Authors: Rakesh Satyal
No, this sleepover is the legitimate kind, and in the car ride to Cody’s house with my mother, my sleeping bag rolled into a bun on my lap and my backpack full of toiletries, pajamas, and a change of clothes at my feet, I conjure up visions of the pillow fights the girls in the Baby-sitters Club books have. Then I snap out of my reverie and remember that no such scenario will happen this evening. I am with Donny and Cody, not Stacey and Krissy, and I cannot expect Donny and Cody to have read those books—and, what is more, to understand why pillow fights and painting one’s nails would be so much fun. The image of Donny and Cody playing basketball pops into my head, and I try to imagine myself there, dribbling with ease, flicking the ball toward the hoop with a deft movement of my wrist and the ball collapsing into the hoop with a light swish of the net. That is what I need to imagine for tonight. No girls, no girly things, no mirror girl. Just Kiran, a boy.
My mom stops the car when we pull up in front of the Ulrichs’ house. At first, I assume she is about to give me a lecture-cum-pep talk, but then she pulls the key from the ignition and gets out of the car. I sit in my seat, puzzled, wondering why she steps up onto the curb and puts a foot onto the Ulrichs’ driveway. Then she turns around, equally puzzled and says, the words muffled through the car window’s glass, “Are you coming?” I cringe as I realize that my mother wants to walk me to the front door.
I get out of the car with my sleepover goodies in tow. My mother walks back to the car and shuts the door behind me. “Mom, you don’t have to walk me to the house. I’ve got it.”
“
Beta
, I vant at least a qvick word with Beverly if my son is going to be in her home all night.”
“Mom, please. Please. I don’t want to look like a loser.”
“You’re embarrassed of me?” she asks. There is a smirk on her face that is in direct opposition to the gravity of this situation.
“YES,” I reply.
Her face crumples in mock hurt, and then she laughs and heads up the driveway. I love her to pieces, but in this instant, I want to beat her over the head with my backpack.
I experience the entrance to Cody’s house as if I’ve never seen it before. The front doorway is a picture frame of white metal peppered with rusty slivers. In a brick corner next to it, a potted plant lies in cold ruins. A welcome mat that has apparently survived an elephant stampede bears “The Ulrichs.” My mother rings the bell, a firefly stuck in a small white box to the left of the doorway, and I can hear the shuffle of feet as someone walks to the door. The lock is turned, and the door opens with a quick crack. There stands Beverly, a cigarette in one hand as usual. She is about six inches taller than my mom, her bushy brown hair adding even more height, and raised one step up from the porch, she looks like an Amazon. The smoke emanating from her cigarette rises slowly next to her. She is wearing faded blue jeans and an oversize T-shirt that has a gaggle of beagles and hearts covering its front. This is a particularly strange image given that the Ulrichs don’t have a dog.
“Well, hi, there, Shashi,” she chimes. She pronounces my mother’s name wrong, making the first syllable rhyme with “rash” instead of “rush.”
“Hello, Beverly,” my mother says. “Thanks so much for hosting Kiran tonight. Please be advised that sometimes he gets headaches, but he has his medicine, so I’m just letting you know.”
My mother has a phobia of other people administering medicine. One time, at Neha Singh’s house, I had a fever and wanted some Tylenol, but she advised me not to accept any from the Singhs because she said if something went wrong, the Singhs could get in big trouble if the medicine didn’t agree with me and I died on the premises. This was frightening enough because of the legal ramifications that she described, but it was all the more terrifying because it implied that I was going to expire.
“I’m sure he’ll be just fine,” Beverly says. She takes a drag from her cigarette.
A thumping of feet comes from the staircase, and Cody and Donny emerge. I wince: this is exactly the type of sight I wanted to avoid, me standing on the porch with my mother next to me while my two potential buddies look down upon us. I can already detect an air of judgment from Donny and Cody, who stop in their tracks once they see my mother. Spurred by their stares, I say, “Bye, Mom,” then step through the doorway, not looking back.
“Bye,
beta
,” she says. “Give me a call in the morning. Thank you, Beverly.” The jingle of her bangles tells me that she has just put her hands together in a
Namaste
. Then she leaves, the keys jingling in her hand before Beverly shuts the door.
“All right, boys,” she says. “I’m gonna watch my soaps, so try to keep it down.” Beverly tapes her soap operas every day since she works as a receptionist at a dentist’s office. She then settles down in front of the TV at night with a can of Diet Coke and a pack of cigarettes to catch up on her viewing. One time when Cody and I had finished looking at magazines upstairs, I went downstairs to get a glass of water and saw her sitting in the adjoining living room with her back turned to me. The lights were all turned off and the smoke was encircling her head in the TV-glowing room. She was sniffling, and at first my heart sank in seeing this woman weep at the sight of the beautiful men and women before her, but then she coughed so hard that I could hear the phlegm in her throat and realized her sniffles were not the result of crying but of her habit.
“Come on, Keern,” Cody says to me, turning back up the stairs. Then he whispers, “Donny brought the goods.”
I make as if to follow Cody, but Donny stays still, perplexed.
“What does ‘beta’ mean?” he asks.
“It’s Hindi,” I say.
He looks at me blankly.
“I mean, it’s Indian. It means…Well, it basically means ‘child.’”
There is a pause, and then he says, “Huh. Cool.”
He follows Cody, and I feel a small rush of Indian pride just hearing him voice this unexpected affirmation. Then I follow him to the porn.
Hustler
puts
Penthouse
to shame.
Donny fans out the magazines on Cody’s bed, then holds up one with the cover of a blond, orange-skinned woman in white lingerie sucking on one of her fingers. “This one is fuckin’ awesome,” he says. The magazines give Donny a confidence that he has not otherwise exhibited, save for the way he smoothly lays a basketball into a hoop. He flicks the issue in his hand to Cody, who catches it and opens it up hungrily, sprawling himself out on the bed. Donny sits down in the chair in front of Cody’s never-used desk, picks up another issue, and chucks it at me. I fumble it, and the magazine lands on the carpet. It has opened up to a spread of another blond vixen, this one perched at the tip of a large penis. There is no professional artistry or glossiness in the photograph, the way there might be in a
Penthouse
shot. The photo seems as if some amateur took it with a second-rate camera in his home. The woman looks very cheap, and a thin film of chalky makeup half covers the few bumpy zits that cross her forehead and chin. I kneel down to the magazine instead of picking it up and then curl myself on the floor with it, turning the pages and revealing more and more images of naked blondes, all of them blondes, half of them smiling and the other half crumpled in frozen screams of ecstasy. In most of the pictures, the men appear not as men but as parts. In one shot, the same blonde from the issue that Donny held up and gave to Cody is sucking on her finger again, with a man’s hairy and thick hand cupping one of her breasts. In another shot, a woman is astride a man, with only the shaft of his penis inside her visible. In one way, it’s as if the men are being objectified more than the women. They are only their penises, their arms, the flexed, tough shanks of their legs bearing the weight of the women on top of them.
But then there are the ads in back of the magazine. Unlike the ads in
Penthouse
, these ads show both men and women fully naked, playing with themselves. I don’t know if I’m supposed to look at these. I glance over at Cody and Donny, and they are flipping through the main sections of the magazine. I quickly flip back to the front of my issue, trying to conceal the naked men that I’ve been examining. If Cody and Donny caught me looking at naked men…I cannot even think about such a thing. The entire school would find out, and I would never, ever be able to show my face at school again. Nothing is more terrifying than knowing that one glance out of place could destroy my entire existence.
“Look at this,” Donny says. Cody and I both look over at him. He holds an issue in both hands, spread like it’s an accordion. There, in plain view, is one woman on her back, with one man inside her and another in her mouth.
“Awesome,” says Cody. His hunch makes him not unlike some delightfully perverted Igor.
Until now, I have not felt the urge to tell Donny and Cody about the scene I witnessed in the park. It’s partially because voicing my delinquency from school frightens me. But I think it’s also because what happened there was so personal, so unique, that I don’t want to share it with anyone. However, I see from the way these boys look at those pictures that it is in my best interests to tell them what I’ve seen. It is a route to instant respect. And, I realize, this is my chance to go back and get my beloved recorder.
“I’ve seen people do that before,” I say, trying my hardest not to quiver.
“No shit,” says Cody. “I’ve seen it a million times before.”
“No,” I reply. “I mean that I’ve seen people do that in person.”
Donny and Cody laugh. I look down at the floor. They notice this and stop, realizing that I am being serious.
“Wait—you’re fuckin’ with us,” Cody says. “When did you see that?”
“Last week.” I look over to Donny, whose mouth is open, not in disbelief, but in awe.
I tell them everything about my escape to the park—well, except for the ballet exercises—and try to convey every last detail about the threesome. I offer the words “tits” and “ass” and “dick” timidly at first, then can feel my speech strengthening as I continue, turning myself on as much as I am turning Donny and Cody on. They are clearly trying to conceal their boners, covering their crotches with the magazines as if their hands just happened to fall into their laps that way. When I tell them about the boys covering the girl in their cum, Donny and Cody both smile eerily, and now I start to feel a little ashamed for having told them these details, while at the same time I am bristling with excitement.
“I don’t believe ya,” Cody says after I finish, but I can tell he doesn’t mean it. He knows that my delivery has been too thorough and heartfelt for the story to be untrue.
“No,” Donny says. “I’ve heard stuff like that happens all the time in the park, ’specially at night. Jared Morgan says his brother goes there all the time to make out with girls.”
“Wait,” Cody says. “Keern, ya said ya went there during school. What about if we go at night?”
We fall silent.
Thankfully, Cody and Donny are not foolish enough to attempt sneaking out of the house without a word to Beverly. That never works in the movies. The parent, after a cursory good night, always has some reason to come check on the kids more thoroughly and finds the pillows that they’ve rigged under their blankets to act as makeshift bodies. Then police and dogs and all that crap ensues, waking up neighbors and leaving someone like Beverly Ulrich smoking like a fiend on her front porch and amassing cigarette butts around herself like fallen tears. No, it is better for us to take a different approach and get ourselves out of the house with her consent.
We go downstairs quietly. Donny and I wait in the kitchen while Cody walks up to his mother, who is still watching her soaps. On the screen, a woman with dark brown hair pulled into a ponytail and a pearl choker around her neck is talking to herself. From this angle, with Beverly sitting in her plush throne, smoking a cigarette and nodding slightly, the woman on the screen looks like a henchwoman from some James Bond movie reporting to her mastermind boss. Cody looks like the doomed messenger who has to tell the boss that Bond, James Bond, just exploded her heat-seeking missile or made away with her five-hundred-carat ruby.
“Mom, can we go to 7-Eleven?” Cody asks. “We wanna get slurpies.” The 7-Eleven is a mere ten-minute walk from the Ulrichs’ house, sitting right outside their subdivision like an old-time general store.
I hear Beverly sigh as she picks up the remote. A big green PAUSE appears on the screen.
“Whaddya want slurpies at eleven o’clock for? We’ve got Puddin’ Pops in the freezer.”
You do?
I think. I love Pudding Pops.
“I don’t want Puddin’ Pops,” Cody says. “I told Donny and Keern about this really good flavor of slurpie and now they’re gonna be mad if we don’t get to try it.”
It sounds like the stupidest reason ever.
“Well, babe, yer just gonna have to have it later because it’s too late.”
“Mom! Come on. I’ll do the dishes for a week.”
“Whoa!” Beverly says, turning to face Cody for the first time. “Ya really want those slurpies, huh?”