The Tragic Age (18 page)

I'm at the Quinns' because it's Valentine's Day. Mom and Dad have driven me over and dropped me off because I'm taking Gretchen out to dinner. They've actually decided to go do something romantic as well. Something romantic. They say that. At least Mom does. Dad has set us up at his favorite restaurant. He's called in his credit card, told the manager to take care of us, told me to order Gretchen anything she wants. He's insisted I borrow one of his sports jackets, and even though it's way too big, I can tell he's getting a kick out of being Joe-Dad, and so I take it. It's black cashmere and it doesn't look too bad.

“You're so handsome,” Mom keeps saying. I get the impression she's sort of pleased that I've started using Killer Cover. Not that she would ever have
suggested
it, but since it's
my
decision, she thinks it's a good thing. Mom likes it that I might be handsome.

Gretchen looks beautiful. She's wearing high heels and this short, slim-fitting dress. Her legs are ridiculously long and sculptured from all the running she does. Her red hair is brushed out all straight and smooth. She's wearing makeup that brings out her eyes and she has on some kind of pale lip gloss. When you get right down to it, it's ridiculous that she's with me.

Gretchen drives her dad's van. It takes us about an hour to find a parking place in the village, and it's at least a ten-minute walk to the restaurant but it's the best part of the evening so far because we hold hands the entire time. Gretchen has long fingers and beautifully shaped nails. She doesn't paint them.

The restaurant is this elegant place with tablecloths where the maître d' escorts you to your table and a busboy immediately puts butter on your side plate. As the maître d' hands you a menu, a waiter, who does
not
introduce himself, asks if you want sparkling or flat water. Either way, you know it's going to cost extra.

The cheapest entrée on the menu is about a billion dollars, and each item has a paragraph underneath written in fake, flowing script that tells you where the ingredients came from and who produced it, as if knowing where the broccoli is grown and the salmon is caught and what ranch raised and butchered the beer-fed cow will make it all taste better. The paragraph goes on to explain in meticulous detail how each moist, succulent, tender, fragrant dish is grilled, braised, sautéed, smoked, poached, or roasted and describes the effluences, zests, herbs, oils, shavings, garnishes, and sauces that complete the dish. Everything is à la carte, all sides cost another zillion dollars, and if we were old enough, for another ninety bucks each we could do a specially selected wine tasting with the meal. All in all, the place is terrible and filled with old people and Gretchen and I last about a minute and a half.

We go down the street to a Thai restaurant. Gretchen gets a vegetarian pad Thai and I get some shrimp fried rice. We share some soup. We don't get charged for the water. When we pay the check, the woman at the cash register, in accented English, tells us we're a very
pretty couple
. I think Gretchen likes that. We each take a wintergreen mint out of a bowl as we leave for dessert.

It's dark but it's still pretty early and so we decide to take a walk down on the beach. We walk down the old wooden stairs, dump our shoes and go barefoot. We're above the tide line and the sand is cool, dry, and soft beneath our feet. I have to admit the sound of crashing waves is very romantic. I can tell Gretchen's cold and so I give her Dad's jacket to wear. She doesn't want to take it at first, she's afraid I'll be cold, but I tell her I won't be and I'm not. The jacket is like an overcoat on her.

Somehow or another as we walk, we start holding hands again. We're quiet but it's an okay quiet. We stop. We're sort of hugging one another. Gretchen has one hand on my shoulder and the other on my face. I have my hands underneath the jacket and on her waist. Gretchen doesn't say anything, she just looks at me, the tips of her fingers touching my cheek. I can feel the warmth and color rising. My mark is an erogenous zone, one I never knew I had. I kiss Gretchen's palm. She gasps slightly as the tip of my tongue traces her lifeline.

“Ooh,” she whispers.

“Ooh yourself,” I say. I'm suddenly feeling very James Bond–like—Daniel Craig, not Pierce Brosnan.

Gretchen giggles. She looks away. She's quiet for a moment. And then she knocks me flat. “Billy? How come you've never tried to … you know…” She searches for the right words and can't find them. But I know what she's talking about. Other than that night on the Ferris wheel, our physical relationship hasn't gone much beyond wild, crazy-making kisses.

“I don't know,” I say, not feeling nearly so James Bondish anymore. “I mean, I really
want
to, I do, but—” It feels awkward to tell her the truth. “I don't know if
you
do.”

The wind blows her hair. Strands of it touch my mouth. I can feel Gretchen's belly, hard and flat, against mine. She looks at me. She looks into my eyes. She looks deep into my eyes and she asks me with her eyes to ask and ask again.

 

48

“Are you a virgin?”

Gretchen whispers the question in my ear. I've put the jacket on the sand underneath her. Her tongue tastes of wintergreen. I have my hand under her dress. I can't believe how soft and wet she is.

“Yes,” I say. “Are you?”

“No,” she says. “Is that all right?”

“Of course it is,” I say. “You're beautiful,” I say.

“Touch me here,” she says, guiding my hand, and when I do she half murmurs, half moans. After a while her hand goes to my belly and then slides lower.

It goes too fast the first time. All the things I thought I'd do and say go right out the window. I'm too excited and the feel, the very
idea,
of what I'm doing makes me cum the moment I enter her.

“I'm sorry,” I say.

“It's a compliment,” she says. Which is a really nice to thing to say. It makes me feel better. I stay inside her. I can feel her softly squeezing me. “I didn't know you could do that,” I whisper. She just giggles.

It takes much longer the second time and is so much better.

My orgasm begins as a tickle somewhere out on the far side of the moon, so quiet I'm hardly aware of it at first. By the time it hits the earth's atmosphere, I'm both inside and outside myself, praying to it.

“Do you believe in God, Billy?”

Dorie once asked me this from her hospital bed.

“No. Do you?”

“I do. Yes. I can't help it.”

“It's cool that you do. I wish I did.”

“If God
does
exist,” says Dorie, smiling her Dorie smile, “what do you think
she
looks like?”

We laughed.

I could tell her now. I can tell Dorie all about God. If God exists, her face is that of the woman looking up into my own.

 

49

“… reason to believe that this involves young people so if you see anything, hear anything, know anything, it is your responsibility as citizens to inform…”

If the policeman who arrested Twom for driving his grandmother's car looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger's nephew, the guy on the stage must be his uncle. He has short hair and a stocky, muscular build. The uniform is tight across his chest and belly. He looks like he wouldn't go down if you hit him with a wood plank.

Cop man.

High School High is being brought up to speed on the Night Visitors and, except for me, Ephraim, Twom, and possibly Deliza, no one in the school auditorium could care less. The Latino kids and the black jocks are numb with boredom, some of them probably so inured to breaking and entering, they might as well be listening to regulations regarding jaywalking. The Asian kids are studying. The surfers are stoned. And even though it's against the rules, practically every other kid in the auditorium has their cell phone in their lap and is tapping away.

No one is listening.

Beatrix has told me that when she was in elementary school, students did bomb drills in case of nuclear attack. They were all herded into school basements, stacked side by side against the wall, and told to duck and cover as if putting your arms over your head was going to ward off a hydrogen bomb. They would then be quickly loaded onto school buses, driven home and dumped off so their parents could drag them into the hastily built, backyard bomb shelter. Kids today wouldn't go into the school basement or a bomb shelter on pain of death because it might cut off their 4G service. And if the bomb ever does drop and the servers go down, my generation, with no phones or iPads, will undoubtedly die of symptoms that resemble drug withdrawal long before they die of radiation poisoning.

“… when you leave the house, set your alarms.”

Twom yawns. Deliza is playing idly with the tips of her hair. Ephraim, however, hangs on the policeman's every word as if it's a death sentence.

“If your family is going out of town, remind your parents to notify their security companies…”

“We should confess,” Ephraim whispers across Deliza to Twom. His voice is trembling.

“You should go dig a grave in your backyard and bury yourself,” Deliza hisses back, not so much as even glancing at him.

“Maybe
you
should.” says Ephraim, like a defensive little kid. He turns to me. “Billy?” He says it as if he's hoping I'll agree with him and I find myself almost considering it because, frankly, just like Ephraim, I'm feeling like a small dog trying to shit a large bone.

It's like this.

Everywhere I go lately all I seem to see are patrol cars. I see home security guards on foot checking out gates and fences. I see black-and-whites cruising for no apparent reason. Just this morning on my way to school, I pass some agitated home owner talking with two policemen on his front lawn. He's yelling and gesticulating. The closest I've ever gotten to his house is right here on the sidewalk but still the cop turns and yells at me.

“You with the cheap, crappy coverup on your face! I'm talking to you, Normal Man! Get your ass over here.”

Actually he doesn't say that.

But as one of the policemen turns and glances at me, I feel as if he might. The cruiser is parked on the street and I have to go around it. Looking through the open window, I see that there is an ugly but very efficient-looking onboard computer installed in the dash and a nasty-looking riot gun mounted on the metal screen behind the front seat. I flash on Twom sitting in the uncushioned backseat, his hands cuffed in front of him. Only instead of Twom it's me. And unlike Twom, I'm not handling it well at all. The problem is I have something to lose now.

Gretchen.

It absolutely kills me that I've done something so incredibly stupid as to fall madly in love. I keep telling myself it's nothing but infatuation, that sooner or later this whole “I can't wait to see you” period will be over. But there's a big part of me that doesn't want it to be. It's ridiculous. Gretchen and I eat lunch together. We unashamedly meet between classes. I borrow Mom's cell phone so we can call one another at night. I've even gotten an e-mail account—
[email protected]
—so I can write notes to her.

On the weekend, we'll say we're going to the movies, Gretchen will pick me in the family van and we'll go to the mall, park in the parking garage and screw each other's brains out in the back. Once when her parents and sisters are out, we go over to her house and up to her bedroom. The bed, the sheets, the drapes, the covers, the smell of her everywhere—it's wonderful. Having seen Twom and Deliza do it, I've discovered the joys of oral sex. I can't believe how much I like it, making Gretchen gasp and pull on my hair and murmur my name. And when she takes me into her mouth I immediately turn into a quivering, slack-jawed, semiparalyzed anthropoid.

“Wow, that was
a lot,
” Gretchen says, and the way she says it, as if it was the very last thing she expected, makes the two of us laugh until we can hardly breathe. Not in my wildest imagination has it ever occurred to me that sex can be funny. It makes me like it even more.

But it's not just sex.

I find that I enjoy going to watch Gretchen run after school at track practice. I'll sit high in the stands above the track with a book and sometimes I won't even pretend to read. I can't believe how great she looks in her running shorts and shirt, with her red hair pulled back in this long braid that goes down her back. She reminds me of an Amazon huntress.

Point of reference.

In Greek mythology the Amazons were this nation of beautiful women warriors who cut off one of their boobs because it got in the way of shooting their bows and arrows. When they weren't hunting and killing things, their modus operandi—which is Latin for method of operation—was to go around kidnapping men and then screw them totally senseless so as to impregnate themselves. Once the mission was accomplished—
datum perficiemus munus
—they'd cut the guy's throat.

Thankfully, nobody on the girls' track team has cut off a boob and/or killed anyone yet. At least I don't think they have. However, there's no doubt they're all very good at running and you could only wish for the screwed-senseless part.

Gretchen's specialty is the fifteen hundred meters, which is this crazed all-out race that goes three and a half times around the track. It's insane how they train for it. Gretchen and the other girls will be jogging along and all of sudden they'll break into an all-out sprint that lasts about a minute and a half but seems like an endless lifetime. And then, they'll stop and smoothly jog again for a little while. And then, unbelievably, they'll suddenly kick it up into high gear again. You get exhausted just watching them.