here - Jersey Devil Press

oad as a barn door. “Hit me with it good.” Purple pools. Purple
pools.
“There’ll be time for all that,” Gatsby would tell me, volleying
from closer and closer as the shadows drew long.
The October I turned sixteen, Gatsby crept into my bedroom.
“It’s you and me, old sport. We need to get serious.” The kickball
field was empty. The rest of the girls had taken to sitting in boys’
parents’ cars late at night, laughing at jokes that weren’t funny.
Everybody else had crossed themselves off Gatsby’s roster. He and
I took up racquetball. It’s a serious game.
“You’re co-captain now,” Gatsby told me. But it was just the
two of us, and we were playing on different sides.
Late phone call Thanksgiving night, after people’s parents had
given up on pinning them to couches in the den. A friend of a
friend picked me up in his parents’ Oldsmobile. Tall and meaty,
with pimples like tender little cherry blossoms kissing up out of his
collar. Out in the middle of the desert, there were two other cars
waiting. There were six guys; all the real girls had been trapped at
home, feeding leftover pie to maiden aunts. There was some booze,
there was lots of talk about a bonfire but nobody had a lighter.
Gatsby had stayed home. Crawled in through the window at
sunrise reeking of Jack Daniels and John-Paul Gaultier Classique –
everything smells like it now – and Gatsby got into bed with me for
the first time.
“Capital,” he told me. “Aces.” My grandmother had died the
month before and I was in the habit of wearing long Victorian
bedthings, my own strange mourning. “I’ll show you something,
old sport,” Gatsby said and the hair at the back of my neck soaked
with sweat, drew a canopy of whiskey perfume around us.
He lifted the covers but not the dress (Gatsby’s like that) and
reached a hand into the bottom of my rib cage, the other into my
unruly pubic nest, and pulled out a long tense spring. When it
broke through my surface, it thrummed like a guitar string, one of
the thick ones.
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