• •
She had her hand on another guy’s cock, I have a sick zigzag in my head of it like I’m typing it all out. To be honest, I keep typing, it turns me on sometimes, a flicker in my ankles and my mouth, churned up thinking about the details, disgusted and cold and erect. I’m not typing this to anyone, there’s no one to do it to. I’m not even typing it out loud.
• •
Raging awake, pacing so loud my mom makes sure I’m OK. Sure, I’m OK. Her hand around his cock like that. Try to come, just to get some sleep, but every cock on the screen is his. Watch the girl-to-girl stuff, gets it done.
• •
—End of the semester I’m leaving, so,
—Stop saying that. You don’t get to fuck people over just because you used to live in Cairo and then pack up and get on a plane.
—Make this quick, Cole. Can you get over this?
I’m letting her cup my face. I can feel my cheeks squinting furious. Are we good, is what she’s asking.
—Can we just have a few more weeks having fun and—
—You were jacking him off.
• •
I wish anything, anything was hacking at me except for this. Feeling stupid and not smart enough to stop it. A teacher is repeating himself and still I do not, will not fucking listen to what it is he is saying, I can only hear what is getting at me. A girl, I want to tell him, a girlfriend, surely even this lousy ugly man knows the drill of how much it is drilling in me, and will leave me alone while I shiver it out at my desk.
• •
—You were fucking jacking him off.
—I’m not, I’m not going to deny it or something.
—My girlfriend!
—Remember, Cole, we said it could be anything. We said, we both did, that we could call it—
—You’re my girlfriend, that’s what it’s called, that’s what anybody would call it—
—Yes but then, but the other night,
—I didn’t give you permission.
—Permission?
She is furious behind her glasses, the glare of the streetlight. In the mirror that time, naked except for those glasses blinking and fucking. Her hand on his cock back at the party.
—Permission?
• •
There’s cheating, I say on a run alone and cold, and there’s sleeping with a lot of people. There’s another girl at a party when I go along with it, and another guy at a party when I don’t. I am, it’s like, glaring at two equations on a blackboard having their different operations pointed out when I do not fucking care about either, any of them.
• •
We are monsters with it. Told you, told you. I am saying this to myself. Are we good, no we are fucking not.
• •
Another, though, to deal with that river-god of the blood: hidden, guilty.
• •
—Don’t say that, Cole. Take it back right now or, don’t you dare,
—Slut.
—Fuck you! You? You with every girl you have been inside all over this school warning me. And you say,
—It’s different.
—Cole, you know what slut is? There isn’t one for boy. It’s a punishing, it’s a fucked-up word for a girl, only, who likes sex. There’s no guy word for it.
—Guy. Is the word.
• •
—Don’t talk to me.
—You mean now or like ever?
—
—Grisaille did you get my last message?
—
—OK just say if you got it.
—
• •
Robin knows. Gus knows. Janie knows. Word spreads, it’s in the air like something I can’t breathe.
• •
Find another girl and fuck her to get over it, says some new terrible buddy in my head. The only one I can think of is the first-year and how nervous she was, scared.
First-year, now you’re doing it.
• •
I am heaving, sitting on the edge of the tub fully dressed. Heaving with how much I want her, and how the shame sickens me. She’s the only one I would let see me like this.
• •
You know her name’s not even a real name, Cole. You know it’s some art technique or whatever.
• •
I’m searching for a clip I can see in my head, hot and filthy, hard in my underwear on the bed leaning over on the screen looking for it, when it hits me thunderously and I wilt and almost, sort of, vomit. It’s just one night with Grisaille in her bed, not porn. Never find that no matter how you search on your screens, you stupid broken fuck.
• •
The trouble, I realized buying myself an awful, idiotic soda or something, standing with it cold in my hand outside the store. Girl in a car laughing at something the guy said in sunglasses. I tried to show you the real person I am. I let that happen when it seemed like the coast was clear. But the real me is terrible. You saw I am an asshole. But you, your hands I miss so much, you got away from me. And I’m stuck here. Yes, that is the trouble. You’ve figured it out, moron with a can in your hands, alone, congratulations.
• •
The party rumbles and me quiet for hours, who knows what I say to who knows who I’m talking to. Beer in my hand and then it’s empty, fourth time. Some freeze-over maybe when I say something, or did I just glare and everyone left the room, shaky in my eyes, on the sofa shaking and trying to talk to Alec who has stayed there, out of habit, out of loyalty, or maybe he’s just too scared to go. I can only say it once, that I miss him so fucking much.
• •
Driving around not as late as it feels. Too early to go home. Music no help, the seatbelt the only thing in the world that wants to hold me. There used to be places. Things kept me out at night. By things I mean you, Grisaille, answer something will you? Fuck me for old time’s sake, just give me your voice on the phone, your name on the little screen. Stupid lonely Friday. Saturday and Sunday ahead like a cliff.
• •
Who can I complain to, if I don’t like the shape of the globe?
• •
We’re all happy, I tell myself. She’s gliding someplace tonight like she does, she should be happy. Alec’s around someplace making it work. And I have everything I could, a clear night in this corner of a parking lot smelling like dogs. Happy, fuck it, it’s not working.
• •
—Your father and I are going to try that new Thai restaurant, Cole, if you want to come with us.
Wondering if they serve poison there.
• •
I think I see her holding hands with a guy and my blood froths up in my head until it is revealed he is a grown man pushing a shopping cart, because it is a grocery store and she’s not here.
Grisaille. You have corrupted my imagination.
• •
It’s a Boy, says a row of balloons in a window, down the block. Poor thing, I think, on the other side of the car window. Too late for you.
• •
This morning, Cole, you decided to focus on your run. But you seem to be sidetracked, or anyway are focused on this tree you are leaning on, breathing and crying on it.
• •
C’mon, I am saying silently. I am saying it in the field we went to. My throat hurts so maybe it is getting shouted after all. C’mon! C’mon! I don’t even know the rest of it.
• •
I miss her, I’m coaching at myself as I trudge toward school, like I missed a bus. Not like a limb, a life, an everything.
• •
Had that coming, is the national opinion I guess at school. With my rep. Surprised nobody castrated that dude, somebody or everybody is saying.
• •
This is not, while I am standing here, happiness. It is not half-happiness. It is so far from any happiness I have had once, that the light from that happiness is taking years and years to reach me here trying not to cry in this stupid class I’m in.
• •
Stolen is how it feels, looking around the yard wondering what bench to disappear into. I know she’s not a possession I owned, but still I can’t help it. She was in my possession. In my arms, at least. In your legs, it sounds dirty I know but I miss it. Sex with you, in you, the dirtiest parts and all of it, too, the rest, the whole thing gone like it was taken.
• •
A year later, and I’m fine. I’ve learned my lesson, my comeuppance, I’ve zipped up and treated everyone right. I’m making this up, desperately. I’m happy now. A year later and the clock on the wall in the school in the middle of my endless painful day has not moved two minutes.
• •
The first-year even meets my eyes with a little sad shrug before I can say sorry, or whatever it was I was going to say when I stopped in the crowded doorway. My rep, who doesn’t know about it. Courtney can’t be surprised. She knew, she tells herself, what she was getting in for.
• •
So this week I have this other guy I know, Oliver, hanging out a little. He’s the nicest person, the only one right now being nice. But what am I going to tell him?
• •
Kristen leans over so her head is level with mine, flat on the desk. Her boyfriend, it’s been how long and she’s still so happy with him, is waiting in the doorway.
—Whatever happened, you totally deserve it and it’s totally your fault.
I tell her I know.
—But I do pity you, if that helps.
I have to say something. —You know what would help?
But she’s already walked away.
• •
In the shower the water feels like her mouth everywhere. Get hard, get lonely, the patheticness, dude, of your wretched life this morning. These are the details, somebody. And every night I fall wide-awake on my mattress.
• •
I wasn’t just a fuck to them, any of them probably, is what I’m seeing. For every girl I thought I was uncomplicated sex, it wasn’t. Put it this way: if you can’t see the complication, you’re probably it. I zipped up in all those places, left them walking out of my car, or a kiss at the bus stop. And they shivered like this, while I did nothing but lick my lips, thrust through all of it. And then to Alec.
• •
I sit down on a bench next to this girl from Bio last year.
—I’m having a shitty day.
But she just puts her bag on her shoulder right away.
—I have a boyfriend, Cole.
• •
The nighttime’s closing in like the same trap, definitely time to go home and jump out of my skin. In my room stalking around with my shoes off, flopping down to roll and reroll on my bed. Stupid and stupefied, my eyes on the ceiling, the wrecked-up blanket, wide open. And every time I shut them it’s that place by the open elbow, comfortable and safe as she reaches over us to slide shut the window. That spot right there, front and center forever in my goddamn head it won’t stop.
• •
It’s one thing to write love poems. Another, though,
to deal with that river-god of the blood: hidden, guilty.
Even the girl, who thinks she knows her young lover,
even she isn’t close enough for him to tell
how this lord of lust—in the lonely times
before she knew him, before she eased him, almost
before she seemed possible—would lift up his cock,
wet with the unknowable, and churn the night
to an endless riot.
• •
I read it nineteen times or maybe once, when I see what it is. I haven’t been able to get to her in forever, I’m blocked, but she sent it to me blindly, I see. Blind-copied when she sends it to some address, her old teacher maybe, in Germany. But she couldn’t send it if I was still blocked, right? Even though I’m blocked now, trying for the fifth time, just blank with please in the subject, it means sometime she turned it off. She unblocked it even for just a minute, for just a minute maybe she wouldn’t have minded hearing from me.
Is that what it means? Or is it just, Look, I put cock in the poem after all?
• •
After some dance, the something alliance, Alec has a boyfriend for a little while. I hear this.
I start to tell him. —I heard that—
—It’s true.
He stops walking in the hallway. His shoulders, I don’t know, relax a little. I think of them bare, trembling from somewhere. It’s a very tiny smile on his face.
—Is he cool?
—You know, I thought about getting a cool one, but then I just chose a big douche.
—Ha. OK. Sorry. I’m sure he’s awesome. I hope,
—You hope what?
—I don’t know, what’s he, I don’t know, what’s he like?
Alec looks at me like a dog in from the mud. What are we going to do with you, boy? —Bi.
It takes me a minute to figure out he means bisexual and not see-you-later. He’s laughing and we both, a little, laugh.
I don’t even know what I’m even asking. —Do you want to—
But he’s down the hall and then it’s just a few words every so often for the rest of the year.
• •
—No, no.
He’s shaking his head professionally, the guidance counselor. I have brochures in my hand from all the finagling I’ve done. Opportunities abroad.
—What?
—If she’s leaving we haven’t heard. She just turned in her registration papers, late I might add. Grisaille Avelar is enrolled for next year.
• •
—When you are older—
That’s the only part of the advice I hear. But, Dad, I’m not.
• •
The screen shows me Portugal. The screen shows me Cairo. They have a thing where you can wander the streets. I can go anywhere I want is what the screen keeps telling me. Try this. Try there. Go around here. The world’s wide open. You can wander anyplace and you’ll be alone there, too.
• •
So, what is it? Time to go home, but I am. Late, late, all the music seems tired. Sparky inside my body but no one will have me, no one I can find or want to possess. Strip down in my room, the weather warming, tip tap on the screen, hello girls. But it fails. Nothing moves me. My hands on my knees, my face so tired in its screened reflection. Who is it, hello, what girl, who’s out there someplace to jolt me happy, to color the world sexy again? Grisaille has thieved them all away from me, all these naked girls look just like her. Wishing I could watch every beautiful fuck with her, just to breathe it a little. Wish I could bring up all my time with her, Grisaille and start it, whatever the words, that lead to the flesh and the warm and the happy in bed. I’m hard with it. My mouth’s hungry thinking of her wet, but it’s dry trying to think what to say. I rattle my fingers on the buttons, wondering what buttons to push. Grisaille, Grisaille. Naked. Every girl I can see, their voices, so sad delicious, all sound like her, the only girl I can call up is Grisaille. I do it, trembling broken and so hard. Hello? Help me, hello?
• •
—Hello?
(RIP Prince)
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Daniel Handler is the author of the novels We Are Pirates, The Basic Eight, Watch Your Mouth, Adverbs, and Why We Broke Up, a 2012 Michael L. Printz Honor Book. As Lemony Snicket, he is responsible for many books for children, including the thirteen-volume sequence A Series of Unfortunate Events and the four-book series All the Wrong Questions. He is married to the illustrator Lisa Brown and lives with her and their son in San Francisco.
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First published 2017
© Daniel Handler, 2017
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ISBN: HB: 978-1-63286-804-6
ePub: 978-1-63286-806-0
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Handler, Daniel, author.
Title: All the dirty parts / Daniel Handler.
Description: New York : Bloomsbury USA, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016046093 | ISBN 9781632868046 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781632868060 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Erotic fiction. gsafd
Classification: LCC PS3558.A4636 A79 2017 | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016046093
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All the Dirty Parts Page 7
