I look into the camera and say no and after that he’s irritated because I’ve messed up his video and this one was on target to be a good one. I’d done everything right, acted just like a whore. It’s taking forever so I get on top and ride him until he’s about to come, then hop off and watch him make a mess on his belly.
“That’s a ton,” I say. Boys like to hear things like this. I hand him a wad of Kleenex and he wipes his stomach, the hairs sticking together to form a little peak.
We get dressed and go to China Buffet 2.
I fill a plate and set it at the table, my Sprite already there. I go back for an egg roll, cream cheese fried wontons, slices of cantaloupe, a bowl of ice cream. I nod at the Chinese girls as I pass. There are real Chinese people here, not like at the other place in the old Shoney’s.
He tucks his napkin into his shirt like his fat father and eyeballs me. He knows I won’t eat half of it. He knows I won’t eat much of anything even though I carry chocolate bars in my purse, packages of cookies and honey roasted peanuts.
“What are you looking at?” I ask, as I pick the egg and bits of carrot out of my fried rice, sip my Sprite. The Chinese girl comes over and tops it off. “Take your plate away?” she asks him. He tells her he’s still working on it. There’s a half a chicken stick and some shreds of cabbage.
When we get back to his house, he goes into the other bedroom to play guitar and smoke a joint. My sister smoked a bunch of his pot once and said it was Mexican dirt weed. She says I’m not allowed to smoke his dirt weed or ride on the back of his motorcycle because I’ll fall off and hit my head and my brains will spill all over the pavement. She acts like my mother even though I already have a mother. She knows I’ll listen to her because I know she knows how things are in a way my mother will never know. I want to talk to her but she’s still in the hospital so I call my friend Iris.
I tell her I’m not sucking dick on camera anymore, her baby crying in the background.
“It can’t be good,” she says. “What good can come of it?”
“I don’t know—sometimes we watch it together and it turns us on.”
“It doesn’t turn you on,” she says, and I tell her she’s right, it doesn’t, but the idea of it does. “Ideas are useless,” she says, “as soon as you have one you forget it. I read self-help books and I’m fixed for like a day—for a day I’m not putting my shit on anybody and I’m only thinking good thoughts and the next day everything’s fucked again.” The baby is wailing now. “I have to go,” she says, “little man’s hungry. You should see my tits, they’re so big. You’re going to end up on the internet so stop, just stop.”
I go to the bathroom and brush my teeth. I need a new toothbrush. This one is shitty because it came from the dentist.
My boyfriend starts a new song and I pause to hear what it is—“Folsom Prison.” He tries to sound exactly like Johnny Cash, which bothers me because he has no imagination but he thinks he’s a fucking genius because he’s registered with BMI. Ryan Ellington’s BMI card is stuck to the bottom right-hand corner of the bathroom mirror. I bet Ryan Ellington is hot. I wipe a little foamy spit on it and then get in his bed, on the side that’s mine, the side that doesn’t have a table to set things on, and pull the spread up to my chin. It’s black and gray with a stripy animal print circa 1989. It has linty balls all over it, which I pick off and release between the bed and wall.
“I’m about to feed the fish,” he says, from the doorway.
“I’m sleeping.”
“Come watch.”
“I don’t want to,” I say, but then he’s mad, so I get up and go in there and sit on a foldout chair next to the table with all his drug stuff on it: a wooden box with spiky metal teeth, rolling papers, a yellow plastic lighter and a Zippo, an ashtray littered with roaches. I want a cigarette but I’d have to go outside to smoke it.
He has live crickets in a mesh bucket, which he drops into the tank two at a time. The fish open their mouths and eat them off the top of the water: bloop! The fish are too small for eating but too big to be in a tank. He got them out of the river. I don’t like the river because there are gars and snakes and the water makes you feel all crackly and tight when it dries on your skin but I go with him because his ex-girlfriend never went with him once in four years and I don’t want to be like her. She once prostituted herself behind a Blockbuster Video. There are also some snails and a crawfish. The crawfish is a monster. I like to watch him eat the fish when they die because it goes on forever unless you fall asleep.
“Do you want to feed them?” he asks.
“They smell awful.”
“Come on, just one.”
I reach my hand in and they jump all over it.
“You complain a lot.”
“I’m difficult,” I say, though I don’t know if I’m difficult because I don’t know how difficult other girls are. He says I’m more difficult than most, though not as difficult as the Blockbuster girl, but he also says it’s okay because I’m pretty and pretty girls have room, unlike fat girls, like my sister, who have no room, who should learn to keep their mouths shut.
I grab one and throw it in, right above a fish’s mouth: bloop! Then I turn around and walk out, wash my hands and get back in bed. Adult Swim is on. They aren’t shows I’d have ever watched on my own but I like them now, especially the one with the mean baby and talking dog. I feel like I’m figuring something out about boys when I watch them—something like how much they can appreciate smart when it’s presented to them as stupid.
He takes off all his clothes and gets into bed with me. I put my head on his shoulder and stick my face in his armpit; even when he stinks I like it, especially when he stinks. I’m allergic to his semen, though. It burns and gives me infections, but he always wants to put it in me because he has this notion about “spilled seed.” Anything outside the vagina constitutes spilled. I tell him I’m going to get pregnant but he knows this isn’t true because I’m on the pill and the pill is 99.9 percent effective if you take it every day, which I do. I also have a tilted uterus.