Mason
Mason sat on his bed, facing the windows of the senior boys’ dorm, thinking about Miri. He’d had an early supper with Jack. Burgers at Mother Hubbard’s, then apple pie. Jack wanted to know about him and Miri. Wanted to make sure he wasn’t moving too fast, that he knew the rules.
He more or less told him he’d never known anyone like her, so sweet, so trusting. He didn’t say anything about their game of Trust. That was private, between him and Miri. He still couldn’t believe he’d told her about his mother and about his father chasing him with an ax. Until now, only Jack knew. But it was his idea to play Trust, wasn’t it? He must have known he’d tell her, must have wanted to tell her, to prove he trusted her, the way she trusted him. And now, as he sat at his window in the dorm at Janet, that was what was killing him. Because all the time he was living a lie. What if she found out about Polina? What was he supposed to do then?
Polina had volunteered to keep Fred overnight back in September, before he’d ever met Miri. She took him and Fred home with her to the two rooms on Williamson Street where she lived with her three-year-old kid, saying Fred could stay there. She unbuttoned her dress, showed him her breasts. You like? she asked. You think I’m pretty?
Yeah, and yeah.
You like to touch?
Oh, yeah. Keep asking. Please don’t stop.
But she stopped when the kid came in and Fred barked. And the kid, who hardly spoke English, laughed. Doggy?
No, that’s a story he’d never tell. A story that has no end, because every week he’d gone to her place until the crash destroyed their house. Every week. And sometimes he was thinking of Miri when he did it. And sometimes he wasn’t thinking at all—he was just pumping her and it felt so good. She didn’t want anything from him, only that, only to say she was pretty and he liked her. Easy to say because it was true. He was careful. He got a package of rubbers. He wasn’t taking any chances. She was his first and she was a good teacher. She didn’t have to say much. Just took his hand and put it where she wanted it. Took his dick and guided it where she wanted it, which was where he wanted it, too.
—
AS HE STARTED getting ready for bed, he felt the house shake, then heard the earsplitting roar of a plane. A few of the other boys woke up and ran to the window. In the clear moonlit night, they saw it heading straight for them. He and the other boys fell to the floor, flattened and braced themselves. Mason made it partway under his bed. But instead of smashing into Janet, the plane must have hit something else and seconds later it crashed into their playing field, taking down the swings, the softball backboard. One explosion followed another. Mason didn’t stop to think—he raced outside in an adrenaline rush and charged across the field to what was left of the plane, its fuselage ripped apart. Three of the other boys followed. He pulled out a young woman hanging upside down in her seat. “I’m the stewardess,” she cried. “I have to help.”
“Okay, sure,” Mason told her, “but first we have to get you out of here.” He carried her in his arms while she kept insisting, “I have to help…” He got her out just before another explosion, handed her over to one of the other boys, then rushed back to the plane. He freed a girl trapped under her seat, and threw her over his shoulder. “My husband,” she cried. “I’m not leaving without my husband. We just got married.” Mason handed her down to another of the boys, then went back to find the husband buried under debris, and barely alive, if that. They were working as a team now. The boys from Janet and the other rescuers, police, firemen, nurses. He pulled out another victim, and another. An arm came off a corpse. A baby was charred and dead.
Then he was being restrained, held so tight he had to fight to free himself. “Let go!” he shouted.
“No, no more,” Jack told him.
But Mason wouldn’t listen. He broke away from Jack, with Jack following, in time to help Mason pull out a little girl, alive but in shock. “Mommy…” she cried again and again. Jack handed her over to a fireman, who carried her to an ambulance, then passed her to a nurse, who rode with her to the hospital. Mason was on his way back to the plane when an explosion sent him flying. Jack dragged him away from the plane. When he looked up he saw bodies, still strapped into their seats, hanging from trees like puppets in some kind of sick show. By then the field had turned into a muddy, bloodstained junkyard.
Christina
In the middle of the field Christina bent over a woman on the ground. “Please, girly, loosen my girdle. I can’t breathe.”
Christina knew exactly how to do it—the hooks up the side, the stays. “My mother runs a girdle shop on Broad Street,” she told the woman. “Nia’s Lingerie—maybe you know it?” Why was she making small talk while the woman moaned?