Jess Walter - Land Of The Blind

But in Susan I had a real partner, and this changed me in some way. Namely, I wanted more. I liked sex. Liked everything about it. Hoped to get better at it. And so I stayed with Susan for the rest of the school year, even though I couldn't think of a thing we had in common, except our mutual recognition that I needed practice having sex. And so we did, almost daily. We had so much sex in Susan's parents' Wagoneer that I couldn't bear to see her family driving around in it, her brothers and sisters belted into the backseat that we used like a gymnast's apparatus. I still can't see a Jeep Wagoneer on the freeway without becoming aroused, and more than once I have narrowly averted accidents after following a Wagoneer's path too far in my rearview mirror.

As I dated Susan that year I got marginally better at having sex in off-road family vehicles. The entire school, of course, knew that we were together, and knew the instant that we began "doing it." We groped in the hallways and she waited by my car after school and outside the locker room after games and we went to dances – Homecoming, Sadie Hawkins, Christmas, and Sweethearts – and groped outside the gym. We wrote notes and talked on the phone, and people combined our names into one: ClarknSue.

Looking back, I realize now that Dana Brett's rack arrived the very week I had sex with Susan. But at the time, I didn't connect those events, didn't realize that Dana would hear about it, and that she would dress that way not to impress the high school boys, but to impress me, to get me to notice her the way I'd noticed Susan.

And I did notice Dana, but I was so single-minded then – a mad scientist devoted to my work with tall, statuesque Susan, we were like a small Intercourse Research and Development firm – that it never occurred to me to go out with anyone else, especially my old grade-school friend, the eternally presexual, perpetually cute Dana.

For her part, I think Dana must have realized fairly quickly that I wasn't interested, for she was back to wearing baggy jumpers and combing her hair straight. But the rack was out of the bag, and the other football players hounded her for a few weeks, asking her out and offering her rides home, before they eventually gave up. Tommy Kane was especially smitten with Dana, and he asked me about her constantly. I even tried to fix her up with him. But she wasn't interested. So the guys called her frigid and surmised that she was a lesbian, based solely on the evidence that she had laughed when Tommy asked her to climb into the backseat of his Ford Maverick.

"I hate dykes," Tommy said, and in our base stupidity we all agreed. What possible good was there in a woman who wouldn't have sex with us? I would love to say that I didn't participate in these Cro-Magnon conversations, in this emerging male idiocy, but this is, after all, a confession. We bragged about the things we did to our girlfriends, as if they had no part in it. We banged them and humped them and screwed them and nailed them, and if they did anything to us we still took credit ("I got first snub of Eli at the bus stop to the events of… fifty-two hours ago, I offer no excuse except this: I was young and male and I was pretty sure I'd invented sex, just like I invented driving fast and making fun of people and eating french fries.

With all of this attention to sports and student government and, of course, my groundbreaking work in Susan's parents' Wagoneer, I didn't have much to do with Eli, except on those Sunday afternoons when he'd call to make sure the coast was clear and then come by the house so we could work on his appearance. He was plainly disappointed by our progress. He'd been dressing right for two months and nothing had changed. Even though they'd finally broken up our mainstreaming gym class ("They're making a mockery of physical education!" Mr. Leggett testified at the school board meeting), the SpEddies had retained a bit of their mascot cool.

But Eli lost even that measure of popularity. If anything, he was worse off. At least he had been the best of the worst. Now he was the worst of the best. If I were him, I might've choked on the irony.

One Sunday in the late part of winter, we sat on my front porch and watched my sisters skip rope on the sidewalk in front of us. It was probably February or March, one of those days that strobes between warm and cool, the sun flashing in and out of clouds.

"What am I doing wrong?"

"Nothing," I lied. "I don't even know what you mean."

"You know what I mean," he said. "Why isn't it working?"

I looked over at him. Eli was four inches shorter than me, about five feet eight, not too fat or too skinny, and while he still hadn't mastered the blow dryer, his hair didn't look awful anymore. His face was still too wide and his skin was still a problem, all pale and pimply, but it was getting better. Honestly, he didn't look that bad. The problem was deeper: context and history and a collection of problems that went to his core.

"Level with me," he said. "Be tougher on me."

"It's hard," I said. "People have thought of you one way for so long…"

"There are only a few months left in school," he said. "Please…"

I looked at him and saw those same eyes I'd seen on the bus in grade school, searching my face for something he'd missed, some rules that no one had told him. "I'm serious, Clark. I'll do whatever you say. Just please, help me.

"Well, there are other things besides clothes and hair," I said.

He pulled a pencil and pad from his pocket. "What?"

"Well, there are things that probably can't be helped."

"Tell me."

"I don't know."

"Yes, you do."

"Well, you're a senior and you still ride the bus."

"I don't have a car," he complained.

"I know," I said. "You asked what it was and I'm trying to tell you."

He wrote this on the small piece of paper and said, "Other kids ride the bus."

"Yeah," I admitted. "There are other things."

"Tell me."

"Well." I sighed and looked down the block. "There's… you have a bit of a lisp."

"What elth?"

"That's funny," I said.

"Come on. What else?"

"Well, your hands shake."

He wrote on his paper. "And?"

"You limp when you walk. And you twitch and make funny noises. You still pick your nose too much. And…"

"Slow down." He wrote on his paper. "Okay, what else?" he asked.

"That's it."

"What else?" he asked.

"You smell," said my sister, who had stopped skipping rope.

"Shawna!" I said, and she ran off.

Eli's chin slumped to his chest and he nodded, as if she'd confirmed what he suspected. The problem was that he and his mother didn't have a shower in their trailer, just a tub, and his mother would only let him take baths twice a week ("You'll wash the oils off your body and

So we started the second phase of the Eli reclamation the very next day. I began driving Eli to school an hour early. I used the extra hour to shoot baskets, and since it would have drawn unwelcome attention for Eli to arrive early simply to take a shower at school, he lifted weights for twenty minutes, then showered and dried his hair.

But perceptions don't break easily, and by senior year few people were likely to notice that he smelled better and that his arms and shoulders had begun to develop small buttes and gullies from the weight lifting. He was still Eli. And, in truth, any progress would have been too slow for Eli, who by April saw our impending graduation as the date of his death.

"It's not helping," he said as we sat in my backyard later that spring, throwing chestnuts over my back fence. "Everything is the same. It's never going to change."

"It's not the same," I said. "It's better."

"It's not," he said. "There's gotta be something we can do."

I felt so bad for him I began work immediately on the final stage of the Eli Project. "Let me think about it," I said.