Robin tries to bring reassurance to his voice. “I know. He was just saying that. I didn’t believe him.” He makes himself stand up. A queasiness washes through him; he is pissing off Todd and betraying Scott—cheating on him is how it feels. Why can’t I just shut up?
“I’m totally gonna kill him,” Todd says, but without much emphasis. “Fuck, I really hurt my hand.”
“Don’t tell him I told you.” He takes a few steps toward the door when Todd’s voice calls him back.
“Wait. Look.” Todd is unzipping his fly, prying free his semirigid dick. He squeezes it inside his fist and shakes it up and down. “Smoking pot gets me kind of boned up.” He rubs it, staring intently at himself as if unable to look away. Robin stares, too: it’s the first time he has seen Todd’s dick in the light. The skin is dark against Todd’s clenched knuckles, and the hair around it curls tightly, a soft, dark moss. He takes a step closer but stops, checking the doorway for Victoria. Todd says, “I bet if I stood in front of my window you could see me from your house.”
“Maybe. How would I know?”
“If I jerked off in front of the window you could see me, I bet.” Todd raises his lids slowly, unveiling seductive eyes. “That would be funny, if you could see me doing it.”
Robin shakes his head, as if in disagreement. He looks away and back, away and back. Hypnotism, a set trap, bait on a line. He doesn’t trust the moment, but it doesn’t matter. His dick is stiffening in his pants, he finds himself stepping closer.
“Wait,” Todd says. He moves his eyes between his dick and Robin’s eyes. “Show me yours.”
Robin unsnaps the fastener at his waist, pushes down his pants, rolls his underwear to his thighs. He tries to mimic the way Todd is touching himself but it’s embarrassing, a show, a display. “What do you want me to do?”
Todd says, “I’ll do you, that’s all. You don’t touch me.” He lunges forward. Robin gasps at the smothering warmth of Todd’s mouth on his dick, the weird vacuum of it. Then the chill of Todd’s cold fingers on his hipbones, rocking him back and forth. His leg bones wobble; he braces himself against Todd’s shoulders, wanting to sit down. Todd’s face is pure concentration; his back is tense. Robin can count ribs through his T-shirt.
He thinks of Scott, how he probably stood here just like this. He wonders if Scott could know that he is here right now; he imagines him walking in, staring at them in this position. His knees buckle at the idea. Closing his eyes helps—he can control his breath, steady his legs.
The sensations change. He can distinguish Todd’s teeth from his tongue from the insides of his cheeks. It gets better from here: an embrace, a tightening, a satisfying tension climbing upward, taking over. He is disappearing, he’s still in his skin but also he is flying: a bat flying out from the dark quaking cavern of his body. It expands. Something pulls. His muscles seize up, he hears a whimper as if someone is crying, but it is him, doubling over with the terrific burn of his come emptying into Todd’s slick mouth.
Todd pulls off, and Robin watches more of his goop spurt out and drop. The come fascinates him. Another string of it hangs for a moment and then plops onto his sneaker, spreading out like egg white. “Cool. It’s still coming out of you,” Todd whispers in a voice so mesmerized Robin thinks he is picking it up telepathically. Todd leans back against the bed, pumping on himself until his entire body is rigid except the blur of his right arm and the quivering of his wet lower lip. With an enormous shudder he blasts a pearly string from between his strokes. The look Robin sees on Todd’s face is so gentle—Todd weakened, Todd relieved—that for the first time ever he allows himself to relax in Todd’s presence. For a short while—thirty seconds, a minute—everything is perfect.
“Do you like me?” Robin asks.
“Pull up your pants. My mother could be home now.” Robin feels the protection of the climax crack apart; the old Todd is back. He grabs the crusty towel and hastily wipes himself and the floor, as if it’s all been a bother.
Robin gets a whiff of the semen’s chlorine stench. He pulls up his pants. “It was just a question, because of that—the blow job you just did.”
“Jesus Christ—just cool out about everything.” Todd lays himself out on the mattress, a pillow over his face.
Is this something else Scott learned from Todd: no talking about it afterward? His eyes rest on Todd’s crotch, asymmetrical curves squeezed into his pants, like a stuffed purse. He wonders suddenly why Todd hasn’t let him suck his dick. He doesn’t get it at all. “I guess I’ll just go now,” he says.
“Later.”
Downstairs, Victoria takes one look at him and accuses, “Your nose was bleeding.”
He turns his face away from her. “What are you talking about?”
“I noticed it before but I didn’t say anything.” She purses her lips as if she’s got something on him. “See what pot does to you?”
“I have them all the time.” He begins backing away. “I probably need more vitamins and iron. My mother has some at home in the medicine chest.”
Victoria plants her gaze on the TV, her shoulders to Robin. “The show’s practically over already.”
When Robin steps outside and the cold air hits him, he feels relieved. Three steps into his own yard he feels as if he might cry. He turns around. The light in Todd’s room is off.
He goes to bed early, speaking as little as possible to his family. The next morning he skips breakfast and walks to school alone. He isn’t thinking anything, or he’s forgetting his thoughts as soon as he has them—he isn’t sure which. His desires flare up and then disintegrate into disaster: he pictures himself with Todd, driving across America together, broad green fields all around them, Todd’s arm across the seat, Jim Morrison on the eight track, Todd singing, “Come on, touch me babe.” But then Robin says the wrong thing—maybe he just tells Todd how much he likes being with him this way—and Todd gets angry, kicks him out of the car in the middle of a burning red desert, and peels out in a spray of dirt and dust, leaving him to the wolves. He tries to picture Todd and him on Bleecker Street, in the Village, flipping through the record racks at Bleecker Bob’s, his hand in Todd’s back pocket, right there in the middle of the store ... but Todd would probably yell at him and smack him in the face or bolt out the door. He’d be stuck in the city all by himself, the drug dealers in the park would sidle up to him, muttering their strange incantations, and the muggers would move in for the kill, knowing he’s just a lost kid from New Jersey.
He tries to crush these daydreams, to wrestle himself from their foggy wrap. He thinks more than once that smoking pot must be rotting his brain—that’s what they tell you in health class: you can suffer permanent damage—but then he decides that he’s going crazy, that a poison is leaking into his thoughts and tricking him into acting out all his secret wishes. In social studies they are studying world religions, and that day a question from the Hindu teachings snares his attention: “How can a wise man, knowing the unity of life, seeing all creatures in himself, be deluded or sorrowful?” He cannot make sense of “seeing all creatures in himself,” but decides that his problem must be that he just isn’t wise. He raises his hand and asks his teacher where the Hindus thought wisdom came from. The answer—“Wisdom is found by looking inward”—brings only more confusion; looking inward, he thinks, is where his problems start.
Gym class: no Scott. Passing through the courtyard between classes, no sign of him. Robin is restless with cheater’s guilt, full of the need to see Scott, not to confess, but to talk with him about something regular. To make it all OK again. When he gets home from school he dials Scott’s number. Scott’s father answers—slurring his words as if his mouth is full of toothpaste—and tells Robin Scott can’t talk now. Robin leaves a message with the sinking feeling that Mr. Schatz won’t deliver it.
At dinnertime his mother questions him about his “silent treatment,” and he just says he’s got a lot on his mind. Later, after his father knocks another few feet from t
he old dining room wall; Robin helps by sweeping plaster dust. The house is freezing at night, with only plastic across the hole to the backyard.
He closes his bedroom door and sits in bed in his underwear, reading. The book he’s been assigned in English class is Lord of the Flies, and by midnight he’s still awake and very spooked. He hears the stranded boys chanting in his head like a pulse: Kill the pig, cut its throat, drink its blood. He remembers that the ladder his father has been using while building the new room is leaning against the roof outside his bedroom window. A murderer could climb up and slit his throat, drink his blood. He shuts the book and turns off the light and buries himself under the blankets.
He is staring up from his bed at a figure, robed and menacing, long black hair across its brow. He is unable to discern if it is male or female, but knows that the words this person wants to speak are dangerous to him; he knows, too, that he just needs to wake himself up to be rid of it, but his arms have been pinned to the sheets and his mouth is stuffed with a plastic tube that is meant to help him breathe but instead is slowly choking him. He forces the tube out, thrusting it from his throat as if he is vomiting, and bursts back into consciousness, not knowing if he has screamed or not. He listens. No one is stirring in the house. The robed figure is gone, but the room whistles as if a spirit has just rushed through. For a moment he thinks he hears someone calling his name. He looks at the clock. Only thirty minutes have passed since he turned out the light.
When he was younger, the quiet and darkness of night frightened him. His first memories of this house are all set long after sundown. After the noisy brightness he knew from their apartment in the city, where he could fall asleep to the sounds of car horns and the hissing brakes of busses, bedtime here was frightening. His mother had to lull him to sleep reading from Charlotte’s Web and the Winnie-the-Pooh books (which he loved the most, because the boy in them had almost the same name as his). But that was nine years ago, and now he hates it when he gets freaked out at night. Lately he’s as bad as Ruby.
He opens his window for air. After the terrible silence of the dream, even the faintest sounds of the night are a comfort: wind disrupting the dried leaves, a motorcycle buzzing its way through empty streets. He pulls a T-shirt on and climbs out onto the roof, happy to get away from his bed, which feels haunted. When his eyes adjust to the light of a half-moon, he feels better. Scattered stars are visible high up, and a single, silent airplane, streaking gold and red light. The roof shingles are gritty, an irritation against the thin cloth of his underwear.
He hears it again: someone calling his name. And footsteps on the ladder, rubber soles squeaking against the aluminum. This is not a dream. He inches back fearfully as the point of a hooded jacket rises over the edge, then a face. Scott.
“What are you doing here?” Robin checks over his shoulder, toward his parents’ bedroom window.
“Just hanging out, man.”
Scott’s voice is just above a whisper, but in the empty air it booms. Robin holds his finger in front of his mouth to indicate quiet and motions him closer, where the Spicers’ backyard light can’t reach them. Scott sits near enough for Robin to smell him. He is giving off heat, as if he’s been running.
Scott says, “My Dad was on my case.”
“About what?”
“Same old shit. Telling me I’m no good, a piece of shit, the usual.”
“He said that to your face?”
“Fuck, what does he care? There’s no one around to stop him.”
Robin pulls his knees to his chest and stretches his T-shirt down over his legs, embarrassed to be in his underwear, worried his parents will awaken, sensing that something must be very wrong for Scott to be here. He asks, “Did you just sneak out or did you run away from him or what?”
“I just waited till he passed out and then I walked out.”
“Passed out from drinking?”
“Sorta.” He coughs once, a heavy, phlegmy cough, and spits off the roof. “Then I went to The Bird.”
“Really? What’s it like at night?”
“It’s pitch fucking black inside that birdhouse building. Remember, the one we were in?” Robin only nods; Scott has never since spoken of what happened there between them. “Pretty fucking scary, though. Like, you ever see that movie The Texas Chainsaw Massacre?”
“No!” The title alone gives Robin a chill along his shoulders.
Scott shrugs. “My brother snuck me in.” His brother?—Robin remembers rushing through a bedroom at Scott’s house, a very tidy boy’s bedroom, as they outran Mr. Schatz that Sunday afternoon a few weeks ago. But before he can ask for details about this never-mentioned brother, Scott says hurriedly, “The Bird wasn’t that scary, but I started remembering from the movie this scary house with all these teenagers getting stuck on meat hooks, and I was thinking about the psycho guy, Leatherface, sneaking up on me and coming around the corner and—”
Robin cuts him off. “Scott, you’re creeping me out.”
“Sorry. I got really creeped out at The Bird, but I couldn’t go home ’cause I’d knocked my old man out. Actually, I hit him over the head with a frying pan.”
Robin stares at him in disbelief.
“Yeah, he was coming after me so I hit him.” Scott’s voice is now just a whisper, guilty and scared and proud all at once. “He hit me first. And then he chased me around but he tripped on the garbage. And when he fell down I pulled this frying pan off the stove and clobbered him on the side of the head.” He unzips his sweatjacket, pulling his T-shirt away from his body to show a stain. “This is some grease from the frying pan that splashed up.” He pretends to taste it and fakes a satisfied grin. “Mmm. Fried chicken.”
Robin is too startled by the story to notice the attempted humor. “Did he go unconscious?”
“No, he got up, but he was really dizzy, totally out of it. He was already drunk, so I probably just, you know, killed a few more brain cells.” He slams a fist into his thigh, twice, and spits out, “Bam, bam!”
“How many times did you hit him?”
“Once, and then I guess one more after that. I would have kept hitting but I thought I’d, like, kill him or something.”
Robin tries to picture the scene: the blow to the head, Mr. Schatz’s collapse, Scott’s second hit, this one from above. He wonders if at that very moment Mr. Schatz is bleeding to death on the kitchen floor.
As if he can read his mind, Scott says, “Nothing happened. Cool out. He just sort of spun around for a minute and then sat down in his chair in the living room.” He lowers his head; behind the profile of his hood, only his nose and chin are visible. He mumbles, “I checked to see if he was still breathing. Just in case.”
“God, imagine if you killed your father.” The comment fades into the night. Robin tightens his arms around his knees, protection from the night’s chill, protection from the trouble Scott is in. “What are you gonna do?”
“I don’t know. He’ll probably black the whole fucking thing out. If not . . . he’ll wake up and really want to kill me.” Robin hears Scott’s fear; he knows Scott’s been through this kind of thing before, but maybe this is worse than usual. Would Mr. Schatz look here for Scott?
“I don’t feel so good, actually,” Robin says. “I think I’m getting dizzy up here. I had a nosebleed yesterday and I haven’t felt right ever since.”
“Should we go inside?” Scott asks, shifting toward Robin.
“Both of us?”
“I could crash here for a few hours and then wake up early and split.”
Scott’s voice is hopeful, though to Robin this sounds like a risky plan. “What if my mother and father wake up? I mean, shouldn’t you make sure your father’s OK?”
Scott hisses, “You just think I’m a fucking scum, don’t you?”
“No!”
“You got no idea what it’s like to get slammed in the face.”
Robin wants Scott to lower his voice, but Scott’s words provoke him. “For your info
rmation I got slammed in the face yesterday.”
Scott narrows his eyes at him. “By who? Your father? You’re bullshitting me. You’re trying to act tough.”
“I happened to get a bloody nose from someone who you happen to know.” Robin turns his head and stares toward the Spicers’ house and Todd’s darkened window.
Scott follows Robin’s sight line. “Right, like Spicer hit you in the face. Let me see where.”
“You can’t see anything,” Robin says. “He didn’t hit me that hard, but I got a nosebleed.”
“Shit! What’d you do to him?” Scott now sounds almost proud of him.
Robin shrugs. “Nothing.”
“Did he only hit you one time, or did he really pound you?”
“Only one time. I got him mad.”
“He hit me one time, too,” Scott says excitedly. “The only time I ever saw him take a swing at anyone, and it was right at me. I fucking hit him back. He totally wussed out right away, just backed off.”
“Wow.” Scott’s words leave Robin wondering why he himself didn’t strike back at Todd—why, in fact, he didn’t even think of it. Scott asks, almost shyly, “Did you say something to him, that you liked him or something?”
Robin considers his words, then says quietly, “I said something about you.”
“Did you tell him stuff I said about him?” Scott asks with alarm in his voice.
“No, I would never!” Suddenly Robin does not want to have this conversation. It’s bad enough acting like getting smacked by Todd was a cool thing; now he has to make up a reason why it happened. “I said to him that I’d been hanging out with you, and he said you were a scum, and I said, ‘Fuck you,’ and he decked me. And then Victoria came in, and I went home.”
“I can’t believe that,” Scott says. He curls tighter, his knees nearly under his chin now, mirroring Robin’s own posture. “No, I can believe it. He fucking hates my guts.”
The World of Normal Boys Page 24
