“Oh?” He wanders around the garage and fiddles with some odds and ends lying around, then wanders back to me.
“Colin,” he says seriously, looking me right in the eye, “you got some girl knocked up again?”
My face heats up instantly and my palms start to sweat just thinking about Maya. “No! Why would you think that?”
“Well, what am I supposed to think? You’re asking shit like how to teach a kid to fix cars and taking a Saturday off. I figure you’ve got some girl.”
“No, no. I just need the day, Pop, that’s all.”
“Yeah, okay.” He pauses and studies me. “You’re sure it ain’t about some girl?”
I shake my head.
“Huh. Too bad,” he says and leaves me to finish the Audi, heart pounding.
SOME GIRL. Jesus. Maya.
I was seventeen and every little thing that anyone did—the way they tapped their pencils or flicked their hair or cleared their throats; the way they said “hey” or fist-bumped or smiled kindly—stirred a rage inside me that was just looking for a target. And god help anyone who gave me one.
Brandon Starkfield caught me looking at him near the auditorium one day, so I kicked the crap out of him and he never made eye contact again. Mrs. Goldzer, the German teacher, offered to let me retake a test I failed and I called her a fat cow. In German. Girls would smile at me and I’d fix my expression into an uncaring neutrality so cold that I would watch them startle and look away. I hurt everyone around me. Everyone. But Maya was the worst.
I had sixth period free that semester so sometimes I’d cut seventh period study hall, leaving after fifth to wander around until football. In the previous few months, though, my grades had been shitty enough that I was worried I’d become ineligible to play, so I started doing homework in the library during sixth period. Maya always came in after choir. She lived in my neighborhood, so I’d known her awhile, though we weren’t really friends. We’d chat a little, or sometimes just sit at the same table doing homework. She was a pretty girl—dark skin, big hazel eyes, curvy, great smile. And somehow she didn’t trigger the furious reactions that I had so little control over with most everyone else. Because she was an exception in that way, I thought maybe she would be an exception in the other.
I spent a lot of time staring at her, not listening to what she was saying, just trying desperately to catalogue her physical attributes and figure out my reactions to them. I’d stare at her tits and appreciate how round they were, how soft they looked; sometimes I’d even pop wood because tits reminded me of sex and sex was… well, sex, and I was seventeen. I’d look at her mouth and recognize that her lips were full and she looked devious when she grinned, which was cool, but… it didn’t make me feel anything.
One afternoon after a few weeks of this, Maya caught me by the wrist and pulled me into the choir room music closet. She was the instrument monitor for the orchestra—she played violin and always had this mark on her neck from it that boys would tease her about, like it was a hickey—so she had keys. She pushed me up against the inside of the door and told me that she’d seen the way I was always staring at her and she was into it. Then she kissed me and grabbed my dick through my jeans.
A few hours before, I’d gotten hard sitting behind Jake, the new kid in my English class who transferred from somewhere in California. He had longish dark blond hair and blue eyes so light they were almost silver. He’d turned around to ask if he could share my book, and those eyes had made my stomach tremble. When I nodded my assent and he leaned closer, the smell of him—something blue and fresh, oceanic—got me hard in five seconds flat, and I’d been on edge ever since.
When Maya grabbed me, I think she felt the effects of Jake, because she grinned that devious grin and started stripping off both of our clothes. She was pretty tall and I hadn’t grown my last few inches yet, so we managed to do it standing up, against the door. At one point I knocked into some triangles that were on a hook against the wall and the sound of tinny percussion nearly gave me a heart attack. The whole thing was incredibly awkward. It felt good the way getting enough sleep feels good, or eating a burger when you’re really, really hungry—the fulfillment of a physical need that doesn’t touch anything deeper—but the second it was over, I felt a rush of hot shame so intense I squatted down on the floor of the music closet, the smell of all those dusty instrument cases and resin making me feel sick. When Maya asked if I was okay, I said I dropped my lighter and pulled my pants up quickly.