"Shut up!" Kevin warned.
Paul suddenly stood up, pounding on the window with both his fists. In the quiet night air, the sound was explosive. "Suck me, Father Ralph!"
he yelled at the top of his lungs.
The rest of them scattered, taking refuge in the dark safety of the trees.
Dion ducked behind a bush next to Kevin. He saw the curtains open, saw the priest's expression of shock as he saw the clay cock. A moment later, the front door flew open. "I'll get you punks!" the minister yelled. In his hand was a baseball bat, which he waved threateningly in the air.
"Suck me, Father Ralph!" Paul called from behind a bush, The rest of them took up the cry:
"Suck me, Father Ralph!"
"Suck me, Father Ralph!"
"Suck me, Father Ralph!"
Dion laughed. "Suck me, Father Ralph!" he cried.
The priest ran toward the nearest bush, toward the sound of Paul's voice.
"Haul ass!" Kevin yelled, and the bushes rattled as all five of them scurried back the way they'd come, heading for the cars.
"I'm calling the cops!" the priest yelled after them.
Dion was still laughing, his heart pounding, blood pumping with adrenaline, as they broke onto the street. "This is great!" he said.
Kevin laughed with him. 'Told you."
"Take off!" Paul ordered, rushing to his car. "Follow me!"
"Let's go!" Kevin said.
Dion jumped in the passenger seat. He could not remember when he'd had this much fun. This was the kind of thing that happened in films, not in real life. Certainly not in his life.
The two cars took off in twin squeals of burnt tire.
The lights inside were off when Dion returned home, though his mom's car was parked in the driveway.
Parked in back of it was a red Corvette.
Dion glanced quickly back at Kevin's disappearing taillights, but it was too late to flag him down. He turned back around. It was nothing, he told himself. She had just invited a new friend over for some innocent talk, that was all.
But if that was all, why were all the lights off?
He stepped quietly over the gravel of the front walk, tiptoeing, until he reached the front door. It was locked, but he had a key. He pulled out his wallet, removed the key from its hiding place behind the bills, and opened the door.
He could hear his mom in the bedroom.
She was not alone.
He stood there, unmoving. That was it, then. She was starting again. All that cock and bull she'd given him about turning over a new leaf had been just so much hot air. She hadn't meant a single goddamn word of it.
So where did that leave them now?
How long was it going to be before she screwed things up here and got fired from this job?
He crept carefully across the wooden floor to his bedroom, moving silently, a trick he had perfected long ago. He could smell the pungent odor of whiskey in the still hall air. He wished he was one of those people who just didn't care, who could roll with the flow and accept things the way they were. But he was not one of those people; he could not do that.
He closed the door to his room, took off his clothes, and got into bed.
The loud drunken conversation which had greeted him when he'd first come into the house had now degenerated into something else. He could hear the loud squeak of bedsprings through the thin wall, accompanied by short, high, breathless cries. His mother would start her litany soon:
"Oh, God, you're good!... You're so good! ... Yes! ... Yes! ... Oh, God!
... You're so big!... Oh, God, you're big! ... Oh, God!" He knew it by heart. It never changed. She never used names, and he'd wondered more than once if that was because she did not know the names of the men she brought home.
He pulled the blanket over his head and plugged his ears, trying to block out the sound, but her cries were getting louder. Did she enjoy this? he wondered. Did she mean any of the crudely flattering things she said, or was it all simply an act? He had never been sure.
He closed his eyes, trying to focus his attention on the earlier events of the night rather than on the show in the next room, but it was impossible to do so.
He hated his mom right now.
It was said that teenagers rebelled against their parents, consciously rejecting their parents' value systems in an effort to forge their own identities. That sounded good in psych class, but he certainly didn't feel as though he was rebelling against anything. He had no doubt, however, that his social awkwardness stemmed from, or was a reaction to, his mother's "overly permissive" lifestyle.
Maybe that was why he'd never had sex.
It was not something which he would ever admit to in public, not something he would share with Kevin, but it was true. He rationalized it to himself, told himself it was better to wait until he had found the right person, but that was just an excuse and he knew it. It sounded good to have such high moral principles, and it did make him feel a little better about himself, as though he was making a conscious decision to do the right thing, but the truth was that he was just like anyone else. He would have jumped at the chance for sex if it had been offered.
Only it had never been offered.
Then again, maybe he wouldn't have jumped at the chance. People always seemed to assume that the children of so-called "liberated" parents had an easier time of it, were more comfortable with their own sexuality, but he knew from experience that this was not the case. If anything, knowing about his mother's love life in such detail tainted the sex act for him, made it seem distasteful and repulsive instead of exciting and desirable. He was also privy to his mother's morning-after comments and could contrast what she moaned in bed and what she said afterward.
And that scared the hell out of him.
"You're so good!" she cried from the other room. "You're so big!"
He plugged his ears more tightly.
He fell asleep still plugging his ears.
Dion awoke in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and stumbled out of bed into the hall.
Where he ran into his mom's "guest."
He jumped back, startled. "Sorry," the man said sleepily, grabbing Dion's shoulders. "Didn't see you." He was good-looking--weren't they all?--and was tall and muscular, with thick black curly hair and a mustache. He was completely naked.
Dion watched him pad into his mother's bedroom and close the door.
In the morning he was gone, and when Dion woke up and went into the kitchen for breakfast, his mom was already there, reading her paper and drinking coffee. She looked up when he entered, pretending as though nothing was wrong, as though nothing had happened. "What time did you get home last night?" she asked brightly.
"About eleven," he said. He walked over to the counter, took two pieces of bread from \ the unwrapped loaf, and dropped them into the toaster, pressing the handle down.
"Did you have fun?" she asked. Did you? he wanted to say, but he simply nodded. He took the butter out of the refrigerator. "I had a hard time sleeping, though," he said pointedly. His mom seemed not to notice the inference behind the words, and he poured himself a glass of orange juice.
She was being nice to him today, all traces of last week's hostility gone, but somehow that made him feel even worse. He thought of what a friend of his back in Mesa always used to say about the girls who treated him like dirt, that all they needed was "a good fucking."
His toast popped up, and he buttered it and sat down across from his mom at the table. She smiled at him. "What do you want to do today?"
"I don't know," he mumbled.
She folded the entertainment section of the paper and picked up the front page. "We'll find something."
He nodded, chewing slowly. He watched her as she read. His gaze focused on a small red stain on the right sleeve of her nightgown.