Emma Straub - Modern Lovers

“I know, that’s why I invited you,” Ruby said. “That and the fact that I wanted to make out with you in public in front of ten thousand strangers.”

“I accept,” Harry said, but before he could say more, Ruby’s tongue was pressing against his lips and her hands were on his face. The Aeroplanes walked out onto the stage, and everyone in the crowd screamed, and Harry felt the entire wall of sound inside his body. For the rest of his life, no matter where he was or what he was doing, hearing the first few chords of that one song would bring him back to Ruby’s tongue and to feeling like the luckiest boy in Brooklyn.

The band played. All the people around them stood up and swayed or bopped around in their seats, and when they felt like participating, so did Harry and Ruby. Harry found that Ruby would just make fun of the people around them and/or the band if he wasn’t kissing her, and so he felt like it was his civic duty to do that as much as possible. About halfway through the show, the singer in the band, a tall, scrawny-looking guy with greasy black hair that hung down to his ears, said, “This next song isn’t one of ours, but I think you’ll know the words anyway,” and then the guitar player launched into the opening lick of “Mistress of Myself.” Ruby and Harry pulled away from each other and started laughing. The entire crowd — thousands upon thousands of people — sang along.

“This is so weird!” Harry said, shouting over the noise of the crowd.

“I know,” Ruby said. She bobbed her head and mouthed the words. “I think the singer has a crush on Zoe.”

Harry shrugged. A lot of people did. It was sort of a joke in their family, Zoe’s sex appeal. When Harry was young, before he understood about lesbians, he’d once asked his father if he’d ever had an affair with Zoe. She was so beautiful, and she was always around. Maybe it was like bumper cars, being a grown-up, just crashing into whoever was closest. He didn’t know. Andrew had laughed, and Harry had felt instantly ashamed, having clearly misunderstood something important.

The singer writhed around, bending in half and jerking back up. It was like watching someone be electrocuted over and over again. Ruby threw her hands in the air and danced. “Don’t tell my mum,” she said, bouncing up and down.

Harry shook his head. “Not in a million years.” They didn’t kiss or even touch again until the song was over, because otherwise it would have felt like their parents were watching them, like the song was a radio transmitter and something in both of their houses would start beeping and show their parents what they were doing. Like incest, almost. It wasn’t like that — sure, they’d grown up in tandem, Harry in his house and Ruby in hers, on the same block, and sure, there were those old photos of them standing naked together, but that was before life was real, before Harry could actually remember. What Harry could remember was feeling nervous when Ruby walked by, and her not paying attention to him once they were in middle school. Their families didn’t all hang out like they used to, in and out of each other’s houses. Everyone was too busy now. That was when they were someone else, some babies who looked like them. They weren’t kids anymore, they were actual people. Harry worried that his parents would never notice that he’d stopped leaving his dirty underwear on the floor, or that he’d started eating avocados. Almost everything about him had changed, or was changing, and they had no idea. Harry had watched porn, he’d smoked weed, he’d jerked off a thousand times. In their house! Sometimes he felt like he could build a robot out of old pictures of himself and his parents would never know the difference.

All Harry wanted was to have sex with Ruby, preferably all day long, for at least a week. They’d gotten close — or at least he thought so. In the house, she’d given him a blow job, his first, and since then it had been mostly hands-over-the-pants-type stuff, which was obviously a huge improvement from staring at her surreptitiously down the hallway at school, but after her actual mouth had been (he could hardly believe it) on his actual dick, there was no going back. Ruby had invited him to her house, but Zoe was always around, and she didn’t seem to knock, and Harry wasn’t ready for his very first coitus to be interruptus, too. His mom had more open houses coming up. Or it didn’t have to be like in some high-school movie, the deed taking place underneath a fluffy pink duvet, the guy all cautious and serious and asking “Is this okay? Is this okay?” every two seconds. It could be anywhere. Even just being around Ruby made him feel braver than he’d been before — like with Dust, at graduation. Harry had never dreamed of hitting anyone before, ever — but it was for Ruby, and so he could do it. He could do this, too.

“Let’s go,” Harry whispered in Ruby’s ear.

“What?” she asked, still dancing. He put out his hand, and she took it, and this time he was the one leading her through the crowd.

The arena was enormous, and the Aeroplanes had been on for only an hour, so when they made it out into the halls, it was mostly empty except for vendors selling beer and T-shirt stands.

“This is your new thing, huh, like, International Man of Mystery?” Ruby said.

Harry looked around until he saw the exit. “Maybe it is,” he said.

“Maybe I like it,” Ruby said.

There was a playground tucked just underneath the bottom of the park. Ruby had always preferred it to the tiny one on Cortelyou, because the one in the park was big enough to get lost in. Someone’s parent was always wandering through, calling a kid’s name. Ruby and Harry opened the little metal gate and hurried inside. Unlike the rest of the park, which was “open” until midnight, playgrounds were technically closed after dark, but that still didn’t mean they were actually locked. There was a row of swings running along the right-hand side, closer to the street, and then there were big fiberglass cutouts of animals on a squishy floor, soft enough that little kids could fall and not actually hurt themselves. The playground was empty, except for the two of them.

Harry walked around a large purple elephant, running his hand along the elephant’s back. “Would you do that to my hair?” Harry said, without looking up.

“You want to look like a disco goddess?”

Harry ruffled his hair and fluttered his eyelashes. “Yeah. And maybe cut it shorter?” He pulled up a curl, stretching it out straight from the top of his head.

“I’ll cut it, I’ll bleach it, whatever you want. Full service.” Ruby walked around to Harry. They’d probably played together, right here. She just hadn’t seen him recently. She’d seen him, sure, on the block and at school, but that was just his familiar face, like his father and mother shrunk down in some sort of machine. The machine of procreation. They were robots, all of them, built with eggs and sperms and covered in goo. Ruby had seen the photos of herself coming out of Zoe’s vag — some friend of her moms who’d been in the room for that exact purpose, to snap pictures of Zoe’s vagina and Ruby’s hairy little head and all the blood and the goop and the whatever. And then there you were, this tiny person, a doll that would grow and grow and grow until you were standing in a playground at ten o’clock on a Wednesday in the middle of the summer and you were about to slide your undies off and kick them to your old friend, your new boyfriend, whatever he was.

Cars drove past, but Harry and Ruby didn’t once stop looking at each other. Harry held her underwear in his hand, his fingers loose around the cotton. Ruby walked up to him, waiting until their lips were touching, and then she pushed him lightly backward until they were both lying on the ground. She reached down for his zipper and took him out of his pants.