“I got another idea,” Andy said, already running for the office. He slammed the door loud enough to wake everyone in the house.
“You fucking idiot!” Colin whispered through the slats. He tried the knob but it was locked. “You want to wake up my mom?”
“She didn’t hear it.” There was a hollow metal sound as Andy opened the third drawer. Colin felt his hands go numb.
“Dude! The fuck are you doing?”
The drawer groaned again. Before Colin could remember where he’d put his paper clips the knob clicked from the other side and Andy pushed it open. The gun was tucked into the front of his underwear. It’s like a bomb going off, Colin wanted to say, but it didn’t make sense without the rest of the story, which he’d sworn never to tell.
“You’re fucking crazy,” he said.
“I didn’t actually load it.” Andy drew the gun and aimed between Colin’s eyes. “I just wanted to fuck with you.” He closed one eye and laughed. “You’re totally shaking.”
Colin felt like he was about to pass out. He looked down at the concrete and waited for it to look like concrete again.
“Or maybe it is loaded…”
“Not funny. Is it loaded or not?”
“Do you really think I’d load a gun?”
A year ago Colin would’ve known the right answer. He would’ve known that Andy, despite how he called Colin faggot and pussy and fuckface, wasn’t all that different from himself. He would’ve known how Andy was scared of being alone in dark houses, how he laughed at the sight of blood and gore in movies but cried the day Colin sliced open his thumb trying to pick up a broken bottle in the woods. Today’s Andy was a different Andy.
“I guess you’ll just have to do whatever I say.” Andy twirled the gun in his finger in a way that should’ve been graceful, but he had to steady it with both hands when he nearly dropped it. He pointed it back at Colin. “It’s like truth or dare, except you’re stuck on dare.”
“Knock it off.”
“I dare you…” Andy looked around the room. “I dare you to sniff the armpits on my shirt.”
“Come on, man. You’re being a dick.”
Andy waved the gun, as if Colin could’ve forgotten it was there.
With a sigh he walked over to Andy’s sleeping bag. The shirt was balled up in the corner, and when Colin unrolled it he could see the whitish spots from Andy’s deodorant. He smelled those spots and let out a fake moan of ecstasy, even though they just smelled like shampoo and drugstore cologne. Andy wasn’t satisfied.
“I dare you to take off your clothes,” Andy said.
“What? All of them?”
“Every stitch.” Andy touched the barrel of the gun with his other hand and stroked it, like an arch villain might stroke his villainous cat.
Colin looked down at the sleeping bag. “How about I take off my clothes, but I can be under the sleeping bag?”
“Sure. Whatever.” Andy put both hands on the gun and held it steady.
After Colin pulled his briefs from under the sleeping bag he gave them a ceremonial twirl on his finger. “Ta da,” he said, as though it was the most boring thing he’d ever done, as though his desperation wasn’t pointing straight up at him. He tossed the underwear aside with the rest of his clothes.
Andy crossed the room and took Colin’s shirt, jeans, and underwear and locked them in the office. He pulled the paper clips from his pocket. “Oops,” he said.
“Not cool.”
“Looks like you might have to come out of the sleeping bag after all.”
“Fuck you, dickhead.”
Andy shook his head. “Sorry, kid. If you want your clothes, you’re gonna have to pay for it.”
Colin rolled his eyes. He was sitting cross-legged in the sleeping bag, the fabric bunched up in his lap. “Okay,” he said with a loud, fake sigh. “What do you want?”
“I dare you to blow me.”
Colin looked down at his lap. Nobody could see his eyes right then, how they’d brightened and reached out for what they wanted. Nobody could see how he was struggling to breathe. “Um…” He tried to laugh. “What?”
“You know. Suck my dick.”
He could almost forget about the gun leveled at his forehead. “You’re not serious?”
“Why wouldn’t I be serious?” Andy shrugged, like it didn’t matter. Like this was as big a deal as cutting ahead in the lunch line. “You suck my dick, you can put your clothes back on. And, you know, I don’t shoot you or anything.”
Colin bit his lip. Then he smiled, as if he’d caught on to Andy’s sense of humor. But Andy wasn’t smiling, and the gun was starting to tremble.
“You don’t really have a choice, dude. You’re totally naked, at the wrong end of a gun. Plus, I could always tell the whole school how you boned up as soon as I said blow job.”
Colin pulled more of the sleeping bag into his lap. He’d never dreamt this situation. He’d never failed at this merciless fantasy, but he knew if Andy touched him he’d burst as helplessly and iridescently as a soap bubble. He laughed and shook his head.
“You have ten seconds to make up your mind,” Andy said. He stepped closer and put the gun against Colin’s forehead. “One.”
Andy’s boxers were black with orange flames. A designer brand, the name stenciled on the waistband. With his jeans worn so low, Colin could make out the first half inch of his fly.
“Two.”
He never got to three. There was nothing to say as Colin cast aside the sleeping bag, unzipped Andy’s fly, and wrenched away jeans and underwear in one stroke. Colin had always suspected Andy was lying to the boys at the lunch table, but a dark part of him had hoped, all along. Even so, it was difficult for either boy to be disappointed, and long before it was over the gun was nestled among the sleeping bag’s folds. Colin no longer cared about his clothes, not even with the certainty of hell ahead of him. Because Andy too would be in hell. They would be in love, and their suffering would only be suffering until each had swallowed the other’s pain.
In November 1899, the Boston Evening Transcript reported the rumored existence of hundreds of cats, living in a mine near Butte, Montana, that had never seen the light of day.
Since the recession, many families have surrendered their horses to the desert. Those that don’t die fall in with the wild herds already scavenging the plains for water—some ninety thousand horses. Without predators, the wild population doubles every four to five years, depending on rain.
According to his brother, six-year-old Sergei Nabokov adored Napoleon, and took a little bronze bust of the emperor to bed with him every night.
Kaskaskia, Illinois—the “American Atlantis”—will not survive another flood. The town’s fourteen residents, most of whom are over sixty, are waiting for what they call the last flood.
The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement was proposed in 1991 as a solution to human suffering, as well as a precaution against the “extinction of millions of plants and animals.” Choosing to stop reproducing, the VHEMT argues, “is a humanitarian alternative to human disasters.” Here disasters are poverty, starvation, disease, and a planet that grows increasingly hostile as it tries to scratch its own back.
Who can blame them? his father had written.
As it grew colder and the birds and insects disappeared, Colin felt personally responsible, as though without him the seasons wouldn’t change and nothing would have to die. But here he was, alive and killing everything around him, a year older as his birthday came and went with no one noticing, not even his mother. At the grocery store, a week afterward, she ran into a former coworker. “This is your youngest?” the woman asked. “How old?”
Colin and his mother spoke at the same time but gave two different numbers. “I mean fourteen,” she said, as though it was funny. After they parted she picked up a small cake from the bakery and put it in the cart. “Colin, I’m so sorry,” she said.
With the end of October came the season’s first frost, and
in November all the trees looked naked in the white slanted sun. Andy hadn’t spoken to Colin since their last sleepover. They still had classes together, lunch together. They ate at the same table. Andy filled his followers’ heads with lies and Colin still listened, every time thinking of the truth, of how Andy could fit gently in his hand. He knew there was nothing to say. Instead, he thought of how it should have gone, how Andy should have kissed him and said, “Now it’s your turn.” But that only made him sick with shame. He imagined that the right word could reset everything and bring them back to where they’d gone wrong. Even if they never touched each other again, he wanted that word.
The worst part was how nobody cared. His mother didn’t ask, as the weeks went by, why Andy never came over. Heather never mentioned the kid who drooled over her. Their friends at the lunch table hung on Andy’s every word, and had realized, maybe, that they’d never liked Colin in the first place. That same weekend, his grandfather accused him of looking brighter than usual—“Did you get some good news?” Their Sunday meals, with the cooling weather, had complicated themselves. He’d taught Colin how to julienne radishes, potatoes, something called celeriac. He’d shown him how to sear chicken without losing the skin to the bottom of the pan. When Andy wrapped his fingers in his hair, Colin had sworn never to forget it. Here was an image scratched into the backs of his eyelids, and he’d never go more than ten seconds without the most thrilling moment of his life knocking him out of place. At his grandfather’s house, he was surprised to go nearly an hour without reminding himself of what had happened.
But his grandfather was just as clueless as everyone else. “I don’t feel brighter,” was all Colin said, and shrugged as if it didn’t matter. He’d gone back to slicing the carrots and was thinking how something as soft as human skin would be so much easier to cut, so smooth. But his grandfather was waiting with the sauté pan.
Even Chelsea, who came over twice a week in Andy’s place, seemed oblivious. All she wanted was to watch movies on the couch. “This is so comfy,” she said as she dug through his mother’s stock of extra pillows, blankets, quilts, and throws. She never seemed to move or even shift her legs, but by the end of every movie she was somehow right next to him, her thigh against his, her shoulder against his, her ribs trying to interlock themselves with the spaces between his. Once, when his mother wasn’t home, she managed to slide her fingers up under the back of his shirt. “It gets so cold in here,” she said, even though her hands were hot and slick with sweat. “I really like that you’re so warm. You can be my heater.” She laughed, and the suddenness of it, so close to his ear, startled him halfway down the couch.
Other people: more often than not they made him feel alone, and he spent most weeknights in his father’s office. The more he dug into the notebooks, the more space they took up in his head. How is this, he wondered as he read about mummification rituals in ancient Egypt, related to this—a list of “Living Places” with bullet points like “Mojave Desert, dawn” and “another world’s sun” and “Penn Station, rush hour.” He read until his eyes crossed and the ink blurred. After locking the door, he would peer across the basement. How must it have looked, Andy’s knees shaking as Colin licked and gorged like a starved dog? He shut his eyes and let it happen again, and even a little more as—in his head—everything went as he wanted.
By late November, Andy simply wasn’t a part of his life anymore. During the last class before Thanksgiving break, Colin was watching him from the other side of the room. For a few days, Andy had been whispering, passing notes, and snickering with the boy who sat behind him. Instead of hurting less as time went on, it hurt more. Their science teacher, Victor Miller, warned the class of their upcoming unit, the human reproductive system. Those three words brought laughs from the back of the room, a few whispered words flipped into the air like a profane deck of cards. “I know, I know,” Victor was saying as he reached for a textbook on his desk. “But what the human body can do is more beautiful than you can imagine.”
“You should see what I can do,” Andy said, and the kid behind him prodded him between the shoulders. The boys in the class laughed and the girls rolled their eyes. Colin was thinking, was picturing, could feel in his hands, could savor the taste all over again, of precisely what Andy could do. He wanted to die.
Victor ignored the comment. “Now, over the break, I want you all to read…” He stretched the last word as he thumbed the book’s middle pages, raising his eyebrows at sighs that were anything but subtle. “Read all your recipes carefully.” He closed the book and smiled at his students, immune to every groan and glare in their arsenal.
Colin watched as his teacher walked back behind his desk, studying the way his feet hit the floor. Over the last five weeks he’d looked for similarities. Was there anything in Mr. Miller’s face that would have looked girlish when he was young? Did he chew his lip when he thought about something? Had he loved, against his will, the feel of his hair clenched in another boy’s fist?
The bell rang and he flinched in his seat. He got to his feet and threw his backpack over his shoulder, but before he could leave Victor stopped him.
“Colin,” he said. “Can I see you for a moment?”
Some of his classmates sneered as they walked out—the look every child learns by kindergarten. Colin put his hands in his pockets and thought of the beaker he’d broken and hidden. As he approached the desk he felt the room emptying. Who could he blame? Who couldn’t prove it? It wasn’t until they were alone that he thought of what Andy had said, the warning he’d given—that boy his brother knew who’d been hunted. He could scream, if he had to. Someone would hear it.
Victor wrote a note and stuck it to his computer. “You’re not in trouble, so don’t worry.” The footsteps in the hallway paled from thunder into a clatter. The textbooks on the desk were left open to diagrams of the genitals or grainy fetuses drifting in kidney-shaped shadows. “I want you to know that as your teacher I’m concerned. You and Andy are best friends, are you not?”
What the word father had been a year ago: Andy was now that word. Friend was another. “I guess,” he said, in a way he hoped sounded bored.
“Are you two having a fight? Is there something going on?”
He heard footsteps again. He hoped someone had forgotten something—a hat or a jacket. Instead he saw the earth sciences teacher hurrying down the hallway, an oversized red bag over her shoulder. How obvious they must be—Andy, the boy who always looked uncomfortable in class, and Colin, whose depravity had ruined everything, who wore it on his face. He thought about the classroom, how there might be nobody left in this wing, and only that one door.
He shrugged his backpack up onto his shoulder. “We’re fine.”
Victor folded his hands on the desk and tried to catch Colin’s eye. “Are you sure?”
Colin looked away, as though Victor was too bright. If he wasn’t careful, his teacher could cross the room and lock the door. He could pull down the blinds. He could take Colin in his adult hands and unfasten every button and zipper that kept him safe. “I’m okay, Mr. Miller. Really.”
“I’m here to help. We all are.”
Colin looked back at the door. “I should probably catch my bus before it’s too late.”
“Of course,” Victor said. “Sorry to keep you.” He leaned back and glanced up at the clock. “You may already be late. The buses leave at five to.”
He looked up and saw that it was three o’clock. Paul would be waiting on the steps, alone while the buses pulled themselves into the street like immense yellow worms. He imagined the noise coming from Paul’s throat, like a life raft’s pinhole leak. It would be dark by the time his mother arrived, crossing the empty parking lot of a locked school to collect her shivering, stupid boys. He leaned up against the wall and banged the back of his head into it.
Victor stood and neatened a stack of papers. As he was slipping them into his briefcase he shrugged. “If you don’t have a ride, I could give you one. And
your brother.”
Colin’s scalp tightened. He couldn’t tell which was worse—stranded at school and waiting in the dark, or accepting a ride from this man who may never take him home. He chewed the inside of his cheek as he looked at the clock and time moved forward, one second, two seconds, three seconds, on and on. Why should it stop? The halls were quiet now.
“If you want,” Victor said.
He drove a black Toyota with grey upholstery. Colin guided Paul into the backseat, careful, by instinct now, not to touch him. Outside of the car he clutched his backpack like a shield, thinking of the ways kids disappeared, of basements, abandoned warehouses, parts of the woods no one knew about. “Ready when you are,” Victor said. His gloves squealed against the steering wheel as he tightened his grip. Colin swallowed and slipped into the front seat. A fly landed on the windshield and flicked its wings. He reminded himself to go on breathing.
Victor backed the car out of its spot. “So…where to?”
A boy and a girl crossed in front of the car, holding hands and laughing. There were no cars in either direction and they were free to turn at any time. The sun slipped behind a cloud and the car’s interior felt cooler. A car behind them honked. Colin sighed and surrendered his address. He hoped Heather was there waiting. He hoped the neighbors were out raking the last of the leaves before winter ushered them inside. He hoped his mother had come home early for the holiday, that she would climb out of her car just as he arrived.
Victor tapped his fingers on the wheel as he drove. Colin wasn’t looking but he could hear faint puffs of breath as Victor mouthed words in a whisper, some song stuck in his head. The houses and the gas stations and the baseball diamonds crept by.
“You’re not taking the freeway.”
“I prefer side streets.”
Colin could feel him watching. A route like this had what you’d call quiet roads—ones that snaked off to hidden places, playgrounds and parks that were empty this late in the season. He thought of how easy it would be, how it’d only take a sudden turn, a hand over the mouth, a threat. Everything would be lost. Stories came to him—the plots of movies where men would bind their victims’ hands. He thought of the things they did to boys and felt his dismay between his thighs.
Some Hell Page 10
