The Steel Kiss

There’s nothing to do but say it.

The graduation party. Frank and Sam’s and mine.

Maybe forty people there. The sports crowd, pretty nice most of them. A few look at me like, him? But mostly nobody stares. Nobody whispers.

And I’m playing music—took me like ages to try to figure out what to play, what everybody’d like—and Sam says come on back here. And in the parlor or den there’s Karen DeWitt, who smiles at me. I’ve seen Karen, she’s a junior and is sort of pretty, skinny too but not like me. Her nose is big but who am I to talk? The parlor’s dark and she starts touching me on the shoulder and arm. And I’m like, what is this? Only I know of course what it is, even though I never thought this would happen, at least not for years, even though half the guys in the class have been laid.

And she unzips me and does what she does with her mouth.

Then some other people come into the parlor and Karen says let’s get out of here, there’s a bedroom over there. She’s going to pee and then I’ll meet her and we can do it. So I wait a few minutes and she calls me into the room and it’s dark and there she is, no clothes, bent over the bed and I start to do it. I’m inside her and everything.

And then. No, no, no—Lights come on. And there’s Sam and Frank and Karen only she’s not the one on the bed. The person bent over the bed is Cindy Hanson, with her jeans down and panties down. And she’s passed out, sheet around her mouth all wet, she’s been drooling.

And Sam is taking pictures of me and Cindy with a Polaroid. Getting her drugged sleepy face and my string-bean body and my you know. Other people too are there. Laughing and laughing.

I’m grabbing clothes and putting them back on and crying. “What are you doing, what are you doing, what are you doing?”

Frank and Sam are looking over the pictures and laughing ever harder and one of them says, Hey, you’re a natural born pornstar, String Bean!

Frank still laughing hard lifts up Cindy’s head by her hair, “You like it after all, bitch?”

I got it then. Remembering them coming out of Cindy’s house a month ago, seeing them on my secret route home, talking to them for the first time. Cindy had told them no. No fucking, no blow job, get out of my house. Or something.

And that’s when they’d thought of it. Seeing me. How to get even with Cindy Hanson.

The “Epic” was a lie. The Alien Quest was a lie. Music at the party was a lie.

All of it, a lie.

CHAPTER 46