bluegrass guitar. All the colleges lined up for that boy with carnations and chocolates. We hated him like hate was something we’d invented in lab that week and had been saving up for something special. Bobby Zhao and his bullshit hipster-crooner straw hat. Coyote didn’t pay him mind.
“Let’s invite Bobby Zhao,” Coyote said suddenly. His eyes got big and loose and happy. His
“Um, why?” Jimmy frowned. “Not to put too fine a point on it, but fuck that guy. He’s the enemy.”
Coyote flipped up the collar of his leather jacket and picked a stray maple leaf the color of anger out of Jimmy’s hair. He did it tenderly.
“Son, what you don’t know about enemies could just about feed the team til their dying day.” And when Coyote called you Son you knew to be ashamed. “Only babies think enemies are for beating. Can’t beat ‘em, not ever. Not the ones that come out of nowhere in the 4th quarter to take what’s yours and hold your face in the mud til you drown, not the ones you always knew you’d have to face because that’s what you were made for. Not the lizard guarding the Sun, not the man who won’t let you teach him how to plant corn. Enemies are for grabbing by the ears and fucking them til they’re so sticky-knotted bound to you they call their wives by your name. Enemies are for absorbing, Jimmy. Best thing you can do to an enemy is pull up a chair to his fire, eat his dinner, rut in his bed and go to his job in the morning, and do it all so much better he just gives it up to you—but
Jimmy fidgeted. He looked at Oster and Halloran, who still had bruises, fading on their cheekbones like blue flowers. After awhile he laughed horsily and said: “Whaddaya think the point spread’ll be?”
Coyote just punched him in the arm, convivial like, and kissed Cindy Gerard and I could smell the raspberry of their kiss from across the circle of boys. The September wind brought their kiss to all of us like a bag of promises. And just like that, Bobby Zhao showed up at the lake that night, driving his freshly waxed Cowboy silver-and-black double-cab truck with the lights on top like a couple of frog’s eyes. He took off that stupid straw hat and started hauling a keg out of the cream leather passenger seat—and once they saw that big silver moon riding shotgun with the Dumpling Prince of the Southland, Henry Dillard (linebacker, #33) and Josh Vick (linebacker, #34) hurried over to help him with it and Bobby Zhao was welcome. Offering accepted. Just lay it up here on the altar and we’ll cut open that shiny belly and drink what she’s got for us. And what she had was golden and sweet and just as foamy as the sea.
Coyote laid back with me in the bed of my much shittier pick-up, some wool blanket with a horse-and-cactus print on it under us and another one with a wolf-and-moon design over us, so he could slip his hands under my bra in that secret, warm space that gets born under some hippie mom’s awful rugs when no one else can see you. Everyone was hollering over the beer and I could hear Sarah Jane laughing in that way that says:
“Come on, Bunny Rabbit,” Coyote whispered, “it’s nothing we haven’t done before.” And it was a dumb thing to say, a boy thing, but when Coyote said it I felt it humming in my bones, everything we’d done before, over and over, and I couldn’t even remember a world before Coyote, only the one he made of us, down by the lake, under the wolf and the moon, his hands on my breasts like they were the saving of him. I knew him like nobody else—and they’ll all say that now, Sarah Jane and Jessica and Ashley and Cindy Gerard and Justin Oster and Jimmy Moser, but I knew him. Knew the shape of him. After all, it’s nothing we hadn’t done before.
“It’s different every time,” I said in the truck-dark. “Or there’s no point. You gotta ask me nice every time. You gotta make me think I’m special. You gotta put on your ears and your tail and make the rain come for me or I’ll run off with some Thunderbird QB and leave you eating my dust.”
“I’m asking nice. Oh, my Bunny, my rabbit-girl with the fastest feet, just slow you down and let me do what I want.”
“And what do you want?”
“I want to dance on this town til it breaks. I want to burrow in it until it belongs to me. I want high school to last forever. I want to eat everything, and fuck everything, and snort everything, and win everything. I want my Bunny Rabbit on my lap while I drive down the world with my headlights off.”
“I don’t want to be tricked,” I said, but he was already inside me and I was glad. Fucking him felt like running in a long field, with no end in sight. “Not into a baby, not into a boyfriend, not into anything.”
“Don’t worry,” he panted. “You always get yours. Just like me, always like me.”
I felt us together, speeding up towards something, running faster, and he brushed my hair out of my face and it wasn’t hair but long black ears, as soft as memory, and then it was hair again, tangled and damp with our sweat, and I bit him as our stride broke. I whispered: “And Coyote gets his.”
“Why not? It’s nothing we haven’t done before.”
When I got up off of the horse blanket, marigold blossoms spilled out of me like Coyote’s seed.
Later that night I fished a smoke out of my glove box and sat on top of the dented salt-rusted cab of my truck. Coyote stood down by the lakeshore, aways off from the crowd, where the water came up in little foamy splashes and the willow trees whipped around like they were looking for someone to hold on to. Bobby Zhao was down there, too, his hands in his jean pockets, hip jutting out like a pouty lip, his hat on again and his face all in shadow. They were talking but I couldn’t hear over everyone else hooting and laughing like a pack of owls. The moon came out as big as a beer keg; it made Coyote’s face look lean and angelic, so young and victorious and humble enough to make you think the choice was yours all along. He took Bobby Zhao’s hand and they just stood there in the light, their fingers moving together. The wind blew off that straw hat like it didn’t like the thing much either, and Bobby let it lie. He was looking at Coyote, his hair all blue in the night, and Coyote kissed him as hard as hurting, and Bobby kissed him back like he’d been waiting for it since he was born. Coyote got his hands under his shirt and oh, Coyote is good at that, getting under, getting around, and the boys smiled whenever their lips parted.
I watched. I’m always watching. Who doesn’t like to watch? It feels like being God, seeing everything happen far away, and you could stop it if you wanted, but then you couldn’t watch anymore.
A storm started rumbling up across the meadows, spattering their kisses with autumn rain.
Suddenly everyone cared about who was going to make the Devil’s Court this year. Even me. The mall was cleared out of formal sparkle-and-slit dresses by August, and somehow they just couldn’t get any more in, like we were an island mysteriously sundered from the land of sequins and sweetheart necklines. Most of us were just going to have to go with one of our mom’s prom dresses, though you can be damn sure we’d be ripping off that poofy shoulder chiffon and taking up the hems as far as we could. Jenny Kilroy (drama club, Young Businesswomen’s Association) had done all the costumes for
The smart money was on Sarah Jane for the win. She was already pregnant by then, and Jessica too, but I don’t think even they knew it yet. Bellies still flat as a plains state, cotton candy lipstick as perfect as a Rembrandt. Nobody got morning sickness, nobody’s feet swelled. Sarah shone in the center of her ring of girls like a pink diamond in a nouveaux riche ring. 4.0, equestrian club, head cheerleader, softball pitcher, jazz choir lead soprano, played Juliet in both freshman and senior years, even joined the chess club. She didn’t care about chess, but it looked good on her applications and she turned out to be terrifyingly good at it—first place at the spring speed chess invitational in Freemont, even seven months along. You couldn’t even hate Sarah. You could see her whole
