“Hey,” I whispered. “I don’t know. Maybe we should stop.”
He did not stop. He kept kissing me, easing me back against the spine of the boat, rocking side to side as his hand spidered along my hip, and then under my shirt. What did my stomach feel like to him, my soft stomach, so unlike Marlena’s, how strange it was to have Ryder touching me there—palming my waist, pinching me. He wrenched my sweatshirt up until it covered the lower half of my face. He filled each of his hands with one of my breasts titties like a fat girl titties and squeezed. He licked the places his fingers had been. Strange, strange, strange, his tongue flicking my nipples, what a strange thing for him to do, so obviously because he believed I would get pleasure from it. Silly-feeling, like being tickled in an ineffectual place. I made a soft sound in my throat, the lowest note I could hit in choir. It seemed appropriate. I felt sorry for him, somehow, the base of my skull bruising against the boat, his hands moving so clumsily, faster than I think he knew. I was no longer aroused, as I’d been before he kissed me, when he was all whispers and fingertips. Nothing about what he was doing resembled the chaotic, brain-numbing urgency of what I’d done to myself. It was like the difference between water and ice. Even my shame, which started the moment my shoulder blades hit the bottom of the boat, was of a different quality than the shame I’d felt when I touched myself. Now I was ashamed of desire writ large, of my body, of his body, of the dumb way we were moving, of what Marlena would think if she saw, of the fact that I didn’t much want this—and yet I wasn’t stopping him.
I ran my fingers through his hair, tugging the curls near his ears. When he got tired of sucking my chest, his mouth slippery with his own spit, he kissed me again, and I understood that this really wasn’t about me at all. I was incidental. It came as a humiliating relief. His hand traveled up the inside of my skirt until he jammed one cold finger inside my—what? My cunt? My pussy? My vagina? All of those words were wrong; why were there no better ones? I yelped for real, a sound I could not control, and I imagined that I was her, Marlena, that I knew what was happening, that I liked it, wanted it—he must have learned this somewhere, this must be what they did together. What would she do? Would she kiss him back, her tongue forcing its way into his mouth, her hips bucking against his hand until he pulled his fingers out and unzipped his pants, cramming himself into her until she felt something snap inside?
It was over, a gummy web between my legs, and I was now very, very drunk. It didn’t hurt as badly as the Internet said it would. I didn’t want to see his face, but I wanted him to see me. I wanted his fingertips back, I wanted him to fit his lips over mine, tasting their shape, to tell me he thought I was pretty, and that if I wanted to, we could try the whole thing again—and that I could decide what we did and when we did it and how. I hated that I wanted—so clichéd—for it to have been like two people having sex as an expression of love instead of what it was.
“Were you a virgin?” he asked.
“No.”
“Then you should get the morning-after pill.”
“Okay.”
“You’d be a better kisser if you paid attention to what I was doing.” He lit a cigarette. No book I’d ever read described what had just happened to me—it was never like that. I’d kissed him back; after getting over the surprise of his finger inside of me, I’d been turned on for a moment before being overtaken by a dissociative combination of fear, self-consciousness, anxiety. And pretending—pretending I was brave, that I knew, like her, what I was doing, as if I was not myself—that had excited me, too.
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay.” He snuggled me against his chest. It felt nicer than anything he’d done so far, his arms fitted around my own, our fingers laced. “Just chill out a little. I’ll teach you.”
Inside me, Ryder’s semen was swimming around, semen that had been in my best friend too, semen that at that very moment was doing its biological best to ruin my life. Come. I’d made Ryder come. It happened so quickly, the whole thing, the kissing included, over in just a few minutes.
“You’re a good kid, Cat.”
“You kind of suck.”
He laughed. My mouth tasted funny. I was thirsty. I felt my pulse in my brain. We watched the lake hit the shore, tiny wannabe waves, one after another. They slapped the sand and then dribbled away.
“I gave the police some information about Marlena’s dad,” he said.
“Information?”
“You know about the railcar, everyone knows. They know. I just gave them a few details they were missing.”
“Did you tell her?” She would have told me. She hadn’t told me about Jimmy, but she would’ve told me this.
“Somebody saw one of Greg’s videos. The idiot put them up on YouTube. It’s like, a public site. There’s all this shit in it, me and the Mapletree and you can see where I cook. I kept getting emails from this creepy address with a bunch of Xs, and all they’d say was like, I see you, or HA-HA. Do you know what that feels like? Like someone’s watching you?” He rubbed his birthmark as if he was trying to erase it. I hadn’t even seen his penis. Or touched it, really—not with any part of me that could make sense of what it looked like. “I can’t go to jail, Cat.”
“So what’re you, like an informant?” This was all my fault. How horrible and thrilling, that my presence in their lives, one stupid suggestion, had set in motion actual events.
“I didn’t say that much. I told them about the railcar, you know. The one in the woods, near Marlena’s. That’s all they wanted.”
“What about her?”
“It’s not like I’m the only person who’s come forward about this. She’d never know it was me—she doesn’t have to.”
“The other day, before lunch. I saw you coming out of KHS.”
“I didn’t know where else to go. I don’t have like, a lawyer. Principal Lacey is a good dude. He and Cher called the cops in. They’re making me go to court school next year, do some community service—it’s better than jail.”
“What’s court school?”
“Nontraditional alternative education, says the pamphlet. School for dropouts and druggies, says everyone else. You can’t tell her, Cat. You’ve met her dad. You know what’s happening. Don’t you think it’s better for her, for Sal, if he goes away?”