“Now we’re telling secrets?” I said. “What’s next, Spin the Bottle?”
“Tell me a secret,” she said again, poking her finger into my thigh to punctuate each word.
“Ow!” I said. “Okay. Okay. You win. I’ll tell you a secret.” Then, before I knew it, I blurted out, “I fooled around with Rankin.”
I couldn’t believe I’d said it. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t want to. I’d actually been thinking about telling her something about me and Allie. But that’s what came out. Afterward, I sat there wishing I could disappear.
“You fooled around with Rankin?” she said.
I almost told her I was kidding. I knew she would believe me if I laughed hard enough to prove it to her. But I didn’t. I just nodded. I couldn’t say anything. I mean, I’d just told her the worst thing I’d ever done in my entire life.
And do you know what she did? She rolled her eyes.
“You call that a secret?” she said.
“Um, yeah,” I said. “Don’t you?”
“Well, what do you mean you fooled around?”
“We…” I said, then stopped. “We just…” I almost told her about sucking Rankin’s dick. But I couldn’t. So I moved my hand up and down like I was, well, like I was doing what Rankin and I did. The first time.
“You guys jacked off together?” she guessed.
I nodded.
“Wow,” she said, and made her eyes really big. For a second I thought she was going to freak out on me, and I started to panic. Then she laughed. “Big news flash,” she said. “Guys whack off. Film at eleven.”
I didn’t know what to say. I thought she would at least be a little surprised. I know she thought me seeing Rankin playing with himself was nothing exciting, but this was different. Totally different. This was me and Rankin playing with each other. Here I was totally freaking out about what happened, and she was treating it like it was nothing. I almost felt like I should apologize for being so boring.
“I meant a secret about you,” Sadie said.
“That was about me!” I said.
“No,” said Sadie. “It was just something you did that you think people would be freaked out about if they knew. Trust me, everybody around here has done stuff way weirder than that.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Remember Alice?” said Sadie.
Like I could ever forget. I nodded.
“She used to catch flies—and eat them. And last time I was here there was this guy named Benny. He liked to hide things up his butt. Trust me, what you and Rankin did was so not secret-worthy.”
I looked at her while she waited for me to respond. “Sorry,” I said. “It’s all I’ve got.” Which wasn’t true, but for some reason I wanted to stop while I actually felt a little better. I was afraid if I told Sadie the rest, suddenly it wouldn’t be so “normal.”
“How about what happened between you and Allie?” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“Come on,” Sadie said. “I know you did what you did because something happened between the two of you. So what was it? You can tell me. Since we’re sharing and everything.”
“There’s nothing to tell,” I said. To tell the truth, in a weird way I was kind of pissed off that she didn’t think the thing with Rankin was a real secret. I mean, even if it wasn’t a big deal, and even if I did feel a little better about it now, it was still a secret.
Sadie clearly wasn’t buying my cool act. “Yeah, there is,” she argued. “What? You slept with her and she freaked out? You and that Burke guy got into a fight over her? What was it?”
“I told you, it had nothing to do with her,” I said.
I thought she would push me some more, but she didn’t. She just looked at me for a long time. I looked right back at her. I’ve gotten pretty good at staring contests what with the doc and I having one practically every day. The trick is to sort of unfocus your eyes so that you’re looking at the person but not really seeing them. If you do it right, they can never tell.
That’s how I won the staring contest with Sadie. After a minute she just turned away and turned the TV back on. The sound was still off, so we sat and watched the host talk. Now she was pitching some fake pearl necklace.
Sadie was quiet for so long that I thought maybe she was pissed at me. I was just about to say something when she started talking again.
“Remember that Saturday morning cartoon show with all the superheroes?” she asked. “Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Superman?”
“Sure,” I said. “Super Friends. What about it?”
Sadie stared at the television. “They all looked like normal people until they turned into these other things, right? But it always turned out that they originally turned into superheroes when they were running from something they didn’t like about themselves. Like Batman fought the dark part of his soul by battling bad guys and all that.”
“I think Wonder Woman was just born Wonder Woman,” I argued. “And Superman was just Superman.”
“Okay,” Sadie said. “Bad examples. But think about the really interesting superheroes. Most of them were normal until they turned into something freaky. Like Wolverine. He was part of some experiment. And the guy who turned into the Hulk hated to do it because it meant he was mad. Plus, it hurt.”
“I guess so,” I admitted.
Sadie went on. “When I was a kid, I used to watch that show, sitting on the couch in my pajamas and wishing more than anything that one day I’d just change into this other person,” she said. “I thought that would explain everything. You know, about why I felt so different. Then I’d find out that my mother was really an alien or that I’d been bitten by a radioactive spider as a baby, and it would all be okay because I’d be able to fly and see through walls.”
She stopped talking and watched the TV some more. I thought that I should say something, but then she started talking again. “But it never happened,” she said. “I just went on being me my whole life, until one day I realized that all those superheroes were doing was fighting themselves, and that getting to breathe underwater or shoot fire from your fingers didn’t really make up for being screwed up in the first place. It was just the consolation prize—you got the great costume and the invisible jet for being a loser in everything else.”
She stared at the silent TV. Her expression was completely blank, as if her soul had just flown out of her body. It was actually kind of scary. “I guess I just want my invisible jet,” she said.
Day 33
Now I know for sure that all of this is a dream, because what happened tonight can’t possibly be real. It just can’t.
I don’t even know where to start. Rankin came into my room last night. I guess technically it was earlier today, since it must have been about one or two in the morning. I was sleeping, and then I felt something pressing against my back. Rankin had pulled my shorts down, and he was pushing himself against me. I was still only half awake, so I didn’t realize what he was doing at first. He put his arms around me and pulled me closer. I could hear him breathing in my ear.
Believe it or not, that’s not even the bad thing. If that was all, I could probably handle it. Probably. But that was just the beginning.
Like I said, Rankin was holding on to me and trying to… I don’t think I can even say it right now. But he was getting close. As soon as I realized what he was doing, I woke up fast. I even opened my mouth to tell him to stop.
And that’s when the screaming started.
At first I thought it was me screaming. Then I realized it was a girl’s voice. I don’t know what Rankin thought was going on, but he pulled me closer to him and put his hand on my mouth. Maybe he thought I was the one screaming too.