The door opens and JR lowers himself on the bed. One shoe drops, then the other. The bed shifts as he shucks off his jeans and pulls off his socks. My muscles stiffen, resisting gravity when the bed sags as he lies down. He smells like soap and pizza, no trace of beer or Mandy. He yawns and his elbow grazes my back when he reaches up to scratch his head. Then he flops to his side, shaking the bed, and is asleep in a minute.
I grip the edge of the mattress, determined no part of my body will touch any part of his. But, in his sleep, he drops his hand on my waist. What next? Is he going to start stroking my ribs while he dreams of Mandy? It takes me hours to fall asleep.
He’s up and gone before I wake. It’s nearly eleven, an unconscionable time to rise on a farm. I pull on my pants and shoes and guiltily make my way to the kitchen, hoping to find some dregs in the coffeepot.
My mother is working at the kitchen table. Her perky wig contrasts with her exhausted face. She soldiers on cheerfully, rolling the dough and cutting it into perfect squares. My aunt stands behind her, hovering, playing backfield, ready to catch her if she collapses. She thinks she is being discreet and my mother is careful not to let her irritation show. My mother and I know a tornado couldn’t bring her down, let alone a little chronic fatigue. She’s been up since dawn. The tomatoes on the stove have already cooked down to a thick sauce. The Calhouns will have one more Ravioli Easter. It’s my mother’s contribution to the family reunion. Up here in the hills, pizza chains with guaranteed thirty-minute delivery and Al Pacino in The Godfather are the sum and substance of things Italian. The Calhouns wait each year for their homemade pasta.
My mother insists on brewing a fresh pot of coffee for me. My aunt grudgingly pulls the can of Maxwell House from the refrigerator and carefully spoons out just enough for a two-cup pot. I’ve won a small victory and don’t bother to suppress a smug smile. My mother stuffs and folds and pinches the corners of her ravioli while the coffee perks in the background. She looks up and sees me staring at her. She smiles, letting me know she appreciates what drudgery this weekend is for me, promising that, in a day, it will be over. Her smile is an apology, not asked for, unearned. Why she loves me so much I will never understand. If I don’t leave the kitchen I might start to cry.
I want to go back to sleep, to crawl back into bed and not leave the room until Sunday evening. The day ahead, or what’s left of it, stretches and yawns, mocking me with its leisurely pace. The coffee does the job. I have to shit. It’s inevitable.
I’d hoped to get through the weekend without the need to take a crap in this tiny bathroom. It’s an add-on, its walls nothing more than drywall partitions. The family still goes to the outhouse for privacy when the weather is warm. There’s one advantage to sleeping late. At least I’m not spurting while foot traffic passes outside the door. While I’m at it, I might as well shower and shave. The water is tepid and keeps me from lingering. I wrap a towel around my waist and walk back to the bedroom, surprising JR. He slaps shut the book he’s holding between his legs and self-consciously covers the title with his broad hand.
He smiles and tries to act nonchalant, telling me I can have the room to myself, now that he’s found what he was looking for. Mildly intrigued by the kid’s odd behavior, I scan the paperbacks on the shelf by the bed. Nothing out the ordinary for a seventeen-year-old boy, certainly not anything that raises any red flags. Franny and Zooey. Stranger in a Strange Land and Dune. Silas Marner and The Mayor of Casterbridge (neither spine creased, required reading, no doubt), the mandatory Tolkien and Orwell. A bottom-of-the-line Taylor acoustic is propped in the corner. There’s a chord book with leaves of loose sheet music. Some pretty hip stuff. Old Velvet Underground songs-“Sweet Jane,” “Head Held High.” A stack of printed e-mail messages slips out of the book.
Jesus H. Christ! Holy shit!
I’ve stumbled across the mother lode. I read them once, then again, letting it sink in. It’s hard, no, impossible, to believe the clean-cut kid I just shared a bed with has a secret identity as WrestlerJoc2071. Bobby’s son is maintaining a heavy correspondence with some unsavory characters. Mongoloids, probably, who can’t string a coherent English sentence together, but who demonstrate a definite affinity for constructing pithy screen names trumpeting physical attributes and sexual predilections.
Leantight8.
NCbtm4U.
JOBuddy.
NCtop4U.
Sukitall.
Once I get over the shock, I feel almost giddy discovering another aberration in the family tree. A little twinge of guilt for invading his privacy doesn’t keep me from reading his e-mails. WrestlerJoc2071 tries hard to go mano a mano with the hardcore sexualists, peppering his talk with descriptions of throbbing cocks and quivering assholes. But his phrases have a tentative cadence that reveals his tender, young heart. He’s naïve enough to believe the love and acceptance he’s seeking can be found in this miasma of pornography pecked onto a screen by sticky, dirty fingers. The object of his affection calls himself OnMiKnees4U. They’re embarking on a romance, one so deep and real and full of promise and undying devotion they actually share their names, their first ones at least.
Dear Cary,
Thanks for the pic. I hope you aren’t too disappointed by mine. Some people tell me I’m handsome, but I don’t believe it. If I had seen your pic first, I wouldn’t have had the nerve to send mine. I hope you will still write back now that you know what I look like.
I can’t believe we found each other online. I can’t believe that in only five months I will be at Chapel Hill too. I know there’s so many things you can teach me. I am reading the book you suggested. It kind of scares me. But I like it very much.
And I love you very much.
Robert
Robert? He’s already begun his double life, taking a new name. But then again, who really expected him to go through life answering to JR, called that only to distinguish him from his father?
And this Cary? Why do I expect it isn’t a real name? Why do I suspect JR is fated to spend many lonely evenings in September, wandering the streets of the campus, looking up at windows and wondering if the boy sitting, reading, writing, staring at a computer screen, is the Cary who disappeared into cyberspace without a last name or address or telephone number?
I rifle through the papers looking for the picture of Cary. But JR hasn’t printed it. It’s safe in his program file, secured by his password. What would it mean anyway? The face in the picture probably doesn’t even belong to “ Cary.” JR is too young, too trusting, to even imagine such duplicity.
Who is this predator? Some ancient, overweight tenured faculty troll, belching after indulging in rich meals and glasses of port, sublimating his sexual frustrations? Some scrawny graduate student in Birkenstocks with clove cigarettes on his breath and an ass that smells like macrobiotic rice? Whoever this creature is, he’s putting JR at risk, laying the foundation for a lifetime of heartaches.
And what the hell was JR doing in that notorious toilet at the mall? Did he have an agenda more sinister than taking a piss and washing his hands? I have to find him and warn him. He’s starting down the wrong road, one that could lead to a dead end on the interstate on a sticky summer night, to arrest and probation (if he’s lucky).
Neither my mother nor his knows where he is. Bobby’s wife looks out the window and says his car is gone.
“He’ll be back, probably with that girlfriend of his. Wait till you see her, hard as nails and looks like she’s been around the block a few times. Bobby has a fit every time he brings her around. But I tell him to calm down. JR’s at that age that it would only throw gasoline on the flame if we started bitching about her. Let it go and it’ll die out. Hope I’m right or Bobby’s gonna put me six feet under.” She laughs.