“You’re thirteen,” Cory felt he had to point out.
The boys looked at Sab’s rotating carousel of porn whenever Cory’s family came for a visit, and over time the images became less new and less shocking. They stared at the photos, studying them hard for their future application in their own lives. One month there was a pictorial called “She’s Hot 4 U—Sizzle!” in which a girl dripped candle wax all over a guy’s naked torso. Other times, Cory and Sab sat together actually reading the text in Beaverama that was thinly scattered among the pictures. Beaverama’s advice columnist, Hard Harry, wrote:
Learn how to find her clit quickly. Ask her to show you where it is—she’ll like that! Guys, if you can make her come she will be sooooo grateful, she will do anything to you. And I mean anything. Seriously not exaggerating!!
“What do you think ‘anything’ means?” Cory asked Sab. His cousin shrugged. Neither of them had enough imagination yet to even think of what else a girl could do to you, what powers she possessed, which you would want her to unleash upon your naked form. But eventually, going online to meet their daily porn requirements, they learned. The men in these scenes shouted out things to women, and the women shouted back. “I’m going to make you come!” the men cried. “Yes, yes!” the women cried back. “Do it now!”
The girls Cory knew at school had none of these skills. They could, though, walk the balance beam, and they could tap out IMs to one another at the speed of light. Over time he went out with a couple of them and furiously kissed them and touched them, and then later on he went further with two different girls, trying out the language that had come from all the long hours spent in the company of porn.
By senior year of high school, many of the boys in his grade played a game called Rate ’Em. Cory, fully handsome at this point and finally inhabiting his body as if he actually owned it and didn’t lease it from a disreputable place, was walking down the hall when Justin Kotlin grabbed his arm and said, “Pinto, you in? Rate ’Em time.”
Cory turned to see a row of boys leaning against the wall. Every time a girl approached, the boys huddled together and each of them gave her a number rating, and then Brandon Monahan added the numbers up on his Texas Instruments calculator and came up with the average, which was hastily recorded on a piece of paper and then held up for everyone to see. Kristin Vells got an 8 (she lost points for being a skank), and Jessica Robbins, who was super-religious and wore plain jumpers and black shoes with buckles on them like a Pilgrim, got a 2.
“Sure, whatever,” he said. Distantly then, he saw that Greer Kadetsky was wandering their way. Though they were still in all the same accelerated-track classes, he hadn’t really spoken to her in years. He had seen her over time; she had an after-school job a few days a week in the mall at Skatefest, where the employees wore horrible outfits and matching hats, but he had never really looked at her critically before. Now he did. She had an appealing but imperfect face, a spot of electric blue in her brown hair, and black jeans and an Aéropostale T-shirt that stretched across her smallish breasts. But he could see for himself now, for the first time over all these years, that quiet, fiercely hardworking Greer was also crisp and ready and serious and special, and maybe, actually, even a little bit beautiful. This realization, coming after all this time, was almost startling.
Beside him, all the boys huddled over a calculator like employees at H&R Block during tax season, and finally a number appeared, which was then scrawled with a flourish on a piece of paper.
6
Greer Kadetsky was a 6. No, no, that was all wrong, Cory thought; she wasn’t a 6, that was way too low, and even if she was, that number would make her feel bad. He didn’t even think before taking the piece of paper from Nick Fuchs, who was routinely called Nick Fucks, when he wasn’t being called Nick Pukes.
“What are you doing, Pinto?” Fuchs said as Cory turned the notebook upside down, transforming the 6 into a 9.
Cory had rescued Greer from a moment of public humiliation, but she wasn’t even looking. Turn around, Greer Kadetsky, he wanted to say. Turn around and see what I have done for you.
But she had her narrow back to the row of boys, and the bell rang and everyone started to scatter. Cory crushed up the piece of paper in his hand and walked away, and as he did that Nick casually stuck out a leg and tripped him. “You piece of shit,” Nick whispered as Cory went down, his cheek scraping the sharp edge of a locker where the metal had peeled back. A little flap of skin had opened on his face, and he knew he would need to go see the nurse, and that there would be Neosporin in his immediate future. But the pain wasn’t too bad, and all he could really keep thinking about was that he had rescued and praised Greer, and had now taken an injury for her, and yet she knew none of it. That same afternoon, on the bus, he sat directly behind her, with the bandaged cut on his cheekbone lightly throbbing while he studied the back of her head. It was a very well-shaped head, he noticed. It was definitely not the head of a 6.
Greer had nothing in common with the women of Beaverama and all those websites, except that beneath her standard-issue high school clothes she possessed a good body, apparently full of holes the way all girls’ bodies were. It could make you slightly psychotic if you really focused on the idea that girls had holes under their clothes. Holes that suggested, in the absence they pointed out, that they could be filled, and that you could do the filling. He had turned a 6 into a 9; together the numbers made 69, which embarrassed him even to think about, but right away he saw two heads bobbing up and down in a bed like separate buoys in the ocean.
His deliberate, crafted sexualization of Greer Kadetsky increased day by day. It was only three weeks after Greer Kadetsky had been rated and Cory had been deliberately tripped and sliced his cheek on the locker edge that he decided it was time to establish contact with this girl he now contemplated deeply and continually. He turned to her one afternoon as they got off the bus and said something inane about Vandenburg’s physics test being “unfair.” Then he lightly followed Greer up the path to the Kadetsky house, and from there it began.
His cousin Sab almost immediately sensed the change in him, for each time the Pintos went to Fall River lately, Cory turned down Sab’s invitation to look at porn. “Oh come on, don’t be a pussy. Instead, come look at pussy,” Sab said. But Cory didn’t want this anymore, and Sab called him a faggot. Sab had been changing too, becoming mean and angry, and doing who knew what with his friends. Hard drugs. Dark things. When they saw each other, there were long, cold silences. But Cory was far away from Sab now; he was leaving him, and leaving his whole family.
“When you’re both in college I’m going to visit you,” Alby, now four, said one afternoon when Greer was over at the Pinto house and they were sitting in the living room. “I’ll bring my superhero sleeping bag and unroll it on the floor of your room.”
“Wait, which of us are you going to visit, Alby?” Cory asked, his hand in Greer’s hair, lazily rubbing her head. “That is, if Greer and I aren’t at the same college, which we really hope to be. Preferably at one of the Ivies,” he added with casual arrogance.
“First I’ll visit Greer, then you,” said Alby. “And one day you can visit me at my college.”
“And I can sleep in my superhero sleeping bag when I do,” Cory said.
“No,” said Alby seriously. “That makes no sense. When I go to college you’ll be . . . thirty-two. You won’t want a sleeping bag. You and your wife will want a bed.”
“Yes, Cory,” said Greer. “You and your wife will want a bed.”
“Greer could be your wife,” Alby said. “But she has to convert to Catholic like us.”
“How do you know about converting?” asked Cory.