“I don’t get why you want that cum dumpster so bad,” Jay said. “And she’s my sister and I love her and all that shit, I guess, but she’s slept with like a hundred guys, some black guys too.” He smeared the blood that had welled up where the scab used to be across his elbow. “And I might have to punch you or something. If you get dirty with my sister.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. I mean, you plug those other hundred guys?”
“It’s cause I know you would tell me about it,” he said. “And then I’d have to punch you.”
No question this would be worth it, for Stella. She was perfect, the perfect woman, and the danger of my loving her only added to her allure.
After school, we all convened in New Veronia. Toshi had brought some vodka he’d found in the back of a cabinet at his house; he’d never gotten us anything to drink before.
“Thanks, man, this is perfect,” Jay said. We were all in his part of the triplex, which had ended up just a little bit bigger than the others. I pushed aside some of Jay’s clothes and sat on the mattress; Jay balanced atop a rickety old stool he’d brought over from his garage.
“Are we supposed to save this stuff for the girls?” I asked, passing Jay the bottle.
He threw down the magazine he’d been flipping through. It landed atop a bunch of other junk—blanket, soccer ball, portable radio—that he’d scavenged from his house. “They wouldn’t drink it,” he said. “Keep working on the wine coolers.”
When Jay passed the bottle to me, I wrapped my lips around it, preparing mentally for the burn in my throat and the jump of nausea in my stomach.
“You know that girl, Janet, with the super-shiny lips?” Jay said. “She would come out here with me next weekend, but I have to go to this thing with my parents. So she’ll come the next week. You two need to get girls, too, so she doesn’t feel alone or whatever.”
“Where are you going with your parents?” I asked, avoiding the real question about how Toshi and I were supposed to get girls.
“Some conference thing. Something political. They go every year, and I’m old enough now to be a part of the conference, too. To have a political conscience.”
“Oh,” I said. My dad and I had never gone anywhere together, not really. We’d taken a couple of day trips to fish frogs and once we’d seen the phonograph museum, but we hadn’t done anything that lasted for a whole weekend, and though my dad had said we could hang out before he packed me off to my mother, he was all talk. “Where is it?”
“Kentucky,” Jay said. “Takes over a day to drive. I’ll get to miss some school.”
“Killer,” Toshi said.
“Is Stella going?”
“Whole family.”
“When you go on a trip like that, do you guys, like, stay in the same room? Same hotel room? You and Stella?”
“You’re one sick fuck, Bennet.” Jay laughed. “This trip is a big deal. All kinds of important guys will be there, and I’m going to meet them. They all know my parents. I mean, my parents are more big into this kind of thing than you would think. And it’s time to start growing up.”
Dave the squirrel scampered across the outside wall; the scritch of his little claws had become a familiar noise, and sometimes we stuck peanuts in the cracks for him.
“Maybe we could start a housebuilding company,” Jay said. I could smell the sweet, harsh vodka on his breath. “When we graduate.”
With a pang, I thought that maybe I would have to graduate in Florida, far away from everything I knew.
“Or we could drop out and do it now. After soccer season is over.”
“A long time ago,” Toshi said, “I promised my mom I would graduate. Forty-two percent of homeless teenagers are high school dropouts.”
“Oh wait, I didn’t tell you?” Jay grabbed the bottle back from me. “I’ve actually been keeping your mom in my basement so that I can slip it to her on the sly. You should go down there and ask her for some more life advice.”
This was Jay’s brand of sarcasm, and we laughed along with him.
“Or maybe if we’re housebuilders,” Toshi said thoughtfully, “that would keep us from being homeless. We could build a super-sturdy New Veronia.”
“That’s dumb.” Jay came and sat on the bed so that we all bounced. “In a few years, we won’t need a New Veronia. We’ll have wives and houses, and we can just take them into the bedroom and fuck them there.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Toshi said. “You never know what might happen, years from now. We could be in another depression. People living in tents.”
When the bottle of vodka was nearly empty, we all flopped back on the bed and stared up at the overlapping wood slats of the sloped ceiling. As I watched the planks, they spun a few degrees, then snapped back into place. My head felt pleasantly light, and I breathed through my nose because it made the air cooler.
“Knees”—Jay held out the vodka—“you finish the bottle.”
It occurred to me that Toshi hadn’t had any, or maybe he’d had just a sip. Anyway, he couldn’t be feeling as unsteady on his feet as I did.
“No, thanks,” Toshi said. “I’m starting to get a headache.”
Jay spun the vodka bottle around on the bed; it pointed at Tosh. “Look at that,” he said. “Now you have to do whatever I say.”
“I think that maybe Bennet wants it.”
I shrugged. “I’m okay.”
Toshi cut his eyes over to me. “The children of alcoholics are four times more likely to be alcoholics themselves.”
“What the fuck, Tosh?” I said. Probably all the dads in our neighborhood drank just like mine. The second shelf of every fridge I’d ever opened was full of Sam Adams. In Delaware, dads loved beer and they loved the Founding Fathers, too.
“Drink it, Knees,” Jay said.
I hurried upright so that I wouldn’t miss the show. The quick movement made my head twirl. I felt pissed at Toshi for always harping on my father, and I wanted him to suffer a little bit so that he’d feel the way I felt.
Toshi held the bottle like it was a used hanky, but Jay didn’t have to say anything else to make him drink: Jay just narrowed his brown eyes until the staring bore into Toshi’s brain.
Toshi dumped the bottle’s contents into his throat, and then he choked and sputtered and let at least half of it dribble back out over his chin.
“You,” Jay said, “are the biggest pussy I have ever known. In fact, I think you’re reaching vagina level. I mean, do you got boobs?”
“No,” Toshi said angrily, which was a mistake: he should have stayed quiet.
“Well, obviously you didn’t do my dare. You spit up half the booze like a baby.” Jay rolled his shoulders so that the bones cracked. “So now you got to do another one.”
“I didn’t know we were playing truth or dare,” Toshi said, again when he should have just shut up.
“I dare you to go outside, run around the cabin, and come back in.” Jay rummaged around beside his mattress and then held up a jar of peanut butter. “With this smeared on you. Bear bait.”
“Whatever,” Toshi said, which would have been on the right track, except for his eyes turned red and watery. Jay hated those sorts of signs of weakness.
“Now,” Jay said, “take off all your clothes.”
Toshi stripped down to his underwear and reached for the peanut butter, but Jay said no. “All your clothes.”
Toshi protested, he squirmed, but in the end, he did as Jay said.
It surprised me that Toshi’s penis was a dark purplish color, and it was uncut, which surprised me even more. Halfway down, it curled a little to the right, and I thought about a snail backing into its shell. But as he ducked outside, I had this flash of déjà vu, like I’d seen his dick before a long, long time ago. Playing around when we were little kids, had we turned our dicks into toys? Had we pretended to fire them at each other, like guns? It bothered me that my elephant recall was glitching out now, that I couldn’t figure out if this was a false memory, or something that had really happened. Maybe the vodka was interfering with my recollection.