“Where’d you get it?”
“From Ryo Murakawa, that kid from your class.”
Ryo Murakawa is an A-number-one bully, and it surprises me to hear Kevin mention his stupid name. “How do you know Ryo?”
“He goes to our church.”
“Ryo goes to church?” I can’t believe a little jerk like Ryo would ever step foot in a church.
“Yeah, he does. But, more importantly, his dad owns a shop on Hollywood Boulevard, where they sell these kinds of things. He sold it to me for a really good price.”
Kevin stretches out on the bed, right below the cowboy, and lifts his leg up and down against the poster, which makes me laugh. It looks like he’s rubbing his leg against the cowboy’s leg.
“He’s dead now,” he says.
“Who is?”
“James Dean! He died in a car crash ages ago. He was only twenty-four.” Kevin jumps off the bed, skips to his desk, and snatches up a book. “But, still, I love his movies, and I love his style. Here, look.” He hands me the book. “This is his life story. It’s got lots of cool pictures of him from before he was famous, like when he lived in Indiana as a kid, and also from his movies. Everyone was crazy about him.”
I flip through the pages for a few seconds, then hand it back to him and look at the poster again. I could look at it all day.
“I have other things, too. Check this out.” He leads me by the hand to the bulletin board above his desk. It’s covered in trading cards and pictures cut out from magazines and things, all of James Dean.
“How long have you been collecting this stuff?”
“It’s not stuff. It’s memorabilia. Look, this one’s signed.” He hands me a shiny black-and-white of James Dean wearing a black turtleneck sweater pulled up over his nose and mouth. It’s signed in the corner, but I can’t make out what it says, just a big curly J with a squiggly line after it.
“Is this for real?” I ask.
“Of course it’s for real. Ryo scored it for me from his dad’s private collection.”
“You mean he stole it.”
“No, he didn’t steal it. I bought it.”
“For how much?”
“Jeez!” Kevin grabs the photo out of my hand. “What’s with the third degree? I paid him ten bucks.”
“That’s all? Something signed is worth way more than that, isn’t it? Does his dad know he sold it to you—something from a private collection?”
“Of course, he knows!”
“Cause it’s not nice if Ryo stole it.”
“Like I said…” Kevin stuffs the picture into his pencil drawer and pushes it shut super quick. “I’m not some lowlife thief if that’s what you’re implying.”
“I didn’t mean you. I’m talking about Ryo. He’s a stuck-up big mouth. And I wouldn’t put it past him if he stole it from his dad and sold it to you for a lousy ten bucks.”
“Buying something stolen is the same as stealing it, Clyde.” Kevin frowns and shakes his head at me, and I realise then I shouldn’t have said anything because I really like him, and I don’t want him to be mad at me.
I look back at the bulletin board and pretend I’m interested in the pictures. That’s when I spot a black-and-white of James Dean and a blonde lady, both of them smoking cigarettes on a balcony. The focus of the picture is totally on James Dean. His face is all scowly and squinty, and he’s gripping a cigarette between his teeth, almost like he wants to bite off the end. The blonde lady, who’s wearing a tight white dress, is more in the background, not really paying attention to him. She’s in her own world, bending over the edge of the balcony and sucking hard on her cigarette so that her cheeks are pulled in. You can see a bunch of tall New Yorky-looking buildings behind them, and some tiny spots down below that I guess are cars. I lean forward to take a closer look.
“Is that Marilyn?” I ask, pointing at the picture.
“Huh? Oh, yeah, Marilyn Monroe.” He unpins the picture from the bulletin board and hands it to me. “It’s a fake, I think. I’m not sure they ever met each other.”
“I think she’s the prettiest lady I’ve ever seen in my whole life. I love her blonde hair, the stylish way she dresses, and I really like her friendly face. She’s perfect!”
“You can have it if you want, for your birthday.”
“Really?” I sit on the bed and stare at the picture. “Thank you, Kev!”
Kevin sits next to me and looks at the picture again. “What I like is the cool way Dean’s clenching the cigarette between his teeth. I hardly notice her.” He lays back on the bed and stares at the ceiling.
“I saw her on TV last night,” I say, after a moment. “I told Momma I want to meet her someday, but she told me that I can’t.”
“It’s because she’s dead,” he says, still staring at the ceiling.
“She is…?” I glance at the ceiling to see what he’s looking at and notice there’s a big mirror up there where you can see yourself if you’re lying flat on your back.
“Yeah, my mom says she took too many sleeping pills and died. Some people think she did it on purpose; other people think the CIA killed her because she was having sex with the president.” Kevin sits up and grins. “But you don’t know what sex is yet, do you?”
I shake my head and set aside the picture of Marilyn, feeling a little sad to know she’s dead.
“So, as I promised, I’m going to show you!” He jumps up and rubs his hands together fast, the way you rub two sticks together when you want to make a fire. “But first, let’s get you out of your dirty uniform.”
“You’re so lucky to be able to decorate your room the way you like,” I say, taking off my cap and stripping off my uniform shirt and the T-shirt underneath.
“Mom doesn’t like it,” Kevin says. “But my dad says she should let me because it’s good for me to develop my personality.”
“That’s probably because he’s from England.”
“Maybe so,” Kevin says with a little shrug. “They argue about it sometimes. But, so far, so good.”
Kevin takes my shirt and folds it into a perfect square just like they do in department stores, then he helps undo my belt, which has a tricky buckle I can’t open very easily, and helps me wriggle out of my baseball pants and stockings.
“My father won’t let me touch my room,” I say.
“Have you asked him?”
“No way. It’s Hiro’s old room. He doesn’t want me to touch anything.”
“Hiro’s been gone a long time. It’s your room now. You should be able to decorate it however you want. Start with that picture I gave you. Pin it up on your wall.”
Kevin puts my uniform on a chair and looks at me, standing there in my underpants. He points at the red patch on my left thigh. “Is that the thing?” he asks.
I nod, not wanting to think about it.
Kevin leans forward and kisses the patch. He keeps his lips against my leg for a few seconds, and it makes me feel better. Auntie Doreen says Kevin has healing powers, and I believe it, even though Uncle Alistair says it’s a bunch of rubbish.
“I heard my parents talking about it one night,” I say. “The doctor told them it’s some kind of cancer. But my father said it’s a curse for what happened before, with Hiro.”
“Your dad’s fricking nuts. Don’t pay any attention to him.” Kevin passes the tips of his fingers over my thigh. “My mom told me it’s just some kind of rash that won’t cause you any problems, at least not for a long time. Maybe never. So don’t worry about it.”
“How would she know?”
“I have no idea.” Kevin gently rubs his fingers over the patch in a little circle. “She just knows.”
“Make it better, Kev, please.”
Kevin lays his hand flat against the patch. It feels warm and tingly. I close my eyes and imagine his healing energy flowing into my body. After a little while, his fingers move around to the back of my leg. They stop right under my bum and lift my underpants.
“What’s
this?” he asks.
“What’s what?” I open my eyes and crane my neck to look at him.
“This scar.” He rubs his fingers against my skin, right where my leg meets my bum cheek. “It’s, like, two inches long.”
“I don’t know.”
“How can you not know?” he says. “It looks like it was a deep cut.”
“I mean, I don’t remember.”
“Haven’t you ever seen it?” He leads me to a full-size mirror on his closet door. “Here, look.” He points out a thick, reddish scar on the back of my leg in the shape of a crescent moon.
“I don’t feel well, Kev.”
“Sorry, little cuz.” He leads me to the bed. “Sit here for a second.”
He runs to his bathroom and comes back a few seconds later with a glass of water. I take a sip and draw a few deep breaths, the way Momma showed me to do whenever I feel nervous or scared.
“Maybe it happened when you were little,” Kevin says, still frowning. “Maybe that’s why you don’t remember.”
“Maybe.”
“Anyway, it’s not good to forget things. Especially things like that. You should ask your mom about it.”
“OK, I’ll ask her,” I say, even though I know I’m not going to because Momma doesn’t handle things very well. I take another sip of water.
“I’m serious, Clyde. Promise you’ll ask her.”
I nod and smile at him.
Kevin kisses me on the cheek again. “OK, cool.” He takes the glass out of my hand and sets it on his nightstand. “Ready for the lesson I promised you?”
“What lesson?”
“The one about sex.”
“Oh, yeah. But, shouldn’t I get dressed first?”
“Not yet!”
He disappears into his big closet. I can hear him digging around in it for a couple of minutes. Then he reappears with a big book. He jumps on the bed and holds it up to me, showing me the front cover with a cartoon of a man and a lady smiling at a baby in a crib.
“What’s this?”
“It’s a book from Denmark that explains everything about sex. And it has lots of cool pictures.” Kevin flips open the book to a cartoon of a naked man with a beard, whose arms are wrapped around a chubby naked lady with weird pigtails.
“Does your momma know you have this?” I ask, being that his parents are religious and kind of strict, especially Auntie Doreen.
“No way! And don’t you tell them. My mom would kill me.”
I take the book out of his hand and look more closely at the cartoon, which is really dorky-looking. I mean, it doesn’t look like a real artist drew it. The man’s chinchin looks like a tiny fish sausage, and I’m not sure what that white space is between the lady’s legs. “Where did you get this?”
“Doesn’t matter.” Kevin takes it back. “The point is, I’m going to explain all about sex to you.”
“OK…”
“So, first, you see how the man has hair around his chinchin?”
“Yeah, I guess…”
“OK, what that means is before you can have sex, you need to have hair around your chinchin. Like this.” He pulls down his shorts a little and shows me some dark brown hair growing below his belly button. He reaches over and pulls down my underpants a little in the front, too. “You don’t have any, so you’re not ready yet.”
“What if I never grow any hair there?”
“Don’t worry,” he says, with a short laugh. “You will. All guys do. Give it a year or two, and you’ll grow hair. I guarantee it. Maybe it’ll start growing on your kintama first. But, eventually, it’ll grow right there.” He rubs the space below my belly button. His fingers feel cool against my skin. “Anyway, you see here in the picture how the lady has this long hole between her legs, and it’s surrounded by hair?”
“Yeah…”
“That’s her omeko. Girls need hair around their omekos before they can have sex, just like guys need it around their chinchins.” He flips a couple of pages and shows me a picture of the same bearded cartoon man lying on top of the pigtailed lady. They’re holding on to each other, and their lips are touching, sort of like they’re kissing each other. “See that?”
“What am I supposed to be seeing now?”
“Right there!” He draws an invisible circle with his finger around their leg area. “The artist drew the picture so you can see inside their bodies.”
I lean forward and squint my eyes.
“You can see the man’s chinchin is pushed deep into the lady’s omeko.” He pokes his finger at the book.
“Oh, yeah…” I look up at Kevin and see he’s raising his eyebrows up and down again with a big grin on his face. “That’s kind of weird.”
“It’s not weird,” he says. “It’s sex. Everyone does it when they get older. And this,” he says, raising his voice like a TV announcer as he flips the page, “is what happens afterwards.” He points at the book, and I see a picture of the pigtailed lady with what looks like a big-eyed worm inside her belly. Kevin pokes at the picture again. “That’s a baby growing inside the lady.”
“It doesn’t look like a baby.”
“It’s what a baby looks like before it grows into this.” He flips the page again and shows me another picture of the pigtailed lady with something that looks more like a baby inside her belly, only all scrunched, almost into a ball.
“And finally,” he says, flipping the page again and pushing the book up to my face, “the baby pops out of the lady’s omeko.”
I grab the book and hold it away from my face and see this crazy picture of the pigtailed lady lying flat on a table with her legs spread wide apart and a baby’s head poking out of her omeko with a goofy smile on its face. The bearded man is standing on one side of the table, and a doctor is standing on the other, and neither of them is paying any attention to her, because, like, who would! I slam the book closed and hand it to Kevin.
“What’s wrong?” he says. “I told you I was going to explain to you about sex. And that’s what it is.”
“Babies come out of omekos?”
“We all came out of our mothers’ omekos!”
“That’s gross!” I try hard not to picture Momma’s omeko with me shooting out of it, or Kevin flying out of Auntie Doreen’s.
“It’s not gross! It’s how babies are made.”
“Whatever! And that’s what you can’t wait to do? Make babies?”
“No!”
“You said you can’t wait to have sex!” I jump off the bed. “That’s exactly what you told me back there on the Cobb Estate, didn’t you? And then you told me you were practising for sex when you kissed me.”
“Calm down! I’m not done explaining.”
“Explaining what?”
“About sex! It’s not just about making babies. Come on, sit back on the bed.”
“No,” I say, backing away from him. “I can hear you from here. Tell me what you meant, if it’s not about making babies.”
Kevin holds up his hands and says, “Fine. I’ll explain from here. But stop being sore about it, because I didn’t mean anything bad, OK?”
I nod and wait.
“So, the thing is, even though sex is mainly about making babies, you can do the part about sticking your chinchin inside a girl’s omeko just for fun.”
“What’s fun about that? That’s where her pee comes from.”
“It’s fun because it feels good. And it’s not just about putting it in a girl’s omeko either. It’s more about rubbing your chinchin against something soft. The more you rub it, the better it feels.”
I’m totally confused by what Kevin is saying and almost feel like running away. But he’s been so nice to me, and I want to feel his arms around me again. So I shuffle a little closer to him.
“Come on, slugger.” Kevin pats the bed. “We can practise kissing a little more.”
I sit next to Kevin, and we kiss again. Then we stretch out on the waterbed to kiss some more, and I close my eyes and imagi
ne I’m melting into his body.
Over the sound of his breathing, I hear a loud grinding noise in the background. It sounds like it’s coming from outside of the house.
“Kev!”
“Don’t stop,” he says.
I point at the window. “I think your parents are home!”
“Oh, shit!” He sprints to the front window and pokes out his head. “Mom’s just coming into the house now.” Grabbing his hairbrush off the dresser, he passes it through his hair a few times. “Hurry up and get dressed, Clyde! Grab anything out of there.” He waves the hairbrush at the closet. “Meet me downstairs in the kitchen.”
He runs to the hole in his floor, stops for a second, then comes back and kisses me on the cheek. “Don’t say anything, OK? This is our secret.”
“I promise.”
Kevin smiles the handsomest smile I’ve ever seen and kisses me again, this time on the mouth. “To be continued,” he says, looking deep into my eyes, right before he disappears down the hole.
Chapter 5
Once Kevin’s gone, the room gets super quiet and I feel completely alone like I’m the only person left in the whole world. I sit on the bed and think about everything that just happened, which makes my heart race. So I lay back and close my eyes, taking a few deep breaths to relax myself. When I finally open them, I find I’m looking up at the mirror on Kevin’s ceiling, which is weird and a little scary at first. So I shut my eyes again and keep them that way for a while and think about how nice Kevin is to me, about how handsome he is. The bed bobs around from the water sloshing inside. It’s warm and relaxing.
After a bit, I open my eyes and look up again. I look so strange, so far away up there on that high ceiling, almost like I’m another person—just a boy on a bed in his underpants.
Why would anyone put a mirror on the ceiling above their bed? I mean, it’s not like you’re going to be able to see anything when you’re asleep. And people don’t usually look so great in the morning either. And who’s going to get dressed and lay on their bed to look at themselves, since clothes don’t look right when you’re flat on your back. So, I reckon the mirror must be there so you can look at yourself when you’re relaxing or when you’re thinking, like what I’m doing now.
The Death of Baseball Page 3
