Chapter 12
I skipped school the day after our break in, a Friday—I just didn’t go, I told myself that I wouldn’t and I didn’t, and no consequence came of it—and so I didn’t see Toshi again until Monday. Jay had returned by then, which made our dynamic feel regular, the same-old same-old, except for that, sometimes, when I looked at Toshi, I worried that I was only my cock, that my cock was me, that it owned me. This was a concern I’d had before: in class, at the most inconvenient of moments, my cock would demand all of my brainpower, it would force me to think about Stella’s thighs, so that I’d miss a whole lesson. Or I’d have to hurry off to the bathroom, part-ways crouched.
That Monday at lunch, I asked Jay about his trip.
“Oh, man. It was great.” Jay pushed aside his food to talk, which I had never seen him do before. “I feel like I have a real action plan for life now. A real direction. Everybody there was so into it. Me and my dad, we went to all these sessions together; we really figured out some shit.”
“Did you meet any girls?” I asked.
“What do you mean, an action plan?” Toshi said. “What are you going to do?”
“There weren’t girls there; they were women. You should have seen these women. Dressed up in skirts and shit. Tweed. I never thought that a bun was a sexy hairdo, but now I know different. You got to dress superior if you are superior. You can really tell who’s who, just from their outfit.”
“I’m all about buns,” I said. “You get with any of them?”
“It wasn’t that kind of meeting. We were doing real work.” Jay started eating again. “But it was so weird.” He spoke with his mouth full. “When we got back, my parents were sure that someone had broken into our house, but they didn’t steal anything.”
I ducked my head to hide my surprise. How could they have possibly figured out that we’d been in their house? It was messy to begin with, and we’d left everything exactly as we’d found it—almost. It seemed impossible that they could have noticed anything off. “Do they”—my voice squeaked, so I started again—“do they have any idea who it might be? I mean, what would they do to someone like that? A burglar?”
“The crime around here keeps growing and growing,” Toshi said. “I’m surprised you haven’t been broken into before. Just last month, nonviolent crimes in Delaware rose by three percent.”
Jay said, “We’re ready if the asshole tries it again. That’s one thing this conference got us: is ready. Speaking of—Janet is all set to come to New Veronia this weekend, Sunday, she likes to do it after church or whatever, so you two coxos need to find your girls now. Go into serious survivalist mode. Hunt twenty four-seven until you trap one. It’s the kill that matters.”
My heart flipped up into my mouth—Jay had just called us cock suckers—and I had to force it back down again. He said coxos all the time, but it wasn’t literal. Once I’d recovered, I said, “Does Janet have a sister or someone, maybe?”
“Quit dreaming.”
The lunchroom din made my body feel like a hundred little weights were strapped to it, and my blood quickened even before I looked behind my shoulder and saw—a miracle—Stella eating alone. I felt like I was in a trance as I stood up and floated my way over to her. Ever since we’d started school, my eyes had been constantly sweeping the merchandise, rotating over bodies in class, in the hallways, in the cafeteria. But really, though I would have gladly taken basically anyone who wanted me, the only girl I wanted was Stella.
“Hey,” I said, sitting down next to her in the mystifyingly empty seat.
She glanced up at me, but said nothing. While I searched for a witticism or a compliment, I nervously picked up a forgotten spork. Its tines were tiny, ineffective, and I snapped one of them off. The triangle of it in my palm looked like a cartoon eyelash. My mother had shaped her eyelashes into spikes with black wax. Whenever my mother had cried, dark rivulets had flowed down her face. Back then, I’d figured that her tears were different from my father’s, that men’s and women’s tears looked different, that tears were just another physical variance between the sexes. Kids are so stupid.
“So,” I said finally, feeling massively discouraged. “How are classes going? Did you hear about that pop quiz in history? Mr. Ollsen is trying to crush us, but all the kids who had history first period warned us about it.”
“I’m not an idiot.” One of her pretty shoulders lifted and then fell.
“You’re probably the smartest girl I know.” I started to worry that she was acting so prickly because she’d smelled me in her room, on her pillow, or she’d found one of my hairs on her floor, or she sensed that I’d already had sex with her in my mind. Or maybe she’d missed her purple panties—I pressed a hand over my front right pocket, where I’d been transferring them every morning when I got dressed; they were still there, deep down.
“What do you want?” she said. I had the feeling that her eyes were shifting around, trying to gauge how many people at school were noticing us together, though she stared only at the juice box in front of her.
I pushed on. “Me and Toshi and Jay, we’ve been working in the woods, I mean, you know, we built this really killer thing, actually, and we’re having this… party, a small sort of party, this weekend, Sunday, and I was wondering if maybe you would like to come as my date?”
“Date?”
I clenched my hands together and tried to smile.
“Do you still think that people do that? Go on actual dates? My god.”
“Maybe you’ll have fun?” I said, my voice way too small.
“Go on a date? And my brother is there?”
“You wouldn’t have to be around him, not hardly at all, because you would be mostly with me. There’s a place for us to… we could have privacy.”
“What are you always doing around him?”
“Who?”
“Jay. He’s getting worse. Like when he got that stupid tattoo, and he thought it made him a man.”
When Jay showed up one day with a tattoo at just thirteen years old, we’d all been impressed. A tattoo on the back of his neck, where it was clearly visible, did seem like the mark of an adult.
“He’s really buying into this whole thing of our parents. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t have soccer to wear him out anymore. Our dad is such a tool, but Jay wants him to be proud, and now Jay’s whipped. You should see the way they talk to each other, like they’re in the military when really they’re just in the kitchen drinking juice.”
Several tables away, Jay was holding a fist over Toshi’s unopened milk container. I said, “What do you mean, the whole thing of your parents?”
Stella rolled her eyes. “Their white culture stuff. Like… skinheads.”
The noise and activity of the cafeteria whirled around me, and I felt like I was at the center of a giant wheel, with everything but me on the move. “Like, kind of racist?”
“You should have seen some of the people at this conference. I can’t believe they made me go.”
Jay wasn’t a skinhead; he had a crew cut. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. One of his best friends isn’t white. Toshi.” Jay and Stella hated each other in the way that seemed typical of siblings, so I couldn’t fault her for making her own family sound like creepy skinheads, but she didn’t really know Jay; I knew Jay, and he was a great guy, my best friend.