Jo slipped out of her chair and stood with her hands on her hips. She wore gym shorts and a cropped tank top that showed her smooth, flat belly. Her skin gleamed in the light of the single floor lamp. “As chairperson of the SOS,” she said, looking down at Deke, “I’d like to make a motion.” Jo was chair, Deke president. Pax, as a half orphan, could not hold office, but he could vote.
“I second,” Pax said.
Pax fell on Deke, pinning him across his wide chest while Jo unsnapped his jean shorts and began to tug them down. Deke grunted and laughed, halfheartedly pushed Pax aside. Even buzzed and immobilized by back pain he could have thrown them across the room if he wanted.
Deke wasn’t wearing underwear. Pax had seen him naked dozens of times before the Changes, but this was the first time since.
“Well would you look at that,” Jo said. “You’d think you argo boys would be bigger.”
Deke roared, laughing, and reached for his pants. Jo pushed his hands away. “Come on now,” she said. “This is for science.”
Deke stopped struggling, and Pax, sprawled across his chest, looked down the length of his friend’s body. The sunken stomach, the hip bones like shovel blades, a patch of gray pubic hair like a tuft of straw. His penis seemed too short for his giant body, though it was wide as Paxton’s fist. Pax had no idea if all argos were shaped like this. Probably Deke didn’t know himself.
Jo pulled Deke’s shorts down his thighs. He raised his knees and she slid them the rest of the way off.
The atmosphere in the room had changed.
Jo touched her red-brown hand to Deke’s white thigh, only a few inches from his dick. She looked up and said, “You next, Paxton.”
Jo, as always, was in charge. Even changed, she was the referee, the intermediary. Later she’d tell him, What choice did they have? There were no books for their people. No skin mags, no soft-core movies on Cinemax to show them what their bodies were supposed to look like. It was no crime to be curious.
Paxton leaned back on his knees and pulled off his shirt. Then he stood and without looking at them slid down his shorts, stepped out of them. He was naked except for his white Hanes underwear.
“Everything,” Jo said.
He didn’t want to take off his underwear. He was already hard.
Jo stood and walked to him. She slipped off her tank top. She wore a dainty bra, startling white against her wine-dark skin. She reached behind her, performed tiny magic with her fingers, and the bra fell away.
Her chest was almost as flat as Paxton’s. Her nipples, dark red and small as dimes, were set a couple inches lower than he expected. She grasped Pax’s arms and guided him down to the floor so that he was lying shoulder to shoulder with Deke. Deke’s skin was cool and dry, and Paxton felt feverish.
Jo squatted over his legs and with both hands peeled the waistband over his rigid cock. “There we go,” she said.
Pax felt flushed with embarrassment and excitement. If she touched him he would explode.
“Your turn, Jo,” Deke said.
She seemed not to hear him. She was looking at their bodies, but seemed not to see them.
“Jo?” Pax said.
“You got nothing to worry about from us,” Deke said.
She pushed her thumbs into the waistband of her shorts and stepped out of them. Her crotch was a smooth mound, her cleft like the jot of a pencil. Everywhere she was hairless as clay, her skin dark as raspberry syrup.
“Nothing to see here, people,” she said. Her tone was light, but her voice trembled.
“Shush,” Deke said, and held up a hand. Pax shifted over, and Jo lowered herself to lie between them.
He woke to his father calling his name. Pax’s eyes opened to slits against the light. His father was looming over him, his shadowed face haloed by the overhead light. It was his father as he was before the Changes: the white shirt, the black pompadour.
“Wake up, now,” his father said sternly, in that voice that could rattle the back pews. He leaned down, abruptly becoming a fat old man in a robe. A chub. “We don’t have much time.”
Pax pulled himself upright, and the picture frame fell from his chest to his lap. It was deep in the night, 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. He’d passed out on the bed fully dressed, still wearing his shoes. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “What’s going on?”
“I’ve only got a little while ’til I’m mad as a hatter again,” his father said. Then, “Why aren’t you in your bedroom?”
Pax ignored the question, and his father turned and shuffled through the guest room door.
Pax rubbed a hand across his face. He felt shaky, unbalanced. He picked up the picture Tommy had given him and put it on the bookshelf next to the bed. This guest room had doubled as his mother’s library. She’d been a voracious reader: mysteries, romances, true crime, anything she could get her hands on. During the Changes, when she was burning up from fever, she’d made him read to her.
Pax got to his feet. The vintage still fizzed in his bloodstream. The room quivered with a strangeness that coyly refused to reveal itself, as if each book and article of furniture had been replaced by a subtly imperfect copy.
He found his father in the kitchen, trying to open a can of Campbell’s soup, the manual can opener almost lost in his huge hands.
“Here…,” Pax said, and reached to take the can from him.
“I got it,” his father said. Pax sat at the table. Eventually his father did manage to peel the lid away. He dumped the soup into a pot on the stove and stood there stirring with his back to the room.
“I suppose Rhonda took you to see her place yesterday,” his father said.
Pax was surprised he remembered her visit. “It was nice. Homey. Very clean.”
His father grunted. “You don’t think I can take care of myself.”
“I never said that,” Pax said, unable to keep the annoyance from his voice. He didn’t know if it was fatigue or the vintage, but his emotions kept teeter-tottering between anger and grief.
His father said, “I do things the way I want, when I want. I’m not going to go to her little…
“If this is providing, then you must have really pissed him off.”
His father half turned. “Watch it, boy.”
“Not just you, the whole town,” Pax went on. “The Changes? Now that was Old Testament-quality smiting.”
“Not everything’s a punishment, Paxton. There are trials in life. Tests that teach us something.”
“Oh, got it,” Pax said. “The Job thing. God makes you into a monster, takes away your church, kills your wife-”
His father swung toward him. “Shut your mouth!”
Pax remained stock-still. He and his father locked eyes, but only for a moment. Pax looked away first, shook his head.
His father turned back to the stove.
Pax quickly pressed tears from his eyes. What the hell was the matter with him? He breathed deep, trying to master his emotions.
After a couple minutes his father brought the pot to the table. He set it on a hot pad and picked up a spoon. Pax raised an eyebrow.
His father looked up. “I can do this because it’s my house.”
“Yeah. If Mom could see you she’d kill you.”
“Trust me, she’s watching.”
Pax couldn’t watch, though-Harlan was practically inhaling the soup. He looked away, but still had to listen to him. After a few minutes, Paxton said, “You remember your first sermon after they reopened the church?” Even though the town was in quarantine, the churches and schools had been shut down for several months for fear of spreading TDS to the remaining townspeople who were unaffected. When his father was finally allowed to hold a
