Close Encounter

Wayne had a new girl. She wasn't sweet at all. She was rough. There are morphological types I've catalogued, and she is in the "coarse" column--wiry hair, large, hard teeth, eyes set wide, big hands and feet. None of this was monstrously exaggerated. You wouldn't stare at her or eschew her walking down the street. But she had a rough life, I think, poor and neglected if not abused at home. Wayne had no intentions of saving her. On the contrary, he used her as an uncharted territory, a map where he might fill in the blanks. He invited Steve to join him. They told me about it. She was Wayne's girl, but, as they say in the Bible, Steve had known her.

She was in one of my classes, and one day, someone called in a bomb scare. This had been happening a lot at our school, for it was fun to disrupt the routine, to let everyone out of class. On this day, as the entire school stood outside in the parking lots and playgrounds surrounding the buildings, it began to rain. Those of us who got wet got to go home to change into dry clothing. Wayne's girl and I lived in the same direction and walked together. She was living with her aunt at the time (my first encounter of many with "strange" lives and living arrangements) and I had to walk by her house to get to mine. She asked me to come in. The house was not furnished well or hardly at all. It looked transient as if the tenants would stay only a few weeks. She went into her aunt's bedroom to get some clothes and called me back. Reluctant and excited, I shuffled down the hallway. There was Wayne's girl standing in her underwear. I had never seen a girl in her underwear before other than in the Sears catalogue and, of course, my mother who was not a girl. I went numb when she approached me and put her arms around my neck. Then she kissed me.

This was something I'd only done at night in secret places, but here we were in her aunt's bedroom in the middle of the day, all the paraphernalia of daily life perfectly lighted by the light falling through the un-curtained window, the room filled with a tinny, hollow, roaring silence. I could hear everything as in an echo chamber, magnified, altered. Our kissing sounded foreign, like a strange dog picking through the garbage, I thought. She led me to the bed, her aunt's bed, where she pulled me on top of her. This was my chance at manhood, I thought, right here and now. There was only one thing to do, but I didn't want to. I was being guided by something outside of me, some foreign power of destruction and doom. When she stuck her tongue in my ear, though, I yielded, but only slightly. I touched her without knowledge or passion, without curiosity, really, only from sense of unwanted masculine duty.

I jumped up. "What was that?" I shouted.

"What?"

"I heard something. What was that? It's your aunt, I think. What time does she come home?"

"She doesn't get home for awhile," she said drowsy and dreamy, beckoning me back to her thick-skinned arms.

"I'd better go," I said. "We've got to get back to school. I'd better go," I repeated.

She looked at me with a twisted smile. Without knowing the word, I'd just learned the concept of the sardonic. Embarrassed, I told her I'd see her back at school.

Back in the street, I ran all the way home, my heart pumping like a washing machine. I had shamed myself, I said. She will tell Wayne. Everybody will laugh at me. It would be horrible, horrible.

But there was something else, too. I felt good. I had escaped. I was happy. I could be a boy a while longer. I didn't care about the rest.