Uses for Boys (4 page)

In the kitchen we decide between cereal and frozen pizza. Some days we choose the
pizza, which takes longer, but today we have cereal and Joey says I use too much milk.
Afterward he wants to kiss me in the kitchen and take off my shirt and kiss my chest
and I always feel kind of funny here because someone could see me if they were looking
through the kitchen window.

“You’re so beautiful,” Joey says. And we kiss and kiss and our hands run up and down
each other’s backs and soon he leads me to my bedroom and I lie down on the bed. Joey
likes to sit next to me, unzip my pants and help me pull them down. He likes to watch
the way his trailing fingers make goose bumps on my skin. He likes to stroke my hair
and put one hand over my eyes so I can’t see what he’s doing.

He covers my eyes with his hand.

“I’m moving back to Seattle,” he says. “To live with my dad.”

And then he doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t say he’ll miss me or that he’s sorry.
Does he know he’s leaving me? That I’ll have to ride the bus home alone and come home
alone and be home alone? They leave, I think, just like my mom says.

In the tell-me-again times, when I was seven, before the stepfathers and the stepbrothers,
before the big house in the suburbs with its big windows and landscaped yard, before
Nancy Baxter and Desmond Dreyfus, when my mom and I lived in a little apartment in
a little building downtown, I slept in her bed. It was a raft on the ocean, a cloud,
a forest, a spaceship, a cocoon that we shared. I could stretch out like a five-pointed
star and then she’d bundle me back up in her arms. I’d wake in the morning tangled
in her hair.

Sometimes I want to be back there so bad I can’t breathe. I can’t close my eyes tight
enough. I can’t wish hard enough. Joey’s hand is still over my eyes and I can feel
the weight of him sitting next to me. I hear a sharp crack from somewhere in the house,
like a bird flying headlong into glass, and I’m really cold all of a sudden and topless
and my pants are down around my ankles. I push away his hand so I can cover myself
up with the blankets. I’m fourteen and I hate Joey Sugimoto. I hate my bed. I hate
this house.

I have to get out of here, I think.

The sun is still bright through the windows and making little rainbows against the
rain. Joey’s taking off his pants because he thinks we’re going to have sex. I turn
away from him and curl up into a little ball.

“Anna?” he says, but I don’t say anything. After we have sex and it’s dark out, Joey
leaves like he always does. That night, when my mom comes home, she opens my door
and sticks her head into my room.

“Good night honey,” she says.

after joey

Joey moves away. It’s getting warmer and my mom has set the sprinklers to turn on
automatically. They beat against the window when the sun rises and I wake early. In
the bath I run my hands over my breasts, my stomach. I pretend they’re Joey’s hands.

The house gapes. My key echoes in the lock. I wear his Skoal cap to school but someone
grabs it off my head in the hall and I can’t get it back. I turn fifteen. We get a
new cleaning lady. It’s spring, but without Joey the school year lumbers on. I’m waiting
for something to happen.

alone

I decide to move downstairs into the stepbrother’s room. The younger one’s. It’s dark
and colder than the rest of the house. The windows are level with the ground outside.
I carry everything I need in one trip. Sheets, a blanket, towels for the bathroom.
A pillow from my bed. A French magazine I found at the thrift store. I’m wearing the
jeans the stepbrother left behind and my hair’s grown long again and tucks behind
my ears. I go through a box of my mom’s and find a photo of her when she was my age.
She looks serious and sad and I pin the picture to the wall near the bed and try to
imagine what she was thinking. Her life when she was fourteen: her father leaving,
her mom retreating. Does she remember? I pin my hair like hers and lay back on the
bed. I take the picture down and hold it close to my face.

When I visit the upstairs I feel like an explorer. I live downstairs now. A different
life. A different person. My mom never comes down. She stands at the top of the stairs.

“I’m leaving,” she calls.

the dream

I skip school and wander from room to room. I watch daytime TV. I make up illnesses
and forge my mom’s name to the bottom of notes. “Please excuse my daughter’s absences
this week,” they say. “She had the stomach flu.” Or food poisoning. Or an infection.
I’m very careful. Nobody ever asks.

I stare out the window at a bit of bark dust and brush. I stare at the base of a fir
tree and at the neighbor’s fence and I think about our little apartment in the city.
My mom’s blue bedroom. Her warm sheets. At night I have the same dream. I dream that
all the people in the world are racing to a single point on the earth, and when I
wake up, the buzzing makes me feel like I have to get out of my head. But there’s
nowhere else to go.

*   *   *

My social studies teacher, Mr. Carlson, pulls me aside on the last day of school.
He was my homeroom teacher too and he knew Joey. Once he gave us a ride home from
school when we missed the bus.

“Are you OK, Anna?” he says. He’s looking at me in a way I don’t expect, like he wants
to know more, and the kids, the kids I’ve gone to school with since grade school,
push past me in the halls. Nancy Baxter’s yellow ponytail turns a corner.

I’m not coming back to school. I’ve already decided. I’m supposed to go to the high
school across the street next year. But I can’t picture it. Maybe that’s the problem,
I think, looking at Mr. Carlson’s beard. I can’t picture anything.

Some other kid is waiting to talk to Mr. Carlson. “See you,” I say and no one else
talks to me as I leave the building and wait for the bus.

nippery slipple

Five days later, on the day they’re supposed to leave for vacation, I come upstairs
and find my mom and her boyfriend standing in the entry. It’s early afternoon and
I’m wearing the stepbrother’s T-shirt with a pair of cutoffs.

“Why are you still here?” I ask, crossing past them toward the kitchen. My mom is
looking in her purse.

“I’m not going to have you just moping around,” she says without looking up. And she
tells me to get ready. “You’re going with us,” she says.

*   *   *

The resort is hot and sticky and full of families from Portland. I carry a stack of
magazines to the pool and lean back into the sun. I drift. The whole place splashes
and screams around me. I’m sun-stoned and dreamy when Delmi, a girl who was a year
ahead of me in middle school, waves herself over and sits down. She reaches past me
to the pile of pictures I’ve torn out of magazines. She flips through them, pulling
out a picture of a tall girl in faded jeans stretched out in the sun.

“I like this one,” Delmi says. She’s wearing a thin green bikini and her family owns
a house here so she knows everyone, but she seems just as happy to sit with me and
look at pictures, one hand shielding her eyes from the sun.

“How long are you here?” she asks. And she asks if I want to come to a party at her
house tonight. “Everyone will be there,” she says. “Him,” she points at a boy across
the pool. “Her,” she points at one of the lifeguards. “They’ll be there,” she says.

“Sure,” I say and we look at another magazine.

*   *   *

Delmi’s parents have a collection of schnapps that glisten like lacquer. Peppermint,
blackberry, sour apple. I choose butterscotch and Delmi makes me a drink called a
Slippery Nipple. Her stepbrother Todd calls it a Nippery Slipple. He sits down next
to me on the bar stool in Delmi’s parents’ basement. We’re waiting for the party to
start.

He leans over and says it with his mouth tight against my ear.

“Nippery Slipple,” and his breath is hot and there’s the pressure of his chest against
my arm. He pinches the tip of my breast and repeats it like it’s my name, Nippery
Slipple.

Delmi makes the drink. She reaches for the bottle, pours, and puts it back on the
shelf. She’s wearing a soft blue T-shirt that falls off her shoulder and then when
she reaches for the Baileys it slips back. She turns around to look at Todd leaning
against me.

“Leave her alone,” she says and then she gives me my drink. “Ignore him,” she says
to me.

“I am.”

“You’re not,” he says, reaching for my nipple again.

“I am,” I say, but I can still feel the ghost heat of his breath against my ear. He’s
older than me, I think, out of high school at least. But not as old as Delmi’s boyfriend
who’s twenty-two.

And very intelligent, she says.

I finish my drink. Todd disappears upstairs and I’m trying to think of a way to ask
Delmi about him. Instead I ask for another drink. “Make me another drink?” I say.

“He’s an asshole,” she says. “I don’t know why he’s here. Usually he stays with his
dad.” Delmi lives with her dad and Todd’s mom. They’re gone all the time, she says.

I’m looking at Delmi, but thinking about Todd. I can see myself in the mirror behind
the bar and if I dip my chin down, my hair falls in my eyes and I look sexy, I think.

I finish my drink and the basement fills with kids. Delmi’s gone and Todd hasn’t come
back. I make my own Nippery Slipple.

I’m wearing my favorite red canvas shorts with a fluttery Egyptian top. Girls show
up in summer dresses mostly or jeans and T-shirts with eagle wing jewelry. This summer
all the girls wear eagle wing jewelry. The boys hunch together in groups. I spill
my drink and make another.

Then Todd’s back and I’m on the couch and he pinches my nipple again like he can and
I flip him off, like I’m saying fuck off, this happens to me all the time. I lean
back and drink my drink. I look older, I think. Somebody moves off the couch so he
can sit next to me. I want to tell him things. I want to tell him about my mom. Why?
But I do. I’m full of sympathy for my mom. I drink my drink. I have no mom, I say.
I don’t even care if it makes sense.

Then he says something about fucking. Fucking, I think he says. What’s he asking?
Have I ever fucked a boy? I dip my chin down and look up at him through my bangs.
I try to look experienced. I make a joke and start laughing so hard I spit. What’s
so funny? I talk about love. I loved Joey, I say, and he left. Love wears off like
the gold plating on eagle wing jewelry.

But I’m not sure what he’s asking.

“I’m very experienced in the ways of love,” I say. I can’t stop laughing. The schnapps
pours a thick blanket over my brain and Todd puts on dark sunglasses so I can’t see
his eyes. The kids next to us on the couch are making out and someone has turned off
most of the lights. I’m pressed up against the armrest and Todd lays his head against
the back of the couch like he’s asleep. I can’t even tell if his eyes are open.

Then Delmi’s here again and her boyfriend’s standing behind her with his arms around
her waist. “Are you alright, Anna?” she says and I wave her off. I look over at Todd,
but he’s not there anymore and the couple’s gone too, so I’m alone on the couch and
it takes me a long time to get up and find my way down the hall to an empty room.
It’s a guest bedroom with a twin bed pushed up against the wall. I kneel down on the
spinning bed and hug a pillow against my chest. The music is thumping from the other
room and the bed won’t stop its spinning.

I’m going to throw up.

I push myself up and make it to a garbage can by the door. Afterward I lie on the
floor for a while.

Delmi comes in. “Oh, Anna,” she says like maybe she’s angry but then she helps me
to the bed and I take off my shorts and climb under the thin blanket. She pulls the
covers up under my chin and rests her hand on my forehead.

“I’m sorry,” I say but I’m not sure if she hears me.

“Good night,” she says from the doorway, then her boyfriend calls from the other room
and she’s gone. “I thought Todd left,” I hear her say from a long way away and then
I think she says my name but the bed is spinning again and I have to concentrate on
my breathing. I open my eyes in the darkness and focus: in and out, in and out.

Now Todd’s here, sitting by the side of the bed. His hand is on my arm. Then Delmi’s
back, shooing him out. “Leave her alone, Todd,” she says.

Later he’s back. My head sticks out from the blanket. I fight against the spinning
bed. His profile in the darkness. My shirt bunches around me.

He pulls down the covers and I laugh. But he tugs at my shirt and pinches my bare
nipple. Hard. I cover my chest.

He climbs on the bed.

I make noises. “Stop.” I’m trying to locate him in the darkness. It’s as though I
didn’t say anything.

Delmi, I think. She’ll make it stop.

“Delmi,” I say but it’s less than a squeak. My heart beats in my ears. I can’t hear
him. I can’t see him in the darkness. I can’t remember what he looks like. His hands
are like attacks. I say things but even I can’t hear what I’m saying and finally I
push hard against his arm so he knows I’m here. “Stop,” I say. “It’s me,” I say. I
want him to see me. He pushes harder and something rips and I feel a burning. I stop
moving. I’m so still. I’m so still. Only the thumping in my ears.

I think he might care what I want but he doesn’t.

He pulls down my underwear and pushes my legs open, holds them with his knees. My
knee is screaming. He’s digging into my thighs and I’m twisted and he’s pulling my
nipple and everything hurts and then suddenly he lets go. He puts on a condom and
then he covers my mouth with one sweaty hand. Why? I wasn’t even saying anything.

He pulls at my thighs. He pushes. He fits himself inside me. His knuckles between
my legs. All of his weight on my knee. It’s going to break. I hold my breath. All
I can hear is his breathing and my heartbeat and then suddenly he stops.