Abominations of Desire

by Vince Liaguno

  The pole was fiberglass, as thick as the handle of a baseball bat, tapering to a sensitive point nine feet from the butt. Hooked into that butt, though—Chrissy’s brother had to have smiled here, just from the wash of serendipity.

  Hooked into the cork butt of that pole, just enough tension in the line to keep the tip of the pole nodding over the slightest little bit, was a big black treble hook. A real treble hook.

  Chrissy’s brother unhooked it with all due reverence, compared it to the one in his pocket.

  With a little touch-up spray paint, the two would be twins.

  Fast-forward to two or three days later. That fated recess. The class loser is playing with his little cars in the sand behind the monkey bars, making the motor sounds with his lips. Only the little kids play there anymore. And him. Until a cluster of shadows falls over the berms and straightaways he’s dragged out with the pads of his first two fingers. He looks up, and up, and Chrissy’s brother makes the appeal: they’re going to pull a prank on one of the girls. A cheerleader. It’s going to involve this obviously fake treble hook. He crushes it in his hand to show off how soft it is, and how it springs right back into shape. Then he tosses it across and the boy who’s about to become Kissyface, he fumbles it to his chest, sure that, never mind what he just saw, this hook is about to pierce a finger, or snag into his shirt. But it’s just floppy rubber.

  A slow smile warms his face.

  He’s finally being invited in, isn’t he?

  Because part of selling the prank is making this fake hook look real—this cheerleader, she’s going to scream—Chrissy’s brother takes it back, to tie a real leader on it.

  The boy who’s not Kissyface yet’s part here, it’s to open his mouth wide enough to accommodate this hook—because they’re playing the Dolphins this week in football, he’s pretending to be a human fish here—and then to bite down hard on the hook right when Chrissy’s brother winks, so the rubber barbs don’t slip through his teeth, show the joke before they’re ready.

  It’s going to be beautiful.

  And, Mark supposes, it probably was.

  Just, not for the fish. Not for the boy who would be Kissyface.

  The cheerleader is there waiting, wearing her uniform because it’s Friday, her red spirit ribbon safety-pinned to her poofy sleeve—while all the other students use stick-pins, cheerleaders are more active, need safety pins—and, to really sell it, the boy who’s about to be Kissyface (he’s always been eager to please), he even drops down to his knees, sticks his tongue out like for the wafer.

  The hook Chrissy’s brother places on the flat part of the back of his tongue, it’s colder than it was before, and heavier. But that’s probably because everybody’s watching now, right? When the spotlight’s warming your skin, everything inside, it probably always feels cold.

  For a moment his future in elementary branches out before him like capillaries flushing with blood, starting with this exact prank: a different table in the cafeteria, a locker without gum smeared on the lock every day. Standing at the urinal without boys at the sink wadding up wet paper towels to throw, the bullseye always the naked skin at the back of his neck. The cheerleaders always screaming and running away when he does his mouth just like this prank, to remind them.

  It’s going to be beautiful.

  Except, “Don’t—” this cheerleader says, reaching out, something maternal to the cast of her face at this last second, a new kind of suspicion or foreboding to her voice. But Chrissy’s brother is already setting his feet and turning half around to yank back on that leader all at once, a moment that splashes into school legend in the slowest of motion.

  The top barb rips a ragged furrow into the corrugated roof of this boy’s mouth, and then pushes through, into the rootspace above the top two teeth. X-rays later in the day will show that it neatly snips the base of each of those top two teeth’s roots, insuring the lisp Kissyface is going to wear like stigmata all through high school.

  It doesn’t stop there, though.

  The barb pushes all the way through the front of the gums and out through the skin above the lip.

  The way they have to remove it is the way they remove arrows in the cowboy movies: snipping the head off the barb then steadily pulling the shaft back the way it came in. Except, in the cowboy movies, the cowboy always just bites his belt. In this version, this boy who’s almost Kissyface now, he’s screaming the whole time. He’s screaming like the end of the world.

  And there are still two hooks to go.

  While the damage they do is negligible compared to the loss of the two most prominent teeth, the rupturing of a palate, the reconstructive surgery and the permanent diamond-shaped scar above the top lip, their effect is larger.

  Each side hook—the base the treble was resting on—snags on the webby inside of a cheek, neatly piercing out then back in like a fast stitch, like a dolphin coursing up and down through the surface of the water. The metal goes right through what had been Kissyface’s dimples.

  This means that, when Chrissy’s brother keeps pulling, it sucks those cheeks in, and, because his mouth is already open to accommodate this deep-sea hook, not to mention all this sudden pain, those cheeks pull in and slide up the hooks’ shafts, to the thick junction where all three hooks start. The cheeks pull in close enough so as to be almost touching.

  Snap a picture right there.

  It’s the birth of Kissyface.

  Nobody ever bothered to tell Mark what that kid’s name might have been.

  Not that it matters overmuch. Find some white contact lenses, apply your mother’s red lipstick a little too liberally, and now that grown-up kid, he's a killer who doesn’t even need a mask, a killer with a score to settle, a killer with scales to balance. A killer with a prank to answer in kind, with interest.

  This is the way things happen.

  It makes Mark kind of sick, actually. Not just because of all the dead seniors sprawled throughout the church—though, yes, there is that—but because he should have seen it coming. He should have read between the lines of the yellow flyer on the bulletin board on the other side of the hall from Calculus: this was never going to be a church lock-in. It was always going to have been a massacre.

  If he’d paid attention in Calc, he might have done the math, graphed a sine curve, figured out that tonight is the obvious-to-everybody-else anniversary of the Day of the Triple Hook, as it came to be called. Tonight, this night he’s trying and trying to live through, it’s Kissyface’s birthday. And this lock-in, it’s his bloody, bloody cake. All that’s left is for him to walk from room to room, extinguish the screaming, begging candles.

  Never mind that Chrissy Carlton had to have known this. It’s Kissyface’s birthday, sure, but it’s also the day her brother’s troubles all began: juvenile detention, drugs, more drugs, county jail, the trial that was going to lead to real jail, all capped by the grand suicide the whole town had lowered their heads for, even though they’d all been breathing a sigh of relief.

  Never mind that, with her big brother dead and gone, Kissyface should be satisfied. He’s not. Not even close. And, if you squint just right, Mark figures—or, if you’ve got white contacts clouding your vision—any high schooler will do. Any of those graduating might have been standing on the playground that day. That they didn’t stop this from happening, that’s more than enough.

  Never mind that the reason Mark even came here, sleeping bag in tow, it had nothing to do with Kissyface or fishing hooks or playgrounds or any of that. He hadn’t even been here for elementary. No, the reason he finally went into the garage to dig up a sleeping bag, it was that, standing by that yellow flyer in the hall, standing by it and jotting the dates and times down, had been Leo Barnes, Westview High’s underwear-model-in-training if they’d ever had one, complete with the smoldering eyes, the lecherous scruff on his cheek every other day, those piercing blue eyes that were always looking away, across some Mediterranean only he could see. The complete package—emphasis on
package, Mark was fairly certain.

  He wasn’t exactly sure which church Leo went to, if it was the same one Mark went to, but it was worth a night in a sleeping bag to find out, he figured.

  As it was turning out, though, the only intimacy the two of them were going to get to share, it was the one they'd already shared, while Leo’s throat-blood was bubbling up from that sharpened gaff Kissyface was scything through the graduating class with. Mark had cradled Leo’s head on his left thigh, looked down into his eyes, lied to him that it wasn’t that bad, that—was that sirens he was hearing?

  But he hadn’t held his cheek down to press against Leo’s in farewell, to all the things that could have been. He hadn’t even done that movie thing where he slid his hand down Leo’s face, to make his eyelids close over his dead eyes.

  What he had done was run, hell for leather, damn the torpedoes, whatever meant fast and blind and crying and sliding around the corners, forgetting to breathe until his lungs insisted. Finally finding a closet that only became a metaphorical closet after he’d been standing in it for longer than he meant to.

  So he’d opened it, startling Chrissy Carlton back over the inflatable log they were sitting on now.

  As far as either of them knew, they were the only survivors. The last survivors.

  “And then there were two,” Chrissy had said to Mark, by way of hello.

  “Three,” Mark corrected, cringing from the sound coming through the speakers.

  The third was Kissyface’s steady, amused breathing.

  He’d evidently found the mic the preacher wears for his sermons. In the time it had taken for two high school seniors to smoke a cigarette halfway down, Mark had decided that, because Kissyface needs the hands-free action—any mad-dog killer would, right? —the mic must be a clip-on, the wire threaded inside his shiny black athletic undershirt, maybe electric-taped to his ribs, even. Otherwise it would come loose every time he swings that gaff.

  And his cheeks . . . his cheeks are the real spectacle. Instead of letting those holes heal like would make sense, like you do if you want to get past a bad day on the playground, this boy who had become Kissyface, he’d picked at them all through his recovery, until they had to strap his hands to the side of his institutional bed. But even still, he’d been able to punch the tip of his tongue through the scab that kept trying to form. So they loaded a dental syringe up, deadened his tongue, sure to sit him up so he wouldn’t choke.

  It was like this was what he’d been waiting for: using just suction, he pulled his cheeks in until they were touching, and then he bit down, ground around, his face wet with tears.

  Never forget, never surrender, all that.

  By the time he showed up at school again for junior high, he’d had all the skin grafts everybody’d been lectured and lectured not to notice.

  Like that was remotely possible.

  For a couple of years there, because of where the skin was rumored to have come from, he’d been ‘Buttface,’ not Kissy-

  Still, for those two years, and the few after, he wasn’t pulling at the skin anymore.

  As it turned out, he was waiting.

  For tonight.

  Mark hadn’t stuck around to be sure—the prayer nook he’d been momentarily cornered in was pretty much just a blur—but he was pretty sure that Kissyface had threaded a large safety pin in through his open mouth, through one cheek and then pushing the spring-coil through, stitching through the other side as well, pulling his cheeks together in dimples so deep everybody would know who he was when he was killing them. As for the choice of a safety pin instead of stapler or thread or all the other options, even just suction—was it because safety pins were what the cheerleaders still wore to keep their ribbons on for Fridays, when they were going to be more active than the rest of the class? Was this still that same prank?

  Maybe. Probably.

  This anniversary had fallen on a Friday, anyway, and Kissyface was definitely being more active than a safety pin could help with.

  And his cheeks, now, they were a reminder to the whole town: this had happened, and on their watch.

  With just a slightly different roll of the dice, Mark figures, that could be him out there with that gaff, voices whispering in his head for years, blood everywhere he looks, a hollow space inside him for the life he’d never gotten to live. A plan to fill that hole with whatever blood he can find, whatever blood he can let.

  It’s not beyond understanding.

  Maybe everybody who’s already dead, too—what if they were the kids who had kept the legend alive? Who had whispered the story of the Day of the Triple Hook at sleepovers and in the back of buses?

  These were all sleepovers Mark had never been invited to either. Buses Mark knew better than to walk all the way to the back of.

  Which is where this night starts to feel particularly unfair.

  “I can understand that he wants you,” he says to Chrissy at last, passing the cigarette back. “Your brother . . . you know.”

  “I hated my brother.”

  “But you’re related,” Mark says, breathing his smoke out through his nose like his first boyfriend taught him was a secret code. “The blood that was in him, it’s sort of still in you. That’s probably good enough, the way he’s figuring it.”

  “He?”“Kissyface.”

  “That’s not his name. It’s just Derek. He was always a dweeb.”

  “That you even know his name gets you in the victim pool, though. But me—right?”

  “What do you mean?”“You don’t have to pretend,” Mark says, flinching around to a sound in the corner. It’s just the quarterback’s corpse, relaxing into a slightly lower position, like even in death he’s trying to avoid getting sacked.

  “You think I’m pretending?” Chrissy says, a lilt to her voice that Mark knows is both a challenge of sorts and a reminder of who’s actually who, here.

  She doesn’t look over to see if her tone lands like she means it, though. She’s occupied watching the open doorway directly across from her, that opens onto the sanctuary. Like it’s her duty. Like if she even looks away for an instant, Kissyface will come gibbering through.

  Directly in front of Mark, beside the doorway Chrissy’s watching, is what he guesses his duty must be: a framed poster of long fingers on piano keys, in some orchestral dark. There’s scrawly, surely homiletic white words at the bottom, but with the glare on the plastic protecting the poster, he can’t quite make them out.

  All he can see is his own silhouette. And, when he ducks down to his hand for a drag, Chrissy’s.

  “You’re pretending not to know that he’s not saving you for last,” Mark says to her.

  “Double negative,” Chrissy tells him, like identifying a species of bird nobody really cares about.

  Mark tracks back, fixes it: “You’re pretending he’s not saving you for last.”

  Chrissy squints, probably trying to make sense of just removing one negative and getting the same meaning—Mark can’t figure it out either, quite—and finally she looks over to him, her lips screwed up in question.

  “He could have killed you in the preacher’s office back there, easy,” Mark explains. “Under the desk is the first place you look. It’s the first place anybody would look.”

  “You were watching?”

  “I was hiding.”

  “And you didn’t do anything?”“I don’t even know you,” Mark says. “Not really.”

  “Still,” Chrissy says.

  “You’re you, you mean?” Mark says.

  She doesn’t say no.

  “Do you even know my name?” Mark asks.

  That she doesn’t answer is answer enough.

  “What I’m saying is, it’s not fair,” he goes on. “I’m not even in this . . . whatever this is, this cycle of justice bullshit. This balancing the scales of childhood. I’m an innocent bystander here. But I’m going to die all the same.”

  “Because you’re with me?”

  “Partl
y,” Mark says. “Party because the black guy always gets it, as some sort of twisted object lesson.”

  “But you’re not black.”

  “Is anybody black at our school?”

  “There’s—” Chrissy says, but can’t follow it through, no matter how far into her mental yearbook she squints.

  “Exactly,” Mark tells her. “But I’m the next best thing.”

  “Because you’re . . . not attracted to me?” Chrissy says, finally looking over to him.

  “Like that would make sense, right?” Mark says, tonguing at his lower lip so his grin won’t be so obvious. “Me having the equipment I have, you having the kind of equipment you like to flash around?”

  Chrissy laughs through her nose, her dimples showing.

  “Thought you weren’t supposed to notice,” she says.

  “I was taking notes,” Mark says. “Got to watch the competition, right?” She nods, can appreciate this.

  “One thing I’ve never understood, though,” Mark goes on. “Since you bring it up.”

  “‘It,’ watcher-boy?”“You wish,” he says. “But—youth group and all that. Like, abstinence is the good thing, right? The message, the sales drive, the big push?”

  Chrissy shrugs sure, adds, “But there’s not like a chart for what exactly counts, what doesn’t.”

  “There’s always workarounds,” Mark says, already bored with that part of it, “reacharounds, as it were. But, still, if abstinence is the desired state, then what’s it matter then if you’re into guys or you’re into girls? I mean, if everybody’s not doing what they want to be doing anyway, does it even matter what they want to be doing?”

  “You should have asked Pastor Rob all this,” Chrissy says, stubbing the cigarette out on the carpet, which, as much as anything, chills Mark through and through: if even she’s not taking care of this place anymore, then it is all coming down tonight, isn’t it?