Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1
Beata was coarse. She was low-class tough, which made her masculine. She had the hair of a baby or an old woman, fine and staticky, pulled back harshly in a black rubber hair band. Her makeup was slutty, lots of black eyeliner and singed curls for bangs. She wasn’t nice to the boys. No eye contact. A scowl. An air of impatience.
Doughty had a plan for her. Any of the three boys at the table would have gladly fucked her. But Beata was out of reach for Stanny and Lew. Not because she was above them. She was, clearly, beneath them. But because fucking Beata required a plan, some thought, some energy, maybe a bit of cunning. Doughty had this ability. His friends did not.
Beata, with her name tag above one of her tiny breasts, stood by the counter, fiddled with her stiff hair, looked into her compact, applying greasy purple-pink stuff to her lips. They had driven from Darien to Watertown, a small town with a diner and a hardware store that also sold cigarettes and potato chips. They did this to feel adventurous, to be in another world, a lowly world, a world of people with shitty jobs and cheap clothes. Darien girls would never be seen looking at themselves in a compact in public, they only did that in private. Doughty watched her smooth her apron and lick her teeth. It all happened in slow motion due to the weed they’d smoked, and in that way it felt profoundly intimate. She hated them, this he knew, so did Stanny. He was pretty sure Lew didn’t know. Lew was thick.
Lew was the biggest of the three, well over six feet, and because he had grown so fast his body had parts that were larger and parts that were smaller. He was a poorly-arranged-looking guy.
Beata walked over, check pad in hand. “What can I getcha?”
“I’ll have pancakes,” Doughty said. He made eye contact, but only briefly. Her eyes were hard. She was tapping her pen on the pad. A tick. Impatience. She also wore, as she always did, so he noted, a small cheap-looking necklace with a glittering red heart at its center. Doughty focused on it, where it lay on her throat. A gold-colored chain, and rhinestones. Fake jewels.
“Milkshake for me,” Lew said.
“Chocolate?” she scribbled.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Give me a Coke,” said Stanny.
She wrote it on her pad and walked away without looking up at them.
***
After they finished and paid, leaving pennies and a nickel for a tip, they walked back to the tree-lined path that led out of crappy, low-class Watertown up to the ivied brick buildings sprawling majestically above it. Stan had spent a summer at a cross-country camp at Taft. He told them for the millionth time that the boarding school was equipped with its own golf course, hockey rink, and pond. They sat on some rocks and smoked a joint in the privacy of the trees where the students partied at night, the ground around them littered with bottles and cans. Then they went back to Doughty’s mother’s station wagon and drove the hour back to Darien from Watertown.
***
When Doughty got home, his mother was already drunk. She was sitting in her favorite chair in the den, watching Wheel of Fortune. He had taken off his shoes and padded through the dining room, whose table held a scattered pile of unpaid bills, then through the never-used living room, and into the den. He sat next to her on the small couch, one his mother liked to call a “settee.” His high was wearing off. She sipped her brown stuff on ice. He could smell it. Her eyes were swimming.
“How was school,” she asked, trying not to slur. It was funny. She would talk slowly and try to control the movements of her mouth.
“‘The Road Not Taken,’” Doughty said. Then the contestant said it.
“Bobby!” She leaned her head back and laughed. He could see the scalp under her hair. It looked red, irritated. “You’re a genius!”
“Let me get us some sandwiches.”
“Wonderful, Bobby,” she said. “Will you get me another drink?”
He took her glass into the kitchen.
They ate cold tuna fish sandwiches in front of Wheel of Fortune. He focused on the winning. He liked winning. He loathed losing. It wasn’t something he could accept at all, so he didn’t.
“It’s teen week, Bobby.”
“Mom, call me Rob.”
“Oh, Bobby. Don’t ask me to change. I’m too old to change. Anyway, you should be on this show. You’re smart enough.” It was something she had said so often it had lost its meaning.
The third round was a “phrase.” Six words. A seven-letter word, then a four-letter word, then three- and two- and three-letter words—small connecting words, words like “and” and “but”—then ending with a six-letter word.
“Working Your Way up the Ladder,” he said. Then a contestant said it. Then everyone on the TV got excited and so did his mother. She clapped for her son.
“You got it before he did!”
“I always do, Mom.”
“We have to get you on that show!”
“Yeah, Mom. And then we’ll go to Tahiti.”
This made her laugh. He took their plates to the kitchen. She had eaten half her sandwich. That was better than none. He dropped them in the sink, but didn’t wash up. Hopefully she would before his father came home.
“I’m going out,” he yelled.
“Bobby, you don’t yell across the house.” She said it somewhat quietly, but he could hear her. He could hear a pin drop in the other room. It was as if he were born blind, his hearing was so acute. A house of whispering and lots of silence and some screaming does that. Yet his eyes saw everything, too. He had better than twenty-twenty vision, a rarity his pediatrician had marveled at. He closed the door to the house and got in his mother’s car and started the engine and drove.
***
In Watertown, the light was fading. Soon it would be dark. It was April. So close to the end of the school year, making every day seem like an eternity. But what was real and what wasn’t? A day was twenty-four hours, a week was seven days. The months varied slightly. But time was just time. How it felt didn’t matter.
He parked on Main Street, rolled the window all the way down, and lit a cigarette. The diner was closed, but the gate hadn’t been pulled down. You could see inside the windows. From where he smoked, it was just two windows, leading into darkness. He knew it wasn’t empty. Beata was in there, counting her tips, the old lady sitting down with her. There were the chairs, the small bar with the stools, the humming refrigerator. The cheap, dirty vinyl-tiled floor, engrained with a filth that stayed, no matter how often the old lady mopped it.
Working your way up the ladder. He had thought “climbing.” Not working. Climbing. But the word count was wrong. No one worked themselves up any ladder. Anyone working was already losing. Working gets you nowhere, he thought. It gets you stuck at a desk or behind a mop, doing the same thing over and over again. It was one of the circles of hell. Climbing was at least grasping onto rocks, or better yet, the backs of other people. Climbing was primal. Even better yet was to be a rock. Rocks were unmovable. The last thing he wanted to be was a sad, working person. He saw it as a choice. He had choices. Everyone did.
Chapter 2
That Friday night, there was a party at a classmate’s house, a square-necked boy named Charles, after a lacrosse game. Charles was a second-string lacrosse player, and his parents were at their home in the Bahamas. His parents were in the Bahamas or Vail for half the year. The home, like almost all of Darien’s homes, was a sprawling, well-tended mansion, with a staff of four caretakers. Doughty had been there before. It had six bedrooms and four bathrooms, and a maid’s quarter behind the kitchen.
Darien had beaten New Canaan. People were hysterical with joy. It was an hour into the party, and Stan and Lew were wasted. They had done beer bongs, then returned to the kitchen. Doughty lingered a bit longer outside where people, mostly boys, were on their knees nearly incapacitated by the tube of beer that throttled their necks as they tried to gag all that foamy liquid down. There were always a few girls there. The tomboys, the girls who wanted to compete with the men, not just the women. The aggressive girls, not quite dykes but maybe dykes, the ones who didn’t even wear a little mascara, or a little lip gloss. His dick got hard watching the self-abuse, accompanied by the loud chanting and fist pumping.
In the kitchen was the land of Jell-O shots and giggling females. Jell-O shots had none of the glamour gore of beer bongs. But that was where the normal girls hung out, so of course it was a place of much excitement for his friends. No one had to prove anything, because Jell-O shots were easy and effective. It was just bam, one after another. By the time he joined Stan and Lew in the kitchen, it was clear they had done many Jell-O shots. It was funny, watching them try to talk to the girls. But boring as well.
One of the few problems of not drinking was that his dick remained very hard and undistracted and untamed by buckets of alcohol. Doughty meandered around the large house and found a bathroom in the front hallway, but then ventured further and found another, more private bathroom. He wasn’t feeling adventurous enough to venture to the bathroom off the parents’ bedroom, so this one would do.
The first thing anyone with half a brain did when entering a bathroom was open the cabinets and look for drugs and anything else fun, like a condom or a nice razor. He locked the door. He found some aspirin and some prescription codeine cough medicine. He took the latter. After pocketing the bottle, he saw a towel hanging on the shower rod. It was slightly damp. His dick sprang harder at the feel of that. He sniffed it. He then pulled out his cock and masturbated, looking at himself in the mirror, his handsome jawline, his wide-set blue eyes surrounded by the blond waves of his hair, smelling the towel, feeling its dampness. Getting up on his toes, he came in the sink, gripping the towel as he did.
When he returned, refreshed and relaxed, Stan and Lew were sitting side by side on a couch in the living room. Doughty sat on a large pale-green damask armchair next to them. It was a heavy chair, but he scooted it closer to his friends. Lew’s hairy forearm was resting on the arm of the couch. Doughty had smooth skin, which was irksome, but it was what it was. Lew was as hairy as a Jew. Sometimes, this being one of those sometimes, he and Stan called him Jew instead of Lew, to make fun of his hairiness. Both of his friends were blacked out, so it was all fair game now. Someone was puking in the hallway bathroom. There wasn’t much time left before the police came.
Doughty lit a cigarette. Flicked the flame of his lighter on, flicked it off. On and off. Then he ashed his cigarette on Lew’s left arm.
“Hey, Jew, if I ash in your arm hair, it won’t fall on the couch. It’s like an ash trap, the greasy Jew hairs making the ash cling to it.” Then Doughty ashed on Lew’s neck. Lew opened his mouth to protest. Quickly, Doughty put the cherry of his cigarette on his friend’s tongue. It sizzled.
Lew gagged. He even managed to jerk his head back. Quite the feat, because his neck was barely able to hold his head up. Amazing what a shot of adrenaline could do.
“What the fuck,” Lew said, but it sounded like “Wha a fwa.” And then he leaned forward between his shoes and threw up a stream of foamy red and yellow on the lovely carpet that was probably from Afghanistan.
This brought Stan to attention. Stan, in comparison to Lew, was so average, he wasn’t as fun to play with. He wasn’t loud, like Lew, and he had mousy hair and pale brown eyes. A normal face. Harder to pick on. But watching him sit up straight and show some emotion was still gratifying.
Doughty stood and grabbed Stan by the neck with both hands in a choke hold, lifting him onto his feet, then dropping him back to the couch. “Time to go, Stan the Man.”
“Fucking Doughty!” Stan touched his neck. It was beet red where Doughty’s hands had been. He gagged, his mouth wide and his tongue out.
Doughty heard the police sirens before anyone else. He heard them from so far away that it felt like magic, like he could hear a universe that no one else could hear.
He opened his mouth and when he was loud, when he needed to be heard, his voice came from a special place he didn’t really understand, but it came, and he directed it inside Stan’s ear. “LET’S GO, ASSHOLES!” Then, with the heel of his hand he whacked each one on the head. “The police are coming.”
In the car, after the fresh air, the running to the vehicle, his friends were far more alert. He dropped them off at their respective driveways, and headed home.
