Perfectly Good White Boy Read online

  I didn’t find out what Neecie picked for the break room altar because my shift ended before hers, but it was a choice between a million-year-old condom that came from some old guy who died at the nursing home, some nasty Polaroids of this chick in a bikini sitting on an ugly couch smoking a cigarette, and a crucifix made out of wire hangers. Wendy had found the condom; Kerry had found the Polaroids. I’d found the crucifix.

  Wendy even let me go a little early when things slowed down, which was awesome, because there was a party out at Prairie Lake where Hallie’s cousin’s cabin was. Everyone was going waterskiing, and I wanted to get out there fast because it was supposed to thunderstorm later, and I loved waterskiing.

  Hallie had been drinking all day. Everyone had been; it was kind of a sloppy all-day-swimming thing. Which was good; I had met all of Hallie’s friends, but I still felt a little weird being around them, since they all had known each other forever and had a million inside jokes and talked about people I didn’t know. And her cousin was in college and so everyone was talking about college, like they were already there or something. I was glad they were all drunk by the time I got there.

  We went out on her cousin’s boat. Hallie wore a white bikini, and she looked tanned and sunburned, both at once. She was drinking this crap that her girlfriends always drank: these super sweet malt liquor bottled drinks that made their mouths a bloody red color, and she was being kind of crazy. Like, loud. Telling her cousin driving the boat to go faster and swearing a ton more than normal and touching me more than usual in front of everyone. And screaming laughing when she got up on skis. Just being really drunk, I guess.

  Around seven we came back to her cousin’s cabin because everyone wanted to get some pizza in town. The girls changed out of their swimsuits; the guys finished their beers; everyone scooped up keys and purses and hashed out who was sober enough to drive.

  “Do you want to go?” Hallie asked as she stood on the deck in her bikini, wrapping a towel around her waist.

  “Whatever. You decide.”

  “I just feel so . . . I don’t know. I’m not hungry. You’re probably hungry, though, right?”

  I was really hungry. And pizza sounded good. But I was always hungry, I guess. I could eat an entire pizza first thing in the morning. But I looked at her and saw everyone leaving, and I didn’t care where they were going.

  “Okay, let’s just stay,” she said. “Okay?”

  “Cool. Yeah. Fine.”

  From the deck, we watched the guys wrap up the ponykeg in a trash bag and load it into someone’s trunk, taking the party with them, or maybe just getting Hallie’s cousin to return it for another.

  Hallie went inside and brought me back a Coke, and we sat watching the sun get low over the lake. Though I was exhausted, I felt pretty good. It was hard to get alone with her sometimes. If we weren’t at a party with a bunch of people, then I’d be at her house, late long nights where we’d sit on the couch and watch TV, and I’d wish her parents would just go to bed already so she’d calm down and let me touch her.

  “. . . plus he’s totally got a girlfriend at back at college,” Hallie was saying. She was talking about her cousin.

  “So?”

  “So he’s hooking up with all these other girls while he’s home,” she said. “It’s so shitty of him.”

  I shrugged. Her cousin was sort of a douchebag, in my opinion, but that wasn’t anything I’d ever bring up, since he let us hang out in his parents’ cabin and had bought us alcohol a lot this summer.

  I stretched out my legs so the sun could dry off my wet board shorts, gulped the rest of my Coke.

  “I’ve met his girlfriend,” she said. “She’s really nice. She’s really pretty, too.”

  I didn’t get why she was saying any of this. Hallie was always talking about girls she thought were pretty. I didn’t think about girls’ prettiness all that much since the end result was The Horn. Looking at Hallie now, her legs all tan and firm and strong—and man! I wanted to just . . . bite her. Right in the thighs. Not like I was some kind of vampire or any kinky weirdness. Just that, all the time, I was ready to practically, you know. Eat her up.

  “Maybe he doesn’t like her anymore,” I said.

  “Well, then he should tell her!” she yelled. “Not cheat with someone else. I feel like I owe it to his girlfriend to tell her. I feel like I’m lying.”

  “Is that why you didn’t want to go back to town with him and everyone else?”

  She looked at me then, and she smiled and I felt like I’d won something.

  “Kinda,” she said. “Yeah.” She looked happy that I had figured this out, but also still kind of sad.

  “Come here for a minute,” I said. And she did.

  That was also weird, because I never really told her what to do, ever. I was always waiting for her, really, to do everything. Go out, make plans, let me touch her. Always waiting.

  She wrapped herself in my lap, and the chair I was on almost fell over, and I laughed and she freaked out, but I wouldn’t let go of her and we kissed for a while, and then she started talking again. She did that a lot, the whole make-out-then-stop-and-talk thing, which was fine, I guess, though The Horn wasn’t a fan. I mean, The Horn did what it did, no matter what I wanted. It sort of ruled my life in a way that got embarrassing sometimes.

  Still, I liked her on my lap, even though my thighs were starting to get numb, and I liked how her hair smelled, even though it tickled me as the sun sunk and the breeze blew up from the lake. I liked how her left boob smashed against my shoulder. Since school had ended, I’d been with her almost every single day but it never got old, being with Hallie. Especially when we could be alone together, touching like this. I’d barely seen Eddie all summer.

  “It’s going to storm,” she said, slapping a mosquito on my arm. “Let’s go in.”

  We went inside the cabin and poured bowls of cereal, which we ate standing up in the kitchen. Then she said she wanted to go lie down in bed for a while. The sun was setting, orange everywhere across the lake, but the clouds started covering it, making it feel like it was later than it was.

  “Do you mind?” she asked. “I just feel so icky.”

  Did I mind? “Fuck no, I don’t mind,” I said. Sometimes I wondered if she was crazy. Even though we always ended up doing whatever she wanted to do, she always asked me what I thought about this or that: Is this okay? Do you mind? What do you think?

  Like I was going to complain about getting in bed with her. Like I wouldn’t do whatever she said.

  Upstairs, we moved all the clothes and stuff the other girls had dumped on the bed and got under the covers. It was hot, though, so she had me get up and open the window. The storm wind started rushing up from the lake and it felt good on us.

  Then I just did my normal waiting thing. Let her curl herself around me. Listened to the bugs buzzing around the screen of the window. The sky rumbling. Waited to see what she wanted. From that first night, Hallie wasn’t weird about sex stuff, not uptight about getting naked at all. But she had these standards.

  Like: No calling each other pet names. No dirty talking. No popping her boobs out of her bra without unhooking it first.

  No using words she thought were gross, like “tits” or “pussy” or whatever. (Not that I would. Not to her face, at least.)

  It reminded me of those signs they have up at the swimming pool. But instead of No Running, No Spitting, No Horseplay, it was all her things she didn’t like. I sometimes imagined it written up like that when she talked with her friends about other guys (Dan, her hockey player ex, was often mentioned) who had broken all these rules.

  No feeling her up before kissing her.

  No touching under the bra before taking off her shirt.

  No sticking my hand down her pants before I touched her boobs.

  No no no no.

  It wasn’t like she’d smack me over the head with her purse about it or anything. But she’d say “No,” or “Wait,” or just move my h
and. So I learned quick. It sort of embarrassed me, anyway, to be the one who wanted more than she wanted.

  She started kissing me, then. Nice, but basic kissing. Being that we were both kind of sandy and sweaty in our swimsuits, I thought it wouldn’t go far; Hallie had a thing about that, too. Her definition of what it meant to be “clean” or “ready to go out” was a thousand miles different from mine. Plus she’d already said she felt icky; that could have meant anything.

  But that night, just when I got her bikini top off, she stuck her hand down my board shorts. Right on The Horn. Which, though out of order, was more than cool with me.

  Then, next, she tugged my shorts down and pulled them all the way off. Okay, that wasn’t normal. She didn’t ever strip me like that. Ever. Just pushed my boxers or whatever down a little if she was going in that area. It was like she couldn’t have me be all the way naked or something. She was the same way about her own self, too. Let me touch under her panties, but never pushed them down. It was like she was thinking it didn’t really count if she was still wearing her stuff or something. I had to try to get her off like that, with her panties still on, and while I think she liked some of it, I was pretty sure I’d never managed to get her off for real. Which bugged me, because she got me off all the time.

  So after getting me all naked like that, all unexpected, when she touched my dick again like it would just be the usual hand-job or blowjob of the past few weeks, I was kind of bummed out, honestly. I mean, it sounds stupid, but changing the rules got my hopes up so quick, made me thinking she’d finally want to have real sex. Handjobs were nice, but I was getting a little sick of them. I’d been jerking off since I was thirteen. I was a professional. And then there was the awkward “time to mop up the jizz” moment that I never could get used to doing in front of another human being.

  Blowjobs I had less to complain about. I mean, I wasn’t completely stupid. But it was like she didn’t get the point of sex stuff. The reason she did her hair and makeup, the reason I put on a collar shirt and picked her up on time and took her out for dinner and went to the mall with her while she looked for crap for her dorm at college and every other goddamn thing. People did all that because there was getting off at the end of it. Because you liked it and you liked each other and all of that felt good. That was why we were both here, right?

  Hallie sat up, swung herself over me. As if she could tell I was being a bastard about her handjobs and blowjobs in my head.

  “Hallie, what . . .”

  “It’s okay,” she said. She put my hands on her hips. Her bikini bottoms were slightly damp, and she moved like I should push them down, so I did. Her body felt sunburned, warm, but her bare ass was cold, which would have been funny to me, except for right now things were serious. She was looking at me. Watching me. Not smiling or talking. Even when I put my hand between her legs, she kept watching me. She was wet as hell. Which was good. Great. Girls can’t fake being wet, Eddie told me once. But the rest of her was very tense and still. Like I was taking out her stitches or something.

  Why is she still looking at me?

  I kissed her so she would stop looking at me. Thought about the condoms that lived in my sock drawer. Condoms that were almost an hour’s drive away. I wanted to punch a hole in the wall for not planning ahead. But then, maybe I’d read things wrong again.

  A couple minutes later, she pulled back off me.

  “I have condoms,” she said. “And I’ve been on the pill since March. It takes three cycles to work. Three months. But it’s been longer than that, just in case. So it’s all set now. Sean? Do you want to? Because we can. It’s okay with me. I’ve never done it before. But we can. Okay?”

  This was a lot of information at once, so I guess I couldn’t help it, then. Because March? The barn party was in April. Was she still with Dan the hockey player in March? According to Hallie, they’d gone out for a million years. She even had a framed picture of him and her together on her nightstand, which she got rid of the first time I went over to her house. Because Hallie and Dan had been a couple. They went to dances. They ate lunch together. They posed for pictures that were then framed.

  But now she was saying she hadn’t fucked him. And now she was saying she wanted to fuck me. Except Hallie would never say “fuck” like that.

  “All right.” My voice was a whisper. “Where are they?”

  She reached around, her boobs swinging in the air, and grabbed her bag, handed me a condom.

  The little packet crinkled in my hand. How do I know she’s really on the pill? What if she’s lying? Does she know I’ve never done it either? What if she did it with Dan? And other guys too?

  What if I come the second I put the condom on me?

  Finally, she was looking at me funny and so I just ripped open the packaging. The second I did that, she laid back, her wrist over her eyes, like she couldn’t bear to watch what came next or she was getting herself all mentally prepared or something dramatic. This hiding her eyes from me and my dirty condom business might have made me feel bad, but instead I was relieved to go through the whole thing on my own. Chucking the wrapper on the floor. Slipping the little circle-blob from the packet. Unrolling it, all slippery, with its weird Band-Aid smell, down my dick. I mean, it was pretty gross, if you really thought about it for a minute. I was glad she wasn’t watching.

  “Did you get it on okay?” she asked from behind her wrist.

  “Yeah,” I said, laying myself over her. Though I actually didn’t know. It wasn’t like she handed me the little instruction booklet that came in the box. Or that I would have read it. Had she read it?

  “You ready and everything?” I asked. Which came out sounding so weak-ass! But she nodded. Put her hands on my shoulders. She still wasn’t really looking at me, but at least her wrist wasn’t over her eyes.

  So I kind of nudged her legs apart with my knee. She was a little resistant, like she couldn’t really believe that was required. Like it was my shitty idea. My fault for biology, for being a guy, that I had to press her open all gross like that.

  Since just sort of pushing around my dick right there seemed very, well, icky, I reached down again to figure out what was where, kissing her at the same time so she wouldn’t notice I was being all clinical about finding the exact spot. But I guess she had the same idea, because then her hand knocked against mine and for a minute both our hands were down there, pushing and moving around, getting everything set up in the right place. Once it was clear things were all set up, my dick nudged her right in the exact spot and her entire body went still again. Like I was a Tyrannosaurus with bad eyesight and she was the prey trying to hide.

  “Hallie?”

  “Yes?” she asked. Her voice was high and soft.

  “Hey,” I said. Then she was looking at me. Weirdly. Like this was the part where I did the sex version of pulling a rabbit out of a hat. Like suddenly my dick should do something really brilliant, like produce a laser light show full of fireworks or something. Which, strangely, it didn’t feel like doing. I was basically completely panicked.

  Stalling, I asked if she was ready again. And again, she nodded.

  There was nowhere else to go. Nothing else for it. So I just pushed in. Slow.

  And then, not slow.

  Holy shit.

  “Holy shit,” I said.

  That day, like most days, I wasn’t any better at not blurting stuff out.

  “It’s okay?” she asked. Now she sounded panicked.

  “Yeah,” I said, closing my eyes. Completely unpanicked. It was like I’d transferred my panic to her because this felt better than okay. “Okay” was not the word. It felt better than I could believe. For a minute it felt so good that I was pretty sure it would now have to be over. That that initial good feeling would be all I’d deserve to get and she’d change her mind or something.

  But then I moved in her, back and forth. And there was more.

  More more more. Jesus. Fuck.

  It took a little whi
le to get in sync, but it happened eventually. My hands in push-up mode, hers around my lower back. Her head tipped back, her boobs bouncing.

  So. Fucking. Awesome.

  Then Hallie’s nails dug in my back and she made a sound like, “Ow!”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yes, yes,” she said. “It only hurt at first. Keep going.”

  It hurt at first? She seemed fine to me. At least from my side of things. But what the fuck did I know about hurting? God.

  “You’ve really never done it before?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. And looked a little peeved.

  “Okay,” I said, really quick. The last thing I needed to do was piss her off! But goddammit. Both of us damn virgins! Though she didn’t know that about me. She’d never asked! I mean, maybe she guessed it, but right now it felt like it was my job to know everything. She’d done the birth control part; now I had to step up and do my side. I kissed her, just for reassurance—hers or mine, I didn’t know.

  Then I just kept, well, doing it.

  She was all breathless, too, which was funny to me, since I was the one doing most of the work. Not that I cared. I didn’t. It was great.

  It was so fucking great.

  But I was getting increasingly brainless. I hadn’t counted on the old “think about baseball scores” myth actually being useful, but I didn’t want it to end. I mean, I wanted it to end, sure. But I also wanted it to go on feeling this way forever.

  what is not sexy what is not sexy think about what is not sexy . . .

  And the first dumb thing that came to mind? My Grandpa Chuck’s new shotgun. The one I’d killed the buck with in the deer stand I’d sat in with Hallie at the barn party. So, then I just closed my eyes and ran through the list of all the other guns that I had ever used.

  The 12-gauge. Oily as fuck the first time I touched it.

  The .50-cal flintlock. The one my grandpa didn’t like me to use.