Dark Places

this about, please?” Like I was a telemarketer.

“I’d like to talk to you or someone in your family about the charges your daughter Krissi made against Ben.”

“We don’t talk about that … what was your name, Lizzy? I’ve remarried, and I have very little contact with my previous family.”

“Do you know how I can reach Lou or Krissi Cates?”

She let out a sigh like a single puff of smoke. “Lou would be in some bar, somewhere in the state of Kansas, I’d guess. Krissi? Drive west on I-70, just past Columbia. Take a left into any of those strip clubs. Don’t call again.”

Ben DayJANUARY 2, 1985

12:51 P.M.

He took a piece of pink construction paper from Krissi’s bin, folded it in two, wrote on it, It’s Christmas Break and I’m Thinking of You—Guess Who? With a B at the bottom. She’d get a blast out of that. He thought about taking something from Krissi’s bin and transferring it to Libby’s but decided not to. Libby turning up with something nice would be suspicious. He wondered how big a joke he and his sisters were at school. The three girls shared one-and-a-half wardrobes, Michelle running around in his old sweaters, Debby wearing what she scrounged from Michelle, and Libby in what was left: patched-up boys’ blue jeans, soiled old baseball jerseys, cheap knit dresses that Debby’s belly had stretched out. That was the difference with Krissi. All her clothes had snap. Diondra, too, with her perfect jeans. If Diondra’s jeans were faded, it was because that was the latest style, if they had bleach splatters, it was because she’d bought them with bleach splatters. Diondra had a big allowance, she’d taken him shopping a few times, holding clothes up to him like he was a baby, telling him to smile. Telling him he could work it off, wink wink. He wasn’t sure if guys should let girls buy their clothes, wasn’t sure if it was cool or not. Mr. O’Malley, his homeroom teacher, always joked about new shirts his wife was making him wear, but Mr. O’Malley was married. Anyway. Diondra liked him in black and he didn’t have the money to buy anything. Fucking Diondra would have her way as usual.

That’s another reason it was cool to hang out with Krissi: She assumed he was cool because he was fifteen, and to her fifteen seemed extremely mature. She wasn’t like Diondra, who laughed at him at weird moments. He’d ask her, “What’s so funny?” and she’d just giggle through a closed mouth and sputter, “Nothing. You’re cute.” The first time they’d tried to have sex, he’d been so clumsy with the condom she’d started laughing and he’d lost his hard-on. The second time she’d grabbed the condom away from him and tossed it across the room, said screw it, and put him inside her.

Now he had a hard-on, just thinking about it. He was dropping the note in Krissi’s bin, his dick hard as hell, and in walked Mrs. Darksilver, the teacher for second grade.

“Hey Ben, watchoo doing here?” she smiled. She was in jeans and a sweater, penny loafers, and toddled toward him, carrying a bulletin board and a length of plaid ribbon.

He turned away from her, started toward the door back to the high school.

“Ah nothing, just wanted to drop something off in my sister’s bin.”

“Well, don’t run away, come give me a hug at least. Never see you anymore now that you’re the big high school man.”

She kept coming toward him, loafers padding on the concrete, that big pink grin on her face, with the bangs cut straight across. He’d had a crush on her as a kid, that sharp fringe of black hair. He turned completely away from her and tried to hobble toward the door, his dick still jammed up against his pant leg. But just as he was turning he could tell she knew what was going on. She dropped that smile and a disgusted, embarrassed grimace came across her whole face. She didn’t even say anything else, that’s how he knew that she’d seen it. She was looking at the bin he was in front of—Krissi Cates, not his sister.

He felt like an animal limping away, some wounded buck that needed to be put down. Just shoot. He had flashes of guns some-times, a barrel against his temple. In one of his notebooks, he’d written a quote by Nietzsche that he’d found while flipping through Bartlett’s one day, waiting for the football players to leave the building so he could clean:

It is always consoling to think of suicide;

    it’s what gets one through many a bad night.

He’d never actually kill himself. He didn’t want to be the tragic freak that girls cried over on the news, even though they never talked to him in real life. Somehow that seemed more pathetic than his life already was. Still, at night, when things were really bad and he felt the most trapped and dickless, it was a nice thought, getting into his mother’s gun cabinet (combination 5-12-69, his parents’ anniversary, now a joke), taking that nice metal weight in his hands, sliding some bullets into the chamber, just as easy as squirting toothpaste, pressing it against his temple, and immediately shooting. You’d have to immediately shoot, gun to temple, finger on trigger, or you might talk yourself out of it. It had to be one motion—and then you just drop to the ground like clothes falling off a hanger. Just … swoosh. On the floor, and you were someone else’s problem for a change.

He didn’t plan on doing any of that, but when he needed some release and he couldn’t jerk off, or he’d already jerked off and needed more release, that’s usually what he thought of. On the floor, sideways, like his body was just a pile of laundry waiting to be gathered up.

HE BUSTED THROUGH the doors and his dick went down, like just crossing into the high school emasculated him. Grabbed the bucket and rolled it back to the closet, washed his hands with hard Lava soap.

He headed down the stairwell and toward the back door as a pack of upperclassmen brushed past him toward the parking lot, his head feeling hot under the black hair, imagining what they were thinking—- freak, just like the coach—and they said nothing, didn’t even look at him, actually. Thirty seconds behind them, he banged open the doors, the sun against the snow a shocking white. If this was a video, now would be the guitar flare, the whammy bar … Bweeeerrrr!

Outside, the guys were piling into a truck and peeling out in loose, showy loops across the parking lot. And he was unchaining his bike, his head throbbing, a drip of blood falling on the handlebar. He smeared it up with a fingertip, swiped the fingertip across the trickle on his forehead and, without thinking, put the finger in his mouth, like it was a stray glob of jelly.

He needed some relief. Beer and maybe a joint, undo himself a little. The only place to try was Trey’s. Actually it wasn’t Trey’s place, Trey never said where he lived, but when Trey wasn’t at Diondra’s he most likely was at the Compound, down a long dirt road off Highway 41, surrounded by hedgeapples on both sides, and then came a big brush-hogged clearing, with a warehouse made of a hard, tin material. The whole thing rattled in the wind. In the winter, a generator hummed inside, just enough juice to run a bunch of spaceheaters and a TV with sketchy reception. Dozens of carpet samples sat in bright, smelly patches on the dirt floor and a few old ugly couches had been donated. People gathered smoking around the spaceheaters like they were actual bonfires. Everyone had beer—they just kept the cans sitting in the frost outside the door—and everyone had joints. Usually there was a 7-