Uses for Boys (15 page)

Only Sam’s sick. Sicker than I imagined. His face is pale and his lips are cracked.
His hair sticks to his face with sweat and he looks thin in his pajamas. He scares
me. He stands unsteadily in the doorway and pulls at my hand like a child. He’s excited.
He takes my hand in his damp one and shows me how hard he is. He kisses me with an
open mouth and when I pull away I can see how glassy his eyes are. I don’t recognize
him.

But he leads me up the stairs. We pass through thick chunks of sunlight in the stairwell
and when we get to his bedroom I start to pull back but then he kisses me until it
changes and I want him as much as he wants me.

I run my fingers across his forehead, unsticking his hair. Kissing his brow, his ear,
his cheekbone. I hold both of his wrists together in my hands and cover the side of
his face with my breath. I want to taste him. He’s pushing against me and I hold his
wrists tighter and jerk him toward the bed. I like this. He’s on his back and I pull
off his pajama top and look down at his smooth chest. I press my cheek to his breastbone,
gathering up his wrists again and holding them over his head with one hand. I press
my face beneath his arm and I’m kissing him. His feverish body. I let go of his wrist
and pull his pajamas down around his ankles. I lean back on my heels and pull off
my dress. I put my mouth on his penis but he pulls me up and I climb off the bed.
I take off my underwear and stand looking down at him. He’s flushed. I lean over and
kiss his mouth and he whispers things to me. He’s telling me that he loves me. I push
off my sneakers and my socks and climb back on the bed. I’m straddling him and fitting
him inside me.

“Oh,” he says. I put my weight forward on my hands and rock against him. His face
is in the path of sunlight from the open window and his eyes are squeezed tightly
shut against the brightness. Everything is perfect. I’m on top of him and his hands
are around my waist and I feel like I could just raise my hands up to the ceiling
and I do. I lift my arms straight up. The door swings open.

His mom has one hand on the doorknob, the other on a slender briefcase. She’s wearing
a dark-colored suit. Her hair’s limp and in her eyes and she just freezes. She just
stops and I think I can see us reflected in her flat brown eyes. Sam’s hands are still
holding my waist and I turn to him because I think that maybe he didn’t hear her come
in but he did. His eyes are fixed on her. And when I look back at her, her eyes are
fixed on him. It’s like I’m not even there.

I drop my arms.

“Sam, meet me downstairs,” she says. Her eyes flicker toward me. “Anna, you can go
home.”

I look at Sam trembling beneath me. I don’t know what to think, because everything’s
changed. I can hear it in her voice and the way she turned away from me. I’m still
sitting on top of him and he’s sick—I know that—he’s sick and trembling beneath me.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

But Sam says nothing. I put on my sundress and shoes. I look around for my bag. I
wonder how I could have ever felt at home here.

toy

I go straight to a pay phone and call Toy. She answers. I want her to hear it in my
voice. How much I need her. But she can’t talk right now because she’s getting ready
for a date with the camp counselor. He showed up the night before and gave her a long
gold chain with a T on it and told her he loves her. She isn’t sure what she should
wear. She loves Finn, she says, but she likes the camp counselor too. And when he
showed up last night she was just wearing an old T-shirt and her hair was all a mess,
but he liked the way she looked.

“He said I looked sexy,” she says.

“Toy,” I say, but it doesn’t even sound like me. Can’t she hear it?

They didn’t have sex, she says. He didn’t even try. They went up to her room and he
took her guitar and played her a song he wrote for her. She curled her legs under
her and pulled the T-shirt over her knees, so she looked, she says, sexy and innocent.
And when the song was over he walked over to her, took her face in his hands and said
he’ll wait.

“As long as it takes,” he said.

“Wait for what?” I say and my voice rises in frustration. “For what?” I say again.
Because they’ve already had sex, she told me how it was, how romantic, and I want
her to know what happened to me. I want to tell her about Sam.

But she ignores me. “Oh!” she says. “I know what I’ll wear,” and then she describes
a soft summer dress. “With nothing underneath,” she says and I interrupt.

“I have to talk to you, Toy,” I say. “It’s important. I have to see you.”

And then she says, “Oh baby, are you OK?” Switching gears, just like that, because
I think she likes it when I’m down.

“It doesn’t matter,” I say now because it doesn’t. Because she’s busy tonight, she
has a date and by tomorrow it won’t matter.

“I’ll come over tomorrow,” she says.

“OK,” I say.

And she says, “OK.” Then she says, “The pink dress. With nothing underneath.”

“Yeah.”

“But of course I’ll wear the necklace.”

“Of course,” I say.

I go back to my apartment, pull open the heavy front door and walk up the familiar
steps. My building has that smell that old apartments have and the hallway is dim.
It’s a Tuesday and it’s quiet. Everyone’s at work. I don’t want to be alone anymore.
I can’t do this anymore. I make a plan. I’ll take the bus to Toy’s house and I’ll
be there when she comes back from her date. Her mom will let me in or I’ll use the
key from under the mat. I’ll take the 38, the express bus, but it stops running soon,
so I have to hurry.

I still smell like sex. In the mirror I’m flushed and feverish looking and I can see
what Sam’s mom saw when she looked at me. Her disappointment. I can never go back
there, I think, and I want to just get on a bus and leave town. Go to Seattle like
Angel. Or somewhere else. San Francisco. New York. Start all over. I put on jeans
under my dress and pile on T-shirts and a sweatshirt because now I really do feel
feverish and I’m sweating but I’m cold too. I pull the door shut. It’s getting dark
and I walk fast, swinging my arms to keep from crying.

The bus is empty and I rock my head against the glass and see my own wavering reflection.
I keep picturing the T on a long gold chain that the camp counselor gave Toy. Real
gold, she said. And I picture his hand on the side of her cheek and his gaze. Why
does everyone treat her like a virgin when she’s not? I picture her looking at him,
her upturned face. I know how she poses so the light hits her perfectly. I know how
she practices.

Everything is familiar once we reach the suburbs. I know every turn of every curved
road. The way the houses settle back behind the trees. The long driveways and manicured
lawns. When we get to Toy’s stop the bus heaves to a standstill.

“Looks like I’m all alone now,” the bus driver says when I get off.

I’m running a little and out of breath by the time I get down the street and around
the corner to Toy’s house. It’s lit up from the inside. I’m shivering under my layers
and ready to jump out of my skin. I feel like an idiot. Sam’s family was never my
family, I think, and I draw the big sweatshirt around me and put the hood up. I had
no mother, I tell myself. I had no father. But now what? I knock on the door but nobody
answers. I let myself in. I can hear the television from the master bedroom and I
can picture Toy’s mom asleep in front of it.

“It’s me, Anna,” I call and go to help myself to a soda from the refrigerator. Toy’s
mom is standing in the kitchen and she has some kind of piece of meat in her hands,
like a chicken breast, dipped in flour and there’s flour all over the counter and
the front of her bathrobe.

“Hi,” I say, worried that I startled her, but then she looks at me and I know I haven’t
at all. In the middle of the counter is her wineglass, the one she always uses, covered
in sticky white fingerprints.

“Anna,” she says and a smile attaches itself to her face but her eyes roam around
me as though she knows I don’t like looking at her directly. “I’m making dinner for
Toy and me,” she says, waving the piece of meat and I know that later, after it’s
forgotten on the counter, Toy will have to throw it away.

“Toy’s not here,” I start to stay, but instead I turn and head up the carpeted stairs.

the necklace

She’s standing in front of the mirror when I walk in and when she turns it’s as if
she doesn’t know who I am. She looks me over slowly like it’s taking her a minute
to place me.

“What are you wearing?” she says. I move closer to her so that our reflections are
framed together in the mirror. It looks like I’m wearing everything I own. Like I’m
running away from home.

“What are you doing here?” she says.

“What are you doing here?” I say. And then we don’t say anything.

*   *   *

She’s wearing an old T-shirt and her hair’s all a mess. She stands next to me and
I peel off some layers. The big sweatshirt and then a long-sleeved T-shirt.

“What’s wrong with you?” she says. We’re both staring into the mirror, into each other’s
eyes and I’m waiting for her to say it. But she won’t say it. There’s no necklace.
So I say it.

“There’s no necklace,” I say and she’s still looking at me in the mirror and then
in a flash I understand. There’s no camp counselor.

“Toy,” I start. Her gaze is steady and defiant. And then I know. There’s no Seth.
There’s no Finn.

upside down

I break her gaze. My sweatshirt is still in my hand. Toy’s room is frilly and girly
and spinning around us and I lock my eyes back on Toy’s and look for my reflection
there. Toy’s stories weave around me and I think about all the times I wished that
Seth was touching me like he touched her.

And collapsing. That first day in the Salvation Army, both of us framed in the mirror
and how I wanted what she had. A boyfriend, she’d said. And what I’d felt. I’d wanted
Joey to come back. I’d wanted Todd to show up and say it was all a mistake.

I’d wanted my story to make sense.

I’m sick. And I want to laugh. And I want to hurt her and I keep looking at her and
I know, in a fractured second, that she’s been hurt before.

Toy has a story too, I know suddenly, but I have no idea what it is.

And I can’t remember why I came here tonight. Why am I here? It would be better if
I didn’t know. If it went back to the tell-me-again times. If I could go back to when
I believed her. To when I thought she had everything. I look at the picture taped
to the wall beside her bed. The one of her upside down like she’s falling right out
of the sky.

And it’s like I can’t even tell what’s real anymore.

after toy

I leave. I just walk out. I pass by Toy’s mom’s bedroom door and I wait for Toy to
come after me but she doesn’t. I imagine she runs after me and I turn around to face
her. I’d wanted what she had.

“I couldn’t figure out,” I’d say, “why the boys in my life were nothing like the boys
in yours.”

When I get back to the city, the apartment is empty. I don’t remember falling asleep.

after sam

It’s bright and hot. I call in sick to work and go to Little Birds cafe. It doesn’t
take long to meet a boy and right away he touches me. Reaches right across the table
with two fingers and touches my cheek. Then he moves a piece of hair out of my eyes.

“Let’s get out of here,” he says.

I don’t think about Sam. I don’t think about Toy. I follow the boy to the corner where
we buy a bottle of rum. The guy behind the counter doesn’t even ask how old we are.
We buy some soda and the boy sends me back to the cafe for two cups. I ask the girl
with the dreadlocks to fill them with ice.

When I come out, he’s waiting on the corner, past the liquor store, leaning against
a mailbox with a brown paper bag in one hand. He’s looking right at me, squinting
against the sun. I don’t need Toy, I think, and I hold up the cups so he can see them.
He squints. He drapes one arm over my shoulders and I follow him down to the fountain.
The one I passed yesterday on the way to Sam’s house.

Just yesterday, I think.

It’s the hottest day of summer, but a heavy canopy of green shades the city. We sit
under a tree where the dirt is tamped down and we’re out of sight. I take a good look
at the boy but he doesn’t look like anything special. I look at my legs in shorts.
They’re brown and kind of long and I like looking at them. I dig the heels of my sneakers
into the dirt and roll my thighs back and forth. The boy pours two drinks, first the
rum and then the Coke, right up to the rim. He hands one to me, spilling it on my
legs. I take a big swallow, real fast. It’s mostly rum. I lift up the cup and tap
it against his.

“Cheers,” I say. Already I’m narrating the story to myself. How I met this boy and
how we got drunk together next to the roaring fountain.

He doesn’t say anything, but leans back on one elbow and drinks. The fountain is so
loud and I think maybe that’s why we’re not talking. The water flashes over concrete
and brick. I take another swallow and then another.

Another and then another. It’s hot, even in the shade. I think we should be saying
something, but the boy leans back, eyes closed, so I just look at him. There’s nothing
familiar about him. My thigh leaning against his thigh. A stranger.

He catches me looking.

He pulls me down and pushes his mouth against mine, opening my mouth with his tongue.
I spill my drink and he doesn’t seem to care until it rolls down the dirt to his jeans
and then he swears a little, but doesn’t let go of me. I’m dizzy and roll onto my
back, looking up through the branches at the hot cloudless sky. He rolls over so he’s
above me, leaning on one arm and kissing me. He’s feeling around my chest with his
other hand and I close my eyes and lay back against the ground. My feet splay open
and I can picture us as if I were just someone walking by. Two kids in the bushes,
in a city park, in the middle of the day.