Stephen Markley - Ohio

That night, while the football team was still showering, he’d slipped out of the dance to meet Kaylyn. So this is something we’re doing? she’d said, but not shamefully. Playfully. Grotesquely. Joyfully as a fucking rainbow. Later, when he and Lisa drove out to the Brew, he’d worried that his dick still smelled like the condom.

“That guy,” he told Dakota, giggling. “He was pretty fucking funny sometimes.”

He was about to bring up another story concerning Rick when blue and red lights erupted in sweeping whorls to their left, and a spotlight as bright as being awake on the operating room table came blasting over their faces, wrenching them from the safety of darkness’s sticky womb.

Before Kaylyn reached out to him after the Marysville game, he thought it was over. It was always up to her if they would meet, when and where, and she hadn’t texted him with their funny little code word— grandmas? —in nearly four months. It began to infuriate him, madden him, make him lose sleep. Every time he saw her with Rick, he found himself dangerously close to becoming the guy who snatches an arm and demands an explanation. But then she sent him the code, and he slipped away. They pulled their cars side by side in the part of the parking lot where the lights didn’t meet.

Because it was already wrong, because they were already ashamed, Bill did things to her. Lisa was wild, but Kaylyn—she wanted punishment or humiliation or degradation or maybe something Bill couldn’t even think to give her. He almost couldn’t find the low level within himself that she actually wanted. Pull her hair, dig into her ass with a finger, choke her, come on her face—afterward she’d seem bored with it, disappointed in him. By winter of senior year, when they’d been doing this under everyone’s noses for nearly a year, he feared that all he could give her was the thrill of what would happen if their friends found out.

“We could get a hotel room sometime,” he suggested. She brought her knees to her chest in the backseat and slid her underwear up her sleek calves, then hoisted up her butt to pull them all the way on.

“We could,” she agreed. She went searching through her jeans pockets, brought out her inhaler and a pack of gum. “What are you doing now?”

“I guess going to the dance.” Bill tugged the condom off, buzzed the window down just low enough to toss it. A frigid gust of winter wind sipped inside and chilled his naked skin. She got her jeans on but then settled back against the door and watched him, her flesh pocked with goose bumps.

“Rick texted you?” he asked.

She chawed her gum thoughtfully. “Only about twenty times. I told him I had to run home after the game to do some stuff for Barrett.” Her mouth curled the way it did whenever she mentioned her autistic younger brother.

“Want to meet this weekend?”

She shrugged with her eyes and jaw. “Maybe.” She kept her curious gaze on him. Before he’d known her, when all the local elementary schools fed into the only middle school, he’d watched her across the lunchroom, marveled at this stunning girl. She had this long, taut body, small hips, small breasts, small round ass, and it was all narcotic to a teenage boy in the grip of hormones, but it was really her face that caught his breath. Gorgeous Germanic features with a dusting of farm daughter freckles on a slim, sharp nose. Green eyes that she must have known were hypnotic because she so frequently wore pale green sweaters and scarves and shirts that set them off. Her small teeth bent slightly into her mouth and were just crooked enough to be charming. She kept her hair long and knew how to play with it; to leave it messily tossed over one shoulder or draping down across her breasts as she did now. He loved burying his hands in the thickness; it felt like you could pirate-swing from the mast of a ship with it. Of course, she had the tattoo she’d gotten with Rick, and that night, pumping into her from behind, he’d stared at it and wondered what could have possessed her to foul a piece of her lovely body this way.

“Do you ever think you hate anyone?” she asked. She propped a foot on his lap, and he kneaded her toes, small as corn kernels.

“George W. Bush,” he said.

“I’m serious.”

“So am I.”

“Bill.”

He thought about it. “I don’t know. I don’t hate Rick if that’s what you’re asking. That’s not why I like being with you.”

“Sometimes”—she chewed and laid her bright green eyes on the fog of the windshield and the gloom of the park beyond—“I get this idea in my head. Like all my frustration gets focused on just one person, and everything that goes wrong—whether, you know, I’m like messing up in a class or I have a lousy game, it all goes into that one person. Usually a girl. And I just can’t even be around them—I can’t look at her without this feeling like I want to just claw her face off.”

He always had trouble reading her but especially now.

“You feel that right now, you’re saying?”

Her chewing quickened. She tilted her head and swept her hair to the side. A big tent of blond stayed aloft for a moment before easing back down to her skull. “Maybe. A couple years ago, this girl…” She let out a single laugh that sounded like Eh-ha . “I just got so much pleasure out of hating her.”

“Who?”

“Doesn’t matter. She was just. I don’t know. Like looking at her upset me, but she was just around all the time. I had to see her all the time.”

“And you still hate her?”

The fog they’d steamed onto the windows had turned the scene outside opaque. This, he realized, was what he loved about her. She was inscrutable, unpredictable. She wore a small gold crucifix around her neck, and now she picked it up to feel the edges. “You know, I did whatever people do. I messed with her a little. Got it on tape. Then got over it.”

He admitted, “I’m a little lost here.”

Her eyes found him again. She leaned across the backseat, naked from the waist up, her nipples still erect because the heater couldn’t quite warm the car. Pausing a few inches from his face, she breathed on his lips twice, then kissed him, and he was hard all over again.

This all began the previous year after her father died very suddenly. About a week after the funeral she’d called Bill out of the blue to ask if he could give her a ride to her grandmother’s house to pick up her forgotten medications. Dover was about an hour’s drive east, and Rick was on a college visit that weekend. On the drive, they talked about her dad. He’d only known Mr. Lynn by reputation: a surly, depressed alcoholic who could never hold a job and who occasionally got into gossip-inducing physical altercations with Kaylyn’s mother. Dead of his second heart attack at fifty-three. The funeral was Bill’s first open casket. There lay the stiff, embalmed, made-up version of what was once a man. His beard looked like it belonged on a mannequin, the hair a toupee. Kay’s mother, a frayed woman with tics in her face like multiple metronomes, blinking as though constantly trying to clear her eyes of debris, spent most of her time handling Barrett. Thirteen and hopeless, Kaylyn’s brother was an incomprehensible jack-in-the-box of illogical outbursts. He brayed, he whined, he screamed, and it all seemed to have no tether to anything that was happening around him. Bill could see how quickly he wore the family out.

Somewhere on the barren state highway, he asked Kaylyn if she was okay.

She didn’t answer for a moment, kept staring at the gray rotten-tooth fields on her side of the road. “I guess I’m fine. People keep asking me that, but what do you say?”

“Uh: ‘I’m awful, my dad’s dead, so get fucked and eat a dozen dicks’?” Bill suggested.