by Frances Raybaud
He has an erection and he is making no effort to hide it. Brash. She averts her eyes more as a formality than anything else.
After several hours of Ouija-him using a ghost as a wingman-they have settled on playing Saints Row. She refuses to hit the prostitutes, but her character has been otherwise destroying the city mainly because it’s hard to pilot a helicopter-yet awesome.
Now they’re stuck on the Game Over screen because they’ve been making out. She and Andrew, the boy next door who moved upstate. She’s visiting him with her mom. The boy next door is wearing less than her, but she’s getting chilly.
“I like your hair like that.” He’s been playing more with her hair than the video game for a while now.
“Like what?” she asks, watching his mouth. She really should be putting an end to this. This has been several days in a row, and she’s leaving. It’s not like he can ask her to the homecoming dance. Yeah. His school’s got a homecoming dance. He’s suburban now. He plays baseball on an actual baseball-sized diamond with his buddies.
“Long. What happened to the yearly haircuts? No more lopping it off?”
Those weren’t haircuts so much as low-key lice checks, she remembers ruefully.
The hairdresser calls her mother over.
“She has lice.” is stated like she’s not even there. She’s 7.
“Are you SURE?” her mother asks in resignation.
“They’re huge. Like cockroaches. We’ll have to close early today.” The woman bustles into the back room and, sitting in the salon chair still with a book on her lap, the girl closes her eyes in embarrassment.
This isn’t allowed. It’s illegal, actually, thanks to the Health Department, for a regular hair salon to tackle her little infestation. She leans back, head in the sink, and scalding water burns the bugs alive. She imagines them screaming.
She used to get lice all the time when she was small. She has the hair for it: thick, curly, soft. She went to public school and summer camp- it was inevitable. It was practically an annual affair for the first 12 years of her life, the delousing. She’d lather her hair in bubbles and her mother would comb out the carcasses. She’s used to killing things for her own health, and that’s what she’s doing now.
Whatever this THING is, it will undoubtedly fuck her up if he fucks her. He knew her before she was like this. Before intimacy was the monster in the closet.
He leans forward. She leans back.
“I thought I’d get you this time.” he complains idly, running his fingers up her leg. She thinks about how she once was going to marry him, but they discussed it jokingly with their parents yesterday and Andrew apparently won’t marry a woman who won’t take his last name. She likes herself too much for this shit, she really does. She doesn’t even like talking to him. She likes playing video games and making out with him, but he isn’t the best conversationalist she’s ever met. It’s more nostalgia and lust than anything else. Which is stupid. They’re not the same little kids that played Manhunt in the elevators of his apartment building back when they were eight.
“Andrew, I’m not a prize.” She means for it to come out like a joke, but it doesn’t. He folds his arms and it looks kind of funny since he’s only in boxers. She thinks about things she could say and almost trips over the Ouija board getting up.
“I’m going to go get some coffee.”
She and her mom leave for Manhattan tomorrow. It’s back to reality and out of this heady basement holding the 6’1” boy with a lazy smile. He looks squashed, standing at the bottom of the stairs as she leaves.
Her mother surveys her critically as she appears in the kitchen, wearing shorts and one of his shirts.
Don’t say anything, don’t say anything…
Her mother finally settles on: “You need a haircut.”
She rolls her eyes and gets some water from the fridge.
