The Parallel Apartments (31 page)

“French. Third period. And math analysis, fourth.”

“Okay, Monday the seventeenth, at the start of third period. We'll have two periods, an hour and half. We can talk somewhere else, like a coffee shop.”

“I… is that allowed?”

“Not really, but what're they gonna do? Meet me at my car, '73 yellow Subaru wagon shitbox, at the appointed time. We'll go to Jim's and order cinnamon rolls and coffee.”

Gracie rolled her chair to her desk.

“Meanwhile, here's my card. I don't give it out often, but here you go. Give me a call if you want. Okay?”

Justine nodded.

“Listen, if Dick Seldom's out there, send him in, wouldya?”

After saying hi to Dick, who glanced at Gracie's door and then winked chastely at his old girlfriend, Justine hurried down the empty hall of the underclassmen's science building toward the bathroom, where she hoped to lock herself in a stall and pinch the itch out of her nipples, quickly masturbate, and then pee, before fifth period let out and the bathroom became a caucus of preening sophomores.

CLOSED MAINTAINANCE
read the sign on the ladies' room door.

Muffled clattering: the bell. Students instantly filled the narrow hall like red cells in a capillary.

“Dammit,” said Justine, hectic with manifold corporeal needs. “Dammit.”

More red cells, sluggish now from overcrowding. Justine was trapped in the middle of the hall.

Justine felt the tail of her blouse being pulled out of the waistband of her skirt. She spun around.

“Hi, sweetie,” said Troy, smiling.

“Don't ever do that again. Where did you learn that? Did you see Rogers LeRoi do that?”

Troy blushed and shifted and shrank.

“I don't know. Sorry.”

“Jesus.”

“I'm just excited. About messing up Sherpa after school. Hey, you look all red and hivey.”

“I have to tinkle.”

“You have lang. lab last period today, right? Want to meet there, then we'll blow this Popsicle stand?”

The crowd squeezed them together, face to face.

“Listen,” said Justine, quietly, fiercely. “I'm ready.”

“Ready for what?”

“I'm ready.”

“Wha… really? You want to go to Sherpa's now? I don't know, you know, I can't cut class, I only did it that one time with that bad-influence kid Alan and I was a wreck the whole time, and besides I have a free period next and I wanna go work on the Circus Maximus model me and Rashad are working on I told you about, I'm making clay gladiators and I'm gonna paint them bloody and gory, and pull some arms off and scatter them around the arena, and I also decided to make a Cleopatra figurine and put her up in the stands with Caesar and Brutus—”

“Troy,” said Justine, whispering in his ear. “Let's go to your house first. Then we'll go to Sherpa's.”

A sea-salty, formaldehydic aroma began to rise off of Troy. A boner also rose in his chinos, which Justine could feel poking at her left acetabulum.

“You mean… you want to meet my dad?”

“I want to see your room. Your
bed.
Now.”

“Oh.”

“C'mon.”

Justine reached down for his hand.

“We'll get in trouble, Justine. We'll get detention. With the burnouts.”

“I need it, Troy,” she said, realizing with a goose-pimpling rosewater blush that she had never said anything like that to anyone; had never even thought those words; had never acknowledged that there was something sweet but always on the lam that people called
it
when they needed
it
yet which could be hunted and caught and field-dressed only by a cooperating team whose prime directive was the pursuit of
it.
“And I know
you
do.”

Justine put her hands on either side of Troy's neck, her thumbs just under his earlobes, and kissed him, hard, her mouth open, her braces tearing at the soft flesh inside her lips, tongue hard and arrogant, just like she'd seen

Rogers LeRoi once do, in the middle of driver's ed, to Lauren Pirckheimer, a red-haired girl who'd gone from zero to D-cup in the thirty days of the previous September.

Justine left several crisp impressions of her braces inside her lips.

“'Kay,” said Troy.

Troy and Justine crawled on their hands and knees through the narrow, darkly shaded side yard that ran by the windows of Troy's dad's den. On their left was an ancient cedar fence ablossom with ivy and corticioids and molds.

“…the sun's not yellow it's chicken!” shouted a voice above them.

“That's Dad,” he said over his shoulder. “Keep down.”

“Duh.”

As she crawled behind Troy, mildly repelled by the sole of one of Troy's Stan Smiths, which had a blackened wafer of antique gum embedded with a red toothpick sword and some grasshopper fragments, Justine paid careful attention to where she placed her bare knees so she wouldn't collapse a fire-ant mound—they were everywhere this year, and it was only April. Barely April.

They snuck through the utility room door in the back of the house, crawled up the stairs, and slid into Troy's room at the end of the hall.

“Whew,” said Troy.

His room smelled of airplane glue and the peculiar sebaceous formalin-and–Dead Sea cologne his body produced when aroused.

“I'm glad we're doing this,” said Troy, digging some
Spaceballs
sheets out of his closet.

“Quiet,” Justine hissed.

“It's okay!” said Troy, shouting melodramatically. “He's deaf. When I told you Dad was deaf, I meant de-e-e-e-e-e-e-eaf!”

Justine winced and pressed the palms of her hands to her ears like she was trying to pop her head.

“Yodel lay ee yodel lay ee yodel lay ee ooo!”

Supposedly Mr. Bugler had lost his hearing from an accident at a stereo store many years before. He'd been listening to King Crimson on some bitchin headphones when there'd been a freak burst of sonic energy from a faulty something-or-other. His deafness was profound and permanent. He never sued the store or the manufacturer, because he didn't believe
in litigation, having once been sued by a neighbor who'd had an anxiety attack after Mactard, Troy's sugar glider, bit him.

Mactard was still alive, and presently hanging out in his cage next to Troy's plastic globes of royal-blue and velvet-red bettas on his dresser. Mactard and the fish seemed interested in Troy stripping his bed of sheets and blankets.

“I wish we could go to my house,” whispered Justine, still uncomfortable with the idea of not whispering.

“Your granddad's not deaf, though. We'd have to be mice there. We wouldn't be able to groan or make the bedsprings creak.”

I bet Dot wouldn't mind.

“Dad's pretty cool, though, so don't worry.”

Troy's dad could be heard downstairs, singing something rich and deep in German.

“He has a nice voice.”

“Yeah. Dad's nice.”

“What if he comes up here, just because?”

“Don't worry, my sweet. We can make sexual love all day and night. Dad doesn't come in here if the door's shut; he knows I need concentration when I'm gluing. And he hates the glue smell. Besides, he sings all the time; we'll know if he comes up the stairs. He sings
The Barber of Seville
when he's climbing the stairs.”

Justine didn't know how
The Barber of Seville
went, but it did sound like Troy had the situation in hand. No siblings, one deaf parent. It was perfect.

Except Justine had lost the lustfulness which had so straitjacketed her during and after her appointment with Gracie Yin. She had been a pool of desire in the hallway at school but now she just felt gross and slick and clammy down there. Now she just wanted to have a bath and a peanut butter and banana sandwich and listen to Theatre of Hate and masturbate over Gracie and sleep until tomorrow. The idea of confronting Sherpa shut Justine down even more.

Troy kicked off his Stan Smiths. The shoe with the toothpick sword landed in a far corner, sole up. Troy struggled with a complicated-looking Boy Scout–type belt buckle in need of polishing.

“Where are the rubbers?” said Justine, testing out a normal speaking voice. “You said you have some.”

“In the tank.”

“What tank?”

“Toilet tank,” said Troy, his trousers finally off, boner holding up a white cotton Hanes tent. “Perfect hiding spot.”

“Serious?” said Justine, looking around and not looking at the boner.

Justine went into the bathroom and hoisted the ceramic lid off the toilet tank. There was a Ziploc, filled with light-blue Trojan-Enz, weighted down with a wrench. There were other things in there, each anchored with tools or flint rocks, but they were not identifiable, wrapped as they were in opaque balloons.

“This is disgusting.”

Troy must have sensed some balking on Justine's part, so he jumped out of bed, still in his Hanes and socks, and tried to woo her.

“I've been waiting for this day since we started going out. Come to bed, my sweet.”

He pulled out her shirttail again, but this time she said nothing and closed her eyes. She wouldn't really deny him now, in the state he was in; that wouldn't be a nice thing to do. She listened for Dot's voice in her head, telling her
Use, use, use.

She left her blouse on. She turned her back to Troy so he could get at the tiny zipper of her skirt.

The sounds of zipping and of unzipping were different to Justine. The former was the harsh chord of a trial—putting on her too-tight jeans the day she returned to school, packing her suitcase for Camp Meredith in seventh grade, watching a paramedic draw the zipper of body a bag over the nose of a girl who killed herself on her unit at ASH. But
un
zipping: a music of release. Opening a vanity case in a hotel;
Sticky Fingers;
undressing for a bath; undressing for bed.

Who is that?
It was Dot, in her head.
Whoever you want him to be.

They were Gracie's hands unzipping her, pulling off her skirt, her panties, undoing her blouse, unclasping her bra. Justine turned around and kissed her.

They fell onto the bed, Justine biting at Troy's lips. The insides of her mouth were still tender and shallowly torn in places from kissing Troy in the hall at school. She bent one leg at the knee, hooked her toe under the waistband of Troy's Hanes, and then stripped them away. She looked down; it was the first time Justine'd seen his dick, and it did seem like a very nice dick, uniform and subtly arced, a Walt Disney dick, unlike the dick of that
dick Dick, which was short and purple and torqued a half turn and veined like a weightlifter's neck. A banyan-tree dick.

“Wow,” said Troy.

Justine plucked a very chilly rubber out of the Ziploc, wondering for an instant if temperature affected its reliability.

She realized she'd have to carry Troy through the next few parts, as he seemed to have seized up at the sight of Justine on her knees on the bed, naked, expertly stripping open a rubber.

“Did Dick teach you all that stuff?”

“Do you know how to put it on?” said Justine, closing her eyes again.

Shuck him, fuck him, do what you want.

Gracie was back, a perfectly symmetrical volcano with a slowly concaving surface, lava branching and channeling, a long pink and tan cleft, starting at the summit and trailing down to the tree line.

“Yeah, no, well…”

Justine became a lagoon.

“I'll do it,” she said. “Lie back.”

Justine straddled Troy just above his knees, put the rubber in her mouth, took Troy's boner in one hand, and bent down to put the rubber on him with her lips and tongue, like Dick the dick had taught her to do. But Troy, with a frantic, trilling huff, immediately ejaculated, getting some in her braces, some in her hair, but most she rerouted to the fresh, clean
Spaceballs
sheets. Downstairs, Mr. Bugler was singing “Psychotic Reaction.”

“Oh my god. Oh my fucking god Justine oh my god. Oww. Ahh. Let go. Don't touch it ahh. Oh my god. Gahh!”

Lava. Justine let go, spit the condom out, turned around, backed up, and lowered her lagoon onto Troy's mouth.

“Nhrrt,” said Troy, waving his arms around.

“Don't move!” shouted Justine, all at once not caring, excited that there was another person, an adult, in the house, singing psychedelic pop.

I can't get your love, I can't get a fraction.

Troy pushed up on Justine's bottom, perhaps to get a breath of air.

“Lick.”

Justine ground herself onto his chin and leaned on Troy's stomach while he licked her in an ice-cream-cone sort of way. She grabbed his hands and brought them up to pinch her nipples.