Uses for Boys (3 page)

I know what I want and this is what I want.

Desmond moves my backpack to the floor, reaches under my jacket, untucks my shirt,
pushes his hand up and cups my breast. His position is awkward and angled so he can
fit his arm under my tight jacket. I don’t expect this quickening, this feeling in
my chest and I’m not sure if I like it. And I don’t know what to do and it’s a quickening
like a tightening and I feel this incredible thirst like I need to drink water and
it’s strange because it’s somehow tied to his hand and the way he’s spreading his
fingers.

With his left hand he takes my right one and places it on the front of his jeans.
I think he’s going to pull me into a hug, but he places my hand on the front of his
jeans and—it’s his penis—so I pull my hand away and he catches it again with his and
laces our fingers together.

“It’s OK, Anna,” he says in a breath. His right hand is still cupping my breast. I
have this feeling like when I was little and I looked at the stepfather’s dirty magazines.
This feeling that seems like thirst and I’m staring out the window trying to figure
it out and I like the way my fingers are laced with his. I never thought he’d want
to hold hands with me, so I didn’t think about wanting to hold hands, but now I know
it’s exactly what I want.

Then he unlaces his fingers and pulls my hand back down on his jeans and covers my
hand with his. It’s his penis and he’s pushing my hand against it with his.

I look up and Michael Cox and Carl Drier are watching. They’re turned around in the
seat ahead of us, their faces just inches from ours. Desmond pushes my hand rhythmically
against the hard knot in his jeans and I’m surprised by the insistent pressure of
it, the hard separateness of it under his jeans. Not like a body part, not like a
limb or a bone, more like a small animal.

I can’t even rehearse the story of it to tell Nancy Baxter because I know I will never
tell Nancy Baxter and now Desmond’s other hand is moving and twisting under my shirt
and he’s pushing on my breast so it hurts and then he makes a noise. His eyes are
squeezed shut and he’s making a sneezing face and then there’s a wet spot on his jeans
under my palm and he takes his hand out from under my shirt and for a second it’s
like a rush of something, like I miss having his hand there, but now there’s a wet
spot on his jeans and Michael Cox laughs like a bark and I pull my hand away and pick
my backpack up off the floor and put it in my lap and wrap my arms around it.

When I get home and turn on all the lights, I picture Desmond in my house with me
so I don’t have to be alone. I have a conversation with him in my head and ask if
he wants to eat pizza and if he wants to watch TV and in my imagination we spend a
lot of time sitting on the couch together. I don’t think about his penis or the wet
spot or Michael Cox’s bark of a laugh. All my favorite shows are on and I watch them
in my pajamas and then when I go to bed, I fall asleep right away and I don’t dream
at all.

joey

After the divorce, after the stepdad punches me on the arm and says, “Better luck
next time,” after my mom learns new ways to leave me alone, Desmond Dreyfus stops
sitting next to me on the bus. It’s so sudden I think maybe I imagined the whole thing.

When Desmond stops talking to me so does Nancy Baxter, and in the mornings before
school, before the light is anything but a faint smudge outside my window, I put my
hands under my pajama top and try to get the feeling back.

Waiting for the bus, I have long conversations in my head. I talk to Nancy. I tell
her everything. I talk to Desmond. I tell him how it felt, his hand under my shirt.
The exploding warmth. I tell Nancy how I feel, like something’s been taken away. Stuff
I know she’d never really understand anyway.

I ride the bus every day now. I wait in front of the school with my backpack at my
feet and this new boy, Joey Sugimoto, stands next to me. He’s from Seattle and wears
jeans that hang on his hips. His arms are long and thin and he doesn’t talk to anyone.
He doesn’t know anyone yet, I think, and I like the way he looks. But more than that,
I like the way he looks at me.

And since Nancy Baxter won’t speak to me anymore, since she won’t look at me in the
hall or sit next to me in class and since she whispers to the other girls about me,
I take Joey home. He can’t believe how big and empty my house is.

“Where’s your mom?” he says.

I show him her bedroom with its matching bedspread and drapes. I show him the neat
rows of her shoes.

“Where’s your stepdad?”

I show him where the stepbrothers slept and the balcony where the older one smoked
pot.

“Where are they now?”

I show him the room that used to be the family room.

“Where’s your real dad?”

I show him what I look like without my shirt and how my bra attaches in the front.
He spends a long time just holding and kissing my breasts, one by one, and saying,
“Oh, oh, oh.”

joey’s my family now

Nobody’s ever home at my house. That’s what Joey says. He comes over every day after
school. He’s better than TV. He’s interested in everything. I show him my mom’s jewelry.
I show him the contents of our refrigerator, our cupboards, the vibrator in her bedside
drawer.

We have a bowl of cereal and then I show him the magazines under my mom’s bed. We
sit together on the floor and pull out the heavy box the stepfather left behind:
Penthouse, Playboy, Hustler.
We’re shoulder to shoulder against the wall. Joey’s jeans have a wide hole in the
knee and his brown, bony kneecap juts out. I put my hand in the hole, exploring the
scarred surface of his kneecap with the lightest tips of my fingers. He lets me. I
can reach down his baggy jeans and trace the barely haired calf all the way to his
ankle, or go in the other direction to his thigh, down to his warm cotton underwear.

Joey chooses a magazine and opens it directly to the center. We unfold the picture.
The centerfold’s skin is a peachy golden-yellow and watching Joey I can see a tiny
reflection of her in his eyes. She has one arm over her head and the knuckles of her
hand just graze the bright blue water of a tropical pool. All of this I see in an
instant: perfectly round breasts pointing out of the picture at Joey’s bent face,
shiny blue water, thick brown curls that cover her shoulders and peek out from behind
her waist. She lies on the thin red sheet, eyes almost closed. Between long, curled
eyelashes are slits of unnaturally green eyes. She has a small smile. Centerfold girl
is happy to have us look at her.

We turn the page. Still on the red sheet, centerfold girl spreads her legs so that
we can see the naked folds. She has only the tiniest mustache of hair, like a thin
indicator, and with one pointy, painted fingernail she pulls at her skin so we can
see the darker parts, like bruises. In another picture, Joey’s finger traces the crack
between two round butt cheeks. My hand still snakes under his jeans, but he’s grown
hard now, and my hand’s stuck there, not sure if it should pull away.

Joey pushes me over and takes off my shirt, then my bra. He rubs himself against my
leg. Beyond his shoulder centerfold girl has slipped to the floor to watch.

Joey’s saying things, breathing heavily against the side of my face. I’m here, I imagine
him saying. I’m here, I’m here, and it’s true. Joey’s here every day after school.
He’s my family now. Anything’s worth this. And he teaches me things. He teaches me
how to hold his penis at the base, tight in a fist, and move the skin up and down.
He teaches me how to take it in my mouth without using my teeth. Joey is very experienced.

“I’m experienced in the ways of love,” he tells me.

I take off my shirt. Joey takes off his and we rub our chests together. My breasts
are small and pointy, but Joey thinks they’re perfect. When he kisses me, I feel important.
Like I’m everything to him. Sometimes everything happy bubbles up and I want to be
chased around the house. I secretly want to run around outside in the cul-de-sac without
my shirt on. I make jokes about Joey’s body, his skinny legs and concave chest. About
the little red hickies I leave on his skin. He holds my wrists, says I can only be
cured by kisses. Or he scissors his legs between mine, trying to take off my pants.

“We’ll just lie together,” he says.

I’m dizzy with his kisses. At my house it’s empty room after empty room and we kiss
in every one. It’s like all I know are his lips. He has thousands of dizzying lips.
I take off my pants and he rubs his penis against me, but I keep my legs tight together.
Joey whispers in my ear and strokes my forehead like I’m ill. Everything is a negotiation.
Everything moves in a series of degrees.

“Just a little, just a bit, just the head.”

Day after day, hour after hour.

“If you love me,” he says.

“If you care about me,” he says.

“It’s not fair,” he says.

“I love you,” he says. And I love you, I love you, I love you.

“OK,” I say, but not because of that. Not because of what he says or how he says it.
Not because I’m tired of waiting, or because I think I should or shouldn’t, or that
it’s right or wrong—but because I want to. I like the way he makes me feel. I want
to feel him. I want to feel him like that.

I say OK and we do. And it’s not that much different than anything else we do.

i belong here

Once we find this way of fitting together, I set about finding other ways. The back
of my knuckles cup the hollow beneath his arm. My nose, my face, I could fit whole
armies of things in this cavity, or just my cheek, my breast.

“What are you doing?”

I angle my body, arm outstretched, and stuff my right breast into the warm depression
under his arm. His ribs press against mine. I penetrate him with my breast. We’re
boob fucking. It’s awkward and mysterious. Fulfilling.

I rest my face against the bottom of his ribs and breathe into his narrow stomach.
The skin stretches thin across his belly. There’s an uncomfortable pucker to his belly
button and I put my fingers in it, pulling at the lip, until I notice the black dirt
inside.

My hand goes lower. The only lushness on his body is the bed of hair where his penis
rests. I rest my cheek against his belly, turn away so he can’t see my face. I have
this view of him: down his belly to the wrinkled sheets between his legs. This view:
his bumpy knees and out-turned feet.

We come unattached and I blow my cheek up full of air against his stomach. Again,
double time, like a heartbeat.

*   *   *

On Fridays, my mom leaves a twenty-dollar bill and a note on the kitchen table.

“Rinse the dishes before you put them in the dishwasher,” it says.

Joey and I have sex in her bedroom. He brings rubbers that he steals from his brother
and brags about how he can put them on with one hand. I like the way he looks at me
with his eyes mostly closed and the way he kisses, like he’s breathing in my mouth.
Afterward we watch the gray sky darken behind heavy pine trees and listen to nothing
at all. It rains silently on the house.

I’m fourteen. I go to school. I dress the way all the other kids dress. I wear my
Levi’s with expensive twill shirts. I wear the right tennis shoes, the white leather
ones with the green stripes. But the outfit buys me nothing. Everyone has heard how
I let Desmond Dreyfus feel around under my shirt while Carl Drier and Michael Cox
watched. Everyone knows about Joey. The boys make V signs when they look at me and
tongue the crack between their fingers. The girls call me a slut.

Joey lives in a thin-walled apartment at the bottom of the hill near the freeway.
His mom works and his dad, like mine, is gone. His brother drinks beer and watches
daytime television. He asks if we’re fucking and then kicks us out. We go back to
my house. Joey loves my big clean house.

He loves the way it smells on Wednesday after the cleaning lady leaves and there are
lines in the carpet from her vacuum cleaner. He takes deep breaths through his nose
and leads me around, inspecting her work. Sometimes, when she’s still there after
we get home from school, Joey talks to her, and she gives me a look. I’m too young
to have boys over she thinks, but she won’t say anything. She piles her worn leather
purse and heavy coat on our kitchen table and before she leaves she collects my mom’s
check from the table in the entry hall.

Joey and I take the bus home together after school. We sit close together. No one
talks to us. Nancy Baxter stares at me and whispers to her friends and I stare back
at them until they look away. Nancy Baxter. It’s hard to remember there was a time
when she wasn’t staring and whispering. Joey holds my hand. He doesn’t notice the
stares. All they see when they look at him is his no-name jeans, his worn shirts,
the dirty Skoal cap he wears. Joey changed everything for me, I want to tell her.
I’m not alone. The place where my hand fits in his, that place, that feeling? I belong
there.

I hate Nancy Baxter. I hate the school bus.

We get off on the corner of a tree-lined street near my house and it’s raining but
the sun is shining and it’s so bright I have to squint. Joey stops, right there at
the bus stop, and kisses me. He likes to put his hand up under my shirt and shock
the adults driving by. The other kids scatter slowly toward their own houses until
it’s just Joey and me and the cars are going so fast that we’re not shocking anyone.

The closer we get to my house, the quieter it is. There’s no traffic here and the
houses are locked, windows dark. I take Joey’s hand in mine. His fingers are cold.
He stops and looks at me intently like he’s going to say something. His cheeks are
wet from the rain, like he’s been crying, and I realize that I must look like that
too.

I keep the key to my house in my book bag and have to put it down while I unlock the
lock and the dead bolt and when we get into the entry hall we’re really careful. We
take off our shoes and our jackets because my mom likes a clean house and she doesn’t
know about Joey.