The Haters (27 page)

Respond to OoC saying, “Hey, ShaeAnne, come over here” by craning neck and giggling more mysteriously than before

Turn away from OoC completely

Then, from across the hot tub, drift slowly backward onto OoC's lap like a car backing into a garage

Refuse to speak not in Spanish

I need to note in passing that Corey was pitching an unprecedented game at the candombe girl. It was like suddenly he had switched brains with Drake. He just walked up to this girl who was at least a few years older than him and eased himself right in next to her, and almost immediately they were having an intimate murmury conversation with their heads like six inches apart, and before long, his hand was almost definitely on her butt. So he had clearly made a full recovery and I was relieved and impressed. Even kind of intimidated.

I mean, I was doing okay with ShaeAnne. Actually I guess I was doing great. She was calling me
azucar papi
and
amor latino
, and she was literally smushing my dick under her thigh.

I sort of wanted to correct her Spanish, because it was nonsense garbage Spanish and those phrases didn't really mean anything. But even if they did, whatever they meant, they didn't apply to me. I wanted to tell her, I don't speak native Spanish, either. I'm a nonpracticing Buddhist. My mom's ancestors are from Poland. My dad's are from Wales and Sweden.

But the main thing was, I didn't want to get into it. You bring up race stuff with white people and either they get awkward and defensive and want to tell you why you've misunderstood them, or else they want you to drop everything and teach a college seminar for them, and either way it's just exhausting.

Also I was trying not to think about Ash, which meant that I was.

But part of me was like,
Wes. There's a nice girl here who is into you and who also saved you from a possibly life-threatening panic attack. And she just wants to have fun
.

So after a while I relaxed and let myself have fun.

I started giving her a shoulder rub. Then a neck rub and then a back rub. To mix it up a little I added quiet sci-fi sounds to the rubs like
bwoyp
and
bbyyyyyyyeeewwwwwwwWWHIT
and
ernt ernt ernt ernt
. She laughed less mysteriously than before. After a while she turned and sized up my face and kissed me, and we made out for a while, and Corey and the candombe girl were also making out, and everyone who wasn't me or ShaeAnne or Corey or the candombe girl kind of conspicuously got out of the hot tub and went somewhere else. ShaeAnne's breath smelled and tasted sort of bad but a comfortable earthy kind of bad like farm animals, and her various areas of skin kept catching on my areas of skin like rubber on rubber. We kept making out and did other dumb stuff like tap each other on the face and make more sound effects and breathe weird on parts of each other's skin to create weird new sensations. And the sun started to go down and the mosquitoes got worse and we decided to go into the house and we ate some vegan fritters and yogurt and we smoked some more pot for some reason and we played some more music with a bunch of other people except I wasn't playing bass and instead I was playing these percussion instruments that I didn't know how to play and so was she and both of our playing was pretty much for shit but it didn't really matter and every now and then we would stop playing to make out some more and my lips were kind of dry and raw but I didn't really care and then at some point she got up and took my hand and brought me to my feet, and we started walking, and I knew we were looking for a place to have sex, and that's when
my heart started racing, because I was thinking, this is how it happens.

We walked through the house looking for a secluded spot but everywhere we went there were Pritchards lying around and eating and drinking and smoking and playing and ignoring us or giving us these sly little grins that I really wanted them not to make, I didn't want them to be part of it, and I asked ShaeAnne once if we were going to the studios because maybe that would be private but she said people are always going in there to record, at all hours of the day, and we kept walking and I couldn't stop thinking, this right here is how it happens, this is where and when it happens, and this is who it happens with, and I was trying to stay calm but my heart was bounding around insanely.

And then we turned a corner and there was Ash, patiently sitting cross-legged on a little cushion bent over her unplugged Les Paul, practicing, and looking at her I just knew immediately that she and Cookie hadn't hooked up and weren't ever going to and that I was an idiot for thinking they would and she glanced up at us and I wanted her to be upset and jealous and pissed off but I knew for a fact that she wouldn't be, and she wasn't, she just gave us this funny lopsided grin for a couple of moments and then went back to playing guitar and we kept walking past her.

We walked and walked and walked and didn't pass anyone else and finally we were somewhere pretty dark and abandoned and ShaeAnne put her hands on my shoulders and pushed me down onto the floor and I thought
this is it
and it was it. She guided me onto my back and pulled on the bottoms of my briefs and I pushed
them over my knees and feet and I was completely naked and not hard at all. She straddled me and pulled her top off and her breasts flopped out and I heard them more than saw them. She reached behind herself and kind of carefully took my not hard dick into one hand and pretty soon I couldn't really think about anything else and pretty soon after that I was hard and she took her hand away and I heard her opening some little crinkly package and I felt her put the cool plasticky middle of the condom snugly on the front of my dick like she was shrinkwrapping it and I felt her fingernails through the plastic like the legs of a crab fingernailing their way down my dick and she rose up a little and adjusted her panties and breathed harder and opened her mouth and her breath was like vegan fritters and farm animals and her eyes were dark and I saw them very clearly somehow and her hair was stiff with chlorine and itched like straw on my face. The moment she put me inside her I came. I mean the exact moment.

FUCK, I said, and I curled up around her like a snail, and kept coming about a hundred times, and I said fuckfuckfuckfuck, until she said sssshhhhhh, and pushed me back down onto my back and just lay on top of me, and that was how it happened.

Shit.

What.

Just, shit.

Shhhh.

I mean, I feel bad for coming, you know, instantaneously.

Don't feel bad.

Why not.

Because you won't next time.

And twenty minutes later, she was right, I didn't, and then an hour later after we smoked even more pot like idiots, I
really
didn't, I mean to the point where I kept getting a stomach cramp and needed to take a break, and eventually during one break we just agreed to call it quits, and I think I was asleep before I had even climbed all the way off.

30.
OBLIVION

I awoke to the sound of the Sailor's Hornpipe.

The music was coming from behind a door. It was being played on a recorder.

It took me a full minute or so of all-hands-on-deck thinking to figure just those two things out. Because I was in a deep brain fog.

The light of day revealed that ShaeAnne and I had chosen to have sex and sleep right smack in the middle of the floor. She had put her clothes back on in the night. But I had not. I was completely naked.

There was the muffled sound of a flushing toilet.

Then a nearby door opened. And out stepped the recorder-playing curly-haired guy.

I skittered into a corner like an insect and covered my dick with my hands. The guy winked mischievously and continued to play. ShaeAnne flopped over and mumbled something irritable. I crouched and grabbed my boxers and tried to put them on without exposing myself. At some point the guy realized that he was not a bringer of whimsy but instead a bringer of terrible mortifying embarrassment and he left. ShaeAnne continued to try to be asleep.
I was alone. I was at a brain speed of about two thoughts per minute, and one of those thoughts was just Corey's demon noise.

It took about an hour to find the rest of my clothes. This turned out to be more than enough time to fully realize the shame of sleeping the entire night totally naked right in front of the door to what turned out to have been a pretty popular bathroom.

COREY: basically everyone saw your taint

WES: oh god

COREY: i was headed to the bathroom myself but i spotted you guys from a safe enough distance that i had time to turn and run away without seeing your taint or anything else that would force me to move to the Yukon forever

WES: great

COREY: i ended up peeing out the window

WES: is there only one bathroom in this entire house

COREY: basically yeah

WES: fuck

COREY: around sunrise you guys really became kind of a tourist attraction

Breakfast was slices of toast. Except the toast was made out of bread that wasn't bread at all. It was just a bunch of nuts and seeds glued together.

WES: what about you? did you hook up with that girl