Ellen Datlow - Alien Sex

“You wanna come along?” His father had asked him, turning away from the TV. Just like that, no big deal, like asking him to fetch another beer from the fridge. “Me and Tommy and the guys—we’re gonna go down there and see what’s happening. Have a little fun.”

He hadn’t said anything back for a little while, but had just stared at the TV, the colors fluttering against the walls of the darkened room. His father hadn’t had to say anything more than down there —he knew where that meant. A little knot, one he always had in his stomach, tightened and drew down something in his throat.

“Sure,” he’d finally mumbled. The string with the knot in it looped down lower in his gut. His father just grunted and went on watching the TV.

He figured they’d decided it was time because he’d finally started high school. More than that, he’d just about finished his first year and had managed to stay out of whatever trouble his older brother had gotten into back then, finally causing him to drop out and go into the army and then god knew what—nobody had heard from his brother in a long time. So maybe it was as some kind of reward, for doing good, that they were going to take him along with them.

He didn’t see what was so hard about it, about school. What made it worth a reward. All you had to do was keep your head down and not draw attention to yourself. And there was stuff to do that got you through the day: he was in the band, and that was okay. He played the baritone sax—it was pretty easy because they never got any real melodies to play, you just had to fart around in the background with everybody else. Where he sat was right in front of the trombone section, which was all older guys; he could hear them talking, making bets about which of the freshman girls would be the next to start shaving her legs. Plus they had a lot of jokes about the funny way flute players made their mouths go when they were playing. Would they still look that funny way when they had something else in their mouths? It embarrassed him because the flute players were right across from the sax section, and he could see the one he’d already been dating a couple of times.

One time, when they’d been alone, she’d given him a piece of paper that she’d had folded up in the back pocket of her jeans. The paper had gotten shaped round, the same shape as her butt, and he’d felt funny taking it and unfolding it. The paper was a mimeographed diagram that her minister at her Episcopalian youth group had given her and the rest of the girls in the group. It showed what parts of their bodies they could let a boy touch, at what stage. You had to be engaged, with a ring and everything, before you could unhook her bra. He’d kept the piece of paper, tucked in one of his books at home. In a way, it’d been kind of a relief, just to know what was expected of him.

It was what worried him about going down there, with his father and his uncle and the other guys—he didn’t know what he was supposed to do when they got there. He lay awake the night before, wondering. He turned on the light and got out the piece of paper the girl who played the flute had given him, and looked at the dotted lines that made a sort of zone between the diagram’s throat and navel, and another zone below that, that looked like a pair of underpants or the bottom half of a girl’s two-piece swimsuit. Then he folded the paper back up and stuck it in the book where he kept it. He didn’t think the diagram was going to do him any good where he was going.

“All right—let’s get this show on the road.” His uncle Tommy leaned out of the driver’s-side window and slapped the door’s metal. They always went down there in Tommy’s car because it was the biggest, an old Dodge that wallowed like a boat even on the straightaways. The other guys chipped in for the gas. “Come on—let’s move on out.” Tommy’s big yellow grin was even looser; he’d already gotten into the six-pack stowed down on the floor.

For a moment, he thought they’d all forgotten about taking him along. There were already five guys in the car when it’d pulled up in front of the house, and his father would make the sixth. He stood on the porch, feeling a secret hope work at the knot in his gut.

“Aw, man—what the hell were you guys thinking of?” The voice of one of the guys in the car floated out, across the warm evening air. It was Bud, the one who worked at the cinder block factory. “There’s no way you can stick seven of us in here, and then drive all the way down there.”

The guy next to Bud, in the middle of the backseat, laughed. “Well, hell—maybe you can just sit on my lap, then.”

“Yeah, well, you can just sit on this.” Bud gave him the finger, then drained the last from a can of beer and dropped it onto the curb. Bud pushed the door open and got out. “You guys just have a fine old time without me. I got some other shit to take care of.”

Tommy’s grin grew wider. “Ol’ Bud’s feeling his age. Since that little sweetheart last time fucked up his back for him.”

“Your ass.”

From the porch, he watched Bud walking away, the blue glow of the streetlights making the cinder block dust on Bud’s workshirt go all silver. He couldn’t tell if Bud had been really mad—maybe about him coming along and taking up space in the car—or if it was just part of the joke. A lot of the time he couldn’t tell whether his father and his buddies were joking or not.

“Come on—” His father had already gotten in the car, up front, elbow hanging over the sill of the door. “What’re you waiting for?”

He slid in the back. The seat had dust from Bud’s shirt on it, higher up than his own shoulders. “Here we go,” said his father, as his head rocked back into the cinder block dust. The guy next to him, his father’s buddy, peeled a beer off a six-pack and handed it to him. He held it without opening it, letting the cold seep into his hands as the streets pivoted around and swung behind the car, until they were past the last streetlight and onto the straight road heading for the southern hills.

All the way down there, they talked about baseball. Or football, shouting over the radio station that Tommy had turned up loud. He didn’t listen to them, but leaned his shoulder against the door, gulping breath out of the wind, his face stung red. For a long while he thought there was something running alongside the car, a dog or something, but faster than a dog could run, because his uncle Tommy had the car easily wound up to over seventy. The dog, or whatever it was, loped in the shadows at the side of the road, a big grin like Tommy’s across its muzzle, its bright spark eyes looking right at him. But when another car came along, going the other way, the headlights making a quick scoop over the road, the dog wasn’t there. Just the rocks and brush zooming by, falling back into the dark behind them. He pushed his face farther out into the wind, eyes squinted, the roar swallowing up the voices inside the car. The dog’s yellow eyes danced like coins out there, keeping alongside and smiling at him.

“All right —we have uh-rived. ” His uncle Tommy beat an empty beer can against the curve of the steering wheel, then pitched it outside.

He looked up ahead, craning his neck to see around his father in the front seat. He could see a bridge, with lights strung up along it. And more lights beyond it, the town on the other side. He dropped back in his seat, combing his hair down into place with his fingers.

The lights, when they got across the bridge, were like Christmas lights, strings of little colored bulbs laced over the doorways of the buildings and even across the street, dangling up above, pushing back the night sky. There were other lights, too, the kind you’d see anywhere, blinking arrows that pointed to one thing or another, big yellow squares with the plastic strips for the black letters to stick on, covered in chicken wire to keep people’s hands off.