by Ariel Schrag
Adam scanned the selections of “real teen girls” and “barely legals.” Sometimes it made him nervous, since he knew people got arrested for looking at child porn online, but he was only seventeen! He shouldn’t get in trouble for looking at girls his own age. Adam found an appealing ad with a blond girl rubbing a lollipop in between her legs. He clicked on the “free trial” link to watch the five-second promo. That was what he usually did, watched the promo over and over again until he was done. Credit cards were too risky. Not that he had one anyway. The blond girl stuck the lollipop inside her vagina. Then another teenage girl, this one with brown hair, appeared on the screen, took the lollipop out of the girl’s vagina, and put it in her mouth. The girls giggled and the screen froze. Adam wrinkled his nose. This was not the sort of video he liked. He didn’t know if this meant he was secretly gay or something, but he just really preferred if there was a dick involved. He didn’t want to see the guy’s face or body or anything nasty like that, just his dick. Preferably being sucked on or plunged into some girl’s hole. Adam scanned more ads. The lesbian thing was just really boring to him, especially since it was so obviously fake. He should know—his sister was a lesbian. And, yes, he’d seen her have sex.
It hadn’t been his idea. It was Brad’s, of course. Brad was obsessed with Casey—all guys were—and was always bugging him, “When are you gonna let me watch your hot sister fuck another girl?” as if Adam were the bouncer to his sister’s bedroom door. “What’s her girlfriend look like? She hot too?”
Adam had really liked his sister’s (now ex-)girlfriend. Her name was Sam, short for Samantha, and she basically looked like a boy. She always wore baggy jeans and a baseball cap and was super-polite to his parents, even though his mom referred to her as “Casey’s confused friend” behind her back. Their parents didn’t know Casey and Sam were girlfriends, and Adam had been sworn to secrecy. “It’s just easier this way,” Casey would say. “The last thing I wanna do is answer a bunch of freaked-out Mom questions about lesbianism.” Adam knew it was more than that. Casey didn’t want their mom to know because Casey was the perfect child. Their roles in the family were immutable: Casey was perfect and Adam was troubled. Adam knew Casey loved him, but he also knew she loved being better than him. It wasn’t that their parents were homophobic—it was just that other people were gay, and people in their family happened not to be. “Also, I wouldn’t want Mom to tell Dad. The idea of him thinking about me having ‘lesbian sex’ makes me want to vomit.” Casey saying this had, of course, put the image of Casey having “lesbian sex” in Adam’s mind, though he also wasn’t entirely sure what that was. And as wrong as it felt, he was curious.
It was last summer the night it happened. Adam’s parents were out at “dinner and a movie” for one of their biannual pathetic attempts at romance. Casey and Sam were watching TV in the living room, and Adam had invited Brad over. When he went downstairs to let Brad in, Casey was sitting in Sam’s lap, and Sam’s hands were around Casey’s waist, under her shirt.
“Get out of here!” said Casey.
“I’m just getting Brad,” said Adam.
“Well, hurry up!”
When Sam was over, Casey acted as if she ruled the house.
“’Sup,” said Brad, walking in and leering at Casey and Sam. Casey ignored him. She didn’t like Brad. “Guys like Brad make me thank god I’m gay,” she would say.
Adam and Brad went to his room, where they hung around doing nothing, being bored. It was around the time that stuff had first started feeling weird with Brad. They had always been best friends—since fourth grade—but for some reason it had begun to feel like whenever they hung out alone, Brad didn’t really want to be there. Like hanging out with Adam was an obligation or something.
“You think they’re fucking down there?” Brad asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Her girlfriend’s kinda mannish, but whatever.”
They heard Casey and Sam come up the stairs and go into Casey’s bedroom next door. Brad smirked and raised his eyebrows. Then a song started blasting from Casey’s room.
“Shit. How the fuck are we supposed to hear anything now?” said Brad.
“Gross,” said Adam.
Brad picked up a Sharpie off the floor and scribbled on his shoe. Adam tried to think of something else to say, to suggest something for them to do, but everything he thought of seemed dumb. The song from Casey’s room played on, highlighting Adam and Brad’s silence. It never used to be this way with them. It was uncomfortable, awkward.
“I actually know how we could maybe watch,” Adam imagined telling Brad. No. He would never.
“I actually know how we could maybe watch,” said Adam.
“No shit, Freedman.”
Adam said nothing.
“Well?” said Brad.
“Never mind.”
“Come on, you just said you know how we could watch.”
Fuck it. He was in it now.
“Take off your shoes,” said Adam. He looked around, even though there was no one else in the room.
“Yeah, OK,” said Brad. He quickly started to unlace.
Adam took off his own shoes and stood up. “Now, whatever you do, do not make any fucking noise.” As much as he hated himself, Adam was enjoying being the one to boss Brad. It was always the other way around.
The two of them crept out of Adam’s room and softly padded down the hall past Casey’s bedroom. Brad lingered by her door for a moment, but Adam waved him on, pointing down the stairs. Brad gave a quizzical look but followed. They walked through the living room and into the kitchen to the door that led to the backyard.
Outside it was dark and cold, and Adam realized how fast his heart was racing. Their house was built on a hill, so the backyard was a slope that led up to Casey’s bedroom window. As they walked up the hill, Adam could feel his socks getting drenched from the wet grass. This was a completely fucked-up thing to do.
Adam leaned into Brad’s ear. “Her shade is open just a crack—it’s perfect,” he whispered.
Brad swatted Adam away and wiped his cheek with the back of his hand. “Stop spitting on me,” Brad said, not in a whisper.
They crouched behind the bushes in front of Casey’s window. The crack in the shade glowed yellow against the darkened house. Adam groped for possible reasons why they were there if caught. “Brad lost his baseball in the bushes,” singsonged in his head like a Learn-to-Read book. They leaned in closer against the bush, and a sliver of the room came into focus. Casey and Sam stumbled into view—about mid-thigh to shoulders visible. They were sort of fake-dancing to the music, pushing and pretend-hitting each other. Sam grabbed Casey around the middle and began to pull her shirt up.
Adam glanced at Brad, whose mouth was opening and closing like a blowfish. He felt an urge to just push Brad, just sort of knock him over and watch him roll down the hill.
“Holy fuck,” said Brad.
Adam looked back through the window crack. Casey was on the bed, and Sam was crawling in between her legs, undoing Casey’s jeans. Look away, just look away. Casey reached up and tugged at Sam’s shirt. Sam pushed Casey’s hands off, but then hesitated and took her shirt off herself. She was wearing a black sports bra. Casey put her hands on Sam’s tits, and they started kissing again. Sam was grinding herself into Casey. Adam imagined digging his fingers into his eye sockets, scooping out his eyeballs, and throwing them into the night. They would be light and slimy and hard to throw very far. Sam reached down and opened one of the drawers underneath Casey’s bed. She took out a sort of black strappy contraption and turned her back to Casey. What the fuck was she doing? Sam pulled off her jeans, keeping her underwear on. She spread the contraption open, turned it around a few times and put her legs through some of the straps, tripping forward a little. She pulled it up around her waist and that was when Adam realized what it was. Coming out of the straps was a huge black rubber dick.
Brad went nuts. “No fuckin’ way! No fuckin�
�� way!”
Sam reached over and shut off the light.
“Fuck!” said Brad.
Adam felt a gush of relief, or maybe disappointment—he couldn’t tell.
“Dude, you’re a straight-up freak,” said Brad. He grinned at Adam through the dark. “Watching your sister? What’s wrong with you?”
And Adam pushed him, and they both rolled down the hill.
***
Needless to say, Adam felt he could speak with authority when he said that two girls sharing a pussy-soaked lollipop were not real lesbians. He found a video he liked, did his thing, and cleaned up with some dirty boxers off the floor.
***
It was 1:00 A.M. and Adam was still awake, lying in bed. His government book lay on the floor in the same spot, now illuminated by a patch of streetlight from the window. Like God was trying to remind him. He also had a five-page essay on The Sun Also Rises due yesterday. He had finished the book the day it was assigned, but writing essays depressed him and he’d put it off for weeks. He always felt forced to find a “point,” one he often didn’t even completely believe in but corralled the book into proving anyway. When he was done, he’d end up hating the book he had loved.
Adam stared around the dark, shadowy room. The lights from cars ran across his wall, soft sounds in the distance. The objects in his room were distorted, anonymous fuzzy gray blobs that looked alien and out of place. He liked finding the weirdest blob, usually two things melded together, and concentrating on it hard, feeling his brain working as it figured out what it actually was (a desk lamp and an old soccer trophy, a broken PlayStation 2 console and a pile of clothes). Sometimes he’d fall asleep doing this.
When he was little, he had these elaborate games he would play when he couldn’t sleep. His favorite was “orphan.” He would get out of bed in the middle of the night and lie on the cold hardwood floor in his pajamas and pretend he’d been abandoned in the middle of the woods. A small child left to die. He would grow colder and colder, huddling into himself, imagining the dark, towering trees above him, the open black sky, and the crack of mysterious noises. He would lie like this for as long as he could, eyes clenched in the forest, until his brain started to believe that it was true. Then he would hear the footsteps, the people coming to his rescue. “We’ve found a child! There’s a near-dead boy!” And his brain would fast-forward—the ride in the back of the car, the nice big house in the neighboring town—the story would run through his mind as he almost sleepwalked back to bed. Then he would snuggle into the soft, clean pillow, imagining that his hands pulling the thick covers over his shivering body belonged to a warm, loving woman. He’d sometimes repeat this action, the pulling of the covers, the nestling into the pillow, three or four times. Warm and safe at last.
A few months ago, when he was having a particularly rough night, he tried the game again, even though it had been years. He got out of bed, lay on the floor, closed his eyes, and opened them about five seconds later, feeling like a complete retard. His body felt huge and lanky and, like, if he were in a fucking forest, he should get up and try to walk the hell out of it. He got back in bed and counted sheep.
Adam halfheartedly tried sheep-counting now, but he was too frustrated to stay focused. He fucking hated his mom. It was always, “Casey never acts this way; your sister always manages to stay pleasant around family.”
“Casey is fucking lying to you about her entire life!” Adam imagined himself screaming back. “You don’t know the first fucking thing about her!”
“Casey’s at Columbia,” his mom’s voice rang on. “Yes, we’re all very proud . . . Adam’s been struggling lately.”
“At least I’m not being fucked by a giant rubber dick five feet from your bedroom!”
“Adam?! What are you talking about?”
“Nothing, Mom, it’s just my Tourette’s.”
“Adam’s been struggling with Tourette’s syndrome lately.”
The way Brad talked to his own parents blew Adam’s mind. It was as if they were his children. “The folks are staying in, catchin’ the late show,” Brad would say, cocking his head toward his mom and dad, seated on the couch with a blanket spread over their knees, as Brad and Adam passed through the living room. “Ya gotta love ’em.” And his parents would smile sheepishly, anxious for his approval. Brad was the perfect son. Good grades, played baseball. But when you got him alone, he was fucking foul. “Her pussy tasted like cat food.” Adam didn’t get how Brad could switch back and forth so seamlessly. He was also an entirely different person for the girls. Smooth Brad. Cocky Brad. “I know what you want and I can give it to you” Brad. “My dick is the most precious object on this planet Earth and you would be blessed to touch it” Brad. Like Kelsey said, girls go for aggressive guys. “You want aggressive?” Adam imagined himself back in Kelsey’s room, standing in front of her, his dick still hard. “Suck on this, then, bitch.” He unzipped his pants and pulled his dick out, massive and throbbing. Kelsey dropped to her knees, falling on it with her mouth.
“No teeth, bitch!” Adam gave a quick swat to the side of her face.
“I’m thorry,” Kelsey said, mouth half full, looking up at him.
“Just be sure to swallow,” said Adam.
Adam reached under the covers to jerk off, but he wasn’t even hard. He rolled over, squeezed his eyes shut, put the pillow over his head, pulled the covers over the pillow, and finally, finally fell asleep.
Chapter 2
THE SCHOOL LUNCH BELL rang, and kids rushed out of their classrooms, bursting through the front doors to the concrete courtyard, where everyone ate lunch.
Adam went to East Bay Prep, a small private school in the Oakland hills. He’d begged his parents to let him go to Berkeley High, the public school that a bunch of his friends from middle school went on to, but his mom had refused: “I’ve walked by that school, and kids were smoking right outside the gate along with the teachers! The teachers were loaning them lighters!” “EBP has a ninety-seven percent top-college placement record,” and of course the inevitable, “Your sister loves EBP!” Adam knew that Casey had not loved EBP. That she would in fact drive down to Berkeley High the minute school was over to hang out with Sam and her friends in the park.
It wasn’t that Adam hated his school. He actually liked some of his teachers and was frankly (though he would never admit it) kind of scared by some of the stories Sam had told about Berkeley High. “This kid totally got jumped today; he’s, like, in the hospital . . . No, no reason. Just looked like a nerd.” What he hated was how small his school was. Only 152 students in all four grades. At a school like Berkeley High, with more than four thousand students, it seemed as if there were an endless supply of groups to hang out with. You get in a fight with some friends, just go hang around another group.
Adam’s cousin Mark went to Berkeley High, and every time Adam saw him at some family holiday gathering, Mark had a new identity complete with a new pack of friends. It had started two years ago at their cousin Sammy’s bar mitzvah, when Mark showed up with his hair (and hands and ears and back of his neck) dyed green, wearing dress pants twenty sizes too big and carrying a skateboard. “I’ll probably go pro before I graduate high school,” Adam overheard Mark telling Aunt Susan. Then, last year at Thanksgiving, to Adam’s mom’s horror, Mark had been wearing skintight black jeans, white makeup, and a T-shirt that read: HYMEN HOLOCAUST.
“I think I’m making people uncomfortable. Do I make you uncomfortable?” Mark had said, hovering so close to Adam’s face that Adam could see the outline of Mark’s lavender-colored contacts. According to Casey, Mark was now a self-proclaimed “thug” who wore designer sweatpants, dealt weed, and only hung out with black people. “I just know Islam is around the corner,” Casey had said, snorting.
Adam didn’t want to follow in Mark’s path, but the range of possibility seemed liberating. At Adam’s school there were only two groups: Popular and Nerd. And he felt like he spent most of his time struggling to hold on to
his place in Popular.
Casey had complained about the same thing. “The only thing worse than spending all my time with EBP brats is knowing I’m one of them.” But then she had met Sam at a joint school field trip organized by all the gay-straight alliance groups from different high schools in the East Bay. Casey’s membership in such a club had been, of course, a total secret, but the teacher sponsor who “totally ‘gets it’” had drafted an elusive permission slip for an “exploration of San Francisco for students interested in local culture.” That culture being the rainbow flag–adorned, gay-men-with-their-balls-hanging-out street called Castro. Adam had occasionally seen the strip through the windows of their family car, always wishing they would drive slower so he could take it all in. For the field trip, Casey and fifteen other gay teens from the Bay Area, along with some teachers, had spent the entire afternoon walking up and down the street. With no other purpose than to, as Casey had put it, “You know, be gay.” “Retardedly gay,” is what she called it when she came back. “They bought us little rainbow flags to wave around, and one kid, this fag from Kensington, even tried to convince everyone to get rainbow sherbet ice cream.” Adam had been surprised to hear his sister use the word fag so casually. “I’m allowed to,” she had said, “’cause I’m gay. You’re not allowed to use it.” Then Casey had launched into a description of Sam, the girl from Berkeley High who was “so fucking hot I want to fucking kill myself.” The rest was history. Or “Herstory,” as Casey had written on her history binder.
Since Adam wasn’t gay, this sort of life-changing field trip wasn’t exactly an option for him. He’d given up soccer after middle school, and the groups at his school (Chess Club, Environmental Action, Junior Classical League) were hardly appealing. Also, his mom was always bugging him to join one (“Extracurriculars, Adam, have you even thought about your extracurriculars?”), and that in itself was reason not to.
