He got her on her back and pinned her arms with his knees so his hands were free, and they were both laughing their heads off, until he raised his hands over her breasts, and I imagine you’ve gathered from what I said that she had really big breasts by now, and he made his fingers like pincers, and then in this weird voice he started saying, “Squeezie squeezie squeezie!” like a frickin’ pervert.
She gave up struggling and just stared at his face. I saw her eyes were very hard—I mean the crystal had become icy—and her whole face, which was usually so pale, blushed deep red.
“Get the hell off me,” she said.
He rolled off looking like she’d bitten him—I mean embarrassed as hell—and she got up from the divan and straightened her clothes. She said to him, “How dare you do that to me! I thought you were my friend.”
I’d never heard her voice like that before, so sharp, I mean.
She glared at him, and he didn’t say a thing but just sort of looked at the floor. And then she left, just walked out and crossed the yard and went up the stairs to her house and closed the door.
I didn’t see her for a week after that.
I saw Carol.
I thought he’d acted like a total moron, but I guess he just felt so embarrassed that he said some pretty nasty things about Suzie to sort of save face. “Jesus,” he said. “So she’s got a big pair of tits! Is she uptight about them? My mom says she’s ridiculous. Get over it!”
He looked at me with his eyes wide open. I knew he wanted me to agree with him, but I didn’t say a thing. It never even seemed to occur to him to consider her feelings. I don’t know what we talked about next—not much, probably, and I must admit I avoided him for a while after that, like a few weeks. His whole routine had made me sick.
Anyways, the next time I saw Suzie was at a party near her house, down in the woods at the end of the street. I guess her mom was out of town on business or something.
This was one of the first times we’d ever had any beer around. Some kids had raided their parents’ stash or gotten their older brothers to buy it for them, I don’t know, but all the kids were sitting on this concrete wall that ran along the stream in the woods, and a few of them, the ones with the beer, had dunked it in the stream behind the wall to keep it cold and hide it, even though we were far enough from the street that we could have put it anywhere and not be seen with it unless somebody came walking up really close.
When I arrived it was already dusk. Suzie was there standing around in a crowd of other girls and we said hi and were friendly enough.
But there was a sort of look in her eye when she saw me.
It was the first thing I noticed.
I thought maybe she was a little angry with me. She looked a lot like Carol had the day he came back from New York, this kind of hard, squinty look in her eyes, and later on when we sat next to each other on the concrete wall I noticed the same look.
It was pretty late by then, maybe eleven. We’d both had a few beers, which tasted nasty, and we were pretty much drunk, I guess, because we’d both never had beer before in our lives—at least I hadn’t.
We started talking, and her voice was slurred, and I saw for the first time how pretty she was.
More than pretty.
She was totally beautiful, and even though she had beer breath, it still smelled very fresh and nice, and she held her face close to mine, I mean really close, and after a few minutes of talking, she put her arm around my back. I thought she did it to keep from falling backwards off the wall. And then she closed her eyes, and her head dropped onto my shoulder.
“Do you mind?” she murmured, right in my ear. “I’m just sooo tired.” You should have heard her voice—it’s like she was cooing.
I just sat there.
I think I sat there for, like, fifteen minutes, frozen.
It’s like I was in sort of a daze.
What woke me out of it was this stubby kid in a flannel shirt, Tommy Werks, who was sitting next to me on the other side. I remember he looked over at me with genuine shock in his eyes and said—gasped, really—“Jesus! I can’t believe you!” and jumped down off the wall to get away from me.
After that Suzie came out of it. She raised her face off my shoulder. “I’ve got a headache,” she said. Then she looked at me sort of sadly, told me good night, and walked out of the woods to the street.
I stayed sitting there.
A few minutes later Tommy Werks came back up. He was a lot shorter than me, but about a year older.
“I can’t believe you!” he said again. He actually sputtered it, really sputtered, because except for his beady little eyes, his face was all nose and lips. “You had her! She was waiting for you! Why the hell didn’t you do anything! You make me sick!”
He didn’t even wait for me to answer. He just turned on his heel and stomped off through the trees.
I didn’t know what to think.
I’m not an idiot.
I sort of knew what had happened.
That day Carol had done the squeezie thing.
That had changed everything.
It was like hanging a sign with ten-foot letters: WE CAN SEE THEM!
Carol, in one fell
