It’s almost like I didn’t even know who I was anymore.
I mean, it was weird, not just the usual at-the-brink sort of feeling you get when you meet somebody new, or are going to a new school and it’s the first day, or start at some new job and feel awkward around everybody or something, like it was for me when I first got this job I’d had making deliveries for a pharmacy and had to sort of wait and see if everybody liked me and if I could get along enough to go on working there.
Maybe it was because I’d really stepped over.
I mean, I was doing something I’d never done before, and it really scared me, scared me so much I felt sick, and I worried, you know, about what I might do if I didn’t keep a handle on myself.
Of course, it could have just been the house.
I was still behind the chair, and I moved it very slowly. I tried to keep it along the wall so it wouldn’t seem too weirdly placed if somebody somewhere checked a monitor. I mean, I couldn’t just push it out to the middle of the floor. And once in a while I’d just stop and wait and listen, and look back over my shoulder at the big darkened room, at the blue glowing lights.
That day in my house when Laura had come over—the same day she noticed I don’t have a dishwasher and got sort of freaked out by it, which was also the same day she told me all about how her mom collected all this modern art stuff and fancy furniture—that day had actually begun really great.
Laura had said something to me then that I didn’t really know how to take—I mean, after she said the thing about the dishwasher, which sort of humiliated me.
What she’d said was, “I love your house.”
Now, one thing you have to know is that when she said this we were both wearing lipstick.
What I mean is that she’d put some lipstick on me, not because I asked her to, but the thing is, she rarely wore any makeup at all, but that day she had lipstick on, this very pretty dark red color that looked unbelievably sexy, and I asked her what it was like, I mean what it felt like to wear it. That interested me a lot, because the few occasions when she had it on, I’d noticed it hid her face behind a sort of sexy disguise.
So she said, “Put some on and you’ll find out.”
I guess she wanted me to look sexy too.
We were already in my bedroom, and she sort of gave me this look that made me kind of shiver, and she took her little lipstick out of the purse she had, took the cap off, and then carefully painted my lips with it.
Then she said, “How’s it feel?”
Her face was about two inches from mine.
I couldn’t stand it anymore, so I kissed her.
I guess having the lipstick on kind of wowed me, because it was like I was trying to swallow her head. When I took a break I saw lipstick all over her face and even on her nose and eyelids and ears.
I was lying there—we were on my bed like I said, and I was practically on top of her, panting my head off—and she was kissing me back with these really sticky, gluey kisses that just sort of felt incredible. And it was the first time I ever thought that maybe she liked me so much, loved me so much, that she wanted to actually go all the way with me.
I mean, she wasn’t really letting me do anything, and every time my hand strayed to a place it shouldn’t she sort of whacked it away. But this time it seemed more from reflex than anything else, because from the way her eyes were and from the way she lay there just squeezed to me, I could tell she really was as excited as me.
And then, I don’t know why—maybe it was to sort of break the moment, because things were really only going one way—she looked up and around my room and said, “I love your house.”
I guess I should have been prepared for it. Because coming in, after we’d said hi to my mom downstairs, we went through the hall, and every time she’d pass something of mine my mom had tacked to the wall, Laura would stop and say, “Did you do this?” or “Is this a picture you drew?”
I must admit I was embarrassed as hell, especially after my mom came over and both of them praised my artwork like I was Picasso or something, which was totally ridiculous, because at least five of the drawings Laura saw, and this weird clumpy clay thing I made that was supposed to be an elephant, dated back all the way to third grade.
So at the moment she said it I just couldn’t help but think she was making fun of me. I mean, she always bragged about her house, which she’d never even let me see, and my house was, well, if you want to know exactly what it was like, it was like one of those sort of cheap antique knickknack stores you find on little roads out in the county somewhere. I mean it had that same sort of cluttered atmosphere. Of all the houses around, mine was the king of too-much-stuff-not-enough-room, and everywhere in it—but especially the hallway leading from the front door—was like a menagerie of junk from the past sixty years. Everything we had came from my grandmother or great-grandmother, and so the inescapable deduction everybody would make
