Scott Heim - Mysterious Skin

He’d stocked his kitchen with bags of candy, fudge cookies, Jiffy Pop popcorn, Tang, boxes of pudding. I spied a Breakfast Sampler Pack, miniature boxes of ten different cereal brands packaged together. “Mom never buys those things,” I said, pointing. “She says they’re a big waste of money.”

“Let’s eat, then,” he said.

I chose sugar Corn Pops. Coach, Cocoa Krispies. He pulled milk from his refrigerator and two spoons from another drawer. He positioned his fingers at each end of his box and faultlessly ripped it open. I tried to emulate, but when I tore, the box exploded. The cereal spilled across the checkerboard tiles. “Shit,” I said. Gold nuggets lay at our feet, their sugar coatings gleaming in the kitchen light. I started to apologize, but Coach shushed me. He held his box over his head. He tipped it. Cocoa Krispies rained down. I watched as he opened the Froot Loops, the Alpha-Bits, the horrible-tasting Special K we wouldn’t have eaten anyway. He spilled them all.

The cereal scattered the floor. In the moment that followed, everything around me clarified. I stared at Coach, every detail of him, this grown man’s body standing before me. The kitchen’s light sharpened the thin blond hairs that curled from his shirt collar. The darker shade of his mustache. His sideburns, clipped level with his earlobes. The small copper-colored sunbursts that ringed each black pupil. And, inside that black, a reflection of my face.

Coach’s hand reached for me. It clamped the back of my neck. I closed my eyes and felt him guiding me, regulating my actions, pushing me toward the floor. I fell to my knees, and he fell with me. “Here we go,” he said. I opened my eyes, and he was leaning over my body. Hundreds of cereal bits were strewn around us like debris from a catastrophe. My nostrils bristled with a perfume of sugar. He moved closer, and I smelled his breath, the clean scent of his Panthers T-shirt, the coconutty residue of his shampoo.

He massaged my neck. “When I really, really like someone, there’s a way I show them how I feel.” He gently pushed my shoulders until I lay flat on the floor. He rested his head against my heart. I shifted under him, and pieces of cereal crunched beneath my ass. Snap, crackle, pop.

I knew what was happening. Half of me realized it wasn’t right. The other half wanted it to happen. Coach hugged me, his fingers soothing and caressing, tracing and retracing the paths and angles of my shoulders, my back, my ass. “Shhh,” he said. “Angel.” His nose touched mine, and his breaths moved into my mouth. “There’s nothing wrong with kissing someone like this. Nothing. Don’t let anyone tell you there’s anything wrong with it.”

He shut his mouth over mine, pushing his tongue between my lips, trailing the line of my front teeth, moving back to circle my own, smaller tongue. It felt as though his tongue were gorging my entire head, tasting and licking behind my eyes, tracing the blue lobes of my brain. Our teeth clicked together. His bottom lip curled over my jawline. My head was disappearing, he was swallowing me. I moaned and understood it was the right noise. Alfred and Mom made that sound at night.

Occasionally I’d open my eyes, catch a random image, then snap them back shut. The images shuffled in my head: his fingers, loosening his circle-and-horse-head belt buckle; teardrops of green glass on the chandelier; his shirt’s pouncing, drooling panther; silver fillings in the recess of his mouth.

He stretched on top of me. More snaps and crackles. My hand made a fist against the linoleum, and my palm burst pebbles of cereal. The tongue kept darting inside my head. Trails of his spit dripped down my throat. I swallowed.

His head lifted. “Shhh.” He unzipped, and somehow managed to wriggle his jeans to his knees. His dick stiffened against my thigh. “Open your eyes and look at it,” Coach said. I did. At that second I would have obeyed anything. His dick curved slightly upward, a milky drop leaking from its tip.

“Neil, I like you so much.” His eyes resembled chunks of stained glass. He kissed me again, and one hand wandered up my leg, rubbing my crotch through my baseball pants. “That feels nice, right?” He squeezed, ironed, massaged. “Right?” Yes, it felt nice. I heard something that sounded like fabric ripping. He reached inside my baseball pants. He grabbed my dick, the sweat of his palm almost stinging me. I focused on a vein in his bicep. The vein twitched like a puppet’s vulnerable string. My body tensed, canting against the support of his other arm, nearly nine years of anticipation clamping in each tendon and muscle. I couldn’t hold it. I moaned again to let him know, and then he shuddered. His entire body shook. He quickly pushed himself up to kneel over me, and in that second I saw the full size of his dick, candy pink and unreal, as it arched over my chest. His sperm shot from the head and pooled its white dribbles across the ninety-nine on my jersey front. It shocked me a little, but I kept quiet. After a while, I put my palm over the puddle. The come felt warmer and stickier than I’d expected. Beneath it, my heartbeat steadied.

He lay back down. He wore an awkward, pained expression, and when he sighed into my face, I could almost taste the heat in the rushing air.

“You liked it,” Coach said. He wasn’t looking at me. “It’s okay that you liked it, it will all be okay.”

Minutes passed. I counted the number of my breaths before either of us spoke. I was on sixty-five before Coach said anything. What he said was, “Shhh,” again, although I hadn’t said a word. I started shivering, and Coach hugged me, covering as much of me as he could, as if my skin had burst into flame and his body were a blanket to snuff it. Only my mother had held me like that.

“That’s how I feel about you,” Coach said. “There’s nothing wrong with showing it. People are afraid to show it, but you should know there’s nothing wrong with expressing to someone how much you really like them, how much you’re proud of them.”

I looked at the floor’s mess: two spoons, a pearly bead of his come, and cereal nuggets in all colors, as if a kaleidoscope had shattered. I swallowed. The taste of his tongue seared my mouth.

He zipped up. It happened, I told myself; it happened. And I had liked it. I heard dogs barking outside, a group of kids fighting in clipped sentences. “I’m telling,” one bawled. Coach dropped a five-dollar bill on the floor beside me, then stepped over my body, a black smudge from my sunblock on his shirt front. He hunched over the sink and twisted the H knob. The water splashed his hands. “I’ll clean the floor later.” He smiled at me. “My number ninety-nine. Guess we should think about heading over to smear that Taco Hut team.”

We demolished Taco Hut. Somewhere within those seven innings I smacked three RBIs, but I don’t remember a moment. I saw his hands giving signals from the coach’s box on the third base line, and I thought about our sex. Although it was difficult to understand it then, what I wanted was more. For the rest of my days I would want it. I would see sex everywhere, splinters shoved into each molecule of each space, saturating everything I saw and smelled and tasted and touched.

I could leap ahead and detail the afternoons I spent with Coach, the money he gave me, everything I learned from him. I could mention the summer’s end, the beginning of third grade, the following June when the Chamber of Commerce assigned Coach another, older group of boys. Without a guide, I would quit baseball. Our paths would trail further and further away, and our relationship would end.

But he’s still here, in a way I can’t explain. Oftentimes I wonder where Coach lives, what he’s doing, whether something like prison or lynch mobs or disease hasn’t killed him. But looking back it doesn’t matter. What matters is how, for the first time in my life, I felt as if I existed for something. When I think back, and I do that a lot, the majority of that summer fades. I barely remember the vacation Mom and I took to Abilene, or her breakup with Alfred. I almost forget the other boys on the team, even the others Coach lured to that house across from the fairgrounds marquee.