“Just like that?” Toshi asked. I could see that he was really into the story: he picked up a saw so that he could hold it in front of his pants. All this I caught from the corner of my eye—it couldn’t look like I’d been looking.
“Pretty soon—I couldn’t believe it, but it’s true—Steph crawled right up into my lap. She might have let me do it to her, too, but then her mom came home and we had to stop.”
I realized that I’d been holding my breath. I let it out in a whoosh and asked when all this had happened.
“Right before finals. I’m sure neither one of us did so good in geography or whatever it was we were supposed to be studying. But her hair, man, it felt so perfect. Every strand carved out.”
Tosh was sort of half-collapsed over sitting there on the ground. Hoping that I didn’t look all smooshed the way Toshi did, I stood up. “Well,” I said, “during finals week, I was in a study group with Allison. The blond.”
“You mean Allison Ruiz? That’s dyed, man,” Jay said.
“Still looks good,” Toshi murmured into his knees.
“We were doing math, I think, but I wasn’t paying attention because she had on this top that was cut down to….” I drew a line between my nipples with my pointer finger. My story was fake, but the shirt was an actual shirt I’d seen on Stella the week before. A sky blue shirt that brought out the color of her eyes. “I love how she smells like caramel.”
Jay shook his head. “All these girls are always wearing that candy perfume shit. I wish I could smell how they really are. Their dirty parts and everything.”
“Yeah,” I said, worried that this was yet another sign of how much less a man I was than Jay, that I wanted sugar and he wanted authentic. “I mean, me too.”
Jay said, “How about Allison’s mom? She don’t even look old. I mean, I would do her.”
“Doesn’t,” Toshi corrected. His favorite subject was English, which I sometimes thought strange because he was the only one of us who looked like English might not be his first language, which it was. Apparently, even in Singapore, where his mom was from, but where he’d never been, everyone spoke English. “Do you think Allison will come to New Veronia with you?” Toshi asked me. “When it’s finished.”
His question made me feel awful; Allison Ruiz wasn’t a real person to me, just like I wasn’t one to her. The most interaction we’d had was avoiding bumping into each other in the hallways at school. “Let’s get back to work,” I said as I reached over and took my saw from Toshi.
He looked down at his empty hands and then turned them over, palms down. “There was this girl in the Dover Downs,” he said, “when I was there with my dad. We saw each other in the crowd. She came right over to me.”
“And?” Jay asked. “And?”
“I don’t kiss and tell. I protect a woman’s honor.”
“Seriously?” Jay groaned and I could tell that his imagination was making up all kinds of awesome sex acts between Toshi and the casino girl. “Come on, Knees, you only got to honor a wife. Like my dad, he thinks my mom is a goddess—he calls her that, even—but all the women he did before her are just trash. No need for loyalty to trash.”
Toshi mimed zipping up his lips and tossing away the key. He was so smart that way: whatever Jay and I imagined was definitely crazier than what had really happened.
If only I had embellished my story more, made it so that I at least got to feel up one of Allison’s breasts, instead of just looking at them. Then it would be me getting interrogated by Jay. Because Jay was magnetic, always upbeat, and it was like you wanted as much of his attention as you could get, to feed into his energy.
After we worked for a couple more hours, Jay said we should take a break and have some fun. While Toshi and I tidied up around New Veronia, he walked to his house to grab a shotgun and a bag full of empty beer bottles.
“Target practice,” he said, grinning, when he broke back into the clearing. He had the gun slung over one shoulder, hip cocked out; the goatee glinted on his chin.
We walked maybe half a mile deeper into the woods, and then Jay went first: I threw the bottles up high as I could while he aimed and fired. Half the time, the bottle shattered against the ground, but the other half, he blasted it apart in midair, the glass transforming into a galaxy of shards that hung in the sky for an instant before they fell away to nothing.
“Who wants to go next?” Jay said. “Knees?”
Toshi shook his head. “An average of twenty-nine people die from gunshots every day.”
“Why you always spouting off these stupid numbers?” Jay said. Toshi just shrugged, but I knew why: it was because the statistics were irrefutable facts, things Jay couldn’t argue with. This little part of Tosh was preserved and separate from us, but he had to show it off sometimes so that we’d remember it was there. The statistics were Toshi’s armor.
“What’s wrong,” Jay said, “your dad never teach you to shoot? Maybe afraid you’d end up on the wrong side of a war?” Jay raised the shotgun to his shoulder and swung the barrel around until it was pointed straight at Toshi. The skin on my scalp shrunk up closer to the bone as the sunlight fell over us in waves.
“My grandpa fought in the forties,” Jay said, “right after Pearl Harbor.”
“Put it down,” I said. Jay’s finger was on the trigger, and I knew he wouldn’t do anything crazy, but I also knew that he was unpredictable and that any little thing could leave him livid. My muscles felt watery, but they were still able to move me away from Toshi, out of the gun’s sight.
“They wouldn’t have trusted any of you then,” Jay said to Toshi. “During the war.”
The broken glass, amber and green, glittered around us. I wanted to tell Toshi to run, but that would have been acknowledging that the situation was more than a joke, and if I pretended hard enough that it was all a put-on, maybe it would be.
“And now we welcome you into this country,” Jay said. “Isn’t that weird?”
Toshi nodded slowly. Somehow, he was holding it together; he didn’t even look scared; his face was an emotionless mask. He licked his lower lip and squinted against the sun.
Jay said, “I always wondered about what could happen if I didn’t shoot at the target.” He pulled in a noisy breath and said, “Pa-chow!” My stomach jumped without me.
Then Jay let the shotgun fall to his side, and he started to laugh, and Toshi and I joined in, all of us laughing way too hard.
Later, when Toshi and I were biking back to our neighborhood, I said, “You didn’t really do anything with that girl at the casino, did you?”
Toshi stared at me with big, lying eyes. “How did you know?” he said. “I mean, how would you know? You’ve never gotten a girl’s attention. Jay said so; we all know it. And I did. I did.”
“What do you mean, Jay said so?” I veered my bike away from his, taking a sharp left where we always went straight. I couldn’t believe that Jay was talking with Toshi about me behind my back. When Jay had pointed that gun at Tosh—I know this thought was stupid—but when he did that, it was like he was giving Toshi special attention.
I pedaled hard so that my thighs burned with the effort, and when a car zipped by in the other direction, the speed of it nearly blew me off course. But even though I was biking faster than I’d ever biked before, when I checked over my shoulder, Toshi was right behind me.
“What is your problem?” Toshi said. “I mean, no big deal. In New Veronia, you’ll touch some girl’s ass soon.”