This car was bound to skip the tracks and splatter me hard.
• • •
Markie Rodriguez worked behind the counter at 7-Eleven.
Just my stupid epileptic fucking luck.
Markie Rodriguez had played shortstop for the Burnt Mill Creek High School Pioneers baseball team. He graduated in June. Apparently, selling condoms, Slurpees, and chewing tobacco at a 7-Eleven was the realization of his post–high school ambitions.
Markie was an okay guy, just a little tightly wound and twitchy. You get that way playing shortstop, where it is so easy to make costly mistakes, which are closely related to extinction.
I believed there was something very ironic in the thought of purchasing a box of condoms from our former shortstop.
“Come on,” Cade said.
Cade Hernandez grabbed my elbow and walked me toward the counter where the cash register and Markie Rodriguez were located. It felt like I was being arrested, or being taken to get a spanking or something.
I had never been spanked in my life, by the way.
Nobody would ever spank a kid who’d had a dead horse fall on him.
And as Cade dragged me the twelve feet from the doorway to the counter, I glanced around in terror, taking in as many details of my environment as possible.
First, I noticed as we entered the store that according to the height chart on the aluminum frame of the doorjamb that was intended to help people estimate the size of stick-up men, Cade Hernandez was six feet four inches tall.
That’s a big robber.
Cade had grown this year.
I also noticed there was a mother and three kids at the back of the store filling up drinks at the serve-yourself refreshment bar. In the center of the store, a sheriff’s deputy poured coffee into a tall paper cup, and a couple of brown-skinned men who looked like gardeners stood in front of the open beer box at the end of the aisle that displayed motor oil and pressurized cans of flat-tire-repair foam.
It was as though all of humanity had gathered at this particular 7-Eleven to watch Cade Hernandez force the epileptic boy to shop for condoms.
I was so horrified, I felt like I could vomit.
Never in my life had I considered willing myself into an epileptic seizure, but if I could have wished one to happen, I would gladly have blanked out on the spot. I even considered faking it, but then I looked at the sheriff’s deputy and grimly considered what it would taste like if he attempted to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on me.
He had a mustache. And besides, no one wants coffee breath on a hot afternoon.
I attempted to reason with Cade.
That was ridiculous.
“Let’s go somewhere else,” I pleaded.
“Stop being a little bitch,” Cade said.
“Little Bitch is my bullfighting name,” I pointed out.
“You are going to do this.”
Cade tugged me along.
“Ow. You’re hurting my arm!”
I sounded like such a baby.
Markie Rodriguez beamed a smile when he saw us in the store.
“Win-Win! Finn! Hey, what’s up?” he said.
Without hesitating, Cade said, “We came in to buy some condoms.”
I was certain there was not one person in that entire zip code who couldn’t hear Cade Hernandez’s announcement.
Look: Apart from having had sex with Iris Boskovitch, there was nothing in the world that could ever embarrass Cade Hernandez. So when he had the opportunity to address an audience in such a way as to make every single listener feel somewhat awkward and ill at ease, he was unflinching in his willingness to seize the moment.
Even the two thirsty gardeners standing in front of the stacks of twelve-packs turned their attention to the front counter and the kids who’d come in looking for condoms.
And Markie Rodriguez said, “Um. We?”
Markie looked from me to Cade and back to me again. One of his eyebrows drawbridged provocatively.
And Cade, never once reducing the volume of his reply, said, “Well, not we. Him. Not that he’s the man and I’m the woman. The condoms are for him and someone else. Who is also not a guy, in case you were wondering. So everything’s cool. But Finn needs condoms.”
Markie cleared his throat and said, “Glad you cleared that up, Win-Win.”
So Cade said, “That kind of gave me a boner. Do you ever get a boner when you talk about sex, Markie?”
Markie answered, “I guess I do. Sure. Who doesn’t?”
“Really,” Cade said. “It’s ridiculous, though. How about you, Finn? Do you ever get a boner when you talk about sex?”
I felt the blood draining from my head. I half expected the shoppers in the store to shower us with outrage. Everyone watched Cade and me in rapt attention. The mother at the drink station nervously told one of her junior-high-school-aged boys to turn around and not look at us. She grabbed the kid’s shoulder and spun him to face the ice machine.
I could no longer speak.
And Markie asked, “What kind of condoms do you want, Finn?”
Kind?
There are kinds?
“Um.”
There were kinds. Just at eye level behind Markie Rodriguez’s buzz-cut head, beside a display of Red Man chewing tobacco, hung several rows of various brands of condoms. Markie reached up and started pulling them down one by one, laying the boxes on the counter in front of us.
The sheriff’s deputy came up and stood in back of me and Cade. He was ready to pay for his coffee. I wished he would shoot us both.
It was a real dilemma: What do you do? Ask Markie to take care of the deputy first? Make him wait behind the condom shoppers?
Cade held up a box.
“Look at this,” he said. “AfterGlow brand. These condoms get hot. Have you ever seen that? Condoms with shit on them that gets hot?”
He was asking his question to the deputy.
The cop shrugged and didn’t reply. He was obviously interested but maintained his aloof law-enforcement defense barrier.
Cade went on. “Who would want to put something that gets hot on his dick? That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard of in my life. Remember that time we put Bengay in your jock, Markie?”
Markie nodded. “That was fucked up.”
Then the deputy chuckled. “We did that once, back when I played football.”
Cade Hernandez drew a little horizontal triangle in the air between me, Markie, and himself.
“Baseball,” Cade said.
The deputy nodded. “Oh. Pioneers?”
“Yeah,” Markie said. “Not a good year.”
“Hey! You’re Cade Hernandez, aren’t you?” the deputy asked.
Cade was a very talented pitcher. He’d already been scouted by three major-league teams.
Cade shrugged and nodded.
“So, which one of you guys would want to put burning shit on your penis?” Cade asked.
Nobody answered.
Cade said, “That’s what I thought,” and put the hot condoms down.
A line stretched behind the deputy. The gardeners each carried cold twelve-packs. The mother and her three kids stood with their drinks. The kids watched their shoes, but their ears flared out like steam shovels.
Twenty miles.
Twenty miles.
My knees shook.
Cade grabbed a different box. “Ultra-thin. Sounds risky, don’t you think?”
“Uh,” I said.
Although “ultra-thin” did sound risky, I had completely lost the ability to communicate with language.
“Look,” Markie offered. “This might be what you want. These condoms have spermicidal jelly on them.”
I shook my head. I did not want spermicidal anything. It made me feel sick to think of killing my sperm with jelly.
“I like these condoms in assorted colors,” Cade said.
“Lots of guys buy those ones,” Markie pointed out.
Two girls from school entered the store
. Thankfully, I didn’t know their names. They were both about five feet five, though.
“Just give me these,” I said. I pointed to a blue box of Trojans. They looked the same as the ones Cade had in his truck.
“Good choice,” Markie said.
“An American classic,” Cade agreed.
Markie Rodriguez scanned the condoms into the register.
Then Cade said, “Throw in a box of those colored ones for me. The condoms I got in my truck are expired. Only a dumb shit would use expired condoms.”
“Smart kids,” one of the gardeners said.
Cade looked back at them and smiled. “Thank you. And put a can of Copenhagen in there too, Markie.”
“Got it,” Markie said.
“Markie,” I said, “I’m going to need an extra bag to put over my fucking head.”
THE BOY IN THE BOOK
July fifteenth came.
I was so nervous.
It seemed the preceding week had been all a blurry haze. Although I hadn’t had a seizure since May, the night of the perigee moon—which was now one hundred million miles behind me—I felt disconnected and drained.
And I was so agitated.
My father noticed it. Everyone did.
“Are you okay, son?” he said to me.
Dad looked straight into my eyes. He could see stuff back there, I was certain. I could tell he was trying to see if maybe I’d blanked out and not told anyone about it. I still felt very guilty for not telling him what had happened to me on the living room floor while he was in New York.
We sat together on the morning of my last day as a little boy, the morning before my seventeenth birthday, drinking our coffee on the patio beside the pool. Laika, freshly bathed the evening before, following a complete body massage on a dead jackrabbit, rested her chin on top of my bare foot.
I said, “I’m okay, Dad.”
“Oh.”
Dad sipped his coffee.
He said, “You’re not nervous about that college trip with Cade, are you? You know, you don’t have to go if you don’t want to.”
That was Dad’s circuitous way of telling me he wished I would stay home forever. Cade and I would be taking our exploratory trip to Oklahoma in just a few weeks. It was time for the epileptic boy to grow up.
“Sometimes I’ve worried about it. But I think it will be good for me.”
“It’s one of those things that you’re going to eventually do, I suppose,” Dad said.
And then I asked him, “Dad, how old were you the first time you had sex?”
Look: Words did not frighten my father. They scared the shit out of me. I almost couldn’t believe I’d worked up the guts to ask the question and not choke to death in the process. But words were the atoms in my father’s universe, and he was their destroyer and their creator.
Dad put his cup down on the table between us. He glanced over his shoulder. I knew what he was doing. He wanted to see if Mom or Nadia had gotten out of bed and were within earshot.
“Sex?” Dad asked.
“Yeah. Well. Um. I mean with someone else.”
Somehow I’d just skirted around the issue of masturbation with my dad.
My dad said, “Fifteen. But things were a lot different then.”
“Fifteen? What do you mean by different?”
“Well, I suppose I mean that you kids now are more mature than I was, that you think about bigger things, and maybe with that maturity there come additional considerations you need to be cautious about,” my father explained.
“That sounds like bullshit to me,” I said.
Dad nodded.
“It probably is,” he said. “Good call, Finn. I just pulled that responsible-dad speech out of my ass. Why did you want to know?”
“Don’t you think it’s normal for a kid to want to know that about his dad?” I asked. “I can’t measure whether I’m normal or not by comparing myself with someone like Cade Hernandez.”
I sipped my coffee and watched the undulating surface on the pool.
My dad said, “Are you having sex with anyone?”
I felt myself turning red. I shook my head. I wanted to ask him what he meant by “anyone.” “Anyone” is the universe, and that includes an awful lot of people I would never have sex with.
“No,” I said. “It just seems like all the guys I know at school have had sex. Everyone has but me.”
“That’s the biggest high school myth of all time, Finn,” Dad said. “Just because the guys say they’re doing it doesn’t make it true.”
I thought about words—like words in books—and how just saying them made things real.
I sighed.
“I think they’re telling the truth.”
“Don’t worry about it. It’s no big deal, Finn. Trust me. Kids make a much bigger deal out of sex than it really is. Don’t let anyone pressure you into feeling like there’s something wrong with you or you’re not normal.”
“Wow,” I said. “I’m normal ?”
My dad laughed. “Probably not.”
I put my hand on top of my dad’s and told him thanks.
I loved my dad.
He cleared his throat and said, “You know, Finn, when it does happen, just be smart. Normal or not, you’re smart.”
“Okay, Dad.”
All things considered, this was much better than the condom talk with Mom.
• • •
I’d hidden the box of condoms Cade forced me to buy between the mattress and the springs on the lower bunk in my bedroom.
Nobody in health class ever advised against that particular hiding place, and since it was my job to do my own laundry, Mom was not likely to stumble onto my secret condoms by changing my sheets.
After dinner, I pouted alone in my room, waiting for the right time to leave. I’d have to sneak out. I’d never left my house that late at night, and if I got caught, there would be questions.
And after our conversation that morning, Dad would know exactly what was going on.
I was scared and embarrassed. I thought about taking off my clothes in front of Julia Bishop—how awkward that would be. I didn’t want her to look at me naked, so, I thought, maybe we could do it in the dark. The problem was, I wanted to see her naked. How do the physics of this light/dark fantasy work themselves out for guys, I wondered.
At ten o’clock, I extracted the box of condoms from their hiding place. The box was sealed shut, and I had to unfold the entire thing to read all the detailed instructions printed on the inside. It was all very pharmaceutical, with black-line drawings of how to properly put on and take off a condom.
It was ridiculous.
At eleven, I got dressed and fixed my hair in front of the mirror that hung on the door of my closet. I tried to look good, confident, but I was so unconvincing. I made sure the clothes I wore were all perfectly clean and smelled fresh—shorts, T-shirt, socks, underwear. I wore the socks with the sharks on them, the ones Julia had admired. My briefs were brand-new and had that just-out-of-the-package chemical smell. Thanks, Governor Altvatter! You had to be sure and have fresh underwear and socks if you were going to have sex, right?
Even the laces on my sneakers were never used and brilliantly white.
I was so stupid.
I put two condoms inside my left pocket. How many did you need? I should have asked Cade Hernandez, but he would have put on some theatrical show to answer such a simple question. The instructions inside the box didn’t say anything about how many condoms a guy would typically use when having sex.
Two sounded good.
At eleven fifteen, it was time to go. I took my sneakers off so I could get out the back door in my socks without making any noise. Then I realized how dumb it was to call sneakers “sneakers.” Those rubber soles were like steel-pan drums on hardwood floors.
I was disgusted with myself.
And just before I left, I turned out the light and put those stupid condoms back inside the box beneath my mattress. Anyway
, the expiration date on them wasn’t going to hit for another eight-hundred-million miles.
That’s a long line for a goddamned roller coaster.
• • •
On the way to Julia Bishop’s house, I practiced what I would say to her. I used Laika as my stand-in for Julia.
Laika was a good listener, and when I talked to her, she would stay near me and not run off to find something decaying that she could roll on.
It was a win-win situation.
Excuse Number One: Look, Julia, I really like you a lot. . . .
Bullshit.
Laika was unimpressed.
Excuse Number Two: I love you, Julia.
“Should I say that, Laika? I mean, it’s the truth, but I don’t think I have the balls to say ‘I love you’ to Julia until she says it first. Is that totally stupid? I think she’s in love with me. Do you think so?”
Bullshit.
Excuse Number Three: Julia, I am too young and too stupid to have sex. I wanted to believe I could do it, but I can’t. I hope you don’t think there’s something wrong with me, because there’s not. I’m just not ready. I love you, and I hope you’re not mad at me. I would never have sex without condoms. I even embarrassed myself and bought some, with Cade Hernandez along, no less! Imagine that! And I purposely left them at home tonight because I just don’t think I’m old enough to do it yet. Maybe that makes me gay. Maybe it makes me a loser, because all my friends are having sex. Just not me.
Bullshit again.
It was all true; I just didn’t know if I could actually say those words to her.
As I climbed up the bank from the creekbed and onto Julia’s property, I found myself wishing I had just stayed home.
• • •
There was no light coming from Julia Bishop’s bedroom.
Would she even know I was there?
We’d talked about it plenty of times, so it wasn’t like either of us had forgotten the mysterious midnight date we’d arranged.
I checked my watch.
Eleven fifty-seven.
Three thousand six hundred miles to midnight.
“Come here, Laika,” I whispered.
I folded my legs and sat down in the garden outside Julia’s bedroom window. Laika pressed up against my bare thigh, and I patted her fur.
And I said, “You are not running off tonight.”