“Don’t roll down the window,” Jay said, “until we find the one we want.”
I think we all must have seen her at the same time. Actually, she looked sort of like Jay’s mother, but without the severe hairdo, with more makeup to soften her features. She had medium-sized breasts and, after we rolled down the window, I saw that she had large, straight teeth.
“Hey, boys,” she said when Jay pulled to the curb. She leaned against the passenger door, inches from me.
“You working?” Jay asked, his voice sounding deep and manly and knowing. But he couldn’t have done this before; he would have told us, bragged about whatever conquest to no end.
“Are you cops?” she said. “You’re too young to be cops. How old are you, anyway?”
“Old enough,” Jay said, spiteful-like.
“Ha!” She sucked on her perfect teeth. “Right. You saved up your allowance for this?”
The cherry smell of her bubblegum, or maybe her perfume, had gotten me hard. Her shirt was cut low and I had the perfect vantage straight down it.
“What’s your name?” I said. My voice came out soft, but somehow, it still sounded good.
“Destiny,” she said and snapped her gum.
“That’s pretty.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out the ten dollars, all the money I had in the world. “There’s more where this came from,” I said.
If I had looked over my shoulder at Toshi and Jay, I’m sure they would have seemed impressed, but I couldn’t take my eyes from Destiny’s. She grabbed the money out of my hand, her fingers touching mine, and I felt that touch in my groin.
The money disappeared below the truck window and she said, “How old are you, anyhow? I can’t be doing kids. What if this is a sting operation?”
“I’m driving, ain’t I?” Jay said. “We’re eighteen, okay? Look, I got a tattoo.” He turned so she could see it on the back of his neck. “They won’t needle you unless you’re of age. Come on, you took his money. Now you got to do something. Then we’ll give you more.”
“I’m obligated?” Her pretty smile took on a hint of a sneer. “Show me the rest. You don’t have to give it to me; just throw it on the dash. For the three of you, hand jobs, I’d need—fifty more.”
When she said “hand jobs,” I wanted so badly to nuzzle my face against her chest. I wanted to nibble her earlobe so that she could hear me breathing deep inside her head. I needed to pace my breathing, anyhow; I was starting to sound like a train.
“You don’t have it,” Destiny said. “I can tell.”
With that, she turned around, presenting us with her peachy ass in the micro miniskirt, and she walked away from the car.
“You have our ten dollars!” Jay howled. He sounded broken. “Bitch!”
“How did she know?” Toshi said. “How did she know?”
Destiny must have told all the other women about us, too, because no one else approached our truck. We cruised up and down four times; we would have taken the oldest of them, the one who showed us her empty gums, but even she shooed us away.
“Fuck,” Jay said as he drove too fast back to the main road. He slammed a hand against the dash. “Dammit.”
“They didn’t want the sex,” Toshi said. “They only wanted the money. They didn’t care about anything else.”
“Duh,” I said. “Sex is their job.”
“Why didn’t we bring more money? We could have gotten some, somehow.” Toshi pressed his legs together in the bitch seat, where he always rode. Cruelly, I thought that he was probably glad we didn’t end up with a woman, since he loved to suck cock, and so was basically gay. Unlike me: I’d felt real desire for Destiny.
“Where were we going to get money?” Jay said. “I couldn’t get no more money.”
“Any more money.”
“Why are you always correcting his grammar like a faggot?” I said to Toshi.
The cab stayed silent for a moment except for the constant grumble of the tires against the asphalt, and then Jay said, “Yeah, you sound like some old grammar-marm faggot.”
Toshi’s knees shrunk away from mine; his whole body sort of curled up into itself: a snail. I fought against the urge to apologize, to make him feel better.
But then he said to me, “You’re an asshole. I don’t care how hard you play dumb: you’re the faggot. Not me.”
My heart was like a steady hum, it was going so fast. I felt dangerous, my body a haphazard collection of pure energy that could lash out in a hundred directions at once. “Muzzle up.” I elbowed Toshi’s ribs. “And stop lying.”
“Maybe that’s why you’re getting sent away to Florida,” Toshi said. “Because your dad is embarrassed.”
Toshi had never been such a bammer to me before, and I wanted to knock the lies right out of him. My eyes felt like they were turning red from the inside out. “That’s the dumbest lie I ever heard,” I said. “I’m going to see my mom.”
“Shut up.” Jay parked the car back at his house. “My parents are asleep. Just be quiet until we get back to New Veronia.”
Toshi was trying to ruin me by suggesting to Jay that I was gay. There had been a student who transferred to our school in the seventh grade, a guy, but sometimes he’d come to class wearing a skirt, or it would look like he had on mascara, and Jay had hated him. He’d hated the kid so much that, one day after school, he’d followed him home and spray-painted FAGGOT across the kid’s house, right there in front of him. Then Jay swore that if the kid told on him, he’d sneak into his bedroom at night and shove a broken bottle up his ass. All this Jay had relayed to me and Toshi with a note of glee in his voice. I couldn’t be sure that it had happened just the way Jay told it, but the point was, he took pleasure in telling us, in describing the way he’d carve out the kid’s asshole. I knew that he was joking, that it was all one big fantasy to him, but still Toshi had to realize that when he called me a faggot, it was sabotage.
By now, we knew our way through the dark woods; a path had formed from nothing more than our footsteps. Jay brought up the rear, and I felt somehow that he was marching us to a place against our will, though we’d all decided to stay the night in New Veronia already. The triangle of our triplex stood out against the dark-blue sky, and a rib of moon curved just above it.
Once we were inside Jay’s room, he declared that our silence could be broken. He switched on the camping lantern and it swung from its ceiling hook, flinging shadows over the walls. I sighed in cautious relief, thinking Jay was going to drop the whole thing, until he said, “Now what was the question, again? The real question? Was it which one of you is a fag?”
“Fuck off,” Toshi said, monotone-like. He was slumped across the bed on his back, both his knees pointing to the ceiling. Jay and I stood close to the door.
“It’s him,” I said. “There’s no question: it’s him.”
“He just might be,” Jay said. “I wouldn’t put it past him.”
The branches of the tree that made up our triplex’s center post swished against the tarps. Outside, the wind was picking up.
“And here we’ve been friends for all these years,” Jay said as he stepped closer to the bed, “and I never suspected. Probably he’s been spying on me in the bathroom. Or drilled a little peep hole here.” He pointed to the wall he shared with Toshi’s room.
The wind rushed, and all the cracks in the structure sighed.
“Screw you,” Toshi said, trying to sound fierce. He blinked hard. I’d only ever seen him cry one time before, when he got a postcard from Singapore, from his mom, telling him that she got married again. He’d brought the postcard over to my house sealed inside a plastic baggie.
“I was so ready to fuck someone tonight,” Jay said. The lantern enlarged his shadow, and the dark imprint of him followed as he bent over the bed. “And I’m thinking: Toshi wants it.”