100 Sideways Miles (17 page)

“Oh.”

Dad sipped his coffee.

He said, “You're not nervous about that college trip with Cade, are you? You know, you don't have to go if you don't want to.”

That was Dad's circuitous way of telling me he wished I would stay home forever. Cade and I would be taking our exploratory trip to Oklahoma in just a few weeks. It was time for the epileptic boy to grow up.

“Sometimes I've worried about it. But I think it will be good for me.”

“It's one of those things that you're going to eventually do, I suppose,” Dad said.

And then I asked him, “Dad, how old were you the first time you had sex?”

Look: Words did not frighten my father. They scared the shit out of me. I almost couldn't believe I'd worked up the guts to ask the question and not choke to death in the process. But words were the atoms in my father's universe, and he was their destroyer and their creator.

Dad put his cup down on the table between us. He glanced over his shoulder. I knew what he was doing. He wanted to see if Mom or Nadia had gotten out of bed and were within earshot.

“Sex?”
Dad asked.

“Yeah. Well. Um. I mean with someone else.”

Somehow I'd just skirted around the issue of masturbation with my dad.

My dad said, “Fifteen. But things were a lot different then.”

“Fifteen? What do you mean by
different
?”

“Well, I suppose I mean that you kids now are more mature than I was, that you think about bigger things, and maybe with that maturity there come additional considerations you need to be cautious about,” my father explained.

“That sounds like bullshit to me,” I said.

Dad nodded.

“It probably is,” he said. “Good call, Finn. I just pulled that responsible-dad speech out of my ass. Why did you want to know?”

“Don't you think it's normal for a kid to want to know that about his dad?” I asked. “I can't measure whether I'm normal or not by comparing myself with someone like Cade Hernandez.”

I sipped my coffee and watched the undulating surface on the pool.

My dad said, “Are you having sex with anyone?”

I felt myself turning red. I shook my head. I wanted to ask him what he meant by “anyone.” “Anyone” is the universe, and that includes an awful lot of people I would never have sex with.

“No,” I said. “It just seems like all the guys I know at school have had sex. Everyone has but me.”

“That's the biggest high school myth of all time, Finn,” Dad said. “Just because the guys say they're doing it doesn't make it true.”

I thought about words—like words in books—and how just saying them made things real.

I sighed.

“I think they're telling the truth.”

“Don't worry about it. It's no big deal, Finn. Trust me. Kids make a much bigger deal out of sex than it really is. Don't let anyone pressure you into feeling like there's something wrong with you or you're not normal.”

“Wow,” I said. “I'm
normal 
?”

My dad laughed. “Probably not.”

I put my hand on top of my dad's and told him thanks.

I loved my dad.

He cleared his throat and said, “You know, Finn, when it does happen, just be smart. Normal or not, you're smart.”

“Okay, Dad.”

All things considered, this was much better than the condom talk with Mom.

• • •

I'd hidden the box of condoms Cade forced me to buy between the mattress and the springs on the lower bunk in my bedroom.

Nobody in health class ever advised against that particular hiding place, and since it was my job to do my own laundry, Mom was not likely to stumble onto my secret condoms by changing my sheets.

After dinner, I pouted alone in my room, waiting for the right time to leave. I'd have to sneak out. I'd never left my house that late at night, and if I got caught, there would be questions.

And after our conversation that morning, Dad would know exactly what was going on.

I was scared and embarrassed. I thought about taking off my clothes in front of Julia Bishop—how awkward that would be.
I didn't want her to look at me naked, so, I thought, maybe we could do it in the dark. The problem was, I wanted to see
her
naked. How do the physics of this light/dark fantasy work themselves out for guys, I wondered.

At ten o'clock, I extracted the box of condoms from their hiding place. The box was sealed shut, and I had to unfold the entire thing to read all the detailed instructions printed on the inside. It was all very pharmaceutical, with black-line drawings of how to properly put on and take off a condom.

It was ridiculous.

At eleven, I got dressed and fixed my hair in front of the mirror that hung on the door of my closet. I tried to look good, confident, but I was so unconvincing. I made sure the clothes I wore were all perfectly clean and smelled fresh—shorts, T-shirt, socks, underwear. I wore the socks with the sharks on them, the ones Julia had admired. My briefs were brand-new and had that just-out-of-the-package chemical smell. Thanks, Governor Altvatter! You had to be sure and have fresh underwear and socks if you were going to have sex, right?

Even the laces on my sneakers were never used and brilliantly white.

I was so stupid.

I put two condoms inside my left pocket. How many did you need? I should have asked Cade Hernandez, but he would have put on some theatrical show to answer such a simple question. The instructions inside the box didn't say anything about how many condoms a guy would typically use when having sex.

Two sounded good.

At eleven fifteen, it was time to go. I took my sneakers off
so I could get out the back door in my socks without making any noise. Then I realized how dumb it was to call sneakers “sneakers.” Those rubber soles were like steel-pan drums on hardwood floors.

I was disgusted with myself.

And just before I left, I turned out the light and put those stupid condoms back inside the box beneath my mattress. Anyway, the expiration date on them wasn't going to hit for another eight-hundred-million miles.

That's a long line for a goddamned roller coaster.

• • •

On the way to Julia Bishop's house, I practiced what I would say to her. I used Laika as my stand-in for Julia.

Laika was a good listener, and when I talked to her, she would stay near me and not run off to find something decaying that she could roll on.

It was a win-win situation.

Excuse Number One:
Look, Julia, I really like you a lot. . . .

Bullshit.

Laika was unimpressed.

Excuse Number Two:
I love you, Julia.

“Should I say that, Laika? I mean, it's the truth, but I don't think I have the balls to say ‘I love you' to Julia until she says it first. Is that totally stupid? I think she's in love with me. Do you think so?”

Bullshit.

Excuse Number Three:
Julia, I am too young and too stupid to have sex. I wanted to believe I could do it, but I can't. I hope you don't think there's something wrong with me, because there's not. I'm just not ready. I love you, and I hope you're not mad at me. I would never
have sex without condoms. I even embarrassed myself and bought some, with Cade Hernandez along, no less! Imagine that! And I purposely left them at home tonight because I just don't think I'm old enough to do it yet. Maybe that makes me gay. Maybe it makes me a loser, because all my friends are having sex. Just not me.

Bullshit again.

It was all true; I just didn't know if I could actually say those words to her.

As I climbed up the bank from the creekbed and onto Julia's property, I found myself wishing I had just stayed home.

• • •

There was no light coming from Julia Bishop's bedroom.

Would she even know I was there?

We'd talked about it plenty of times, so it wasn't like either of us had forgotten the mysterious midnight date we'd arranged.

I checked my watch.

Eleven fifty-seven.

Three thousand six hundred miles to midnight.

“Come here, Laika,” I whispered.

I folded my legs and sat down in the garden outside Julia's bedroom window. Laika pressed up against my bare thigh, and I patted her fur.

And I said, “You are not running off tonight.”

Laika, guilty, hunched her shoulders and sighed.

Flick!

The light on the other side of Julia's window came on.

In the night, the window lit up like a movie screen. It looked odd—a flat yellow cloth of some kind, perfectly clean and smooth with brilliant light shining on it from somewhere inside
the girl's bedroom. It was the same color as the moon when you'd see it through the smoke of the bullfighter's incinerator.

Sometimes, you couldn't help but see things through lighted-up windows in the canyon at night. In some ways, living in San Francisquito Canyon was like living in a commune, anyway. Even though most of the people who lived there were hiding from the rest of the world, nobody in that community exerted much effort at all when it came to hiding things from one another.

My father and I were the exceptions. I hid things from him, while he hid things from everyone else.

• • •

There is something about the dark of night that makes me feel safer, like I'm not constantly being watched to see if I'm
okay
.

A shadow moved across the pale screen from the edge of Julia's window frame.

Naturally, I hoped it was Julia. I wished she would come outside and talk to me and make me feel like things were normal, good.

I stared and stared.

The shadow in the window took form.

In the window, I see an ascending circle that rises upward and freezes. It floats just below the upper border of the screen. I can't tell how the object got there—it doesn't seem to make sense. Maybe it is some kind of decoration that dangles from a string. And then the shadow, the circle, begins to eclipse inward. It
transforms into a moon. At least, it is the shadow of something that looks exactly like a waning moon in the sky.

Once the shadow reduces to a quarter crescent, it hangs there, motionless.

I watch.

Somehow it makes me feel guilty, like a trespassing thief, but I scoot myself along the ground where I sit, leaning closer to the shadow of the moon and the window of the room where the most beautiful girl I have ever seen sleeps every night.

I stroke Laika and whisper to her, “Do
not
run away.”

I sit there transfixed as a second shadow figure grows upward from the base of the window. It is a rectangle in black, and once it has settled into place, it shakes silently as though there is some kind of seismic disturbance on the planet beneath the quarter moon. At the edge of the rectangle, a thin slit of light dilates wider. The rectangle becomes a doorway, and it is opening in front of my eyes. Through the illuminated doorway, a new shadow creeps out onto the screen—a slate gray silhouette of a boy who walks across the stage of the window frame beneath the hovering moon.