Jay’s mom had red eyes, and she quickly began to scoop all the pictures into a cardboard box.
“It’s okay,” Stella said. “We were done anyway.” She flounced away towards the stairs and my heart, trembling, followed her.
Without Stella, the room grew spooky and quiet, and I wanted to leave, but since Jay was still sitting on the floor, staring into his lap, that seemed ruder than just awkwardly waiting around.
“Remember what we talked about, son,” Jay’s father said to him, and I was struck by the kindness in his tone, the civility of the sentence. My dad had never spoken to me that way. “Hunting is a way of life. Could be a model for life, too. In the crosshairs. On the wrong track. All those things mean something in hunting, and they mean something in life.” Jay’s dad watched as Jay’s mom carried the albums out of the room. “The kill matters. You come home empty-handed, you got nothing to show. The kill matters; it’s our way of life.”
Jay nodded, his expression flat and determined.
Finally Jay’s dad stood up. He hadn’t looked at us the whole time, which felt like a brush-off. He said, “You demand respect for yourself, son, is the only way you’ll get it.”
After Jay’s parents had left (for work, I assumed) our threesome made the way to New Veronia.
Toshi walked right beside Jay, kind of leaving me behind, and I heard him say, “I forgot today was his birthday. Are you going to be okay?”
“Fuck off,” Jay said loudly. “I don’t care about that shit. We just did it for my mom.”
Toshi kicked a rock that skittered through the underbrush like something alive. I hated it when I was left out this way, and I wanted to ask them what they were talking about, but I knew from the affront of their backs that they weren’t ready to tell me.
When we reached New Veronia, I said, “It’s impressive. “I mean, if you were a girl, wouldn’t you be impressed?”
Each of the three walls was maybe ten feet long, and they sloped up sharply against the tree. The varnished wood shone in the sunlight, and the blue tarps looked sort of like the topping on a cake.
“Yeah,” Toshi said, “it’s lopsided, but my town looks pretty good.”
“Your town?” Jay sneered. “This is my town.” Jay’s tone reminded me how he’d talked about cutting off Toshi from our friend group—maybe he’d get mad enough to really do it. A sort of dreadful excitement fingered my guts.
“It belongs to all of us,” Toshi said. “We all thought up parts of it.”
“What are you, a commie?” Jay pushed Tosh in the chest and he stumbled back slightly. “It was my idea.”
I started to cut in to confirm that Jay had the idea first, but then I thought better of it: I didn’t want Jay to notice me, to turn his anger my way.
“Everyone is always trying to steal everything from me,” Jay said. “Like they don’t think I’m good enough to have it. But you’re not taking this, Knees; no fucking way.” Jay stepped close to Toshi and grabbed his arm, the one that was supposed to be broken, with both hands. When Toshi tried to wrench away, Jay held tighter, his grip draining Toshi’s skin to white. “Check out this pussy,” Jay said to me.
If I agreed, it would put me firmly on Jay’s side, the two of us against an enemy, but it also might pump up Jay enough to start beating on Tosh.
“There’s enough wood,” I said loudly and gestured at the pile of it. My tactic: distraction. “We have leftovers. For a privacy screen around the toilet. That will be important. Right?”
Jay looked at me, his eyes still hard and angry, but then he nodded and his face softened. Sometimes he could do that, just let go, but other times he would grab on and shake like a pit bull with a Chihuahua.
Himself again, Jay walked over to the extra wood and started lining it up. “The girls probably won’t even want us to know that they go to the bathroom,” Jay said. “We can make a real big privacy screen. It’s hilarious, right, because they have three holes down there”—he circled a hand around his groin—“and I plan to fuck in all of them.”
“Three holes?” Toshi said. He was going to drop it, too, but then, he always did.
“Butthole. Piss hole. Coochie hole.” Jay let his fingers pop up—one, two, three—as he spoke.
“I’m pretty sure you can’t do it in the pee hole,” I said. “It’s too small.”
“Aren’t the pee hole and the coochie hole the same?” Toshi asked.
Jay stopped straightening up the leftover wood. “You two ass-posits. Just wait until you get some girls over here. Then you can see for yourselves.”
I grinned hard at the ground—we were all a big, happy family again, just like that.
“You think that we’re almost ready for the girls to come over?” Toshi asked.
“What I’m thinking about,” Jay said, “is mattresses. No woman is going to want to have sex on a wood floor, get splinters in her ass, whatever. We need some nice, big mattresses to get them in the mood.”
We all thought about Tony’s Mattress Madness then, which was this mattress store out on One that always had a pile of almost brand-new mattresses in its dumpster. My dad had gotten me a dumpster mattress a few years ago, and you couldn’t tell the difference. You really couldn’t.
“Tony’s,” Jay said.
Toshi looked worried. “Tony’s is miles away,” he said. “Miles and miles. We can’t drag them back here. I’ll pop a disc.”
“I have an idea about that.” Jay had a secret; we could tell from the curl of his lip, the same look that meant he’d stolen a fifth of Southern Comfort or figured out how to head butt the soccer ball perfectly every single time. “We’ll just use my dad’s truck.”
I shook my head. “It will look suspicious. If we pile three king-sized into the back of your dad’s truck, won’t he wonder what we’re doing?” I was also worried about being in a cab with Jay’s dad, who would probably sit there in stony, uncomfortable silence, or maybe get mad that my head was blocking the side view mirror and clock me with his fist.
“The thing is,” Jay said, “I can drive. My dad will never know.”
Chapter 5
We had to do the heist at night, of course. Jay said his father would kill him if he found out about the truck, and there were signs posted all over Tony’s dumpsters that said Private Property, No Trespassing, Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted, et cetera. At midnight, I left the house under cover of darkness, but out the front door, since my dad hadn’t come home yet. Toshi and I met on the street. Our neighborhood looked better in the dark, which softened the crab grass and gave it the illusion of lush green carpet.
“You have trouble getting out?” I asked him.
“My dad fell asleep on the couch,” he said, “but I was super quiet. I hate staying up this late. I’ll have a headache all tomorrow.”
“Come on, let’s get going. We got to meet Jay in twenty.” I tried to sound important, like I knew what I was doing, though I felt scared.
Together we walked to a spot about halfway between our houses and Jay’s, where no one lived and likely no one would see Jay pick us up.
“To the cross,” Toshi said. “We’re meeting him at the cross?”
“Yeah.”
The only marker on this long, dark stretch of road lined with trees and soybean fields was a white-painted cross someone had put up for a kid who’d been run over by a car. There wasn’t a name or any dates, just the two pieces of wood nailed together.
“Here comes Jay,” I said at the first rumble of an engine. “Pull your ski mask on, okay?”
Jay parked precisely beside us, and before we climbed into the cab with him, I saw that he’d smeared mud over the license plate. “Jay,” I said, “where’d you learn to drive?”