“Soshe?”
“Sociology, Jim.”
“Oh,” I said.
Amanda walked to the fridge, opened the door, slouched down, and peered inside. Her grey sweatpants were riding low, and you could see the white elastic on her underwear pressing against the chubby pale skin where her back began, a few inches below where her blouse cut.
“Where’s Dad?” I asked.
“He’s asleep.”
“Oh.”
Amanda bent down farther, scanning the bottom shelves, and her sweatpants slid lower on her hips, making more of her underwear visible. Baby blue. Cotton.
“I gotta go then,” I said.
She turned around, let the fridge door swing shut. “You’re going?”
“Yeah, I gotta go … with Oleg. Play some ball in the alley.”
“Well, okay, Jim.” She walked toward me. “My bus leaves early tomorrow morning, so I probably won’t see you for a while. You’ll come visit me, right?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, Jim,” she gushed, and gave me a quick, tight hug, pulling my head into her bosom, then pushing it away.
Her blouse smelled like baby powder. Then she held on to my shoulders for a minute or so, looking into my eyes. I thought maybe she was going to cry. But suddenly her gaze dropped from my face and hovered directly below my belly. She stared at the small bulge for half a second, then, realizing it wasn’t piss showing through my light blue jeans, she whipped her hands violently from my shoulders, opened her mouth to speak — or scream, or vomit, or laugh — but I ran out of the kitchen before I could see which one it was. Ten seconds later I was jogging east through an alleyway, back toward the front entrance of Lawson Street Junior High.
* * *
Somebody was strangling me. An arm. Wrapped around my neck. Cutting my breath. Probably some homicidal maniac. No point fighting him, though. Too strong. I was a goner. Goodbye. Wouldn’t take long. Just let myself go. Don’t fight. Don’t scream. Couldn’t scream. Jeez, it was easy to die …
But suddenly the grip loosened, and Charlie was standing in front of me outside the entrance of Lawson Street Junior High, a half-finished cigarette hanging from his lips, feet turned out like a duck’s.
“Oh,” I said.
He took the smoke out of his mouth, ashed on the sidewalk. “You’re an idiot, you know that?”
“What?”
“I said meet me here at six-thirty.”
“So I came early.”
“What you do that for?”
“Dunno. Forgot which time.”
“You’re retarded, eh?”
“What? How … well, how come you came so early?”
“How come I came so early?”
“Yeah.”
He took a drag off his cigarette, blew the smoke in my face. “This girl kicked me out of her house.”
“You went and saw that girl?”
“No, a different one. This girl I know from my old school. Georgia. But she kicked me out when her mom came home. Made me climb out her window.”
“Yeah?”
“Swear to God. She was naked, too.”
“Her mom?”
“No, you idiot. The girl. I had her naked. Well, everything but her socks. She kept those on ’cause I told her to. But all her other clothes — bra, panties, all that — she stripped them off in front of me. In her room.”
“She did that?”
“Buddy, I’m gonna lie about something like that? Course, she stripped for me. This girl loves to strip for me. She puts on some music and does it like a stripper, teasing me and shit, dangling the panties down her legs and all that.”
“Yeah?”
“We were probably gonna screw, too, but then her mom came home, so I had to bolt.”
“You were gonna screw?”
“Course. But her mom’ll smack her hard if she catches a boy in the house, so I had to get out of there.”
“So you didn’t go home for dinner then?”
“Nah. Not today. I figured I’d just come by here after she kicked me out and hang around till you showed up. If you showed up. I didn’t think you were gonna show up.”
“How come?”
“’Cause you’re a retard.”
“Oh.”
He took another pull off his cigarette, then flicked the butt onto the road. “So you wanna see this whore or what?”
“Yeah.”
“Scared?”
“No.”
I followed Charlie south through an alleyway, kicking pebbles and learning a lot more about Georgia and this other girl from his old school — Caroline, a Filipina, four years older than us, who had a piercing on her vagina and liked to screw so much she waited in a park by Yonge Street every Friday night and gave it to the first guy who came up to her, no matter who he was.
“Even if,” I said, “I don’t know … like if he had warts all over his neck and his chin?”
“I told you,” Charlie said. “No matter who he is.” Then he proceeded to tell me about the time Caroline had invited him to her house, the things they’d begun to do in her bedroom, and was just about to say what happened after her one-eyed older brother, a member of an infamously violent Filipino gang, barged through the door with a machete in his hand, when we came to a green dumpster in the alleyway.
We’d been walking for about a half-hour.
“This is the spot,” Charlie said, strolling up to the dumpster, which was in front of a criss-crossed metal fence, maybe six feet high.
“But wait,” I said. “So he cut you or what?”
“I’ll tell you another time.”
“What do you mean? C’mon. What happened? You get sliced?”
“I said I’ll tell you another time.”
“You had to fight him or what?”
“Shut up!” Charlie snapped. He hoisted his body on top of the dumpster and dangled over the fence, hanging from the top bar, then dropped onto the other side, where there was a small concrete yard that led to a flat-topped grey-brick building, two storeys high, with a fire escape zigzagging to the roof. Crouching down like a soldier, Charlie snuck across the yard and started climbing the fire escape.
Halfway up the black metal stairs, he turned my way (I was still on the other side of the fence), shook his head, then continued toward the top.
By the time I made it over the fence, Charlie was already on the roof. When I got up to the roof, he was lying on his belly by the edge and staring down at the sidewalk.
“That’s her,” he said.
I lay down next to him.
“Probably screws fifty guys a night.”
“Yeah?”
“Maybe more.”
“She could do that?”
“Buddy, that’s her job.”
We