Alissa Nutting: Tampa

My phone came alive with a text summons from Ford. Gift for you at home! it announced. I suppose he could sense the wane of my pretended attentions now that the job was finally starting; he was so desperate not to get left behind.

“Really nice chatting!” I called to Janet. “Gotta get home, duty calls.” I waited a few seconds for a good-bye to emanate from the blue van, but none came.

I put the convertible’s top down and sat upon the stack of manila folders so they wouldn’t blow away. My peel-out from the parking lot was a bit louder and more theatrical than I’d planned, but so be it; I had to let off a little steam before seeing Ford. I drunkenly careened through the long semicircle drive for student drop-offs and pickups, clipped a curb and a bit of the hedge as I rounded past the entrance lane with its large sign: a digital clock and thermometer served as subtext for a scrolling marquee declaring student vaccination requirements; next to these was a large illustration of a stallion, the school mascot, kicking up on its hind two legs. STALLION POWER! it declared. I revved the engine but it was hard to speed away. My eyes kept returning to my rearview mirror, hoping the figure of Jack Patrick might somehow materialize in the middle of the road. I glanced back several times just to make sure he wasn’t in the distance chasing after my car and flagging me down, inexplicably barefoot with the fly of his jeans unzipped, calling out my first name in a desperate whimper.

That evening Ford sat my present at the dinner table, in its own chair, as though a guest who’d been wearing it while eating had spontaneously disappeared: a bulky bulletproof vest.

“It’s huge,” I said. Ford smiled a grin of goofy pride, assuming I meant this as some sort of masculine compliment.

“Kevlar.” He chewed and the word seemed a judgment on his pork chop’s texture. “Beautiful protection. Armor plated inside. Some little punk comes up to you, puts a gun against your spine and says he’ll kill you if you don’t give him an A? Tell him to pull the trigger until his finger falls off. You won’t even get a bruise.”

“That is peace of mind,” I said. Had my little bump against the desk yesterday made a bruise on my asshole? I sent a finger down beneath the tablecloth to inspect for tenderness. The vest would transform my body into an asexual cylinder and visibly add fifteen pounds. The only way I’d wear that vest in front of the class is if I was otherwise completely naked and accessorized it with riding boots and a leather crop. I began to imagine presenting my bare legs to the male students as I rubbed the flesh beneath my tailbone.

Ford caught my pleased expression and winked at me, masticating with wide, flapping jaws that engaged his entire face. His eyes were glazed over and tinged the slight color of yellow onion; he’d been drinking wine. The thought of his tongue leaving a sour film upon my skin was enough to make me stand and intervene. “Let me freshen that for you,” I said with a smile, grabbing his empty glass. I kept a series of pre-crushed Ambien pills inside emptied tea bags at the back of the pantry where he’d never look. Ford loathed tea; it just wasn’t American.

“Thank you, babe.” He took a long sip that left a purple shadow on his teeth and spoke for a while about guns. “Another big day tomorrow, huh?” he finally conceded. I guided him toward bed, playing zookeeper to his tranquilized bear. His unconsciousness afforded me the luxury of getting to watch a boy-band music video on the bedroom television with my vibrator on its highest setting roaring like a speedboat.

Every one of the young singers’ mouths was open in a wide O of reception as they harmonized. Due to the oily lubricants of puberty’s machinery, their skin looked nearly wet in the stage lighting. It was the boxy flatness of their chests that made my wrist quicken its tempo, the effortless feather of their side-swept bangs that were just slightly too long and in their eyes. To make eye contact with the camera, the teens had to brush their bangs back by running their fingers through their hair during a close-up shot; when they did, various paths of shining forehead were exposed. These glimpses of previously hidden flesh lasted only a second but made my heart quicken just as much as if they’d collectively dropped their pants.

My concentration was momentarily broken when Ford emitted a low-frequency gurgle. The television’s light made him look like a blue corpse, the white film of drool around the corners of his mouth a frosted poison.

The thought of Ford dead didn’t necessarily arouse me, but the idea of pert adolescent males singing around his corpse, removing their colorful jerseys and swinging them above their heads in celebration, as though his death was a victory of sport and a crucial step to their winning a divisional high school championship—there was something greater than comfort in that image. It had the feel of Greek myth. I began to fantasize that the boys on television had been tadpoles who grew in Ford’s stomach until the day they were strong and large enough to rip their way out in a violent mass birth. It was almost enough to make me feel a hypothetical sympathy for Ford. If his body, torn in half, were indeed a spent cocoon that had incubated four lovely young men, I would kiss him on the cheek and mean it. Thank you, Ford . But there wouldn’t be time to linger. These new adolescents, sticky from their residence inside him, would need me to give them a shower shortly after arrival. I’ve always had the suspicion that Ford’s entrails smell like industrial-grade carpet: a low chemical odor that wants to seem new but instead just announces itself as ubiquitous. A smell that says, I am not even a little bit rare. There are enough bolts of me at the warehouse to circle the planet.

My orgasm came in the final verse as the four boys engaged together in a scripted play of contrived spontaneity: wading into the ocean, they began to flirtatiously splash at one another. One boy took a salty handful straight to the face and bared his teeth in mock outrage; he returned the assault with a baptism, pushing the offender backward onto his butt in the water. His other two friends helped him up, each grabbing an arm. His tiny, goose-bumped nipples pushed against his shirt’s drenched fabric. Every inch of him was soaked except his hair. I imagined walking to him, lifting his bangs once again to lick his forehead. It would likely taste like the sweat on his thighs, like the doughy tang inside his shorts after he’d run across the sunny beach for miles.

Jack Patrick. Something in his chin-length blond hair, in the diminutive leanness of his chest, refined for me just what it was about the particular subset of this age group that I found entrancing. He was at the very last link of androgyny that puberty would permit him: undeniably male but not man. I loved the lanky-limbed smoothness, the plasticity of his limbs, the way his frame shunned both fat and muscle. It had not yet been wrestled into a fixed shape.

The youth of Jefferson were definitely noticing me. “There’s lewd graffiti about you on the stalls of the boys’ bathroom,” Janet reported in a bored monotone. “The janitor’s painting over it as we speak but it’ll be up again in no time. Calls you a hot bitch. I don’t think they’ve broken out the p-word yet. But give them a few months.” Janet’s permanently half-open eyes had a way of looking past my face when she spoke; she appeared to be gazing out into the near future and seeing tomorrow’s disappointments.

“Boys will be boys,” I declared, shaking my head in mock disapproval. Public displays of flattery didn’t appeal to me in the least—these students weren’t my target audience. Someone bold enough to deface school property certainly wouldn’t be able to keep any secrets, though he’d be fantastically easy to seduce. The opposite was also true. From student teaching, I’d learned that the very boys who likely wouldn’t kiss and tell were the hardest to kiss in the first place.