“I think I’m getting a headache.” He turned his hand over and then back. “Would Jay have really done it, do you think? Would he have broken my wrist?”
“Naw,” I said, because I knew that Toshi needed to hear what he wanted to, and not what I really thought. “No way.”
Chapter 3
The next morning, I caught sight of my face in the bathroom mirror. Somehow, it wasn’t me, like I’d been bilked out of my regular skin and hair and eyes. Everything was growing rougher. My jaw was lined with spots; it was a new galaxy of whiteheads surrounded by red rings. Was my nose growing larger, or my forehead smaller? Black troughs from poor sleep shadowed my eyes, and my hair stuck to itself in greasy clumps. I squeezed milky worms out of my skin and worried that I might be inhuman, undead, rotting and maggot-infested. After my face was dotted with specs of blood, I checked the time and realized that an hour of my life had disappeared into that mirror. An hour: it had felt like a blink.
My dad was sitting at the breakfast table, which startled me until it dawned that it was Sunday; during the summer, I tended to lose track. He held his hair, which sprouted out from a bald patch at the crown, in both hands, massaging his skull, so probably he’d been out at the roadhouse the night before.
“So,” my dad said, lifting his head so that I could see his reddened eyes (definitely the roadhouse), “summer.”
“Summer,” I agreed.
“What you been up to? You waste a whole can of my shaving cream?”
Jay’s tip about making an artificial cunt from Styrofoam and shaving cream hadn’t worked out so great. Thinking about Stella slowly unhooking her bra got me hard fast, sure, but when I slid my cock into the hole, I found that the Styrofoam, even cut into a perfect circle, felt sharp as teeth. I had to pull out after just a thrust or two and use my hand like normal.
“You guys got plans for the summer?” my dad asked.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “We’re keeping busy.” Then I thought about how Toshi was supposed to have broken his wrist the day before, but I kept my mouth shut, since my dad wouldn’t find out anyway. He didn’t talk with anyone much except his coworkers when they went out drinking. “We’re fine doing our own thing.”
He looked embarrassed, which was strange. Maybe he was finally getting the idea that I was growing up.
“Right,” he said. “Long as you stay out of trouble.”
Even though he probably would have been proud if I’d told him about building a sex fort out in the woods—he was always asking if I had a girlfriend yet and what I thought of Miss Lois Lane (his name for the high school math teacher)—I made up a lie about helping add a back patio onto Jay’s parents’ house for some extra cash. This impulse to tell him nothing about my life, to lie even when the truth was innocuous, had become essential to my self-preservation: if I was a complete mystery to my father, then he’d never be able to see through me to my obsessions. He’d never figure out where his shaving cream had gone or worry when I stayed out after dark.
“Well if you’re working for someone else”—my dad poured himself another coffee— “then I guess you don’t need an allowance, too.”
“Dad, come on,” I said, “Jay’s parents hardly pay me anything. I’ll still take out the trash here and all that stuff.”
He looked at me, head lowered in a way that made the crick in his nose especially prominent. “Keep up that work ethic.” He left before I could figure out if I would get my allowance or not.
“Today, we’ll set the bear trap,” Jay said. He was stretched out on the gray-carpeted floor of his bedroom; Toshi and I sat on the mattress above him. The place smelled as if the window hadn’t been opened in years, and I’d moved up to the bed when I’d spotted a bowl sprouting a rainbow of mold on the floor beside me. Jay’s house was always dirty, an alive kind of dirty, the sort of place you felt afraid to go barefoot in, and the whole atmosphere was closed off, unwelcoming. But the three of us always met up at Jay’s.
“I scoped out the perfect spot for it. No asshole bear is breaking into my camp.”
About nine months before, a couple of black bears had been spotted around our town. They slashed open above-ground pools and one of them ate some old lady’s poodle. Delaware normally doesn’t have bears, so their antics were plastered all over the news, and Jay made us hike around for hours, trying to find bear shit or claw marks or whatever. He rented videos about bear attacks, living with bears, getting eaten by bears, and he watched them over and over. I figured that the bears had probably moved on after realizing that Delaware wasn’t so great, but Jay said he knew they were still out there.
“I bet we’ll catch one before summer is over,” Jay said. “I got a feeling.”
The traps he’d dug up from his garage were heavier than they looked, and as I carried one to the site of New Veronia, I kept my eyes on its metal teeth as the Jaws theme song played in my head.
“These things can snap a bear foot in two,” Jay said as we dug holes to bury the traps’ chains, “or at least bite really deep into the bone.”
“This dirt is too hard.” Toshi dropped his shovel and leaned back on his haunches.
“It’ll make him real mad, to be caught like this.” Jay stabbed a spade into the earth. “It would be so killer to have a bear coat. Like, a real hide coat, with a bear head for the hood.”
After we buried the chains, Jay took the premade hamburger patties he’d raided from the freezer and circled them around, and then we scattered sticks and leaves over the whole thing, careful not to spring the traps.
“What if we forget where they are?” Toshi said.
Jay rolled his eyes. “Then I guess we’ll have to amputate your foot.”
When we came back the next morning, a swarm of flies hung over the hidden traps, and it smelled like old blood.
“This is gross,” Toshi said, “and when we put a toilet in here, it will be even worse.”
Jay poked him, hard, on the arm. “At least you won’t step in the traps now. Your nose will tell you where they are.”
I figured that our first step was to start chopping down trees for the triplex walls, but Jay said he’d come up with a better idea. “Pallets. The stores have them, tons of them, and they leave them out back for anyone. They’re a whole huge source of wood! It’s perfect. Way easier than cutting down trees.”
“You think so?” It really was a good idea. Jay didn’t have the brains for English or history or any of the other classes I’d been in with him, but maybe he had a brain for building. That would be just like him, to surprise me after all these years. “Where do we get the pallets?”
“Stores, man, any store.”
Toshi paused from unwrapping the tape around his fake cast. “The Save-Right,” he said. “I know it seems far on the road, but if you walk straight across the woods”—he gestured with the blocky cast—“it’s only a couple miles, maybe less, to get there.”
“How do you know?” Jay asked.
“Sometimes I walk.” Toshi shrugged. “I ended up there. It was easy. Not far at all. We drag the pallets from the back of the store, through the woods, to here.”