“Yeah. He would’ve been better off there. He belongs there, really.”
Jay’s reasoning wasn’t quite my reasoning, but if we wound up at the same conclusion, the route didn’t seem to matter much.
Jay and I pedaled down the road with the wagon tied to Jay’s bike. He wobbled a little bit at first—I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen him ride—but soon he righted himself and was fine, though he had a gawky, bandy-kneed way of coasting. We passed the house, field, field, house, field, field, field that was the makeup of Jay’s neighborhood. You could tell which fields had been recently tilled from the vultures suspended above them; the birds were searching for the littered bodies of mice and rabbits. When we reached the house, the free doors were still there.
“They’re really just giving these away?” I asked. The pressed wood looked real enough, and they had little glass windows across their tops.
“Yeah, come on, Bennet, lend a hand.” Jay was strapping the doors down tight on the little red wagon.
“These doors already have windows in them, so maybe we won’t need to cut out holes for windows, too. That shit takes a long time. Doors and windows in one!”
“Works for me,” Jay said.
The ride back to New Veronia was slow, with Jay and me switching off turns pedaling the bike hauling the door-stacked wagon. Cars kept honking at us because Jay had tied the doors on long-ways, so they stuck out pretty far into the lane, and at one point, we had a line of maybe seven cars inching along behind us.
“Impatient fuckers!” Jay would yell at a car when it whizzed by too close to our doors.
Back at New Veronia, we found Toshi sitting against a tree. “You’re not even working,” I said. “What good are you?”
“I’ve been waiting here all morning.” Toshi stood up, but his foot must have fallen asleep, because he sort of lurched on it. “I’ve been doing stuff, I cut a window hole, but then this bug bit me. It hurts a lot.” He held out a finger, but I didn’t see any bug bite. “Where have you been? I mean, what have you been doing?”
“A window hole?” I said, and Jay echoed me. I saw where Toshi had done it: in just one of the walls, thank god.
Jay said, “We’ve nixed the windows. No more windows. That wall with the hole in it can be yours. Sure, you can have a hole to let the cold in and invite everyone spying on you.”
“What do you mean, we’re not doing windows? They were part of the plan.”
“We got these doors.” Jay slapped a palm against them. “Windows right here in the doors, and high enough up no one can see what’s going on inside the room. Privacy, right— that’s what we need. Plus, windows are a weakness—a spot where the bears could get in.”
We worked in a huffy silence until just after noon, when Jay said he had to go do something with his parents, so I started for home. Toshi stayed behind in New Veronia. I worried that he was mad at me before I remembered that, even if he was, I shouldn’t care: I was above him in the hierarchy, the one who belonged at Jay’s side.
When I passed the front of Jay’s house, I found Stella sunbathing in a purple bikini. Her eyes were closed, and I got off my bike and stood there for about five minutes, arguing with myself, before I threw my shoulders back and walked up to her.
“Nice day out,” I said. “Summer, I mean.” I worked to make my voice buzz against my throat, which edited it down to a nice baritone.
She slowly opened her eyes and turned her head towards me. “Sure.” She picked up the book that was tented over her stomach.
Her hair was loose—it was rarely loose—and the sunlight made it glitter. I wanted to ask her to sit on my lap, but of course I couldn’t. Since she had entered high school, or before that, even, when everything between girls and boys had started to become sexual, we hadn’t really talked to each other, but I thought about her so often it was like we were married. I felt tied to her by my soul, a connection that I knew was real because of the mini heart attack I suffered each time I saw her, and the fact that, despite my pain, I always seemed more alive afterward. “What are you reading?”
“Handmaid’s Tale.” Her eyebrows lowered beneath her dark glasses.
“I haven’t read that one. Sounds killer.” Standing above her made me feel awkward, but I also had a great vantage of her boobs and stomach and legs.
“It’s about how men ruin women,” she said.
“Okay.” I’d been thinking about her body too much; I was afraid she might notice. “Well, I better get going. Hey, you’re signed up for AP history, right?” I’d worked hard and petitioned the school to be allowed into this class because I knew that Stella would be taking it.
“Yeah.” She raised her book up above the level of her eyes.
After breaking ground on New Veronia, I don’t know how much the others were masturbating, by my rate doubled. I’d read about the sperm building up inside you, how some native tribes used to use that excess of swimmers battling within your body to increase your warfighting power, but letting it all out seemed to make me more productive. If I didn’t jerk off, all I could think about was jerking off, but if I just beat it, then I could focus on something else until the urge overtook me again. Because my father was home even less than usual, I had plenty of time and privacy to pursue this preoccupation.
That triangle of purple fabric stretched above Stella’s thighs became an immediate new obsession: I would visualize it until it began to expand and contract and change from purple to blue to gold. That bottom half of bikini was like one of those 3D posters that morphed into something amazing after you stared at it for a while.
Over the next several weeks, Jay and Toshi and I worked tirelessly on New Veronia. It was like we all three got tunnel vision: we patched up gaps in the floors and the walls, we pieced them all together into a pyramid and then nailed all the pieces to each other and the central tree post, we draped tarps over the roof. Toshi brought over some sealant that his dad had used to waterproof someone’s gazebo, and we went over the outside of our structure. We hung the doors. Toshi covered up the window cutout on his side with plywood. I was amazed at how nice the whole thing looked, and it held together pretty well, too. Sure, there were a fair amount of gaps, and doors that didn’t shut well, and places that squeaked when you stepped on them, and nails poking out at odd angles, and you could stub a toe on a floorboard if you weren’t careful, but overall, I didn’t fear that the whole thing would tumble down around me in a big gust of wind.
On the morning that we were supposed to build the outhouse, Jay didn’t show, so we decided to look for him at his house. Maybe he’d slept in.
Toshi and I walked through the front door without knocking—Jay’s parents would be at work, and I always hoped that maybe Stella would be lounging in her underwear and I’d surprise her—only what we found was a weird séance: the whole family was seated around the coffee table, Jay’s mom and dad on the couch, sitting close together as if for warmth, with Jay and Stella cross-legged on the floor opposite them.
Jay’s mom looked stoic, except for her hands: they were smoothing over each other, pulling at fingers, twitching as if jerked by some force not a part of her body. A bunch of stuff was stacked up on the coffee table, albums and loose pictures, and there was a pile of what looked and smelled like homemade muffins, though I’d never seen that kind of food before in Jay’s house.
“Sorry,” I said automatically as the whole family looked up at our intrusion.