“If you all want to know where Pumpkinface is just ask me.” Harry looked at each one of his friends with an unmistakably severe look. “I know where he went.” He was satisfied by the wide-eyed stares he was receiving from each of his friends, along with their clearly obvious attention. A long and antagonizing pause occurred before he went on again. “He sleeps with Brewster’s mom every night.”
“Fuck you!” Brewster yelled at Harry as the others broke out in laughter. Brewster could feel himself about to laugh too, and even let a smile show on his face before standing up and declaring that he had to go and take a piss.
Brewster stood up on complaining legs, leaving his circle of friends with their shadows dancing on the ground in front of them. The coldness had snuck up on him while at the campfire and, now that he was away from it, he could feel the lie that the night told him. There was no warmth under its blanket, just darkness and cold. Brewster zipped his cargo jacket closed and shoved his hands in the front pockets of his jeans as he kept walking. His legs were cooperating now that he had begun using them again. It would be a cold winter, he surmised. It was only October now, but he could feel the relentlessness of the chill in the air. It was a cold that was going to hang around for a little while, and he almost thought against unzipping his pants, knowing that the cold would get in where he would have wanted it to get in the least.
At least his hands had warmed up a little before he reached in to grab himself with one of them. A gust of frigid air blew across the back of his neck, and he used his free hand to lift the collar of his jacket up. When he did he felt his balls shrivel as the cold found its way in. Goddamn, he muttered to himself, and shook from both the cold sensation of the air and the satisfaction of finally urinating. He could still hear his friends, especially Harry who had put that awful picture of Pumpkinface and his mother curled up together in the same bed in his head, back at the campfire laughing. Brewster started to laugh to himself. What Harry had said was funny, he thought. He made a quiet snorting sound, but stopped short of an all-out chuckle when a twig snapped behind him.
Brewster’s head whipped around quickly to search over his shoulder for the source that might have made the noise, but he could not find it. He finished his piss, and had left himself sticking through the zippered mouth of his jeans, when another rush of coolness hit that area. Only this time the night air had fingers, and it touched his pecker and then tugged at it with a sharp pull. There was hardly any time for Brewster to react, other than the sudden drop of his lower lip as his mouth opened wide in shock. His eyes fell on the glint of something shiny and metallic as it sliced downward, toward his belly but not quite stopping there. It was happening all too quickly for Brewster to comprehend exactly what was going on. He felt the cold fingers close tighter around his penis, then he was yanked up on his toes until he could feel the warm, nasty breath coming from the man’s mouth.
Then the quick, decisive stroke fell upon Brewster, and how was he to know what to expect? How, other than to submit under the grim rush of it all, could his mind completely register a defensive response such a fighting, or even a scream? Brewster was paralyzed by fear. He was right where the person who, figuratively, had him by the balls wanted him, and he thought the man was not going to let go until Brewster felt the cold grip around his pecker loosen. That may have been the moment that Brewster could have fled, and maybe even gotten away, but he didn’t. The moment passed as quickly as it had come.
A flood of something warm ran down where, only seconds ago, it had been cold. At first Brewster thought he might have pissed himself, but he had the wherewithal to realize that there wasn’t anything left in the reserves. He felt around down there nonetheless, and when his hands came up in front of his face he saw that they were slick with something wet and sticky.
Blood.
Brewster’s legs began to give out when the white-hot weight of what had just occurred ran over him, trampling his mind like a five-thousand-pound rhinoceros. Then the pain struck, right where his hands had just come back from.
Not that Brewster would be able to know what it felt like now, but his final thought, absurd as it seemed, was that he’d never get to put what had just made a dull thump on the ground inside his Junior year crush, Mandy Simpson. His only attempt, however insubstantial, at defiance toward the person who had just severed any possibility of using the now irrelevant body part
