“Dad,” I said, “are you going to work today? Is everything okay… at the plant?” Maybe he’d gotten demoted or something and now he was taking it out on me.
He pressed his thumbs against his temples. “This is the reason we don’t talk. You wouldn’t understand. We can’t understand each other.” He turned away.
I started to eat my cereal, which had dissolved into the milk. If my dad had been a friend, I would have told him to snap out of it, or to muzzle up, or to go get laid and muzzle up, but he wasn’t a friend, so I ate and finished eating and put my bowl in the sink.
When Toshi and I biked to the edge of the woods and then walked the shrubby stretch into New Veronia, we found fifteen pallets stacked up beside the center post tree.
“Fifteen.” Toshi counted them twice. “Fifteen. He must have worked all night. He probably broke his back doing it.”
Not until then did I noticed a navy blue smudge on the brown and green ground. The navy blue was Jay’s shirt, and Jay was in it, sleeping.
“Let him rest,” I said. “He walked back and forth eighteen times for those other pallets.”
“And they were heavy, too,” Toshi said, “you felt how they were heavy.”
This was the reason we looked up to Jay, the reason he was our leader: he got shit done.
For a while, we messed around rearranging things, some hammers, a couple saws, plenty of nails, all stuff borrowed from our homes, but it was hard to get anything done without Jay directing us, so when he uncurled from the fetal position and opened his eyes, I felt relieved.
“You really got nine pallets after we left?” I said. “Nine!”
Jay’s shorts were torn, a pink scratch angled across his cheek, and a couple twigs were stuck to his forehead.
“Tell me if you feel like you’re dying,” Toshi said, looking truly concerned. “People can over-exhaust themselves and then just keel over. You watch Bennet and me today. We’ll do the hard stuff.”
“No, man.” Jay stretched and brushed away the twigs. “I feel fine. I’ll help.”
A rush of love for Jay overwhelmed me then. We’d done everything together: biked tens of miles, all the way into Maryland, to buy cigarettes from this gas station we’d heard didn’t card (but they did card, and so we never got the Marlboros); played this weird game when we were kids that was all about making up new words for everyday things, and at the same time, reading each other’s minds; we’d gotten drunk for the first time together and still did whenever we could get our hands on anything. I knew that he’d worked like crazy just to bring us enough wood to build New Veronia. Jay and I would always be best friends. I handed him a granola bar that was still warm from my pocket, and he ate it in one bite, then declared that we needed to start constructing the outside walls.
“Measure twice, cut once!” Jay kept shouting happily. For passing out on the ground, getting bitten by bugs all night, he seemed chipper.
The huge trees kept rustling in a high-up breeze that didn’t reach us down there on the forest floor. When I overturned a rock, weird red insects with wings flew up against my face; they didn’t sting, but brushed softly and fluttered off. Because we were working in the open air, we smelled not our sweat, but the sweetish pollen of blooming things and the dry sawdust and dirt—unless we got too close to the north side of New Veronia, where the bear trap stank like rotting horseshoe crabs.
I’d never really built anything before. Once, my dad had bought me a wooden model of a T-Rex skeleton, but that had been on such a small scale, and it came with detailed directions. This project, our New Veronia, was from scratch, which made it feel all the more important. And when we were finished, we’d have our own little city, a place where we could be kings, where we could do basically whatever we wanted—Jay would tell us what that was.
After we had been at work for a few hours, we all collapsed with our backs to the same stunted black walnut and shared the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that Toshi had brought. I contributed a quart of Coke and a package of Oreos. We grabbed for the cookies at the same time, and there was something harmonious about our hands all there with their matching scratches and bruised knuckles and splinters. We were in this together, all working hard on the biggest project we’d ever taken on.
As soon as lunch was reduced to a pile of empty wrappers, Jay wanted to get straight back to it.
“At this rate,” I said, “we’ll have the whole thing finished in no time!”
“Then we won’t have anything to do the rest of summer.” Toshi held up the tape measurer. “And the boredom will kill us.” But he started to pencil measurements onto the wood; I could tell that he was secretly happy, now that he knew he didn’t need to haul pallets all day.
“Another eight feet,” Jay said, “eight feet exactly. You know Stephanie? Stephanie… Heller?”
“You mean Helmet,” Toshi said. The tape measurer connected him and Jay as they marked out the eight feet. “That’s what they call her: Stephanie Helmet. Because she uses so much hair spray, makes her hair all hard like a big helmet on her head.”
“Whatever, Tosh, we get it,” I said. Ready with the saw, I felt impatient to start my cutting. The back and forth motion, the way the saw buzzed softly in my hand as it bit through the wood, the snap when the one piece became two—it all made me feel good.
“Hairspray is sexy,” Jay said. “The way it smells on a woman.”
“But when you touch it, all sticky…”
“Toshi, come on. When have you ever touched a woman?”
I laughed hard until I remembered that Jay could have said the exact same thing to me. Still, that was the whole point of New Veronia.
“Hairspray makes her hair feel sort of hard, yeah, but not sticky. It’s dry, I mean the stuff dries on their hair like that.” Jay finally lowered his pencil to the wood and marked the spot. When he stood, he adjusted himself inside his shorts. “It makes their hair feel… sort of like a statue’s hair. How it’s carved out of marble like that, but you can still see the strands. And you know all those statues, those sexy statues…?”
Jay didn’t have to explain any more. In the fifth grade, we’d all three of us gone on a field trip to the art museum up in Philadelphia, and the pictures were pretty good with the naked ladies in color, but the best things were the three dimensional nudes carved out of white stone. You could circle those bodies again and again, looking from all different angles. We talked about those statues incessantly for weeks, and here we were, all these years later, still talking about them.
“We met up after school one day,” Jay said. “Steph wanted me to help her with her homework. I know, you’re laughing. Of course right then I knew it was a setup. So we met and we went back to her place—her dad was home, but I guess he never leaves his basement office—and her room had this frilly pink bed and pink all over the walls, stuffed animals, even, a teddy bear, like bears are for cuddling, god girls are so stupid, and I sat down on the bed and she sat down next to me.”
I wondered why I hadn’t heard this story before, when it had first happened, for example. Maybe Jay was lying, or maybe he’d been saving this story up so that he could shock me and Toshi. Jay had stopped working; he stood next to our pile of pallets, the tape measurer he held in one hand smacking rhythmically against the other palm. Toshi and I were still crouched down by the piece of wood we were about to cut, and I rocked back onto my bottom since my thighs were burning.
Jay said, “She sat with a foot up on the bed and a foot on the ground so that her skirt sort of hiked up one thigh. She knew what she was up to. She knew. She wiggled until our legs were touching along the side and then she started kissing me.”