Frank Portman - King Dork

“You mean seamster,” I said.

She paused, and said, as though talking to herself, “Mmm, that’s interesting.” Then she stared at me. The candlelight made her glasses glisten when she moved her head. At times 70

they looked almost like they were made of liquid. I suddenly noticed that she looked a little sad, or so it seemed to me, but maybe she was just stoned and sleepy. Maybe I was just imagining the sadness for my own purposes—I always think girls are prettier when they’re crying.

Now, Hillmont is known as Hellmont, or less commonly as Swillmont. And most of the people at the party went to CHS, so I’d have guessed they probably lived either in Clearview or Clearview Heights. Queerview. So that’s why Fiona said, “How are things in Hellmont?” And that’s why I said, in response, “Diabolical.”

She seemed to spring to life. A bit. I mean, she acted as though she thought that was pretty funny. I was sitting there in silence trying to decide whether she was being sarcastic or not. Well, she was at least a little stoned. But I gotta say, her giggling like that in response to my powerful vocabulary, THC-enhanced and sarcastic or not, was pretty fucking charming.

She was hitting my arm. I guess she had said something while I had been in my own world trying to psychoanalyze her, mesmerized by her belly, which her T-shirt had been designed to reveal, but maybe not quite as much as was being revealed now that she was all stretched out on the couch, and which I couldn’t stop staring at. I mean, it was almost physically impossible to pry my eyes away from it. I did, though, which made a ripping sound, like Velcro.

I went: “?”

“Getting a good look, hand-jive?”

I drew back, mortified. But she was just kidding around, still laughing and hitting my arm.

“Slut heaven,” she said. “Do slut heaven.”

Now I was really confused. I think I may have said,

“Um . . . ,” and half smiled so it would look like I knew what 71

was going on while I tried to figure out what was going on.

She grabbed my head on either side, put her face very close to mine, and said, slowly and deliberately, the way you talk to a retarded person or an ESL student:

“How. Are. Things. In. Slut. Heaven?”

It took me a beat, but I realized: she must be from Salthaven, or possibly Salthaven Vista, not Clearview Heights. Duh. I’d never heard that name for Salthaven, but it was a pretty good one, and this time my half-smile was at least semigenuine.

But she was still nudging me.

“Slut heaven, going once, going twice . . .”

“Um, concupiscent?” I said.

See, I was a little slow, but I guess we had established the foundations of a game where she asked how things were in a town, and I responded with the appropriate word from 30 Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary. She shrieked and clapped her hands theatrically and gave me this admiring sort of smile that I had never, ever seen anyone direct my way before. I swear to God, she did, and it didn’t even seem very sarcastic.

The beauty of this moment was slightly tarnished by the fact that in the back of my mind I was thinking of Mr.

Schtuppe and how he might mispronounce “concupiscent.” In fact, I’m not totally sure I didn’t mispronounce it. But I’ve got to say that I hadn’t previously grasped the true benefits of making words your slaves. Fiona was an unusual girl, though, not like any of the Hillmont High girls I’d observed. For one thing, what might cause an ordinary person to recoil, or at best make a mental note never to play Scrabble with you, seemed to make her horny. Well, that and all the beer and marijuana. I hadn’t realized I had one, but this was my kind of woman.

72

So now we come to the weirdest part. I swear to God this is exactly what happened.

Fiona grabbed my wrist and moved my hand over to her belly so that my palm was on her stomach just to the right of her belly button and my fingers draped over her hip. I want to say I almost felt a physical electric-y shock from the feeling of her bare skin. It was so surprising. I knew I was supposed to kiss her, but I wasn’t sure how to go about it exactly.

She scrunched up to me like she was trying to smell my shoulder and I leaned down and we started to rub our faces on each other in the general mouth area. She made this quiet “mmm” sound and started pushing her tongue all the way in my mouth and sort of swirling it in a circle.

Counterclockwise. I started to do that, too, after a fashion, but I knew she could tell I didn’t know what I was doing. I was in a clumsy, mentally deficient daze. I started to slide the tips of my fingers downwards just underneath the waistband of her jeans, so it was jeans-fingertips-underwear-skin with one fingertip poking slightly underneath the underwear layer, but she squirmed and said, all mumbly because she had her mouth full: “Uh, no, mmm, baby . . .” Uh-oh, I thought, I blew it, I wasn’t supposed to do that yet or at all and the whole make-out scene was officially over, but then she said in a kind of whispery voice, “My tits, my tits.” I started to move my hand up the other way and reached her left breast underneath her shirt. I had never touched a breast before. She seemed to shiver a little when I touched it. Somehow, I don’t know how, I knew that she wanted me to start pinching her nipple, and then, when I had started squeezing it and rolling it between my thumb and forefinger and she started saying

“mmm” again and breathing a little laboriously I knew that she wanted me to squeeze it a whole lot harder. I was really digging into it with my nails, and twisting it back and forth 73

while still keeping up with the tongue rotation thing as best I could. Her breathing sounded more like wheezing than breathing. I don’t know about the Frenching, but somehow I knew that I was doing the nipple thing right, how she wanted me to be doing it. Though it must have kind of hurt. Then suddenly her head fell back and she leaned away from me.

“I’m sorry,” she said in a whisper. She was still breathing a bit strangely and she didn’t look sorry. She looked—how?

Conspiratorial? “Look, I can’t do anything with you because my boyfriend’s friends are all here. In fact, we really shouldn’t be sitting here like this.”

I didn’t know what I should say.

She suddenly leaned in and bit me on the neck right above the shoulder, and hopped off the couch and zoomed out. I didn’t know what to do.

Eventually I got up and went upstairs and back into the hallway. I scanned the clumps of drama mods, but I didn’t expect her to be there. She had clearly intended to flee the scene of the crime and was already gone. As I walked through the house tunneling through the little clusters of drunk and stoned kids and to the front door and down the walk and into the street and on my way home, I was really glad I had my army coat, which is long enough to cover up the front of my pants.

Otherwise, I might never have made it out of there.

SON, YOU GOT A BAD APTITU DE

Now, I’ve been avoiding this part, because I find the whole thing a little embarrassing, but I figure I might as well get it over with. I mean the Chi-Mo story.

Back in seventh grade they gave everyone this multiple-74

choice test to determine what you were supposed to be when you grow up. The way it worked was, certain combinations of multiple-choice answers would point to, say, Medicine, meaning you should try to be a doctor. Or you would get Law, meaning you were going to be a lawyer. There was Business, and The Arts, and both kinds of Technology, Food and Computer. Some kids got Athletics, even though it seems like the wrong type of test to determine something like that, and quite a few got one called Counseling and Social Work. Which sounds like wishful thinking on the part of the counselors and social workers who designed the test, but never mind.