There are hardly any juniors or seniors on the bus. They drive themselves. I’ve started to make friends with some of the more popular underclassmen these last few weeks, so I get to sit in the back of the bus with them. It’s a loud group, always gossiping about the latest hookup or who got busted for drinking or smoking. Someone puts on an Ace of Base CD and everyone sings along, even me.
The frozen grass crunches underneath my feet, leaving a trail of green footprints behind me as I sneak from under the bridge next to the gym and dart to the baseball dugout. Through the school-wide announcement system, the late bell rings for first period.
We rarely get snow where I live, which is only a few miles from here, but there’s several inches of compressed powder lining the walkways around campus. It melts into a slush when the rain starts. Jessica, Aaron, and I huddle together for warmth under the narrow metal roof, listening to the rain spattering above us and smoking cigarette after cigarette – unable to tell the smoke from the condensation of our own breath in the cold air. Our morning P.E. class is out in shorts and t-shirts, running laps around the field. If I go to at least five classes a day, they don’t count me as truant. If we can see them, they can see us. Let’s just hope they don’t recognize us at this distance.

It’s still raining on the bus ride home. Tina, one of Jessica’s friends, invites me to her house, so I get off at the stop before mine. We run to her house, getting soaked along the way. The bus only stops every couple of miles as it follows the main road through the Yosemite Lakes Park subdevelopment. Only a lucky few students have a walk home shorter than a mile. In weather like this, most of them will get picked up by their parents at the bus stop.
“Do you have Prince Albert in a can?” she asks me, reaching for the shelf above her. I don’t know who or what Prince Albert is, so she explains the joke as she rolls us a couple of cigarettes from the metal tin. I’ve never had an unfiltered cigarette. It’s a lot harsher, especially in the sections where my hair has dripped on the paper, and it leaves little flakes of tobacco on my lips and teeth with each drag.
After we finish smoking, we make out for a couple of minutes before I tell her I need to get home before my mom gets back. I still have to walk from her house to mine. Nearly twice as far as my usual walk. She tries to get me to stay longer, offering to let me get to second base, but I’ll be grounded if I don’t get home.
I’m only a few hundred feet down the road from Tina’s when the blue Geo Metro pulls up next to me, blaring its horn. I open the passenger door and she’s already screaming at me for not coming straight home after school. She came home early to get ready. She’s going out tonight. We’ll be staying at her friend Diane’s house. The one place I actually look forward to when I have to stay there. She’s a lot nicer than my mom and her kids are about my age. They have the best video games and a big-screen TV. Lately, we’re staying at my mom’s friends’ houses more and more.
My dad moved to LA a couple months back. We’re still a family, I guess. He comes back to visit on his days off – Tuesday and Wednesday – but otherwise we don’t see him. When I was a kid, he worked at an arcade in Fresno. It was my favorite place to spend my weekends, helping out for the all-you-can-play event every Saturday morning and then spending the rest of the day mastering the latest games. Well, this year, another company bought up a bunch of arcades and they made my dad the manager of their new location. It’s pretty awesome. Not only does it have a huge game room, but it also has a skating rink, miniature golf, go-karts, bumper boats, and batting cages. I’ve been down to visit a couple of times since he moved there.
After everyone else goes to bed, Bennett and I stay up to hang out. He’s two years older than me, but I’ve always gotten along better with him than his brother, who is closer to my age. Chris, the younger brother, is really into sports and I’m not. Even the video games he plays are sports games. He’s cool, but it gets boring after a while, always playing football or basketball. Or talking about sports. Or looking at magazines about them.
Bennett takes me out back to gather some pomegranates from their tree. I’ve never had a pomegranate before. “You can eat the seeds,” he explains, “But we’re just going to use the juice.”
In the kitchen, he cuts them in half and squeezes the crimson liquid into a couple of coffee mugs. It’s dark, like blood, but not as thick. Taking a bottle of vodka from the cabinet, he pours some into each cup and passes me one. My mouth puckers and my throat burns as I take the first sip.
We sit around the kitchen table, drinking our tart juice cocktails. Bennett asks me if I’ve ever smoked pot. I lie and tell him I have, but I prefer cigarettes. I’m hoping he’ll give me one, but he only smokes weed.
“Prove it. Let’s see you smoke a bowl.”
Outside, in the driveway, he crams a pinch of green into his resin-crusted metal pipe and passes it to me. I light it and inhale deeply, like I would with a cigarette, and immediately cough violently. Bennett laughs. I’m sure he can tell this is my first time. I have a second hit, even though I’m already feeling funny. Wobbly. My vision is blurry. It takes a few minutes to reorient myself.
“What the hell is that?” Bennett says, pointing into the darkness above his house. There’s a single light in the sky, miles off in the distance. It could be a star if it weren’t moving. It’s not flying in a straight line like an airplane, though. The light jerks sharply in one direction, then floats up, darting suddenly the opposite direction. We watch it for several minutes while it continues this dance, never traveling horizontally or vertically for more than a few moments before moving suddenly diagonally. Then, it just disappears. I must be pretty fucked up from the weed and vodka, but Bennett saw it, too. He was the one who noticed.
After staring up at the dark night sky for a while, we decide it’s not going to come back and go inside to warm up. He heats a kettle of water on the stove and makes two mugs of tea. We’re sitting at the table drinking it when he tells me, in great detail, how he fucked his mom’s cat. I can barely see straight and I’m not quite understanding what he’s telling me. He has to be messing with me.
“How do you like that tea?”
“It’s okay.” I’ve never had tea except on the rare occasion at the Chinese restaurant my parents like to go to for special occasions.
“It’s jimsonweed,” Bennett tells me. I stare at him blankly, since I have no idea what that is. He goes into the next room and gets a book about plants, opening it to jimsonweed and setting it on the table in front of me. It’s hard for me to make out the words on the page, everything is doubled. Words floating around. I manage to figure out that it’s poisonous. Would he really give me poison? He’s drinking it, too. I think. I didn’t watch him make it.
The next day, Bennett drives his brother and I to school in his dad’s big-ass Lincoln Town Car. He tells me I should come down to the creek by the lower parking lot at lunch. I share the invitation with Aaron when we ditch first period to smoke by the baseball field. I didn’t know there was a creek, but he knows where to go. He’s been a few times.
I meet up with Aaron after fifth period and we walk down the gravel driveway to the junior parking lot.
“Don’t look now,” he whispers, nodding over his shoulder. A few paces down, I turn to see Mr. Rupp standing, hands on his hips, at the entrance to the school at the top of the hill. From his post, he can keep an eye on every car in both lots.
“Just pretend like we’re waiting for a friend to take us to lunch,” Aaron tells me, leaning against the passenger side of a brown Karmann Ghia. We take turns glancing at the assistant principal until Aaron nudges me to signal he’s distracted, talking with a student. I follow as he ducks behind the old Volkswagen and makes a dash for the grove of eucalyptus trees that line the perimeter of the lot.
Through about fifty feet of dense growth, we come out next to a nearly-dry creek bed. Twenty or so students sit on the sand or atop large granite rocks scattered up and down the bank. I recognize a lot of these kids from my classes or seeing them around campus. They’re mostly from the skater clique or the goths, though a few long-hairs in flannel shirts are mixed into the group. Nobody I really know. I thought Bennett was supposed to be here.
Several people have metal or glass pipes and I’m offered to sample from each of them as I sit down on a stump at the edge of the group. They all know me as a clean-cut, teachers-pet type, so they’re surprised to see me down here. Surprised to see me smoking. A gangly guy dressed in white shorts and a plain-white t-shirt, Justin, offers me a little piece of paper, torn from the Sunday comics. Family Circus, I think.
“What is it?”
“It’s black pyramid,” he tells me, putting one on his tongue to dissolve and dumping the tiny squares from a paper envelope into the waiting hands that surround him. After some hesitation, but before he runs out, I take one and put it on my tongue in the same way. He tells me the first one is free, but if I want more, they’re five dollars.
A bell rings. I get up to go back to class and the whole world shifts to one side, toppling over to the left while I stay in place. My legs are buried in the sand up to my knees and I can’t walk. I have to hurry, though, the water level in the creek is rising and I’ll be washed away. Why isn’t anyone helping me? Can’t they see what’s happening?
A second bell rings. It doesn’t stop ringing. The PA system must be broken. The kids with the lizard faces and the snowman are swallowed up by the eucalyptus trees. “If I don’t get out of here soon, they’re going to eat me, too,” a panda laughs from inside my brain. Oh no! The trees have taken over my brain. Dorothy and the scarecrow should be coming by soon. They’ll be able to get me out of this quicksand. If that damn bell would stop ringing, maybe I could hear them approach.
Aaron can see that I’m tripping and can’t go back to class, so he takes me to the other side of campus, past the ag farm and onto the football field. I’m staring at the goal post, watching it get smaller as we walk toward it. No, wait, the field is getting longer. Stretching out in front of us. I try to run to catch up to it, but I’m not in control of my legs. Above me, a giant pair of hands holds two marionette paddles, the strings reaching out to wrap around my wrists and ankles. The blood-red, press-on fingernails of the disembodied hands grow toward the field, surrounding me. Trapping me in their prison. Laughing at me. Aaron yanks the sleeve of my jacket and I start walking again.
There’s a metal drainage tube under the roadway behind the school. Big enough for us to sit in. We wait out sixth and seventh period under the road, smoking menthol cigarettes that he got from his cousin.
“Dude, just chill out, you’ll be fine.” The acid doesn’t seem to be affecting him the same. I’m sure I saw him eat one. Or did I? Just like the tea from Bennett. Are they giving me something different?
“Yeah, man. It’s just all the cats, y’know. The toes are everywhere.”
“Don’t worry about it, we’ll get you home soon.”
“No, no. No home for me. Homeless me.”
“Just relax and smoke another cigarette.”
My body still feels tingly and it’s hard to walk on these rubbery Gumby-legs as we head to the buses after the last bell. I keep hoping I don’t get stuck like this forever. They said this kid, Brandon, did LSD in the seventh grade and he permafried. He got trapped in a permanent state of being high. It’s pretty scary, but one thing I’ve noticed is I’m not worried about all the shit I’m going to have to deal with when I get home, so maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to get stuck like this.
There’s a party tonight at Jessica’s house. Her parents are out of town. Sounds like most of the group from lunch will be there. There’s no way I’ll be able to talk my mom into letting me go to a party. Not unless she can come over to meet the homeowners and hang out for an hour to judge every kid at the party, just so she can talk shit about what losers they are later. She has a lot to say about other people for someone who works the makeup counter part-time at a small-town department store.
I tell her I’m going to Tommy’s to play Sega. I’ve been friends with him since kindergarten and my parents know his parents. I’ll invite him to the party with me and then sleep over at his house in case my mom calls over there. His mom would cover for us anyway, she’s pretty cool. Not many moms would watch Spaceballs with us and explain the jokes we’re too young to get. If we’re going to drink, she’ll say, I’d rather you do it somewhere I know you’re safe.
I get a ride to Tommy’s and then we walk, in the cold and dark, up Ranger Circle Drive to the brown mobile home. This house isn’t far from Bennett’s house. I wonder if he’ll be here, too.
Inside, it’s almost all freshmen. Mostly people I went to grade school with, since we live in the same area. I find Sean at the kitchen table. He offers me a can of Budweiser as I sit next to him. Holy crap, this is disgusting. I’ve never had a beer before. I mean, my grandpa would sometimes let me have a sip of his, but I always hated it. He would have me crush all of his old beer cans when I’d go visit and the smell of the hot, sticky cans would make me feel sick. It’s not much better cold.
Tina and Jessica are drinking wine coolers, so I ask them where I can get one and Tina takes me out back to a blue-and-white ice chest, where I pick out a strawberry daiquiri flavored drink in a glass bottle. Sometimes, Tim, from down the street, will swipe a Zima or Bartles and Jaymes from his parents and we’ll drink it together on our walk to the bus stop in the morning.
Tina tells me to meet her back out here in an hour and opens the sliding glass door to let me back inside. Sean, Tommy, and Eric are playing gin at the table, so I pull up a chair to join them. We used to play this game in eighth grade when we were supposed to be having quiet study time, more often than not getting in trouble for being too loud.
“Nice drink, queer.”
The rest of the guys laugh at me. Then they make fun of me for turning red. Tina and Jessica are watching from the living room, which only makes me turn an even darker hue. Vermilion. I don’t understand why it’s considered normal to make fun of people who are supposed to be your friends. Seems like everyone I know takes pleasure in making others feel bad. Like it makes them feel better about their own problems.
“Gin, fools!” Sean slams his cards down on the table for all of us to see. Eric gathers up the piles from in front of us and shuffles the deck for another hand. As he starts to fling cards at each of us in turn, Tina approaches from beside me. She pushes my cards back to the center of the table and takes my hand, leading me into the living room. My friends make onomatopoetic sound effects in the style of a TV audience as we make our exit.
Sitting beside me on the worn sofa, she leans in and kisses my neck. Softly at first, then she starts sucking. Hard. I push her away. She’s trying to give me a hickey, but I don’t want my parents to see. I can’t tell the look she’s giving me. Maybe she’s hurt or angry. I kiss her on the lips and stick my tongue in her mouth, using my hand to brush the hair away from her face.
“Are you nervous?” she asks, placing her hand on my knee and slowly moving it up my thigh.
“I don’t get nervous,” I laugh, nervously.
She finds my hard penis under my jeans and begins squeezing and pulling on it as she kisses me. Unfastening my belt and unzipping my pants, she reaches her hand in. It feels cold on my warm member. Tina lays me down on the couch, on my side, laying down in front of me, so we’re spooning. She slides the elastic waistbands of her tights and panties down just enough to reveal her smooth, round ass below her sweatshirt. Reaching behind her back, she slides my erection into her. It’s not like I expected. Softer, wetter, and warmer than my friends said. They’re probably all virgins, too. Maybe not Bennett. He’s older. Back when I was seven and he was ten, he explained to me how sex worked when nobody else would. Then, a few years later, he showed me pictures in some Hustler and Penthouse magazines he’d found that were his dad’s or older brother’s. Up until now, that’s all I knew about sex. The anatomy lessons in health class don’t teach anything about what you’re actually supposed to do.
Tina is writhing around in front of me. I feel the inside of her vagina pulsating and squeezing. I’m not moving. I’m worried the other people at the party might see us. I look around the room and see Jessica riding Aaron on the opposite couch. She’s completely naked. None of us are old enough to get a tattoo, but she has one of a butterfly on her back, just above her left butt cheek.
I feel a tingling throughout my body and a sudden shiver. It’s over. I came. As quick as it got hard, my erection goes limp. Tina pulls her pants up and rolls over to kiss me. She wraps her arms around me and squeezes my head into her fully-developed breasts. Certainly among the largest in the freshman class.
I don’t know how long we’ve been laying like this when Tommy comes around the corner, announcing he’s ready to go. Fastening my pants behind the cover of Tina’s body, I hug and kiss her once more before getting up and making a trip around the room to say my goodbyes.
On the walk back to Tommy’s house, I don’t say anything about what happened. He might already know. The other couples made it pretty obvious what was going on in that living room. He doesn’t ask. We mostly talk about video games and golf as we walk, shivering, down the wet road in the darkness.