“Hey, what are you doing?” Connor asked.
“Nothing.”
Smooth, Jack. Way not to sound like a loser.
And a total dick. I hoped that Jess hadn’t heard me.
Why was it so easy to talk to Connor in person, but on the phone, it was like I’d forgotten half of the English language?
I licked my lips. I imagined him biting his, swirling his tongue across them, and it awakened something in my groin. I slid down to the floor in case Mom came upstairs and caught me standing there with a boner.
“So,” he said, taking me by surprise, as he continually did. “What’s the hardest drug you’ve ever done?”
I laughed nervously. “What, why?”
“Just curious. I may be looking to buy, and your tolerance level at the pool proved to be pretty solid. Thought you might want something. Toby says his cousins have good deals on certain prescription pills.”
What the hell was he doing? “I told you, man, stay away from them. They’re bad news.”
Jess’s shadow fell over me as she leaned against the doorframe, mouthing: Who is that? I shrugged and she nudged me with her foot.
Connor just laughed. “If you say so. But you didn’t answer my first question.”
I wanted to. I wanted to stay on the phone with him forever, but Jess was giving me this look. “Let me answer that later. I got to go.”
“Oh, okay. Is your mom there or something?”
“Sort of.”
After we said goodbye and Connor promised to text me that night, which sent a round of butterflies flapping furiously through my stomach, Jess just stood there and cocked her head at me, arms crossed against her chest.
“What?”
“Who was that?”
“No one.”
She smirked. “You were talking to no one about doing nothing?”
Shit, she’d overheard me. I got up off the floor and gave her a playful shove back into my room. “Don’t sweat it, Velez. You’ll always be my favorite no one to do nothing with.”
I thought I saw a look of hurt flash across her face, but then she was grinning again, chucking the game controller at me. “Well, this no one can still kick your ass in Mario Kart.”
13.
Look at the woman.
After Jess left to go home for dinner—Mom had said she’d make us chili, but then just sat at the kitchen table staring at her hands for a while—I unearthed the page in the magazine with the watermelon-boobed woman and the shirtless man.
Look at the woman.
I tried to focus on the curve of her back, the pinch of a waist between her hips and chest, the long, sleek legs and manicured toenails. I felt nothing. It was like looking at an ancient artifact at a museum, an arrowhead you’ve seen a million times—interesting at a certain angle, but not intriguing enough to want to wrap your hands around it and feel it from the inside out.
Look at the man.
Warning bells went off in my brain. The ripped man grinned up at me from the page with his movie star teeth. His biceps. His chest. No. I wasn’t going to fall for that. I closed the magazine and tossed it across the room.
“Act like a man,” Dad always used to say. “Men don’t wave like that. Wave like this. Hold your arm straight. Don’t let your wrist flop like a…like a…”
He said it in the grocery store. After my soccer games. At the carpool lane at school. He never said the word itself, never finished the sentence, but I always knew what he meant. And every time I felt like I had to cry, but I couldn’t. Not in front of him.
But then I thought of Connor again, of how he’d looked at me in the pool, water all over his skin. What he’d said to me. The way it made me weak just to talk to him.
This will go away, I told myself. He’s new and kind of rough around the edges and maybe a little weird, an artifact in the museum that’s actually a piece of art. Something you can’t quite wrap your mind around.
14.
We’d just put acid under our tongues, strips of paper printed with Scooby Doo and Donald Duck. We decided on Max’s basement for the trip. It was empty and cool down there, a humming air-conditioner and stained coffee table littered with old copies of National Geographic and Time. They had some trippy pictures in that shit.
I think Toby started to feel the drugs working first. All four of us were kicking back on the couch, our kicks on the coffee table, when mid-conversation, Toby rolled up the sleeves of his Iron Maiden t-shirt and stared at his arms as if he’d never seen them before.
“Put the beer muscles away, Tobe,” Connor said. He leaned back into the ratty couch, probably taking it all in for the first time: the dark oak wallpaper, the carpeting a dull gray, stained with beer and cigarette-burned holes of parties past. Max’s folks never came down here. The dart board over the pool table was only touched by us now, the plastic talking rainbow bass mounted over it collecting dust on the wall, its mouth hanging open in a permanent dumb stare. The basement was our headquarters, a treehouse of sorts for rambunctious boys who were snorting something harder than Pixy Stix and no longer chucking pebbles at girls. Now we welcomed them.
Toby started humming to himself, and Max and I exchanged a smile. Toby jumped up from the couch and kissed his biceps, turning to face Connor.
“These are the real deal, my man,” he said, flexing what little muscle he had.
“Yeah, I doubt that,” Connor said. He shook his head and smacked his carton of cigarettes against his palm. I watched the motion, transfixed by the repetition, my head starting to feel fuzzy, all of the colors in the room giving off a warm glow.
Toby hopped from foot to foot,
