Mike followed suit. He ran over to the fire as if he was trying to beat Kyle to the punch and then he pissed on the fire, too. It was disgusting to watch, but still funny.
When he was done, Mike and I slapped each other five, grabbed hold of each other’s arms like we were dancing, and screamed and laughed like maniacs. It was one of the happiest moments of my life, getting rid of Mr. Dick and Physics, once and for all.
But Kyle wasn’t about to let us get away with such originality that night.
“I’d piss on the fire,” he said, “but I don’t have the feeling to go.”
Me and Mike stopped dancing and looked at each other triumphantly. We felt bad for Kyle, because he didn’t have to take a piss. I thought: Finally! Nature has halted Kyle from upstaging me! But just as we were about to settle down, Kyle spoke up again.
“I said I didn’t have to piss,” Kyle announced with a sly grin. And then, just as he finished that sentence, he ran toward the edge of the waning campfire, dropped his pants, yelled out “Shit on you, Mr. Dick!” and blasted a dump on top of the charred Physics pages. The blaze quickly transformed into a pissy, shitty-smelling heap of smoldering wet ash. We thought it smelled bad before, but Kyle’s dump turned it into a toxic wasteland. God, was it awful. A noxious haze filled the air. It was like the agent orange my father described to me—it just clung to air in the cool, quiet night, making our eyes water as though it were a big onion. But we didn’t care, because it had to be one of the funniest things that me and Mike had ever witnessed in our lives. Kyle was a human fire extinguisher for a night.
When he was through, Kyle pulled up his pants without even wiping, and sat down right next to me and Mike.
“Hot shit!” he said. “Almost burned my ass.” We collapsed on the ground, and rolled in the leaves, hysterical.
The next day, we all went down to the ball field to play softball. Mike knew a lot of people up there, because he and his family went to their cabin so often. He introduced to me to about eight or nine people, and one in particular named Stephanie.
Stephanie and I were on the same team, me the pitcher, and her catcher. Like a pro ballplayer, she’d run up to the mound every inning, supposedly to advise me on my next pitch, but in reality to flirt. She wasn’t bad-looking, either. I didn’t really like blondes that much; but she was the prettiest girl there, so she was good enough to flirt with.
As we talked, it became apparent to Mike and Kyle that she was hot for me, so they left us alone. Although I felt guilty at first, I quickly changed my mind and figured there was nothing wrong with a little flirting. And I guess it felt good that she liked me and there was nothing wrong with that. I was so goddamn confident from being with Maria that I was unafraid to pursue her. I knew she would like me, I just knew it. And if I was wrong? Well, big deal, because Maria was waiting for me back in the city.
We played six innings and tied four-four. I hit a grand-slam, but so did Kyle, who was playing for the other team. Kyle and Mike are sharp enough to know when something’s up with me and a girl. As soon as the game ended, they took off. Stephanie and I talked about nothing in particular. We had nothing in common, other than the fact that each thought the other was cute, I guess. Then she started getting a little closer to me on the bench. For a moment, I thought she was going to kiss me first, and then I thought she wanted me to kiss her. I didn’t really want to, though. I just felt good talking to a girl that seemed to like me.
“So, you’re from the city, huh?”
“Yea, Queens, what about you?”
“I’m from Poughkeepsie. Not the city, though. I live in the suburbs of Poughkeepsie,” she said. “It’s like the pit of hell.” She was funny. I grabbed her hand and placed it on my thigh. She didn’t hesitate. In fact, she ran her hand up to my crotch and then smiled like she wanted to kiss me.
Time was in slow motion. On one hand, I just wanted to finish talking to this girl and be on my way. On the other, I figured it would be cool to kiss her, because I rarely kissed two different girls in the same week, and that alone would just make Kyle and Mike flip. And Maria had said she kissed like ten guys. I had to catch up with her. I just had to.
But then, just as I thought she was about to lean in and kiss me—just as I thought I was going to kiss her—Mike’s father pulled up in the car with Mike and Kyle in the back seat.
“We have to go get some firewood,” Mike’s father said.
“Yeah, firewood!” Kyle said, busting my balls.
I looked at Stephanie—half in disgust, half with lust—and told her I had to go. I got into the car and we all went off to get firewood. I never saw her again.
What a close call! I don’t really know what would’ve happened that day with Stephanie. But between the Mr. Dick fire and the firewood thing, my friends and I haven’t stopped talking about that weekend at the cabin to this day.
Chapter 9
Love
As soon as I got home from Mike’s cabin, I called Maria. We talked for almost three hours. We had a lot of catching up to do since I was away all weekend. I told her about Mr. Dick, and the campfire. But of course I never mentioned Stephanie. Maria said that she was beginning to trust me a lot more quickly that she’d expected. She said that she thought about me all of the time. And the cutest part was that she’d spent the weekend while I was away doing laundry and cleaning her house. Apparently, neither of her parents ever did the laundry. Her moth was too busy working, and her father didn’t do shit. Maria said she’d been doing the family laundry since she was seven years old.
She said that she thought about me as she was doing the laundry. That was so damn cute. She had a way of being cute without even trying; it was truly genuine. She also had a way of being sexy without knowing it.
“How often do you wash your bras?” I asked. It was the first time I showed her my horny adolescent side. Rather than get offended or change the subject, she answered in her own special way, like she always did. “As often as they need to be washed,” she said. I loved that.
“Have you ever let a guy touch your breasts?” I asked.
Maria was a bit startled by my bluntness. “Well,” she said, “I’ve just never felt comfortable going that far.”
I continued to press the subject, partly because it was turning me on, but mostly because I would never touch a girl’s breasts without finding out how she felt about it first. She admitted that she’d thought about letting me get to “second base,” as she put it, when she was hanging her bras out to dry. We’d accomplished “first base” in Central Park on our last date. “Second base,” as every teenager knew, was feeling a chick up—or, if you were a chick, getting felt up. “Third base” meant putting you hands down a girl’s pants, or maybe even eating her out, or, if you were a guy, getting a blowjob. And a “home run” was, well, a home run. I’d just turned seventeen and, coincidentally, Maria had just turned sixteen, so neither of us felt like Babe Ruth. But we both wanted to begin rounding the bases. At least, I did.
Like I said, Maria had a unique way of being cute about stuff like that. Gentlemanly, I told her that we’d go to second whenever she was ready. “I might be ready sooner than I thought,” she said. That was all I needed to hear. My plan was simple: I was going to head for second the next time I saw Maria.