Boy Toy

by Barry Lyga

  "I didn't know any of that," Rachel says softly. We've been sitting on the grass midway between the diamond and the gate for hours, and my ass is numb. Hers must be too, because she stands and stretches, her legs wide apart. Touches her toes a couple of times. "I mean, once you mentioned it, I remembered that Christmas at the construction site. But I didn't know any of that."

  "It was in the papers."

  "Not the details. Not that stuff. It just said that she abused you and then she confessed, and—"

  "And within a week, her whole confession was on a website because someone in the county courthouse thought they were doing the world a favor by leaking it. Don't tell me you never read the confession."

  She stops midstretch, her body contorted, her face twisted to match. "Fine, then. I won't tell you."

  And then she yawns.

  "Sorry to bore you." It comes out snide and mean and shitty, and I wish I could say that it's a mistake, but it's not. In that moment, I want to hurt Rachel and I don't know why. Maybe because I told her things I swore I'd never tell anyone. Maybe because, in the end, it is her fault that it all came out, her and that stupid party and that stupid game.

  "I don't deserve that," she says quietly, folding herself up into a ball on the ground, knees drawn to her chest, chin resting on knees, watching me sadly.

  "I'm tired, is all. I worked all night, then I came here, and I have to be up for work again in five hours."

  "I'm sorry."

  "Five hours," she goes on, as if I've said nothing, "and I'm not going anywhere."

  "I'm sorry." I say it again, this time louder, and more contritely. I've apologized more in the past three hours than in my whole life, it seems.

  "I'll tell you my part of it," she says, now looking up at the sky. The moon's gigantic, pregnant. "It was all my mother's fault."

  "What?"

  "I missed you. I liked you a lot. The way kids like each other and maybe a little bit more. I don't know. I was thirteen. I wasn't experiencing what you were experiencing. All I knew was that you suddenly weren't around anymore. Zik said you were helping Mrs. Sherman with a project, and I couldn't understand how that could occupy every last minute of your time.

  "Michelle was getting tired of me moping around. She was on cloud nine with Zik and I think I was bringing her down. So now I'd lost this guy I liked a lot and on top of that my best friend was acting like she had better things to do."

  She shrugs. "So. Enter: my mother." She says it like the reveal of a villain in a movie, and I can't help but chuckle. Rachel shakes her head. "Yeah, yeah ... She saw I was depressed. Like an idiot, I told her what was bothering me. God, Josh. You should have seen her eyes light up! I mean, it's like she suddenly saw a lever that read 'For Mother of the Year Award, pull here!' I've spent my whole life being called a tomboy and my mother always hated it. She wanted a life-size Barbie doll she could play dress-up with. She said, 'Don't worry, honey. We can fix this up, no problem.'

  "It was supposed to be the last year for me to have a big birthday party with lots of friends over. Instead, Mom suggested I just have Michelle and Zik and you. It was so devious; she said that Michelle and Zik would spend all their time together, so you would have to talk to me."

  "Your mother planned all that?"

  "Well, she didn't tell me to play spin-the-bottle or get you into the closet. That was Michelle's idea. She came over early and we practiced it until we had it down pat."

  "You manipulated me." I don't know why I'm so angry over it; it was ages ago.

  "I wasn't the only one," she shoots back.

  And we stare at each other over the silence for a little while.

  "You want me to finish this story or not?" she asks.

  "Go ahead."

  "Yes. Yes, I manipulated you. Believe it or not, I wanted to just talk to you. But my mom—I think she was living out some fantasy of hers, rewriting or editing something from her own life. You know what that's like?"

  She bites her lip. Her front two teeth are just slightly oversize, but it's fetching in a weird sort of way. Yes, Rachel, I think but don't say. Yes, I know what it's like. More than that, I was the rewrite, the edit. I was the fantasy.

  We walk back to the cars together. By now it's half-past four—4:31, to be precise, which happens to be the record for errorless chances by a major league shortstop, set by—you got it—Cal Ripken in 1990.

  "I'm really sorry," Rachel says. We're standing at our cars, keys out, unready to get in and drive off.

  "For what?"

  "For my mother's stupidity. If she hadn't—"

  "Rache, it was probably ... You know, it would have come out eventually anyway. I really believe that." It's true. We were pretty good at keeping our secret, but we were getting more and more indiscreet as time went on. Eventually someone would've twigged to what was going on.

  "Yeah, but I think about everything you missed out on. The dates..."

  "I wouldn't have been dating anyone anyway, not if I was still—"

  "You never even went to a single homecoming."

  "Homecoming's stupid." And it is. Bunch of kids looking for excuses to grope each other all night.

  "Or any dances or anything."

  But I never cared about any of that stuff, and I tell her so. I understand that some people see school as a social outlet, but I've never been that way, even before I met Eve. It's what made me stand out, I guess. Even what made me stand out to Eve, for all I know.

  To me, school is a means to an end: You get the work done (and truthfully, the work isn't hard) so that you can get through and move on to more important things. Anything else is a waste of time.

  "What about prom?" Rachel asks.

  "What about it?"

  "Who are you going with?"

  "No one."

  "You're going alone?" It's like I've announced my intention to open a crystal meth stand in the cafeteria. "No, I'm not going at all."

  She walks over to me, takes my hands in hers, and looks up into my eyes. She's only a couple of inches shorter than me, but it might as well be a mile. So strange to look down into her eyes; for years, we were nearly the same height.

  "Go with me."

  It takes a second for me to realize what she's saying. She's asking me to prom. Insane.

  "Rachel, you don't have to—"

  "Remember how I kissed you before?" she asks.

  "Yeah. What does that have to do with—"

  "I'm going to do it again. I wanted to warn you this time."

  Part of me figures I should fight her off, but that seems ridiculous. She's smaller than I am. She can't hurt me. But she leans up and in, and then she's doing it. And I want to struggle against it like before, but she somehow teases my mouth open, and then I'm kissing her back.

  Kissing Rachel is different from kissing Eve. Eve kissed like her life depended on it, as if kissing me were the only way to sate some urgent hunger, with moans and sudden breaks for gulps of air before attacking me again. Rachel kisses like she's looking for something. It's the difference between swinging for the fences and going for a guaranteed base hit.

  I flicker. I'm in the closet, in Eve's bed, on the sofa.

  I'm standing outside SAMMPark, fighting against the sick urge inside me, the urge that says to let go of her hands, enfold her in my arms, explore every part of her with my hands, devour her with my tongue—

  She pulls back. "So tense. Lighten up, Josh. How are you going to dance with me at prom if you tense up so close to me?"

  "What? No way. Look, find someone else. I'm not going."

  She drops my hands and takes a couple of steps back, her lips wet, shining, her eyes dancing. "I could always strike you out again."

  "I don't know about that."

  "Try me?"

  "It's late."

  "You don't get what's going on, do you?" She asks it with genuine concern in her voice, and I feel like I'm a three-year-old having a Band-Aid put on a boo-boo.

  "What do you mean
?"

  She boosts herself onto the hood of her car, crossing those strong, magnificent legs. "This isn't about you and me hanging out and throwing the ball around. This is about missing five years. About Zik and Michelle."

  "What do they have to do with it?"

  "They're our best friends, you moron. They've been waiting five years for us to talk to each other. You think they're gonna keep going the way they've been going for five years now that we've talked? You think they're going to let you avoid me? Not gonna happen."

  I think of all the times I couldn't hang out with Zik because he was with Michelle and Rachel. There must have been just as many times that Rachel couldn't see her best friend because Michelle was with Zik and me.

  "You're part of the group now. There is a group now. Like when we were kids. The Four Musketeers ride again." She slides off the car and opens the door. "Get used to it. You might as well agree to go to the prom with me—Zik won't have it any other way."

  She blows me a kiss and leaves me standing there, stunned and confused and wondering what the hell I've gotten into.

  Chapter 12

  Cincinnati Joe

  I'm home by 5:22, which is the same number of shortstops used by the rest of the major leagues during Ripken's streak. Can you imagine that? He's on the job twenty-four/seven for the orioles and the other twenty-seven teams in the league each needed nineteen or twenty players to do that same job.

  I sit on my bed for a minute, still feeling Rachel's kiss on my lips, my teeth, my tongue. I'm hard. I want to beat off, but I'm dead tired, exhausted mentally and physically. All those years of dreading this conversation with Rachel and it ended up not being as bad as it could have been. I don't know what I expected. I guess I was thinking there'd be tears and screaming and a couple of fists thrown.

  I guess I didn't give her enough credit.

  Forgiveness is a funny thing. Dr. Kennedy wants to know if I've forgiven Eve. I've never answered that question directly. I always hem and haw and poke around it like it's a snake trapped in a bag and I'm not sure if it's dead yet. Because I figure there's a lot more to the question, to that topic, and I don't want to get into it. There are other people in need of forgiveness, after all.

  See, forgiveness doesn't happen all at once. It's not an event—it's a process. Forgiveness happens while you're asleep, while you're dreaming, while you're in line at the coffee shop, while you're showering, eating, farting, jerking off. It happens in the back of your mind, and then one day you realize that you don't hate the person anymore, that your anger has gone away somewhere. And you understand. You've forgiven them. You don't know how or why. It sneaked up on you. It happened in the small spaces between thoughts and in the seconds between ideas and blinks. That's where forgiveness happens. Because anger and hatred, when left unfed, bleed away like air from a punctured tire, over time and days and years.

  Forgiveness is stealth.

  At least, that's what I hope.

  Surprise, surprise, the phone rings at nine a.m. sharp. of course it's Zik. I'm a bit surprised that he and Michelle weren't camped out on my front porch all night and all morning, waiting for me to come home. Then again, maybe they were camped out at Rachel's.

  I can still taste Rachel's spit in my mouth, but I think I dreamed of Eve. I feel like my brain has vacated and all that's left is bleary vision, a head stuffed with wet cotton, and truly cruel morning wood.

  "How'd it go?" Zik demands.

  "Didn't Michelle fill you in?"

  "Dude, she was texting Rachel all night." I hear something in the background—a rambling, urgent sort of growl. I check Caller ID—he's calling from home, which means that the growl is Zik's dad. "All night and Rachel's offline, you know? And she's working this morning, so 'chelle won't be able to talk to her until this afternoon, so tell me—Ow! Fuck! All right, Dad. Give me a minute."

  Anger blossoms in the wet cotton packed in my skull and cuts through the fatigue and residual horniness. "Tell your dad I'm coming over to drop-kick his ass through a window."

  "I have to help him clear some shit out of the basement," Zik says. "Fuck, I can't wait to get out of this place."

  Zik and I share the desire to get the fuck out of Brookdale. Different reasons, same passion.

  "He smacking you around again? Because I'll beat the shit out of him." Zik can take care of himself, but I'm two inches taller and twenty pounds heavier. Plus, it's not my father.

  "Nah, he's just flicking my earlobe. Fucking around. Look, what happened, J? I gotta go soon."

  I give him a quick version—I apologized, she accepted. I don't get into the kissy-face shit because I don't even know how I feel about it yet. I don't want to think about Rachel that way, but a couple of kisses have a way of cementing a girl in your glands as a sexual possibility.

  "Oh, man, this is awesome," Zik says, and there's such a joy in his voice, such a light, that I just know it's got to be bad news for me.

  Witness my power of foresight: The first double date takes place that very night at Cincinnati Joe's. It's my first date in three years.

  Cincinnati Joe's is this dive-y sort of wings-and-beer joint in an old shack on Route 27, which is off Route 54. Every time I think about it, I'm struck, for some reason, by the fact that 27 is half of 54, and I can't help thinking that Route 27 is somehow half the road Route 54 is. What can I say—I'm weird.

  High-schoolers hang out at Cincinnati Joe's in terrifying droves. I hate the place, but I love the wings. Still, I don't like crowds, especially crowds of people my age. I can't help wondering which ones are thinking about what they know about Eve and me.

  The place smells like hot sauce and stale beer and stale cigarettes. Fortunately, the minute you get a wing within proximity of your mouth and nose, the heat of the peppers instantly destroys your ability to smell anything else for a week and a half, and you're spared the beer-and-cigs.

  Zik and Michelle sit on one side of the table, and on the other side of the scarred, pitted, wooden surface there's Rache and there's me, sitting ramrod stiff and trying not to brush against her accidentally. Rachel knows I'm uncomfortable. Zik knows I'm uncomfortable.

  The only person who doesn't know is Michelle, but that's because Michelle has the ability to edit reality. When she wants them to be, left is right and black is white in Michelle's world, and that's because Michelle is beautiful.

  Let me back up for a second. Michelle is not beautiful. Michelle is fucking hot. It runs in the family. As hot as Michelle is, her older sister Dina was supernaturally hot. And the oldest in the family, Stacia, went off to college years ago, but some still whisper legends. Mama Jurgens ain't too bad herself, but that could just be me—I may have a thing for older women.

  All this genetic largesse means that the world revolves around Michelle and reconfigures itself at her will. She gets extra wings at Joe's without asking for them. She gets super-sized at fast food joints. She gets the sale price at stores even if the sale ended yesterday.

  So while Zik eats wings and Rachel eats wings and I sit like I'm a condemned man offered a last meal of liver and onions, Michelle burbles on about prom.

  "...think we should all go to Paradis," she says, "and have a long, romantic dinner there. Doesn't that sound great, honey?" She grabs Zik's free hand—the one not smeared with wing sauce—and squeezes.

  "Yeah, I guess so." Zik is, of course, helpless to do anything but agree. And I'm still not sure how everyone decided that I was definitely going to prom. Because I'm not.

  "You'll never get reservations," Rachel says. "Prom's in three weeks. They're booked up."

  Paradis is a new French restaurant in Finn's Crossing. There isn't room for anything quite that fancy or interesting here in Brookdale—we have to emigrate for anything remotely cultural. (Unless you consider wings hot enough to burn your tongue to ash haute cuisine.) And Rachel is right, except...

  "I'll take care of it," Michelle says nonchalantly, as if describing a hangnail and not an impossible reservation
on prom night. She grins and daintily plucks a wing from the plate, managing to eat it without smearing sauce on her cheeks, chin, or fingers.

  "Well, have fun," I say, my first contribution of the evening, chased with a wing (eaten sloppily—I'm a guy).

  Michelle glares at me, then at Rachel. "I thought you said—"

  "Josh thinks he's not going to prom," Rachel says.

  "I'm right here!"

  "I know." She pats my leg and I

  —hand on my—

  almost drop my wing into my lap.

  Michelle's never seen a flicker. She's looking at me, bug eyed, from across the table. "Are you OK, Josh? Josh? Do you need help? Josh?"

  Zik calms her down and explains that I space out sometimes, which really is the easiest explanation and the one I tend to stick with.

  "Are you all right?" Rachel asks in a low voice, leaning in close.

  "Yeah. It happens."

  "It better not happen when we're dancing at prom." Her voice has a lilt to it. Her fingers are slightly orange from wing sauce, and so are mine. How nice it would be to hold hands with her. Just hold hands.

  But it can never be just that anymore, can it?

  "I don't want to go to prom."

  "I know. Give up now."

  I look over at Zik, who's worshipfully tangling his fingers with Michelle's. "I know I'm not as hot as Michelle," Rachel says, her voice still low, "but I like to think I make up for it with other attributes."

  "Yeah, like a fastball hotter than these wings."

  She laughs loud and raucous. I wish I had the guts to laugh like that, to not care if everyone heard me and turned.

  "Yeah," she says. "Yeah, that's one of 'em."

  Zik drives us all in Michelle's car, which is marginally roomier than mine or Rachel's. I end up in the back seat with Rachel, of course.

  "Who do you guys play on Tuesday?" Rachel asks.

  "East Brook."

  "No challenge there."

  She's right. East Brook is strictly Z-league.