“Hey, Dom. I’m just messing with you. You want to come in for a glass of lemonade?” He nodded to an open wooden gate snug in the trimmed hedge. “Your face is all red still.” He pointed at his own face to show Dom where—his cheeks, chin, and forehead. “And we got calamine lotion back at the cottage.”
Dom wanted to go with the man. To have his face, now prickling with heat, touched again by this beautiful man’s gentle hands. Maybe he could lay down and the man would bend over him, his breath warm, the rough pads of his fingers tracing Dom’s forehead, brows, down the sides of his face, across his lips, into his mouth, Dom sucking his long fingers, the darkest brown on top and pale yellow underneath, Dom’s tongue flickering, his mouth filling, in and in and in, and then the man’s voice was behind him, shouting, “Hey, Dom! Come back!”
He ran into the woods, leaping over a pile of fresh-cut wood. He ran fast and hard, away from the Castle, not bothering to use his father’s machete to hack away the branches that lashed his face. He knew he deserved it, the hot stripe of pain on top of pain. He was dirty and bad and sick. Just like his father had known all along. What Dom knew only now. He wasn’t sure what sickened him more, that those asswipes Victor and MJ had known he’d wanted it when Dom himself had not, or the act itself—Dom leaning over Sean Waldinger’s limp dick in the woods behind the school, Sean screaming so loud that MJ had clapped a fat hand over Sean’s mouth while Victor held him down. They’d promised Dom that if he didn’t do it, they’d beat him bloody, break his nose, his ribs, crush his balls with their boots till they went POP! If he didn’t lick Waldinger. Just a lick. But when his open lips touched the silky-soft head of his friend’s penis, and he tasted salt, and something else, yeasty like fresh bread, MJ had slammed a hand down on the back of Dom’s head, forcing his mouth down and open, and MJ’s hot breath whispered in Dom’s ear. Suck it. Open your mouth. There you go.
A few days after the thing that happened in the woods behind school, Dom had the first of the dreams that would wake him with a jolt most mornings, his shorts wet and stuck to his thigh. He dreamt of faceless bodies rubbing, bucking, and sucking.
Now he knew. They were men. And he wanted them.
*
He stretched out the wrong way on his bed, muddy sneakers up by his pillow, not caring if he scuzzed up his Pac-Man bedspread. He stared at the posters Scotch-taped above the headboard. They’d been a gift from his dad on Dom’s twelfth birthday. When Dom had seen the posters, he knew his dad had guessed about the teasing at school. Sure, they’d been a gift—tied with curled ribbon—but Dom knew they were a reminder of the kind of boy he was supposed to be.
They were the same glossy posters Uncle Carmine had plastered to the concrete walls of the office at the auto body shop. The same taped to his cousins Vinny and Enzo’s bedroom walls. Swimsuit models coated in oil, naked but for a string bikini stretched over hardened nipples, a thong tucked between glistening ass cheeks. Puckered lips parted. Cindy Crawford, kernels of sand scattered across her curved butt, a trail leading you-know-where. Alyssa Milano in a strategically soaked tank top. Kathy Ireland rolling her tongue around a cherry lollipop.
At night, when Dom jerked off, letting his jizz spray on his sheets and harden—proof to his dad, he hoped, that his dick worked fine, that he wasn’t all those names the meatheads at school called him—he felt Cindy, Kathy, and Alyssa staring at him. Spies sent by his father.
“Uh-oh.” Maddie’s voice made him jolt upright, swivel around. “Someone’s in a mood.”
“Fuck off.”
“Whoa,” she said with a laugh. “A real shit storm of a mood.”
She stood by his headboard, hands on hips, squinting at the wall behind his bed. She’d caught him, he thought, and his throat flushed hot, itched like he had poison ivy, as he imagined what Maddie would think. Him staring up at the posters getting all turned on, when nothing could be further from the truth.
“It’s not what you think,” he said.
“What’re you talking out of your butt about? What’s not what I think?”
“Never mind,” he said. “I just…” He paused. “I hate those posters.”
She climbed onto his bed, tucked her bare feet under her smooth legs. He thought about telling her to get lost, but he wanted her there. Who else did he have? His Maddie-cake, he remembered the name he’d given her years ago.
She lifted her chin and said, in an impersonation of their mother’s high-pitched, bubbly voice, “Daddy says that’s normal boy stuff.”
He laughed but remembering his mother’s words he wanted to scream. What did she think went on at school every freaking day? Too late, Mom! I’m already anything but normal. The freak who follows dickwads like Victor Hackett and MJ Bundy, follows like a dumb trusting baby, into the woods behind school. Who does what they tell him to avoid a beating. A few gut punches he could’ve survived, he knows now. Bruises fade. Blood wipes away. But what he did—that would never fucking ever wash out.
Maddie was touching him, her hands on his shoulders, turning him so he had to look into her sad eyes.
“Hey,” she said. “I hate these posters too.”
It felt even better than a hug.
She jumped up to stand on the bed, the springs groaning. She slipped her fingers between the slick paper and the wall and before Dom could shout No! or Dad will kill me! she tore Cindy Crawford in half, slicing sand-dusted buttocks from the rest of her body. The hiss of the paper tearing made Dom’s throat catch. Because he knew Dad would go after Maddie when he found out. Maddie had risked that for him.
He’d be okay. As long as he had Maddie.
“Dad.” He knew he didn’t have to say more. She was just as scared of him as Dom was.
“Here’s what we say,” Maddie said, her eyes crinkling with a plan, her voice lifting in mock humility: “But Daddy, we had to take them down! If the Colonel and Veronica saw those posters, they would majorly bug out. You can kiss your club membership goodbye.”
“Dad will understand,” Dom said, hoping it was true.
“Your turn,” Maddie said.
He tore the posters until his ears rang with the cry of paper rending, a whimper that built to a wail, and he was ripping Victor Hackett and MJ Bundy limb from limb, and every dickhead at East Avalon Junior-Senior High that had called him a cocksucker faggot homo buttmuncher. He was hacking his father into pieces. And Veronica too. The carnage—dewy pink flesh and glistening lips and meaty thighs and breasts and ass—piled at his feet.
They laughed. Deep from the gut and contagious so that when his or Maddie’s giggles tapered off, the other started in again, and they’d both be at it, laughing so hard Maddie pressed her knees together so as not to pee. With Maddie near he felt ready for whatever came next.