Crash and Burn

by Michael Hassan

  “So how come I can’t learn?” I asked meekly, which got her to nod her head and smirk at me; then she moved closer, and when she got close, she lifted her skirt slightly. Then, deftly, with her fingers on each side of her skirt, she lowered her panties, pulling them down under her skirt, without even moving the skirt fabric in the slightest way. She did this so methodically that even sitting there almost directly beneath her, I could not, even for a second, see a thing. Plus it happened so quickly that I didn’t expect it at all.

  “You can’t learn because you always get what you want, so you never had to concentrate on something until you get it.” She told me this as she removed the underwear one leg at a time, keeping herself covered with her free hand, with me too startled to even think about what was next, still craning my neck to peek and simply not being able to see anything.

  “That’s your talent, isn’t it? Manifesting the things that you imagine, like magic,” she said, more than asked. “I believe that everybody comes into life with at least one special talent. Yours is a really, really extraordinary one; it’s what attracts other people to you, among other things. Unfortunately, it also victimizes you, because you never learned how to work for anything. So you have decided that you don’t need to concentrate on what you consider to be useless information.”

  She tossed her panties at me. “The kind of information that is not somehow useful to you.”

  I didn’t know if she was insulting me or complimenting me. Or both. All while completely distracting me physically to the point of intoxication. This was just like Roxanne.

  “I got my first tattoo,” she said. “It’s right here,” using her finger to point to the area of her skirt just below her hip bone. Then she leaned forward, as if to kiss me, but instead whispered, “It’s a bee . . . and I will show it to you if you answer all of the questions correctly in the next chapter.”

  She twirled around, heading back to the bed. “Now, read.”

  OK, at first I couldn’t read at all, because I was thinking about what she said, and what she was offering, which was, in fact, exactly what I had wished for when my mom first mentioned the possibility that I would be working with Roxanne. I guess that scene from Billy Madison put it in my head, but it was just a fleeting fantasy, not like I really expected it. And yet, there it was, like the straight flush that I managed to pull out of nowhere against her brother. So yeah, she was totally correct, there was a part of me that, no matter what happened, expected that it would all work out, a part of me that believed that if I thought about something long and hard enough, I could make it happen.

  So when I finally started to read, I stuttered, but went so slowly that I didn’t miss a word, and I tried to listen to my voice, as if someone else was reading to me. Afraid that this technique wasn’t good enough, I switched in my mind to other voices: Mrs. Terrigano, my history teacher, and then even Felicia, how would she sound reading the book? And as soon as my mind wandered, I stopped and reread the passage in my own voice, struggling against my wandering nature, and every time my mind strayed, I thought about the prize and started over again, taking a breath before every new paragraph.

  And when I was done, she had five questions that she had written out while I was reading.

  She read the first question. Easy. Andrew Jackson.

  The second question, my answer, no hesitation, was, of course, correct. The third, correct. The fourth, correct. The fifth . . . the fifth . . . I should have known.

  What a sucker I was. She wasn’t going to let me see anything all along. She would let me go four questions in, then make it impossible, just to prove a point. How could I have been so stupid? The fifth question was some one-line thing from the book: What was the name of the guy who was the president of the Second National Bank, the one who was opposed by Andrew Jackson? I needed the entire name of the guy, first and last names.

  OK, this was where I usually panicked on tests in school and ended up making something up. But not this time, not with so much at stake. Instead, I decided to play back, in my mind, the voices that I used to read the passage in my mind, was that passage Mrs. Terrigano, or my own voice, or Felicia’s?

  Second National Bank.

  I recalled that I was using Felicia’s voice in my head for that paragraph and she struggled with some of the words but not the name. It was . . . It was . . . I had nothing.

  Then I remembered that when I was reading the passage, I was thinking that the name was similar to Tom Riddle, which I was pretty sure was Lord Voldemort’s real name, the name he was born with.

  Got it.

  “Nicholas Biddle,” I exclaimed triumphantly.

  And now Roxanne was doing that smirk-laugh thing again, shaking her head, nodding in a way that I wasn’t sure if I was right or wrong, and I honestly didn’t know for sure until she got off her bed, stood up . . .

  And lifted her skirt for me.

  It was the most perfect bee that I had ever seen.

  “Time’s up, Crashinsky,” she said, lowering her skirt almost immediately. “See you Thursday,” which she had to repeat a few times because I was simply not getting up from the beanbag chair.

  When I finally got the message, I grabbed my backpack off her bed, hearing the sound of my mother’s car in the driveway, wishing that there was another hour, and already thinking that I wouldn’t be able to last until Thursday without seeing her again.

  On my way out, I had to ask.

  “What’s yours? Your special talent. You never said.”

  She smirked. “You already know my talent, Crashinsky. I laugh.”

  On Thursday she got into Spanish and let me touch the bee with one finger through her skirt, or at least where the bee should have been. I couldn’t exactly tell because this time she wasn’t offering to actually show anything, which only left me hungry for more time with her. The following Tuesday, English, and she flashed her breasts for ten seconds. Actually, one for math and the other for English. The following Tuesday, I proudly brought her the test that I had taken in history, showing off the grade: 92. The answer to the last question was, you guessed it, Nicholas Biddle. So thank you, Roxanne.

  My reward: She let me sit on her bed and watch her while she changed out of her hippie outfit of the day into her sweats, getting totally naked in the process, and OK, I’ll admit this, making her the first totally naked girl I had actually seen up close, because, not gonna lie, everything I did until that point I did in the dark or by receiving more than giving. And when Roxanne got naked for me, she did it in such a nonsexual way, walking across her room casually, hanging her things, going through her drawers, that I got to watch her body move, surprised that it wasn’t a perfect body, not like the images and videos of the girls that I had studied so closely on websites. She didn’t have the legs of a dancer or the boobs of a stripper; she had kind of droopy ones, a little uneven, I noticed, and she had a little roundness to her belly, not fat, but not solid and athletic like so many of the girls in the Herd. Also, her ass was kind of flat. If I had come across just the body on the internet or somewhere, I might have even clicked to the next girl.

  But in person, with her quiet, comfortable, nonsexual nudity, she was completely arousing and somehow, yeah, perfect.

  And then she was dressed, in like one quick movement, show over, like it never happened, except that she saw my expression and literally bellowed with laughter, knowing how completely sucked in I was by her performance. And then, instead of studying, we smoked some of her weed together and watched TV for that two-hour session, with her head in my lap, removing her wig and telling me to stroke her hair, which I did obediently.

  As I was leaving, she said: “If you get all B’s or better on your report card, I will solve your virginity problem.”

  Suddenly it was important to me that she did it with me because she wanted to and not because I got good grades. Call me a douchebag if you want, but suddenly it mattered to me.

  Then, the next time I was there, she was all busine
ss, reading through my English paper from before we started with the tutoring, one that I got a C– on, and making me sit at her desk to rewrite it.

  “You have to learn to write, Crashinsky. It’s like the most important thing you can learn in school.”

  And me, all sarcastic, “Yeah, like when am I ever gonna need to write?”

  And she said, “Trust me on this. I know what I’m talking about. If you don’t learn now, you’ll never get anywhere in college. You are going to need it one day. And when you do, you are going to thank me like you’ve never thanked anyone before.” Not a trace of sarcasm in her voice, like she was absolutely sure of this.

  I didn’t tell her that I was thinking of maybe not going to college, although I didn’t exactly think that there was any alternative. I couldn’t help thinking that if high school was a suckfest for me, then how could I even describe what I imagined college to be like?

  “Look at the sentence structure in your opening paragraph, it’s all over the place.”

  “Yeah, OK.”

  “Not OK, what was your thesis? The point that you were trying to convey?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t have one. I never had any pre-conceived ideas when I wrote. I just put stuff down on paper and then kept going until I was done. When I explained this to her, she just laughed in her Roxanne way. “How do you know if you’re done?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t,” which of course got her belly laughing, and there was clearly going to be no nudity in this session because she was intent on teaching me this thing, so much so that when my mother came to pick me up, she went down to the car while I stayed in her room to restructure the outline that she was helping me create. And when she came back up, my mother was gone. We worked for hours, until I had a new paper to hand in, one that had all the words from the one that I did without her, only this time they were part of a much better version. She had me read it to her on the drive back to my house, clearly proud of her own efforts. And I had to admit, it sounded really good, but there was no way I could do it again without her.

  Except in the following session together, she made me write another essay from scratch. Then another, then another. All this time, not even a flash of her breasts although first marking period was halfway done, so I started thinking that it was most definitely time to get the party started. Like, when was I going to see the bee again?

  Except, week after week, we worked on different subjects, with her always making me write something new, and us having this great, incredibly easy time together, talking about everything. Like about all of the girls in my grade and in the senior class, which Roxanne loved because even though she didn’t like anybody, she still liked to hear gossip, so I always brought her a tidbit. And she talked to me about life with her aunt, and I talked to her about living with, well, not exactly living with, but having to deal with Jacob. And she admitted that she was totally lesbo for Felicia, who she even noticed at her mom’s funeral, and who, according to Roxanne, had a kind of lesbian Angelina Jolie vibe, so, she said, it wouldn’t have surprised her at all if Felicia had “experimented.” We talked about her a lot, and about my sisters, and then about how her mom died and how she was dealing with it. Also about her trips into the city, which created a lot of friction with her aunt Beth (Peesmell to me). And then she admitted that she was seeing someone over the summer, this girl Cassie, who broke it off when school started, and I pretended not to be completely shocked but couldn’t help being disturbed by it, not because of the gay thing, well, not only because of the gay thing, but because I kind of wanted her all to myself. And while I didn’t tell her that, it must have been obvious, because we became more intimate after that, more touching, more holding, and more weed smoking and watching sitcoms with my head in her lap or sometimes making out a little, but not getting beyond that. And I stopped feeling like her student and started feeling, at least in my mind, like a boyfriend, and without giving it a name or a label, it was just the two of us every Tuesday and Thursday and the rest of the world didn’t matter or even exist.

  Of course, none of this could have happened if Burn had even once decided to come home after school. But he was always out driving. So we were safe because he always called her to tell her where he was and when he was coming home, and she always got me out of there before he returned.

  And when I asked her about him, where he went, she said she didn’t know. She only knew that he had to drive, that it was his way of dealing, that he simply could not return to the house where his mother died, not unless he absolutely had to. According to her, sometimes he never made it back home at night, and while she worried about him, he always called, and besides, she knew that he was good at taking care of himself after all he’d been through. Still, I couldn’t believe that after weeks of me being in his house every Tuesday and Thursday he still hadn’t once ever shown up.

  Then the first marking period was over, and even though I got a C in Spanish, Roxanne said that was good enough. And even though I needed to know whether it actually mattered to her or whether it was just keeping a promise, in the end, I said nothing, not wanting to ruin the opportunity. So she let me crawl into bed with her, which I did, but I was quick and sloppy, couldn’t even get the condom on right, which she made me wear. After the first mishap, she had to put it on for me, and then we did it again and I finished too quickly again, and she wanted me to take care of her, so I tried, but she slowed me down and told me that I had a lot to learn and that she would teach me.

  And then she showed me what worked for her and what didn’t.

  And every Tuesday and Thursday, I was rewarded for my excellent work. And she told me that I was getting better at pleasuring her, and then she admitted that I was pretty good at it.

  And then she was all business again, because she said now that I had experience, it was time to write again, because there was one more thing about writing that she had to teach me, something that I’d be able to get now, something that she knew I was capable of.

  And when I asked her what it was, she pulled out an essay that she had written and made me read it. It was about her mom, about a side of her mother that she never showed to the outside world, the stuff that only the people who are very close to you ever find out. I will admit that her writing choked me up and made me want to read more, and even now, just thinking of it, I can get choked up all over again. It was that good.

  And then, she explained, it wasn’t just her stuff, it was everywhere, all I had to do was look for it. I told her that I didn’t understand, and she said that seeing this one thing, this real emotion in everything, that was her true special talent and that she totally lied when she told me it was laughter.

  “Here’s the key,” she said. “Whenever you’re writing about anything, find the emotion in it. Don’t be afraid to express it. Even in history, like Andrew Jackson, like how the fuck was he feeling, being president in like the eighteen hundreds with all these things going on and no matter what, he acted like he was on top of the world, like when his opponents called him a jackass and he totally used that against them. The something that happened in his mind when he came up with that, that’s what’s pretty fucking cool if you ask me.”

  “I guess” is what I said, thinking, OK, that is a pretty cool way of looking at it.

  “So if you have to do an essay on Andrew Jackson, then put yourself in his mind at that time, and ask how are you feeling about this, being called a jackass. Does it make you angry? If so, who are you angry at? Like that. Get it?”

  And that’s how Roxanne taught me history. Well, history and writing. Well, history and writing and a way of looking at things in a different light.

  OK, by now, in case there were any doubts before, I was totally convinced that I was completely in love with Roxanne. I can finally admit this now, almost two years later, though I told absolutely no one at the time. Also, I didn’t exactly know what it felt like to be in love with a girl. For me, what it felt like at the time was that this girl was the mos
t fun ever and that I wanted to have more fun with her. She was way more fun than spending time with my boys in the Club Crew, if that was possible.

  Plus, I couldn’t stop thinking about her. So what else would you call it?

  And of course, I couldn’t tell anyone. I was smart enough to know that I couldn’t, what with Burn being Burn and all. He would definitely catch wind of it and would definitely not approve, as he was still reeling over the fact that Christina told him that she liked me. This was his sister, after all.

  In fact, I couldn’t even tell my boys that I had finally had sex. So there was Bobby, bragging about how he was going to nab April, who was back with him, and how he was sure that he was going to be first in Club Crew. And I had to quietly take it, even though I knew better.

  Actually, not true. I didn’t just take it quietly. When I couldn’t keep it to myself any longer, I confided in Newman, the one kid who I knew could keep a secret. But, because I was in so deeply with Roxanne, I felt funny telling him everything, so I minimized it, kept it short and simple, and wouldn’t answer all of his questions. Newman being Newman probably figured there was more, but he respected the fact that I would end up telling him some other time (he always had a level of patience that escaped me). He did have one question that I couldn’t answer, which was, “What would happen if Burn came home early one time and surprised you both?”

  Honestly, call me stupid, but it never occurred to me.

  As to those things I didn’t share, I’m not going to share them, not even here. Because a lot of that was between me and Roxanne, and it’s going to stay that way, book or not.

  My grades continued to improve beyond anything I had ever accomplished before, mostly because I was writing better, which made my mom think that Roxanne was some kind of genius. So get this, she wanted to pay Roxanne for even more hours a week, maybe add a Monday or a Wednesday into the mix.