Charles Bock - Beautiful Children

Nobody was paying the girl a spit of attention and for the first time she was not paying attention to them either, but just sitting, shredding the edge of that flier, being alone with her aloneness. Being alone like her mother.

Wait.

No. Not like that.

See, the girl's mother, she'd come into the girl's bedroom. Two or three times a month. Usually late. Two, three in the a.m. She'd get home from another terrible date. Or maybe after the latest guy had bailed. It would be the tail end of another night at some honky-tonk or when she just could not sleep. The girl's mother would not be able to handle being alone and so she would come into her daughter's bedroom. She would slide in under the covers and wrap her arms around her daughter. Locking her bedroom door when she went to bed seemed cruel to the girl. It seemed wrong. She'd leave the door unlocked and her mother would get into the bed and would form a cocoon around the girl's body. Most of the time the girl pretended to be asleep. If she actually was asleep, then upon her mother's entrance, the girl would wake to a crush of hot breath and whiskey and perfume, and she would hear her mother weeping. She would hear how much her mother hated men. How much her mother hated her own life. The girl would lie there feeling helpless and trapped and also that her mother was kind of pathetic, and although the girl had a tender and unspeakable love for her mother, she felt distant from her mother too. The girl was strong, she was smart, she was never going to end up like her mother, no fucking way.

And this is when Ponyboy ambled to the back.

Ponyboy of the Gibraltar biceps. Ponyboy the beautiful.

He said, “Scootover,” and simple as that, there he was, there they were, scrunched together on the ice cream truck's spare tire.

He was older, she knew this much. Seventeen. Eighteen. Twenty-two, max. A college dropout finding himself. An escapee from the correction facility in Tonopah. There were all kinds of whispers. Whispers about where he slept at night. About hijacking clothes from unattended Laundromat dryers. About hustling games of speed chess and a hot stripper girlfriend, about printing fake IDs, all kindsa shit, serious shit, the kindsa shit Ponyboy didn't really like talking about, although he never did Thing Uno to dissuade the whispering.

Every time the girl had seen Ponyboy, his hair had been a different color, and on Saturday night it was black as fucking death, defying gravity in these totally amazing Vaseline spikes. His broken nose had healed pretty good, and now a new set of silver rings braided his eyebrows. There were so many barbell studs on his face that they were like pimples, and between the studs and braids, the hard ridges of his jaw and features, and the round wooden cork things that weighed down his earlobes, it was like he was bionic or something.

Oh, and that glaze to his eyes, that beautiful layer of animosity. It all but dared the girl: Try, break through.

Purposefully mumbling as if he were some actor from back before color films, he asked, “Wanna lager?”

She had issues with the sexual objectification of women in those beer commercials. Besides, the texture made her mouth-insides feel yucky. But thanks.

“A joint?”

The glowing ember passed across their mutual darkness. The girl told Ponyboy she was going to write a poem about firefly embers. She told him she was just thinking that maybe like the ice cream truck was its own little society. That maybe everyone in here was here because this was the place the fucked-up world wanted them to be.

Ponyboy leaned forward, not so much taking in her words as taking her in. “Interesting.”

He stared down at his combat boots. “Kinda like being on the streets.”

Now straightening, he stared at the girl, his eyes large and tender. “Days are like dog years out there,” he said. “You start living with an eye over your shoulder, you know? Like, you kind of get used to not knowing where you are when you wake up, not having nothing to do with time but get through it.”

He looked down now while he talked and spread his legs wide and the tip of a knee grazed against the girl's. She blushed and Ponyboy smiled, kind of shyly but also with confidence, and he started to open up, tentatively and vulnerably reciting a monologue the girl vaguely remembered hearing before: how he'd bummed and squatted his way from this Covenant House to that detention center to the friend of some relative's friend's pad. “Vegas through Hollyweird by way of Seattle. Stops along the way in Portland, the Tenderloin, and the Orange Curtain Underground.”

He pulled up the bottom of his T, revealing abdomen muscles like a series of steps on a ladder. “That's a tattoo for each city, a piercing for each gig.”

From the beer plank, Pretentious Superior Sellout Green Wool James was doing a terrible job of pretending not to watch her, whatever, fucker. The sound of a flooding engine carried from up front. There was cussing. A door slamming. Someone popping the hood.

Ponyboy finished with the significance of the Gothically styled stallions along his rib cage. His words were more honed now, but genuinely so, coming at a raised pitch, an excited pace. “What I really want”—he grinned, relishing the suspense—“is to shove a triple-A battery through my schnozz.” He waited for the words to register on the girl. “Way I see it, every limp dick has a tatt nowadays. And even the biggest Urkel is pierced. My boy Alkaline did it and Alks told me that alls you need to do is like get your nose pierced. Then you just have to like take the stud out yourself. And then, right before the cartilage and the hole closes up and shit, right then, you have to just like take the little nub on the battery, you know that nub thing on the plus side? Well, what you have to do is jam that little nub thing into the hole in the cartilage, you got to fucking jam that bitch in there right before the hole closes up and then, right after that, you just kind of like push, get the rest of that battery through.”

It was in the middle of the part about making sure the battery acid didn't leak in with your mucous membrane that the girl with the shaved head imagined how Ponyboy would look clean. If all the goop and dye was washed from his hair. She imagined him bathed and scrubbed. Scented with environmentally friendly soaps made by wrongfully imprisoned Tibetan monks.

Jasmine and lavender were turning pirouettes through her head when she kissed him, short and awkwardly, a forced pressing of lips, and the instant she realized what she was doing, the girl broke it up and wanted to laugh and wanted to die.

Ponyboy took a long drag of the spliff. Then he kissed her back. Opening his mouth to her, blowing a stream of sweetness into her. Ponyboy and the girl kept kissing and their kiss was soft and wet, and then it was hot and hard, and then it was over and her panties were moist, the smoke leaking out of her lips, drifting upward.

“Damn, you look sexy,” Ponyboy said.

And damn, she felt sexy.

And so he kissed her again.

Shoved his tongue down her throat. Invaded her tonsils like he had a schedule to keep.

There was lurching, the van suddenly in motion, the pair sprawling onto each other. The truck made a left turn, began accelerating.

“So,” Ponyboy said, once his hands were on the girl's shoulder, and had steadied her. “Why didn't you gimme the digits last time?”

“Oh. My. God.”

“Oh—” Now his right hand was a blur, the scar across his wrist revealing itself as cragged and deep. “Right. What happened was, I was gonna call. Really. I meant to. See these guys at Circus Circus, it was like… What I mean is…Okay, they hired me to do this stag thing with them.”