I pressed my index finger against my thumb, but they were both numb. If Jay turned on me, too, if he somehow knew what Toshi and I had done together in Stella’s room, I would die. I would kill myself.
“Don’t you want it, Tosh?” Jay put his hands in his belt loops and pulled the fabric of his shorts back against his cock. “It’s just to teach you a little lesson. About what it really means to be a faggot.”
Toshi had scooted up the bed until his back was against the wall. “Don’t touch me,” he said.
“We’re not going to touch you.” Jay stepped closer. “We’re just going to fuck you.”
In that moment, I realized that Jay was serious.
“Hold on,” I said. “Leave him alone. He’s our friend, remember? He’s not gay.”
“Do you want me to fuck you, too?” Jay said to me. “Is that what you’re asking for?”
“All I mean is, he didn’t do anything.” I couldn’t keep my eyes on Jay’s steely ones.
“That’s right,” Toshi said. His face was screwed up with fear. “Fuck Bennet, instead. He’s gay. He’s more gay than me. He made me suck his cock.”
The outrage of this statement embodied itself in my hands shaking, and the edges of my vision darkened as if the whole world were tightening its noose.
“What?” I said. “What are you talking about?”
“Oh, my god.” Jay was laughing. “This gets better and better. Is he serious? Did you make him suck your cock?”
“No!” I said, over and over again, until I realized that too many denials might make me sound guiltier.
“Well, if he’s a faggot lying little shit, then he’s asking for it. We have to fuck him.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Okay. Fuck. Him.”
My body felt like the wind outside: everywhere, whipping around, angry. I hated Toshi for what he’d done to me. I hated him most of all for telling Jay, because that meant that I had to prove what Tosh said was wrong. And the only way to do that, Jay had made it clear, was to fuck Toshi.
“Turn him over,” Jay said, one knee on the bed. Tosh had curled up in a tight ball, but otherwise, he didn’t try to fend me off. When I yanked down his shorts, his ass clenched together, leaving two deep depressions in the muscle on either side.
“I knew I was fucking someone tonight,” Jay said.
I watched in fascination as Jay grabbed either of Toshi’s cheeks and pried them apart; it was there, that part of a body I’d never much studied, that Jay would fuck. A tight, plummy coil. How would Jay’s cock fit in there? Inside my shorts, despite my revulsion, my own cock had started to twitch a little along with the pumping of my heart.
Toshi lay limp, as if we’d killed him first. Jay spat on Toshi’s asshole and rubbed the tip of his cock around it. Toshi struggled, his body one quick spasm, and then he lay still as the nighttime bugs started up their chorus.
“He loves it,” Jay said, grunting. The shadows beat against the wall. “He loves it, the sick fuck. You got to make sure he can’t see your cock.” He squashed Toshi’s face deeper into the mattress. “Or he’ll fall in love with it, the faggot.”
This was porn, live: with Toshi face down on the mattress like that, he could pretty much be any woman. I dug in my pocket for Stella’s purple panties, then pressed them to my nose and inhaled. They obscured the smell of shit. Maybe my mother had left the family and abandoned me all those years ago because she’d sensed this coming: she had somehow known that I would give in to my wicked body.
“Get in there,” Jay said to me, “get in there.”
By that point, I would have done anything Jay said; it was like all those years of him being my best friend had embedded his voice in my brain so that his words became my actions. The air on my dick felt strange in the presence of other people. My balls tightened up and it took me a minute to decide that the body on the bed was not Toshi; it was just a body. The wind battered the walls, but I felt nothing of the world outside my own burning anger.
When we had finished and Toshi had pulled his shorts back up over himself, Jay said, “That thing is in my bed. We can’t stay here.”
“Right,” I said, holding fierce onto the last scraps of adrenaline so that I wouldn’t feel anything else. The wind flung the door out of my hand and slammed it open. Jay and I stepped out into the night, into a swirl of leaves, and we went whooping through the woods, kids on a sugar high, running and stumbling and fleeing as far from that place as we could.
Chapter 14
We holed up under a tree somewhere surrounded by other trees and, when the adrenaline finally left, it drained every ounce of energy I’d had out with it. As the wind fingered my hair and blew seashell whistles through my ears, I fell into a hard sleep and dreamed that I was in a play, watching a play, which was a dream I’d had before, when I was in theater working on Midsummer Night’s, and I woke just like the characters, saying it was all a dream. They said that to protect themselves, and none of them really believed it.
Then I started itching from bug bites, and though I tried hard to squash the memory, everything came back in too much detail, like the way that Toshi had squealed, the sound reminding me of Podge, the potbelly I’d abandoned in Texas. If only I had been flagged, wasted out of my mind, but a different sort of altered consciousness had made it possible for me to forget that Toshi was my friend, that he was a person and not just a body there beneath me. Maybe it had been a surge of insane hormones or an intense need to prove myself to Jay or a momentary lapse of brainpower: I could only assume that, for those few minutes, my actions had been taken over by something beyond my control. I stuffed my hand into my pocket and rubbed Stella’s panties between my fingers.
As soon as Jay opened his eyes, he said, “I’m hungry.” He stretched. “Let’s get some food.”
The trees creaked with their own weight. I wanted to ask if he felt bad or guilty or upset, if his regular expression was just a mask to hide his anguish, but I couldn’t talk that way: then it would be obvious that I was shaken up, and maybe changed forever, maybe actually an entirely different person than the one I’d been just yesterday.
Jay found some plants that he said were edible. “My dad taught me how to forage.” He snapped the stems of some fern-looking things. “He’s kept me out here with him a few nights. Survivalist type stuff.”
“You think you could live out here forever? That would be killer.” I had to force the enthusiasm into my voice; maybe if I pretended to be myself, I would find me somewhere.
“My dad, you know how he says he’s always right, and this one time, I was wondering if he could be wrong just a little. And so”—Jay laughed—“I tried to feed him a bad plant. To see if he was really as smart as he says. If he would notice it. And he did. He did right away. It was only a little joke, but he got pretty mad. Then he left me out for a night all alone for trying to poison him. That was right when there were bears around here, too.”
“Wow,” I said. “Were you scared?”
“Naw. He’d taught me enough stuff by then.”
“Still, that’s harsh.” I held up the bottom of my shirt to make a basket for our breakfast plants, and Jay dumped them in.
“Come on, that was nothing. I was trying to poison him.”
“Yeah,” I said, though I was thinking that most fathers probably deserved to be poisoned at least a little. “The other day, Stella said this weird thing to me.”
“You need to get over her. Or I guess if you really want her, then you got to join us. Become a real part of the family.”