“Shut up. And why is it funny?”
“Oh, come on. Your parents are these stoners, and you’re this ambitious good girl. I think that’s funny.”
“I’m honored by your description of me.”
“I wasn’t trying to insult you. I see you all the time with college brochures. You’re trying for the Ivies too, right?” She nodded. “I think we’re the only ones in the grade,” he said. “I think it’s just us.”
“Yeah,” she said, softening. “I think so too.” They shared a single-mindedness that you couldn’t teach someone; a person had to have it as part of their neurology. No one knew how this kind of focused ambition got into someone’s system; it was like a fly that’s slipped into a house, and there it is: your housefly.
When Greer’s mother appeared, dressed in her clown collar but not the shoes or wig, she seemed self-conscious. “Oh,” Laurel said. “I didn’t know you were bringing someone home. Hi, Cory. Well, I’m off to do a show.” She opened the door. “Dad’s down at his workbench.” Rob Kadetsky sometimes puttered around in the basement, listening to cassettes of eighties bands on an old Walkman and working on something involving radio waves. Greer and Cory watched Laurel walk to her car in a modified version of the clown suit that she wore to her occasional gigs.
“What exactly does your mom do again?” Cory asked.
“Take three guesses.”
“Accountant.”
“Ha ha, you’re hilarious.”
“I mean, I’ve seen her outfit,” he said. “Obviously I know the basic concept, but it’s not like she’s going under the big top, is she? Elephants and a ringmaster and a family trapeze act?”
“Library clown,” said Greer.
“Ah.” Cory paused. “I didn’t know library clown was a job.”
“It isn’t, really, but she made it into one. It was her idea.”
“Well, that’s resourceful. So what does a library clown do, exactly?”
“She goes around to libraries dressed as a clown, and I guess she tells jokes to the kids and reads to them or something.”
“Is she funny?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“But she’s a clown,” Cory said thoughtfully. “I thought being funny would be a prerequisite.”
The entire time Greer and Cory were together in the house that afternoon, her father never emerged from the basement. The two of them sat tensely in the den on the old plaid couch, and Cory played with a lighter that one of her parents had left there, flicking it with his thumb and touching it to the wick of one of the small white candles that sat in little glass cups on a windowsill, furred with dust. Then he upended the lit candle and waited until a clear teardrop of wax had dripped off and landed on the back of his hand, where it immediately turned opaque.
“Amazing,” he said.
“You sound stoned. What’s amazing?”
“The way you can tolerate hot wax on your skin for a second. Why is it tolerable? If a car runs over your foot for a second, is that tolerable too?”
“I don’t know, but please don’t try it at home.”
“And if someone else drips wax on you, does it hurt? You know the way you can’t tickle yourself?” Cory said. “Is it like that?”
“I have no idea,” said Greer. “I’ve never thought about any of this before.”
In one move Cory yanked up his shirt so that his long torso was revealed. Cory and Greer were the two brains of the grade, but here he was being mostly a body, a torso—what a strange word. It was one of those words that if you said it aloud a few times, it disintegrated into nonsense: Torso torso torso.
Cory lay down on his back along the wooden coffee table, which creaked with strain, his legs hanging over the edge. “Okay, do it,” he said. “The wax.”
“You’re going to break my parents’ table.”
“Come on, just do it,” he said.
“You’re deranged. I’m not going to drip wax on your stomach, Cory. I’m not some dominatrix on a website.”
“How do you know there are dominatrices on websites? You just gave yourself away.”
“How’d you know the plural was dominatrices?”
“Touché,” he said, smirking.
“Shut up,” she said, the second time today that she’d said that to him. Shut up, girls said to boys, and the boys were thrilled.
“Come on, I just want to see what it feels like,” said Cory. “You’re not going to kill me, Greer.”
So she found herself tipping a lit candle onto Cory Pinto’s stomach, peering down as the flame softened the wax, which formed a transparent pearl of liquid, and then the liquid met skin with a soft little dollop sound. He drew back the muscles of his abdomen, and exposed his teeth and said, “Shit!”
“Are you okay?” she asked. He nodded. The wax hardened into a white oval above the small depression of his navel. She thought that they were done, but he didn’t get up, and then he asked her to do it again. Now she wasn’t thinking about whether this would hurt him; obviously it would, but not too badly. She was thinking, instead, that the feeling of dominating Cory Pinto was new, the feeling of being in charge of him, going past him, and that it was sort of great.
The following Saturday, her parents drove up to the farm in Vermont, and Cory came over in the afternoon without even the pretense of studying or talking about school. He brought no books or notebooks or graph paper or laptop. Later, she could barely remember how they moved from school talk to what happened next. But after sitting at the kitchen table for a while, she invited him upstairs to see her room. After about thirty seconds of looking around at all her things—the snow-globe collection, the trophy for winning the spelling prize, the many, many books, from Anne of Green Gables to Anne of Avonlea to Elie Wiesel’s Night—Cory said, “Greer,” and she said, “What,” and he said, “You know what.” He smiled at her in a new, sly way, which both shocked her and didn’t, and then he took her face between his hands, kissing her so swiftly that their teeth knocked. As soon as she felt his tongue tip she heard him groan, and the sound made her feel as if a spoon were stirring her organs around. Then Cory took her by the shoulders and maneuvered her back so she was lying down and he was lying on top of her, their hearts competing. Greer was so excited she didn’t know what to do with herself.
“Is this okay?” he asked, and she couldn’t think how to answer. How could it be okay? That wasn’t the word for it. He touched her breasts beneath her bra, and both Greer and Cory were silent and shocked from the strength of the sensation. When he opened her bra and kissed her breasts she thought she might faint. Can you faint lying down? she wondered. In a little while, after much touching, he unsnapped her jeans with such a loud sound that it was like a log popping in a fireplace.
Then his fingers hovered tantrically inside the nanospace between jeans and underpants, and he started to get inexplicably and weirdly chatty. “I’m going to make you come,” he said in a voice that was unfamiliar. “I’m going to make you want it,” he went on. Then he asked, a little unsurely, “Do you want it?”
“Why are you talking like that?” she said, confused.
“I was just saying what I felt,” he said, but now he looked as if he’d been caught in something.
And though, once in a while in bed after that day, he would speak to her in a similar, strange way, she was usually able to bring him around quickly to being himself. Not that being themselves was any less disorienting. The freedom of that, the idea that you could have preferences, and that they were your own and it was up to you to know what they were—you and the other person—terrified her.
The second time they were together in bed, he boldly whispered, “So where’s your clit?” The word was almost alarming when spoken by Cory and actually meant to refer to a part of Greer.
“What?” she said, because it was all she could think to say. She was stalling.