Cougar

My senior year was not shaping up. I would need an operation for a pilonidal cyst at the base of my tailbone. It was painful and it was embarrassing. Afterwards, there would be sitz baths and heat lamps and packing. I stayed home rather than going to school until I could sit comfortably. And there were the drives to the doctor's office. I stayed on the couch all day and read and watched T.V. There was a loneliness to it, but a comfort, too. I was left alone.

It was strange to return to school after being away. Life had simply gone on without me. I went back to work at the pizza parlor. While I was gone, Gene had taken up with a woman working there who had a son almost as old as we were. She was a crazy looking bleached blonde who wore too much makeup to hide her age but who had a pretty good figure. When Gene told me what he had been up to, his eyes looked like a feral cat's when you try to feed it. It likes the food but is ready to run. He was like that, all wonder and nerves. I had gone to school with Gene since Junior High School and he had always been a background sort of kid, one you didn't think about, whose life seemed bland. His clothes were nondescript as was his hair and his general appearance, but he was fairly clever sometimes and liked to laugh. He had grown quite a bit in the last year and was bigger than I was, taller and bigger boned, big enough, I guess for the pizza woman's taste. Gene told me he fucked her one night in the restaurant when they were closing up, and since then, he had been going over to her house. I couldn't imagine any of it, but being so close to it, I was envious. It was crazy. She was crazy. She had to be nearly as old as his mother, though she didn't look like most of our mothers, and they would not be working in a pizza parlor. That is what made her odd to me, really, this working at the same job as us at her age. In some ways she was an adult, but in other ways she was ditzier than the girls we went to school with. There was a nervousness about her that infected everything. I had an image of her with her skirt pulled up, standing on her right leg, her left wrapped around Gene's hip, her mouth on his, her lipstick smearing his face, her perfume penetrating his clothing. I couldn't get it out of my mind.

Gene had certainly jumped out of the background, that was for certain.

All that excited me, of course, but I wanted no part of it. Still, I couldn't quit looking at her, either.