M.S. Coe
NEW VERONIA
For Will Cordeiro
Chapter 1
I know for a fact that Jay came up with the shitty idea even though, later, Toshi tried to cop the plan as his. I’ve got a great memory; always have: I can remember my mother bending over infant me as I lay naked and sprawling on the blue checkered changing table, her tiny gold cross necklace dangling above my belly button, and I remember contracting my bladder, spurting the thin stream of celery-smelling urine out through my stunted penis and across my mother’s face. Her lips and eyes flattened out, and her strangled scream (muffled by her closed mouth) sent a shiver over my skin. And I know that I remember this on my own, not in the way that a kid remembers something his parent told him about— which is less remembering and more internalizing “the story of when I peed on my mom as a baby”—but in my own, intrinsic elephant memory, because my mom left when I was two, and my dad and I have barely talked to her or about her since.
All this to confirm: Jay came up with the idea, and at first, it really was cool.
His inspiration arrived when Jay, Toshi, and I were sitting around the kitchen table drinking Cokes. It was two years after the turn of the century, the start of summer, no school, flies droning above the sugared tabs we’d all flicked until they’d decapitated from the cans. Jay stared out the window that arched across the back of his house for a full minute before he shook himself.
His mouth hung crooked at the jaw: “What if we built our own little city?” The flies dive-bombed a puddle of Coke.
“Like a treehouse?” Toshi said. “Or a model? That’s for kids.”
“No, Knees—like somewhere killer. Super strong so even bears couldn’t get in. A place girls would want to go.”
Girls. At fourteen-going-on-fifteen, we all knew the power of the word.
“I mean, we could really make it.” Jay opened another soda and bent the tab of the can back and forth, back and forth, until it popped free. “Build a cabin, a house. We could each have one. With a bed inside, a bunch of pillows.”
“What about a bathroom?” Toshi said. “We can’t make that.”
“We could too. An outhouse, sort of, but put a real toilet in there, with a pipe that leads far away. You can flush it with a bucket of water. Easy.” Jay sat back and folded his arms across his chest, a new move he’d perfected to show off his pumped biceps.
“No, not easy,” Toshi said, and I silently agreed.
“How are we going to build all this stuff?” I asked, thinking of teetering walls that fell and crushed us into the sewage-saturated ground. “It would take forever.”
“Listen to Soppy,” Jay said. “Must be worried because his dick spouts like a hose. Always needs a whole toilet for himself.”
“Screw you,” I said. I loathed the nickname—Soppy—that I’d picked up in third grade for no reason at all, practically right after I’d moved to Delaware.
“Bennet, come on, man,” Jay said to me. “We have the whole summer. Don’t be an ass-posit. What else do we have to do?”
“I’m supposed to go to camp,” Toshi said, “even though last time, I got a spider bite that nearly made my finger fall off and then I couldn’t even play the horn. In the US, six-point-six people die every year from spider bites.”
“Get out of it.” Jay sneered. “Band camp is for losers. It’s the same old, same old. But this, this could be something new. This will get us some pussy.” His hand shot up and snatched at a buzzing fly, but he missed.
That night, my dreams narrowed in on a specific pussy—Stella’s—which floated hazily before my REM eyelids; pink and delicious-smelling like bubble gum, sort of rubbery, something I could stick my tongue into for that satisfying pop, then wrap against my lips to blow the bubble over again.
Stella, the most fabulous woman on the peninsula, was one year older than me, one year ahead in school. Her curly brown hair showed up gold in the sun. Jeans clung to her ass, the seam pressing up against her crack. She popped out tits at eleven, and that year my obsession rewired my brain so that I became addicted, craving her. One third of my life, Stella had been it. That summer when she grew tits, she sat on my lap. The rapturous feeling: an incredible welling up, my body expanding into the air beneath her squirming, the cause of my first real hard-on. Sunscreen all over her. Ever since, any time I smelled the stuff, I thought sex. Her neck when she pulled her hair up into a ponytail glowed like fresh milk; the sight of that knob atop her spine was the main reason I worked hard in school, to skip up into her grade for a couple classes so that I could stare at the back of her head, at the white part down the middle of her skull which divided her hair into two braids.
The thought of Stella was the real reason I decided to go along with Jay’s plan: Stella had emerged from the same soup of DNA as Jay—they were siblings—and if I spent the summer building a cabin behind her house, I would run into her all the time. Maybe she would lay out in the backyard, triangles of fabric against her skin, the contrast of tan and not tan an image I could take home with me each evening.
The morning after Jay’s idea about building a little village, Toshi and I showed up at his house and, without really saying it out loud, we all agreed to the plan.
“We got lots of work ahead of us,” Jay said, “but we can do it. For a good cause.” He disappeared from the kitchen for a minute and came back holding a two-foot-high American flag. The white stripes had cocks drawn in them, realistic looking, with hair on the balls and veins snaking the shafts, and I saw that the pussy village was Jay’s new project.
Jay waved the penis flag beneath my nose. “We got to find somewhere to plant it. We’ll plant it and do a kind of naming ceremony today, and then we can get started on construction. First we’ll build a bear trap in case someone comes creeping around our camp.”
“I hate naming things,” Toshi said.
“Sin City,” Jay said.
I shook my head. “Too many things are called that. It needs to be romantic. Don’t you think the girls are going to want romance?” Wrought iron bridges, blue convertibles, and gondolas breezed through my mind. Stella would wear a tight, white sweater.
She wasn’t home—when I’d arrived that morning, I’d pretended to need the bathroom and instead hunted all over for her—but asking Jay where she’d gone would be equivalent to falling over, lovesick, and I could only debase myself that way every once in a while.
I said, “What about… New Veronia?”
“Huh,” Jay said, “where’s Old Veronia?”
I shrugged. “There is none.”
“That’s stupid,” Toshi said.
“No, I get it.” Jay pointed at me. “Bennet is right: the ladies will want something that sounds romantic.”
“Because girls are stupid,” Toshi said.
Jay scratched his chin where goatee hairs sprouted out of pimples. “I mean, I guess New Veronia sounds okay,” he said. “Yeah, sure. Unless I think of something better.”
I nodded along as the shock of my idea validated by Jay lightened my head to a balloon on a string, bobbing.
In the third grade, when we were in Mrs. Brown’s room, Toshi, Jay, and I formed an alliance around our shared interest in the class pet, an iguana. Ever since those days of scouring the playground for bugs to feed Dino, we’d been friends. Our dynamic started right then: Jay telling us where to look and what insects to snatch, and me and Toshi seeing which one of us could follow his directions better.