feel
him looking at me, something he’s been doing lately. He also rubs close to me when he meets me in the hallway on the way to the bathroom. It’s nice to have him look at me like that but I don’t want to do anything to hurt my mother, even though she’s a pain in the ass sometimes. She has enough problems. She was always a beauty but lately she seems to be fading right before my eyes. I see the grooves in her face where her makeup cakes, and the eyedrops don’t always obliterate the red anymore. She’s also beginning to sag. I caught sight of her getting out of the shower one night and was surprised to see her drooping. She was always proud of her figure and says that was her
best gift to me, a good figure, although we both have to worry about gaining weight and I am sometimes embarrassed by how big I am on top.

Gary comes and stands beside me in front of the picture. We are alone in the house, my mother at work for the lunchtime rush at Timson’s. It’s hot, early June, and heat seems to be radiating out of him, his arm pressing against my arm and the perspiration, like, gluing us together. I hear his sharp intake of breath, or maybe it’s my own. Suddenly his arm is around me and he’s caressing me on top and I lean against him. His aftershave lotion is sharp and spicy in my nostrils and his hand feels good, tender, and I want him to continue but I pull away from him, thinking of my mother.

He removes his hand and says, “S-Sorry,” stammering a bit, and I don’t say anything, just stand there feeling depressed. I feel depressed because I know that if Gary stays—and my mother wants him to stay, permanently, maybe—then I have to leave. Again.

The next day I read in the newspaper that Throb will be appearing this weekend at the ConCenter in Wickburg, where we used to live, and my fixation intensifies. Wickburg is down in Massachusetts, about a hundred miles from this stupid little town where we’ve been living for a year and a
half, and I’m convinced that Wickburg is my destination and my fate and the place where I will place my tongue in the black hole in Throb’s mouth, leaving Gary and my mother to live happily ever after.

Happily ever after
sounds like a fairy tale but my mother believes in fairy tales, happy endings and rainbows. She always thinks tomorrow will be better than today, and believes only the good weather forecasts, never the bad. She drives me crazy repeating stuff, like if you get handed a lemon, make lemonade, or it’s always darkest just before the dawn. Once, early in the morning, rain pelting the windows, she sat at the kitchen table, pressing an ice bag against a black eye she received from Dexter. She looked up brightly from the newspaper on the table and said, “Listen to this, Lori, my horoscope: ‘Brightness everywhere, keep up the good work, your talents will be recognized.’ Isn’t that grand?”

The ice bag slipped down a bit and I saw the bruise, ugly and purple, near her eye.

“What’s the matter?” she asked. “You look as if you’re going to cry.”