“That’s right. My friends are all watching this stupid movie. You want to play spades? I’ll crush you in spades.”
“Muqtada,” I say. He’s still looking up at me, hands on his armrests, ready to spring. “Remember when you saved me from that girl?”
“Yes.”
“I’m trying to do the same thing for you now, to get you out of your room and save you. Please. Play with Armelio.”
He looks at me, then at the speakers.
“This I do for you, Craig. But only for you. And only because of music.”
“Great.” I pat his back. “Go easy on him, Armelio.”
“You know that’s not going to happen, buddy!”
I smile and walk down the hall, waving at them. As soon as I get to the corner, I run—I don’t have much time—but skid to a leisurely pace by Smitty and then, moving as slowly and calmly as I can, enter my room. Noelle picked up on what was happening: she’s already there, sitting on my bed, looking out the window.
“You’re very crafty,” she whispers. I shrug. “Come and sit. It’s a pretty view through your blinds.”
forty-nine
I sit down next to Noelle and it starts off right away, like it was destined to—though I don’t believe in destiny; I just believe in biology, and hotness, and wanting girls. There’s been so much hesitation in so many parts of my life that it’s shocking to not have any here, to just lean in and have this girl’s mouth open to mine, to be easing her down and touching her face and feeling the cuts there but understanding, not getting freaked out, just moving my hands down to her neck, which is clean and smooth, and her hitting my pillow and me next to her with my legs off the bed, still on the floor like I was sitting in class, like my lower half had no part in this. K-I-S-S-I-N-G.
“You’re beautiful,” I stop and tell her.
“Shh, they’ll hear.”
She has her hand in my hair and that reminds me that my hands should be doing something—right now they’re just sort of touching her neck while I try and figure out what it is about her that’s so much more sexy than Nia. It’s her tongue, I think—it’s a whole different creature than Nia’s. Nia’s was small and flighty; Noelle’s is overwhelming—she slides it in and it almost fills me up. It’s like some deep dark part of her that I’ve gotten out, that no one else has access to. She presses it through my teeth and I keep my eyes open, although there’s nothing in the room but scattered moonlight to see her by. We press against each other as if we both had prizes at the back of our mouths and we could only get them out with the tips of our tongues.
It frickin’ rocks.
I put my hands on her white top and she doesn’t stop me, not at all, and there they are, right through the soft fabric—one on each side, that is so cool—my palms envelop them and then rise from them and then envelop again. I’m not really sure what to do with them. They’re bigger than Nia’s; they fill up my hands. Should I squeeze them? I try that. I look up. She’s nodding. I squeeze them again, the whole things, both at once, and move my mouth down her chin to her neck, kissing the underside of it where an Adam’s apple would be, only this is a real girl.
She moves her hips against me. Not her hips, her crotch—I mean, that is a crotch, right? Girls have crotches? Or do they have like a prettier name for them? Wow, how far is this going to go? She presses it—whatever it is—against my thigh. My feet have levitated somehow and now I’m horizontal on the bed next to her, with my hands squeezing her and my shoes—my Rockport shoes—clanking against each other.
She says nothing. Everything is touching.
“Do you want me to?” I ask.
She nods. Or maybe shakes her head. I don’t know. But I take two fingers of my right hand and put them through the soft seam in her top. Underneath is a bra, I’m pretty sure—something made of mesh that wraps around her. I twiddle my finger against it, not sure if she can feel it. Can you feel things through a bra?
She makes noises like someone about to sneeze. When I squeeze her breasts, she makes more; when I twiddle the side of the bra, she doesn’t make any. So I put my fingers in all the way through her shirt and feel up the dome of the bra—the highest point on her. An inch and a half above sea level.
“Hold on.” Noelle lifts her butt off the bed and inserts her hands, flat, palms-down, below herself. Now she’s got no hands. She wasn’t doing anything with them anyway, but it’s weird.
“Keep going,” she says.
“Okay,” I slide my fingers, still outside her bra, around her nipple. I decide to try something. I get the nipple right between the knuckles on my index and middle finger, and I squeeze.
You can’t get much of a squeeze on through a bra, but the noises are immediate.
“Unhh.”
“Um?” I look up.
“Mmmmmmn.”
Oh, this is awesome.
“Shh,” I whisper. “Smitty will come.”
“How much time do we have?” she asks.
“I don’t know. A little while.”
“You’re going to call me, right? When you’re out? And we’re going to hang out?”
“I want to go out with you,” I say. “I really do.”
“That’s what I mean. We will.” She smiles. “Where will I tell people I met you?”
“In the psych hospital. Then they won’t ask any questions.”
She giggles—yup, a real giggle. Now we’ve sort of lost the sexual nature of things. Can I get it back just by squeezing? It’s worth a shot.
“Mmmmmm.”
All right, cool, only now there’s one more voice that wants me to do one more thing. It’s the same voice that got me hooking up with Nia; it’s the voice of the lower half of me, but it feels truer now, and it knows it can’t get away with everything it wants to do, but it insists that we try something.
We need to test out that claim of Aaron’s.
My hand moves down Noelle’s body, down the seam of the frilly white shirt to the skirt, which has a slightly different grain to the fabric. I move down to its end, by her knees, shocked that I don’t get any resistance or hesitancy or punches in the face. I roll the skirt up—I’m really in danger of putting a hole through this bed at this point—and there I find underwear. Not underwear. Panties. Real panties!
Holy crap, I’m actually going to figure this out!
“Wow!”
Noelle gasps.
“It is like the inside of a cheek!”
“What?”
Noelle pushes me off her. The distended seam of the shirt is repositioned; the panties are jerked back in place; the skirt is down and the girl is up at the head of the bed, staring at me.
“What did you say about my cheeks?!”
“No, no, shhhhh,” I tell her. “Not your cheeks, um . . . your . . . your other cheeks.”
“My butt cheeks?” She pulls her hair over her real cheeks, holding it there, eyes wide and angry in the moonlight.
“No,” I whisper. Then sigh. “Let me explain. Do you want me to explain?”
“Yes!”
“All right, but this is like privileged boy information. I’m only telling you because we’re going to be hanging out when we get out of here.”
“Maybe we’re not even. What did you say about my cheeks?”
“No, listen, it doesn’t have anything to do with your cheeks and your cuts, all right?”
“What does it have to do with?”
I tell her.
When I’m done, there’s a terrible pregnant pause, a pause that could hold all the hatred and yelling and screaming in the world as well as the possibility of me getting discovered as having another girl in my room (how did I get two? Am I a “player”?) and having to stay here for another week, never talking to Noelle again, going back to the Cycling, to being unable to eat, to move, to wake up, ending up like Muqtada. Single moments contain the potential for complete failure, always. But they also contain potential for a pretty girl to say—