“Uh, I think that’s, like, the last thing on her mind,” Gabrielle said.
“Those dudes’ll warm her right up,” Gerritt said. The boys laughed. Like it was an inside joke, Maddie thought, and only they knew the punch line.
The men stood in a circle around the woman like in some ritual sacrifice. Some of the men were short, some tall, some black, some white, all tugging on their penises.
“Fuck,” Gabrielle said, cringing so she curled into a ball on John Anderson’s wide lap. John bucked his hips and she bounced up and down, yelling, “Quit it, John!”
As the men shuffled forward, closing in just like the circle of men in the monkey video, Bitsy laughed and said. “Oh God, no,” and flipped her hair so it fell in front of her eyes. But Maddie could see Bitsy was shifting her hips, rubbing against Gerritt’s crotch.
“Aw, man,” Rolo said. “Are they going to? Naw. This is hardcore.”
“Spence, dude,” Gerritt said, “your dad’s into some kinky shit.”
Maddie imagined her feet glued to the floor to stop from running up the stairs, and out the screen door. Walking home in the caterpillar-filled dark if she had to. Wasn’t there someone to help this woman, pull her to her feet, wrap her in a sheet and take her home?
“Ew, I can’t watch!” Gabrielle watched through her fingers, each nail a perfect half-moon French manicure.
“Don’t be a pussy,” Vanessa said. Adding, when she got no response. “Get it?”
Vanessa was staring straight at the screen. Maddie wished she could be more like her. Sure, the girl was a class-A bitch and none of the boys wanted her (she’d had to go to the junior prom with Rolo) but she played tough with total believability, proving again and again she was just one of the guys. Doing keg stands, racing the guys to the beer mart on rollerblades, and packing her lip with their Kodiak so she could join in the contest—who could spit the longest stream of tobacco juice.
Was this sex—the sex all the kids talked about, and the adults avoided talking about, the sex in the songs they blasted as they drove through the island and partied at the beach, the sex they, boys and girls, were supposed to wish for like she had dreamt of the fair all winter? She looked at Penny, still sitting on Rolo’s lap, her smile big so her teeth gleamed blue. What if Penny wasn’t just pretending to enjoy this?
The men tugged their penises so hard she was sure it must hurt. They ejaculated in unison, splattering the woman’s face and breasts with milky goo. The woman played dead—her eyes closed as the camera panned in, and Maddie spotted an angry zit, and realized this was a real person who had sat in front of a mirror and dabbed cover-up on her skin just as Maddie had earlier that night before leaving the cottage. The woman opened her mouth and licked at the come that had landed on her cheeks, her chin, her lips.
The basement erupted.
“Damn! She lapped that up good.”
“Uck, I think I’m going to vomit.”
“Best circle jerk I’ve seen.”
Vanessa shook her head. “Is this supposed to make us want to fuck you guys? As if!” She seemed so calm, like she was already wise to this, and Maddie wondered why she felt like she’d be scarred for life. Stay a virgin forever.
“Don’t you have something, like, I don’t know, hotter?” Vanessa said. “Less cummy?”
“I hear sperm’s got a lot of protein in it,” Penny said straight-faced. “So, basically, she just got her daily dose.”
Once again, Penny’s witty one-liner won the room.
“A protein shake!” Bitsy shouted.
“Daily dose?” one of the boys said. “How ’bout monthly dose!”
Before she could add a barely clever one-liner—how ’bout annual dose!—Maddie felt Spencer’s hot breath on the back of her neck.
“This shit is sick,” he whispered. “I’m sorry you had to see that.”
She wanted to hug him, kiss him even, right then and there.
“It’s okay,” she lied.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said, taking her hand and tugging her toward the stairs so she had no choice but to hop off the stool and follow him.
“Um, wait.”
“For what?” he said, not bothering to look back at her. “You want to watch more?” He laughed. “I sure as hell don’t.”
“No.”
She tried to think of an excuse. She should stay by Penny. What if she had another seizure? But Penny was laughing as she bounced on Rolo’s lap, throwing her head back and giggling. “That tickles!”
On the TV screen, one of the black guys stuffed his penis into the woman as she yelled, like she was angry, “Do it! Fuck me!”
“Yo, it’s the Marshall kid,” someone said.
She decided to let Spencer save her. Take her far from the woman’s fake moans and the men’s animal grunts. Wasn’t that what she’d wanted, she thought, back on the beach as she watched Gerritt slip the rope bracelet over Bitsy’s wrist? BE MINE.
She followed Spencer up the stairs.
10.
Jules
He searched for Leslie, moving past one circle of chatter after another, catching the same three topics he’d heard all night—the caterpillars, the vandal tagging up the island, and Governor Bill Clinton from Arkansas. Pest. Plague. Parasite. The same language used to describe all three.
He filled his plate with red velvet cake, strawberry-rhubarb pie, and a block of coffee cake that was to die for, according to the wine-flushed lady in line at the dessert table. He found Leslie. She was in a circle of women her age (but who could ever tell, he thought, when it came to these women with their private trainers and plastic surgeons). Leslie nibbled on a solitary pastry—bites so small that when she set her plate down, the food seemed intact. One of the things he’d loved about her first was her appetite. She never apologized for it the way other white women did, like it was a sin to feed your body. She’d sit on a packed subway car, stuffed between a Wall Street suit and a Korean grandma, and eat an apple, core and all, spitting the seeds into her hand and tucking them in her pocket—to add them to her tray of seeds drying in the apartment windowsill. A future garden for their someday dream home. Back when they had only dreams and the Marshalls, the Castle, the island, had no place in their fantasies.