“Anyway, I was fifteen. My family was going through a rough patch. My dad, he was always a drinker, but about then he started to head off the cliff. Took him five more years to hit bottom, but we could see where he was going. And my brother, Danny, he’d just gotten kicked out of freshman year at UCLA. He was hearing voices and he hit his roommate in the head with a Tabasco bottle.”
“A Tabasco bottle?”
She laughed, with an edge. “I know it sounds ridiculous, but it wasn’t one of those little ones you see in restaurants. It was big enough to do some damage. He got brought up on aggravatedassault charges. He would have gone to jail if we hadn’t convinced the judge he was schizo. Which he was.”
“I didn’t even know you had a brother, Jenny.”
“He killed himself a few years after that. I don’t talk about it.”
Wells slowed down, put his hand on her shoulder. “Exley.”
“Lots of them do, you know. Schizophrenics. He just couldn’t bear it.” She shook his arm off her. They were still heading north on Thirteenth. The apartment buildings had turned into two-story houses, indistinguishable in the night.
“You’re gonna have to drop me off soon,” she said. “They’re going to call my cell to tell me you’re gone, and they’re going to wonder if I don’t answer. So you want to hear the rest of my story or not?”
“You still want to tell it?”
“Yes. Strange but true.” She didn’t know why, or maybe she did. Because it would be his when she told him, a gift she wouldn’t give anyone else, in its way more intimate than any other. “So I’m fifteen, cutting school, smoking pot, acting out. Wearing black. The whole deal. You know, my brother’s crazy, my dad’s an alkie, and I’m just ignoring my mom, who’s doing her best. And I decide a couple weeks before my birthday that there’s no way — no way — I’m still gonna be a virgin when I’m sixteen. Great plan, right, John?”
“Lucky boyfriend.”
“Only — no. I didn’t have a boyfriend back then. And I didn’t want a high school boy. I wanted a man. Somebody who would fuck me. I didn’t even know what that meant, but my new girlfriends, the ones I cut class with, they were always talking about guys who fucked them, really fucked them. And some of it was crap, maybe most of it, I knew that. But some of it wasn’t. So, about a week before my birthday, Jodie, who was a couple years older, the nicest of them, told me about this party she was going to, in Oakland, across the bay, with some college guys. She said I should go. And then the next day she told me she couldn’t go, but I made her give me the address. And so I told my mother I was going to some concert — I remember I was so happy I put one over on her, my poor mother — and I got all dolled up and I went.”
He slowed down. “Is it wrong for me to imagine how you must have looked back then?”
“I looked
“You’re not old, Jenny.”
“Too kind. So, anyway, I catch the BART to Oakland, ’cause I’m not even legal to drive, remember. And I start walking around this kind of crummy neighborhood, because this is before every square foot in the Bay Area is worth a million dollars, and I’m starting to get nervous, and then I find it. And it’s loud, amped up, a big party in a big run-down house. There were some Berkeley students, but there were grad students too, and some guys from the neighborhood who’d come by and even some bikers, because that’s what Oakland was then. If you were having a party you’d better invite the locals. The girls were a little younger, but they were all in college at least. And I grab myself a beer and take a couple bong hits from this bong that must have been about four feet long. And I start looking for Mr. Right.”
“Jenny—”
“Too late. Let me finish.” She knew she had to tell him everything. To provoke him, to arouse him, she wasn’t even sure. “And I see a blond guy, surfer type, tall, cute. Not rough. Maybe twentyone, twenty-two. I start heading toward him, but before I can get to him, this guy in a black T-shirt grabs my arm. He’s got a couple tattoos on his arms. And he’s holding me pretty close. He asks me if I want a beer or maybe something harder, and he’s practically sticking his tongue down my throat while he says it. But I shake him off and head for the surfer.
“And Blondie’s interested, and it only takes about half an hour before I get him to a bedroom upstairs, and we’re making out, and he’s good and hard, and I say something dumb, like ‘Put it in me, stud.’ He looks at me and says, ‘What did you say?’ Then he looks again, and says, ‘How old are you, anyway?’ and he’s out the door like that, moving even faster when I say, ‘But I
“So you didn’t lose it that night after all.”
