“I like to suck them,” Sasha announced.
“Do you let them come in your mouth?”
“Every time.”
There were squeals and laughter.
Adam was suddenly nervous. He’d heard too much, and he was filled with the absurd certainty that he would be caught, that the girls would decide to walk around the corner to where he was hiding and find him. It made no sense, but it was a feeling that was impossible to shake, and, moving in the shadows, he retreated back along the front of the gym until he reached the far side. Looking over his shoulder to make sure that neither Sasha nor one of her friends was following, he sped across the open center of the campus and past the office, emerging onto the street.
He ran two blocks out of his way just to make sure he wouldn’t be seen.
He thought about Sasha all the way home.
So she’d had sex. She was doing it. He imagined her naked, with her legs spread wide and her most private area open to the world, and he wondered if she was hairy down there.
He desperately wanted to share this with someone, wanted at least to be able to tell Scott what had happened, what he’d heard. And he would have, had it involved anyone other than Sasha. But he could not present his sister like that to other people. He did not know if it was because he wanted to protect her or because he considered anything that involved a member of his family a reflection on himself, but he did not want Scott to discover that Sasha was… the way she was.
Back in California, it would have been hard to imagine Sasha even talking about sex, let alone doing it. She’d been a bitch sometimes, yeah, but she’d also been kind of a goody-goody, and the type of girls she was hanging out with now were the type she and her friends had made fun of then.
But something had happened to her since they’d moved to McGuane. She was even bitchier—if that was possible—but there’d also been a deeper, more fundamental change. A change in the things she liked, the way she acted, the people she hung around with—her entire outlook on life. It was as if she was purposely trying to be exactly the kind of person their parents did not want her to be, as if all of her upbringing had suddenly been tossed out the window.
He was ashamed to say that he liked the new Sasha better.
Adam thought of that quick glimpse up her skirt.
I like ’em long.
He kept his books pressed hard in front of him as he walked.
He got home well before his sister did and explained to his mom why he was late. He’d been expecting a big lecture—she usually freaked out about stuff like this—but apparently she’d lost track of time, too, and she hadn’t really noticed he was not on time until he told her. He took advantage of this rare occurrence, apologized and said it wouldn’t happen again, and quickly ran upstairs.
Sasha’s door was closed, as usual, but he decided to take a chance and tried the knob. Locked. It was what he’d expected, but he was disappointed nonetheless, and he was turning back toward his own bedroom when he saw, on the hall floor next to the hamper that stood beside the bathroom door, what looked like a pair of panties.
Red panties.
Sasha’s panties.
He hurried over and, sure enough, his sister’s underwear had spilled out from the overflowing hamper and was lying wadded up next to the plastic container on the uncarpeted hardwood floor.
He didn’t even think about it but looked quickly around, bent over, scooped the panties up and retreated into his bedroom.
2
The tyranny of a small town.
If he had been a writer, he could have used it as the title of a book. As it was, it would go the way of most ideas and observations, becoming nothing, not even a memory, forgotten after a few moments of consideration.
But it was a valid concept, Gregory thought as he watched a trio of almost identically clad men emerge from the cab of a pickup. All of the men were wearing Wrangler jeans, with a telltale white circle on the right rear pocket, indicating where they kept their cans of chewing tobacco. All had on western shirts. Cowboys. They even walked with a similar swagger, and he watched as they entered the bar, laughing together at some private joke.
He remembered, all during his childhood, wanting to be like everyone else, feeling the pressure to fit in, wishing his parents talked with a Texas twang rather than a Russian accent. There had been a lot of Molokans in town then, and almost as many Mormons, but while there had not been a lot of overt prejudice, he had still felt the desire to blend in, to not be different, to assimilate into Arizona culture.
And things seemed to have gotten worse since then.
He supposed it was because McGuane was becoming more homogeneous, the diversity of its past fading into history as younger Molokans moved away in search of better jobs and better lives. The residents here now seemed somehow less tolerant, even though examples of overt bigotry were much rarer than before.
But conformity was all-important. Yesterday, he’d seen a young woman picking out baby clothes at the store. She’d intended to buy a red jumpsuit with the flags of different nations printed on both the front and the back, but when two of her acquaintances had stopped by and ridiculed her choice, she had instantly put the jumpsuit away and picked one that they liked.
And it was not only such superficial aspects of life as fashion. The tendency toward conformity ran far deeper than that. For example, the bumper stickers that were so ubiquitous in California, trumpeting a driver’s support for a political candidate or cause, were nowhere to be found on McGuane vehicles because no one wanted to call attention to the fact that they might hold views and opinions different from those of their neighbors.
Was that going to happen to his kids? Had he uprooted them for nothing, merely exchanging the pressures of being hip and trendy for the pressures of conforming to the dictates of small-minded small-town rednecks?
The thought depressed him.
He sighed, staring at the door of the bar where the cowboys had walked in. He wondered what was wrong with him. He’d felt out of sorts lately, vaguely dissatisfied, though there was nothing he could put his finger on.
He’d spent the better part of the afternoon wandering around, doing nothing. He could have gone home and asked Julia to come with him, but he wanted to be alone, and he passed from shop to shop, stopping in at the mining museum, walking over to the chamber of commerce, peering down at the pit, sitting for a spell on a bench in the park. He didn’t know what he was looking for, but whatever it was, he didn’t find it.
He walked back up the street to the café. Or the coffeehouse, as it had been unofficially rechristened. The sign outside, the menus inside, and all of the ads still read “Mocha Joe’s Café,” but their new patrons had attempted to bestow big-city sophistication upon themselves, and nearly all of them now referred to the place as “the coffeehouse.”
Wynona, the teenager working behind the counter, nodded at him as he walked in. “Hey, Gregory.”
“Hey,” he said.
It must be later than he thought. Wynona didn’t get off school until three, didn’t start her shift until three-thirty. He looked up at the clock above the counter.
Four-ten.
He’d been out wandering, wasting the day, since just after noon.
But was he really “wasting” his day? Would anything else he might have done been any more worthwhile?
No.