Sixteen

by Megan Mccafferty

  After lunch, I went out to the archery field, where my second was already waiting with John and his second. John and I squared off. Hank immediately shouted, in disappointment, “Come on!”

  We went at each other. He grabbed, I grabbed. A second later, we were on the ground. A second after that, I was on top of him. John twisted and writhed, but I had him pinned. Eventually, he stopped moving and stared up at me. His glasses were still on.

  “Say you give up,” I said.

  “No,” he said.

  “Say you give up or I’ll hit you,” I said.

  “No,” he said.

  stood in a corner. The only light, from a street lamp on the basketball court outside, filtered in through one small window near the ceiling. I sat down on an old foot locker and waited.

  At nine o’clock, Nina slipped in through the barn doors. She closed them behind her, then she came and sat down next to me on the trunk.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi.”

  We sat quietly for a little while.

  “So you want to practice kissing?” she said.

  “Ummm . . . yeah,” I said.

  She leaned towards me. I leaned towards her. And then I was confronted with a problem I hadn’t anticipated—Nina

  My First Fight

  I pulled my fist back and tried more menacingly, “Say you give up on the count of three or I’ll hit you. One. Two. Seriously! It’s coming!”

  He lied there, impassive.

  “Okay, I’ll give you another chance,” I said. “But this time, give up by the count of three, or I’m really going to hit you. One. Two! Two!!” I shook my fist, as if I was just about to slam it down on him. “Two!!!”

  I looked imploringly at our seconds. Hank had his arms crossed in front of his chest, and was watching us with an almost intellectual interest. Russell shrugged.

  “Well, I can’t hit a guy in glasses,” I finally said. And I got off him and walked away. As I reached the edge of the field, John called out, “Hey.”

  I turned around.

  “Fuck you, you fucking pussy,” he yelled.

  had huge breasts. As we moved towards each other, I knew it was my responsibility to avoid making any contact with her breasts. I reached my arms wide around her, pulled my chest back, and craned my neck in, but as we got closer, it became clear this wouldn’t help—our lips could not meet without her breasts being mashed into me.

  Which is what happened. And in the same instant, our lips were together. Then her lips were pressing and pulling. They were plump. And wet.

  She went back and forth between my top and bottom lips, taking each one between her lips and squeezing it. After a little while, I started squeezing back.

  Then she turned her head sideways and came at me at an angle. She affixed her face to mine and her tongue darted into my mouth. It started moving in and out, this way and that, thick and fast. I lifted my tongue and sort of . . . blocked it. Then I started moving my tongue haphazardly, startled each time it collided with hers. After the tenderness of the lip squeezing, this was chaotic. In a place that felt like outer space, I thought, I’m French-kissing!

  Finally, Nina pulled away.

  “Okay,” she said. “You’re a natural.”

  “Really?” I said.

  “Yeah, you’re good at it.”

  I didn’t believe her, but I was glad she said it.

  “Okay,” she said again.

  Then she got up and went to the door. She turned and waved before leaving.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  Manon lived in Glencoe, a suburb an hour from Chicago, and although we never saw each other after camp, we talked three or four nights a week on the phone. The conversations were mostly her talking about her day-to-day life, and me “uh-huh”ing. I still didn’t have any friends at school, and these conversations reminded me that there was an alternate universe where people liked me.

  I went back to camp the next summer, but Manon didn’t. I played Sky Masterson in the fourth quarter of Guys and Dolls. I wore a double-breasted suit, and I sang “Luck Be a Lady Tonight,” crouching and pretending to throw dice on the final “Tonight” of each chorus.

  When I got home at the end of the summer, Manon called and told me her family was moving to Chicago, and she was transferring to New City Day School. We were going to be freshmen together. She shrieked and laughed about how great it was going to be. I was ecstatic, too.

  On the first day of school, I waited against the wall in the big front entryway. All the kids I’d known for years were bouncing through the doors, practically hopping into each other’s arms. New City Day went from kindergarten through twelfth grade, but the move into high school still felt like a new beginning, and everyone was excited.

  Manon came in the door, one hand gripping a Le Sportsac that hung from her shoulder. She scanned the entryway, and then her big, beautiful mouth spread wide when she saw me. She ran at me and threw her arms around me, jumping up and down while we hugged. “Oh my God! I can’t believe you’re here! I can’t believe I’m here! I can’t believe it! Oh my God! I can’t believe this!”

  I looked down into Manon’s eyes and said, “You can’t hang out with me.”

  “What do you mean?” she said.

  “Nobody likes me here. If you hang out with me, nobody’ll like you, either.”

  “That’s ridiculous!”

  “No it isn’t.”

  “We’re hanging out all the time. You’re my best friend.”

  “We can’t.”

  “We’re going to be together all the time.”

  I shook my head.

  “This is crazy,” Manon said. “I don’t know anybody else. I love you!”

  “No,” I said.

  Then I pointed to a group of popular girls clustered together across the hall. Each had a different-colored Le Sportsac. “They’re popular,” I said. “Go hang out with them.”

  “No,” she said.

  “Go.”

  “No, this is ridiculous.”

  “Go.”

  Manon looked up at me. She was crying, and she opened her mouth to say something. Then she turned and left.

  I waited in the entryway for a little while, then went in to start high school.

  Junior year, I started to fall into people. First Kevin Dorst, who I was in chorus with, invited me out to dinner one night. Then Bill Fritz, who was on the soccer team with me, started sitting next to me in Latin class. We both thought the word expugno (are, atus—to take by storm) was funny, and we

  Dinner at Papa Enzo’s

  One day after chorus, at the beginning of junior year, Kevin Dorst asked me if I wanted to come over that night and go out to dinner. I had never gone out with a friend before.

  We took a bus to his building on Chestnut Street, dropped our stuff in the foyer of his apartment, and went around the corner to Papa Enzo’s. It was a neighborhood Italian restaurant with red booths and candles on the tables. Kevin confidently told me that the ravioli was excellent.

  After we ate, we went back to his apartment. With the constant exhale of the central air, dim track lighting, and long, white-carpeted halls, it felt vast and desolate, Kevin’s corner bedroom like a far-flung outpost at the North Pole.

  In his room, we sat on the floor and looked at his favorite Playboy—the Playmate had breasts that swelled out to cover her entire torso. Kevin offered to let me borrow the magazine (I never gave it back).

  I took the 151 bus home through the deserted park. The walking paths twisted into the trees, the antique street lamps glowed, and the magazine in my bag pulsed secretly, like uranium. I could still taste the ravioli in my mouth, and the structure of my loneliness buckled.

  started making as many jokes as we possibly could with it, chief among them simply repeating and declining the verb. (When a teacher has you convinced you’re being disruptive by declining Latin verbs, you are in the hands of a master.)

  Eventually, my relationship with Bill spil
led out of the classroom and into his father’s apartment on Lake Shore Drive, a bachelor’s lair with a huge sculpture of a penis in the front hallway, a bearskin rug in the living room, and a Jacuzzi and sauna in the back bathroom. This was an environment totally different from my own, and going there felt as magical and exhilarating as walking into a rain forest.

  Bill and I played soccer with a guy in the popular clique, Jonah, and at lunchtime we started going to his house, which was only a few blocks from school. Jonah’s friend David usually came, too. I used to go to Shmendel’s, where I’d eat hot dogs and play pinball by myself. Now I went to Jonah’s basement, where I’d eat Chips Ahoy and play video games with a whole bunch of guys. Jonah could hiss exactly like the snake in the Dungeons and Dragons video game, and something about the frequency he hit was so creepy and primal that it gave us chills. It also made us laugh so hard we stopped caring about the game and played just to hear him hiss.

  Once Bill and I were friends with Jonah, becoming friends with the girls in the clique was as effortless and quick as a sponge soaking up water—one moment you were talking to Jonah in the hall when they arrived en masse, the next you were sitting between them at Sarah’s house and watching Days of Our Lives.

  Manon had been a member of the clique since I had pointed her to it freshman year. Now we were around each other all the time again. Our friendship regrew from the old root. We went back to talking on the phone for hours. We sat next to each other in class and at lunch, we snuck away from parties for conspiratorial discussions of whatever was on her

  Bill’s Dad’s Apartment

  Bill’s dad was a lawyer, but not the kind of lawyer the rest of our fathers were. He worked at home in sweatpants, he played tennis every day, he had “deals” instead of cases. One of his clients was Seka, the most famous porn star in the world at the time. I fantasized that on my eighteenth birthday Bill’s dad would arrange for her to have sex with me.

  One night, after taking a Jacuzzi, Bill, Jonah, and I were heading toward the kitchen in nothing but towels wrapped around our waists. We were winding through the narrow, cool hallways of the apartment when we turned a corner and ran into Bill’s father and Seka. She had a sweet, plain face and, stretching a white T-shirt into horizontal ridges, breasts that we knew were heavy and oblong.

  “This is Dottie,” said Bill’s dad.

  Seka was Dottie.

  “Hi,” Jonah said.

  “Uh, hi,” I said.

  “Hi, Dottie,” said Bill.

  “Hi, boys,” she said.

  There was a great awareness of towels.

  Dottie then scanned each of our chests.

  “How come you’re so much tanner than they are?” she said to Jonah.

  “Um . . . I just am,” he answered.

  “Okay, that’s enough,” said Bill’s dad.

  Dottie smiled slyly at us and furrowed her brow in comic suspicion.

  We turned our backs to the wall and sidled past her, three half-naked boys in formation, fully understood.

  mind. We were constantly huddled together, talking about love, complaining about school, reminiscing about camp. The only thing we never discussed was our separation. There was an unspoken agreement between us that it hadn’t happened.

  Near the end of junior year, Manon and I were going to a party together at Jonah’s house. It was my sixteenth birthday, and I was vaguely entertaining the thought that it might be a surprise party for me. It was around eight o’clock, and we were parked on one of the quiet side streets of Lincoln Park, a few blocks from Jonah’s. We were talking for a while before going in, in the way we always talked—her going on and on, me absorbing little bits and pieces of what she said.

  At one point, when Manon was saying something I wasn’t listening to at all, I saw her eyes narrow and focus in on me. “You know, you’re a very confident guy,” she said. “And confident men have big penises.”

  There was a quiet moment while her comment filtered through me. I could feel my mind reaching for it, but there was nothing there except blackness and the faint, fading echoes of confident and penis. Then, for just a second, I felt a whirring in my head. And then I shut down. I stopped hearing anything, seeing anything, feeling anything. My head slumped a little, and my eyes locked blindly on the dashboard.

  Time passed.

  Something clicked. The world came back on. The inside of the car, full of an electric darkness. The trees outside, crisp and still. I sat up straight, and I looked over, and Manon was still talking. I felt something in my toes, and it started climbing, working its way up my body. A feeling of action. Of one fear breaking against another. I started moving across the seat. As I got closer, Manon turned her head and looked at me, all eyes now. And then I was there, and my lips were on hers. Her lips were there. And then they were gone.

  She pressed the back of her head against the car window, went a little bug-eyed, and said, “What are you doing?”

  I said, “I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

  We sat there for a few minutes, silent.

  Then Manon said, “Well, it’s not a big deal.”

  Surprisingly, I believed her.

  Only her.

  A few minutes later, we walked into the party. Nobody yelled “Surprise!” There were boxes of pizza, Cokes, and Diet Cokes (which the girls called “Dokes”).

  After we finished eating, the room went black, and everyone started singing “Happy Birthday.” Sarah and Cindy came in carrying a cake. In the dark light of the candles, I saw David’s mouth wide open as he hammed up the song. Sarah’eyes locked on me, as if they were searching for something inside me. And Jonah, still eating a piece of pizza, brimming with optimism and joy.

  I didn’t really know why these people had taken me in. But tonight they were singing to me. It didn’t feel like love, but it felt like hope.

  A Cab Ride

  When I was in my late twenties, my father died. I had moved home to help take care of him, so I had to deal with his death and the exhaustion and agony of spending an entire year watching him die. It was too much for me, and I fell into something that might be called a depression. I continued to function, to get up in the morning and eat and work and see friends, but in an emotionless, empty-headed way, as if I’d been unplugged from the world. This lasted for a year.

  Then I went into therapy, where I learned that you have to face and share the full weight of your grief. But this made me feel even worse, because my family was dealing with things differently, and didn’t want to constantly discuss how horrible we all felt.

  I was visiting Jonah in New York, and we were riding in a cab together down Ninth Avenue. I started to explain to him that I felt as if I’d died along with my father, and that I didn’t know how to make it back to this world. I told him that the worst part was that my family wasn’t interested in digging into their feelings the way I was, and so I was left to grieve alone, and I didn’t see how I could do it.

  “I’ll do it with you,” he said.

  Nebraska 99

  Jacqueline Woodson

  Tommy’s cursing about the baby screaming. I don’t say nothing, just pull the sheet up over my head. Cold tonight. We put two coats on the bed on top of the sheet and thin bedspread. Got it at Super Kmart and it’s got purple and gold flowers going over it but it’s not warm. Tommy yelled about it. I told him it cost less than it did, but I don’t even know why I lied ’cause it’s not like it’s his money I’m spending. Once a week I do inventory at Joanie’s Shoes out at the mall. One of the Dead Girls takes the baby for me. Not a whole lot of money but something to call my own, I guess. Tommy pays the rent and stuff mostly on time. He drives a truck for Bert’s Bakery— delivers bread and cakes and pies. Brings home whatever people don’t want—smashed loaves and pies. Cakes with the frosting smeared mostly off. I know he hates the job because some mornings he sits at the table with this faraway look in his eyes. Looks like he’s nailed to the seat. Guess me and the baby’s the nails. He says he sta
ys because what kind of man would he be if he left us. I know he stays because we’re all he has—the only thing he can put his finger on and say, “I finished that.”

  The baby cries, “Mama, Mama,” and I don’t answer. The book says you have to let them cry and then they’ll learn how to put themselves to sleep without somebody all the time getting up and going to them. He’s almost twenty months now and I think it’s time. Still taking the breast and I want to end that because they’re starting to look like they belong to a thirty-year-old, not me. That’s what Tommy first loved about me, but now he doesn’t even look at them. Looks away when I go to put one in the baby’s mouth. Not like I want him coming near me anyways, though. The house gets quiet again and I turn over. Close my eyes. It’s almost light out and the baby’s been calling most of the night. My eyes feel like they’re made out of broken glass. My throat is burning and it’s so damn cold in here.

  Maybe sleep comes. I don’t know. But I jump up when I hear the baby say, “Tommy, please. Please, Tommy,” and it bust my heart wide open, him begging for Tommy like that and Tommy not even halfway loving him, so I go down the hall. The floors are cold and the walls are cold and there’s that whistling sound of wind coming through the windows. They don’t close all the way. I lift the baby out of his crib and he puts his cold cheek against mine. We sit down on the small rug in his room and I let him nurse. It’s just me and him in almost-daylight. He sighs. Soon I hear his breath coming even and know he’s asleep. Skin warm against my skin now. Hair soft against my arm. I named him Tommy Jr. but I just call him TJ mostly. Tommy tried to teach him how to say Dad but he never did, and after a while, Tommy just gave up trying.

  It’s December now and the house can’t hold winter like rich people’s houses can. Feels like we’re living in a soup can most days—cold air and floors and walls. The small heater Tommy brought home from somewhere makes more noise than heat. It scares the baby. And since most days it’s just him and me cuddling to stay warm, I leave the heater off and wrap more coats around us. He looks up at me and smiles some mornings. His smile ain’t like nothing else in the world. It’s like the sun coming out and the heat coming on and us living somewhere where the wind can’t slip its cold head underneath every crack in the windows and walls.