Men, Women & Children (13 page)

As he drove home, Kent felt strange about having set up a date. He knew logically that it was all part of moving on, and he was somewhat surprised at how little difficulty he encountered in his first endeavor to reenter the dating pool. It gave him hope, and he found his thoughts drifting to what Dawn’s breasts looked like naked. Kent began to experience the excitement that comes with the promise of a new sexual partner—something he hadn’t felt in a very long time.

K
ent’s son, Tim, had just finished a twenty-five-man Trial of Champions raid in which no gear dropped that was useful to the character he had run the instance with. He told his guildmates good night, waited for each of them to tell him how much they wanted to “fuck his mother in every hole,” “hang him from a tree like a filthy nigger,” or “fuck him in the ass and then wipe their dicks across his lips to give him a cum-flavored shit mustache,” and then signed up for the following night’s raid in the guild calendar and logged out of
World of Warcraft
.

He logged on to his Myspace account and searched through his friends to find Freyja. Tim took the next fifteen minutes to compose a three-paragraph-long e-mail in which he detailed his romantic interest in Brandy Beltmeyer and his curiosity about her alter ego and all of the activities she had described being a party to in her blog entries, specifically the anal sex, threesomes, and bisexual encounters. He admitted that he’d never had any kind of sexual interaction, beyond a few awkward attempts at masturbation that had yet to yield an orgasm. He then highlighted the entire e-mail, pressed the backspace key, and wrote,
I had a good time at lunch today
. He knew she hadn’t responded to the first e-mail he’d sent to Freyja, but he felt now that some ice had been broken, that their individual outcast statuses at Goodrich Junior High had somehow merged into something mutual, something that would compel her to respond this time. He clicked the send button. She wasn’t online, but he assumed that she got text message updates on her phone alerting her to any incoming messages or friend requests associated with her various Myspace and Facebook accounts. He left himself logged into his account in the hopes that she might respond more quickly if she saw he was online, perhaps even beginning an instant-message conversation.

While he waited, Tim minimized his Myspace page, opened a new window, and logged into his Facebook account. He had several new wall posts, most of which were his classmates deriding him for not playing football. Tanner Hodge was the most prolific of the posters in this vein. Tim thought about changing his account’s privacy settings to disallow the public posting of comments on his wall, but he had come to enjoy some element of it. A part of him found pleasure in knowing he was responsible for any anguish felt by his peers. Their posts on his wall confirmed their continued unease due to a decision he made.

He then noticed a new post by his mother. Tim had shown her how to make a Facebook account a few months before she and his father had separated. Both he and his mother had tried to convince his father to make a page as well, but he refused. Tim hadn’t heard from his mother in almost two weeks. He had e-mailed her in response to the last one she sent him, but she had not yet responded.

He clicked on her post, which was titled Napa. He saw a series of forty-three photos chronicling a weekend trip his mother and Greg Cherry had taken to various Napa Valley wineries. The last time Tim’s mother had posted photos was the week after she left for California, when she posted a series of shots chronicling her breast augmentation surgery. The photos, featuring images of his mother out with her girlfriends drinking a few nights before the surgery, images of her on the way to the surgery, and finally images of her new breasts in a bikini, were difficult for Tim to view, but somehow the absence of Greg Cherry in all but one of the seventeen made them easier to witness than the Napa series.

Greg Cherry was in all forty-six of the Napa photos. Seeing his mother with a man who wasn’t his father disturbed him and made her absence in his own life that much more concrete. Her new breasts, almost twice their original size, along with a new, much shorter haircut and a tan that was much too orange, made her seem like a different person to Tim. He wondered if this was the person she’d always wanted to be but was held back, held to some identity she had come to despise, because of himself and his father. There were photos of his mother drinking wine, laughing, dancing, kissing Greg Cherry, living a life that involved neither Tim nor his father—and it was a good life, a life she enjoyed.

Tim’s stomach churned a little bit and his neck warmed. He could feel his forehead beginning to sweat. As he clicked through each photo, forcing himself to look, he told himself that this was the way things were. His mother would never again be a significant part of his life. His thoughts drifted to Carl Sagan and “The Pale Blue Dot,” a video he had found on YouTube. This doesn’t matter, he told himself. He could be looking at photos of his mother having sex with the entire Cornhusker football team—it didn’t matter. Eventually, she would die, his father would die, Greg Cherry would die, even he would die, and beyond all of their deaths, beyond anything they had ever done in their lives—the football games played or not played, the saline breasts implanted or not implanted, the conversations spoken or not spoken—all of those things done or not done by everyone he knew, or would ever know, would be forgotten in time if they were even remembered to begin with. And, far beyond that collective discarding of anything they had managed to leave behind, humanity itself would burn out, leaving no impression on a universe that would itself be torn apart under its own forces, leaving no trace of anything. This undeniable truth of reality propelled him through the series of Napa photos, through the images of Greg Cherry with arms around his mother, through the images of his mother lowering her shirt’s neckline to feature her manufactured cleavage while drunk, through the images of his mother captured candidly through a camera held by Greg Cherry, who was only feet away from her, through all the rest of the images of Tim’s mother, to the final three photos—which somehow trumped all of the rational philosophies he had mustered and made him so nauseated that he nearly vomited.

The first of these three photos depicted Greg Cherry and Tim’s mother, Lydia, kissing in a gazebo as the sun was setting. It reminded Tim of a postcard, the image seeming too perfect to be real. Up until this photo, the captions accompanying all of the others had been innocuous, relaying the time or date of the trip and the location, occasionally including an attempt at humor. The caption attached to this first photo of the final three, however, read, “He chose a perfect moment for it.” Tim wondered what this “it” was, but he had a feeling he already knew. He clicked the next button to get his answer.

The next photo was an image of Greg Cherry on one knee in the same gazebo, with the same sunset as a backdrop, as he extended an open ring box to Tim’s mother. The caption read “The ring was beautiful, especially as the sun was setting. What do you think I said?” Tim wondered what his mother must have said, even though he again had the feeling he already knew. He clicked the next button to get his answer.

The final photo was an image of his mother, with the ring on her finger extended toward the camera, as Greg Cherry kissed her on the cheek. The caption read, “YES!!!” Tim stared at the screen for several minutes. His mother was marrying another man. He didn’t understand where the emotions he was feeling stemmed from. He knew logically that this was to be the eventual outcome of his parents’ separation, certainly of his mother’s move to California to live with Greg Cherry. Despite his rational understanding of the events as they were unfolding, he found he didn’t want them to be real. But they were.

He noted that the pictures had been posted just fifteen minutes before he had logged on. That meant that he was among the first to see these images, to witness this moment of his mother’s happiness. He stared at Greg Cherry’s eyes in the final image. He seemed equally happy. Tim didn’t hate Greg Cherry the way he thought he should. He didn’t even know him. He represented a happiness that Tim and his father were unable to supply Lydia with, and that made Tim feel resentment toward the man, but not hatred.

Unable to look for more than a moment at the photographic evidence of his mother’s wholesale rejection of him and his father, Tim checked his Myspace account and found no response from Brandy Beltmeyer. He logged out and started up
World of Warcraft
, hoping to spend an hour or so running daily quests in an attempt to take his mind off his mother and Greg Cherry. When he logged on with his main character, Firehands, he saw that the cooldown on his alchemy transmute had reset, so he went to the Ironforge auction house in order to buy the necessary materials to perform the transmutation. As he clicked on the buyout price of eighty-four gold for a stack of Frost Lotus, he saw a message in guild chat from Selkis that read, “Why you logging back on nigger? Forget to jerk off to your toon?” Tim thought about not responding, just finishing his transmute and then logging off, but he felt an overwhelming need to let someone else know about his mother. He typed a message in guild chat that read, “I just found out via Facebook that my mom is getting remarried.”

Instantaneously, multiple members of Tim’s guild sent their reactions to the news. The messages read, “Is she marrying a nigger?” “Does she fuck niggers?” “Is your dad a nigger?” “Can I fuck her be4 she gets hitched?” “I thought ur mom died after I raped her last night, but I still raped her again.” “Where’s the bachelorette party?” “You’re gonna have a mulatto half-bro.”

This continued for several minutes. Tim offered no response. He just read the scrolling green text. Tim understood that the responses were absurd, too detached from the actual event to have any real perspective, but they put him at ease nonetheless. They made him realize that none of the people in his guild, none of the people he talked to on a daily basis and considered friends, had any stake in anything that happened in his real life. And this led him to realize that he had no stake in theirs. They could be going through similar turmoil, or going through situations that were even worse, and he would never know—or, if he knew, if one of his guildmates should divulge any personal information as he just had, he knew he wouldn’t care either, and that he might very well be the one responding in guild chat with equally insensitive comments. It reminded him that nothing mattered.

After running his final daily quest at the Tournament of Champions, Tim quit the
World of Warcraft
program, revealing the Facebook window he left open. He knew that looking at his mother’s pictures again was a mistake, but he couldn’t help himself. He needed to see them. He wanted to force himself to look at them, to scour them for every detail that might relay how happy his mother was without him and his father in her life. He wanted to be done with missing her. He wanted to recognize her as a person he no longer knew. He wanted to hate her.

As he clicked the general link to the Napa photo album, he was met with a message from Facebook that read, “This user has made his or her photos private.” Tim understood that she had posted the photos without realizing that all of her Facebook friends would be able to view them. He assumed that, in the few hours he spent on various websites and playing
World of Warcraft
, she made the Napa album private specifically to block him from seeing the photos it contained. This, he reasoned, meant that she was thinking about him and, he believed, trying to spare him whatever emotional pain the knowledge of her engagement to Greg Cherry might have caused. He thought briefly about sending his mother a Facebook message congratulating her on her engagement, but thought better of it, not wanting to seem petty. Instead, he logged out and decided not to tell his father. He would pretend he never knew, that he’d never logged on and saw his mother’s Napa photos before she made the album private.

chapter

eleven

A
llison Doss had become something of a celebrity on the message board at Ana’s Underground Grotto after posting her account of her first sexual experience with Brandon Lender. She had almost one hundred replies to her initial post, and a dozen or so personal e-mails, all commending her on sticking to her diet and seeing the tangible results. She also had far more traffic to her profile on another pro-anorexia website, which resulted in a glut of comments on her photos, all praising her beauty. She was checking this profile on her cell phone at lunch to see if any new comments had been added when Danny Vance and Brooke Benton sat down next to her.

Brooke noticed that she was snacking on a Hostess Cupcake and said, “You off your diet?” After spending more time than usual in the past few days on the various websites that supported an anorexic lifestyle, Allison had been swayed, by various posts she found more than convincing, to experiment with bulimia. She said, “I figured one wouldn’t hurt. What are you guys up to?”

Danny said, “Just trying to focus for the game tonight.”

Brooke said, “In my opinion, you should relax a little. The game should be no problem, babe. Irving is a terrible team, right?”

Danny said, “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have to be focused and play hard.” Danny had not told anyone about Coach Quinn’s decision to start Josh Kramer in his place. He hoped that Coach Quinn would change his mind, but Danny hadn’t noticed any indication that he had in any of the practices that week. Danny took a bite of the chicken-fried steak that had been served for lunch and said, “God, this is gross.”

Allison said, “I’ll eat it if you don’t want it.”

Danny said, “All yours,” and pushed his tray to her, adding, “I’m going to hit the vending machines or something.” Danny left the table, leaving Brooke to watch as Allison ate Danny’s chicken-fried steak. Brooke said, “I don’t want to tell you what to do or anything, but in my opinion, I just know you worked really hard to, like, stop being chubby. Maybe you should take it easy or something.” Allison said, “I know. One day off the diet won’t hurt, though.”

It had been so long since Allison had allowed herself to eat anything other than celery, apples, and an occasional can of tuna that her taste buds experienced a slight amount of pain as the salt in the gravy passed over her tongue. The amount of food in the three or four bites Allison swallowed was more than she was used to allowing herself to eat at lunch. It filled her, but she continued to eat, knowing that it wouldn’t stay in her stomach long enough to be digested. After half of the chicken-fried steak, Allison moved on to the mashed potatoes and then on to the slice of frozen cheesecake that was served with the meal as desert.

She kept up her conversation with Brooke, but wasn’t paying enough attention to what she was saying to remember anything they had talked about; by the time the tone sounded signaling the end of the lunch period, she was too focused on tasting everything she put into her mouth.

On the way to her next class, Allison stopped in the girls’ bathroom, her stomach in pain from being overfull. She entered the nearest available stall happy that no one else was in the bathroom. Then, as she was putting down a paper toilet-seat cover, she heard the door open and Sherri Johnston walked in talking loudly on her cell phone. Allison became paranoid that she might not have enough time to vomit and still make it to geometry class without being tardy. If she had to leave the bathroom without forcing herself to vomit, all of the food she ate would be digested. It would become a part of her. This disgusted Allison.

She heard Sherri Johnston say, “No, I’m in the bathroom, retard. Fine, meet you in front of Mrs. Ground’s room in like five seconds.” Then Sherri Johnston left the bathroom, leaving Allison alone once again.

She had never forced herself to vomit, and although she was nervous, she also found that she was excited to some degree. She was adding a new technique to her regimen for remaining thin. Eating was something she enjoyed far more than starving herself. Even if she found the forced vomiting too disgusting, she knew she would implement the technique from time to time, if for no other reason than to allow herself the pleasure of eating with some regularity. But if she found the vomiting to be tolerable, or perhaps even enjoyable, then it might replace disallowing food altogether.

She read a dozen or so blogs on various websites that gave instructions on the best methods to induce vomiting, and although several methods were suggested that involved drinking things like ipecac, salt water, mustard-seed water, or hydrogen peroxide, Allison assumed that gagging herself with three fingers was the most practical for speed and convenience while at school. It also seemed a waste of effort to Allison to purchase or prepare a drink that would induce vomiting if this was something that she might do only once in her life. If she responded favorably to it, then she would consider alternative methods.

She put a finger into the back of her throat as far as she could, just to test what putting fingers in the back of her throat and holding them there would be like. Her gag reflex initiated immediately, causing her to salivate and choke. She shook her head and her eyes started to water as she spit into the toilet bowl. Her resolve weakened as second thoughts overpowered her original intent. She forced herself to think of the food in her stomach, the gravy turning to fat deposits on her legs, the chicken-fried steak being broken down into green soupy liquid by her stomach acid, the cheesecake congealing into cellulite on her buttocks. She imagined that she could feel these processes occurring in her body as she thought about them. This brought about a mild wave of nausea and helped to nullify any doubt she might have had about going through with it.

She wiped her eyes, bunched her middle three fingers together, took a deep breath, and forced them to the back of her throat. She held the fingers at the back of her throat, despite a gag reflex that seemed to come with more strength this time. After heaving twice with no results, she forced her fingers to the back of her throat a third time, further back than she had the prior attempt, and was met with a stream of vomit that contained all of the undigested food she had eaten for lunch. She had vomited before with different illnesses, but never in this manner. It felt good, clean, made her body feel immediately lighter. It was similar to the feeling she experienced in the morning after a night of eating nothing.

All of the pain she felt from overeating was relieved immediately. It was a strange feeling. Where Allison had become used to the constant and slowly increasing physical pain that accompanied purposeful starvation, this was almost the direct opposite—a quick buildup of pain that was relieved just as quickly. And there was no hunger. She felt just as satisfied as she had after the meal.

Much of the vomit coated her hand, as she’d been unable to remove it from her mouth in time. She would get better at this, she thought, as she stared down into the toilet bowl, amazed by the fact that its contents had been in her body only moments before. She flushed and went to the sink, washing her hands, wiping her eyes, and swishing some water in her mouth. She chewed a piece of gum on her way to geometry. On every blog she read, this was an almost mandatory rule, necessary to mask the scent of vomit.

She took her seat with a few minutes to spare and wondered if anyone could tell what she had just done. She smiled to herself and took out her cell phone in the minutes that were left before class began. She logged in to her Facebook account and, even though he still hadn’t accepted her friend request, she sent Brandon Lender a message that read, “Hey, just wanted to c wut u were up 2 =).”

D
on Truby, Jim Vance, and Kent Mooney stood next to one another in the bleachers at Goodrich Junior High School, just as they had at the season opener. They watched the opposing team, the Irving Aardvarks, leave their bus and jog to the visiting team’s sideline. One Aardvark stood out to them—Kevin Banks. Kevin had grown six inches and gained almost twenty pounds of muscle since his seventh-grade football season, making him easily the biggest football player on the field. Jim said, “Look at the size of that kid.”

Don said, “Did he play for them last year?”

Kent said, “I don’t know. If he did, he grew.”

Don said, “Fuck, that is a big fucking kid,” then took a drink from his flask and said, “Have you guys ever heard of the Erotic Review?”

Jim said, “No.”

Kent said, “Jesus, Don, we know you’re hard up and everything, but all you talk about is sex and porno websites. Doesn’t it ever get old to you?”

Don said, “Hmm. Not really. Have I been any different since high school?”

Kent said, “I guess not. But I just don’t get why we have to talk about your sex life every time we get together.”

Don said, “I don’t want to talk about my fucking sex life, Kent, I want to tell you about this fucking website. Is that okay with you?”

Kent said, “Doesn’t really matter if it is, does it?”

Don said, “No. So, the Erotic Review is this fucking website, right, where you can go and basically read reviews of whores, and then it has the whores’ contact info and everything. It’s like an online whorehouse or something.”

Jim said, “I’m surprised you didn’t invent this site.”

Don said, “I know. I just kind of stumbled across it and it blew my fucking mind. You guys should check it out.”

Jim said, “Why would I need to check out a website that has prostitutes on it?”

Don said, “Right, I forgot, you and your wife have sex all the time. Well, Kent,
you
should check it out. You’ve probably been hard up for a while, right?”

Kent said, “I have been, but I don’t think I’ll be needing your whore website. Because I actually have a date tomorrow night.”

Don said, “What? That’s great. Congrats, man. With who?”

Kent pointed down to the field, where Dawn Clint was taking photos of her daughter and the other cheerleaders holding the banner that the Goodrich Junior High School Olympians were preparing to run through, signifying their arrival to the field. He said, “Dawn Clint.”

Don said, “Holy fuck. Her daughter came over to my house this week, doing some project on 9/11 with my son. She has some fucking huge tits already. How’d you swing that, you lucky fucker?”

Kent said, “I went to this Parents Against The Internet thing and she was there. We kind of hit it off, and I just asked her out.”

Jim said, “How was that thing? I’ve gotten a few fliers about it. Seems kind of stupid.”

Kent said, “Yeah, the woman who runs it is a little too into it, if you know what I mean.”

Jim said, “Yeah.”

Don said, “Fuck, man, Dawn Clint is a serious piece of ass. I mean, for being a certain age and everything. Congrats, man. You better hit that shit.”

Kent said, “I’ll do my best,” as the Olympians ran through their banner and onto the field.

Running toward the Olympian sideline, Chris Truby watched Hannah Clint. As she bent over, he focused on trying to see her vagina. He couldn’t. He wondered if he could convince her to engage in some kind of sexual act while she was wearing her Olympiannes outfit. He wondered if this would allow him to maintain an erection and came to the conclusion that it might, but only if she also allowed him to penetrate her anus while he spit on her face, which was a specific type of pornography he had recently been watching while he masturbated. Something beyond the obvious demeaning nature of the act of spitting on someone was appealing to Chris, something in the saliva itself that was sexual to him in a way that not much else was.

Although Coach Quinn was not starting Danny, he still allowed him to take center field for the coin flip, which the Olympians won, electing to receive. After a twenty-three-yard kickoff return, the Olympians’ offense took the field led by Josh Kramer. In the stands, Jim Vance was beyond confused. He said, “What in the hell is going on? Who is that kid? Is that Josh Kramer? Where’s Danny?”

Don said, “He’s over there. Sidelines.”

Jim said, “What the hell is going on?”

Kent said, “Maybe it’s some kind of trick strategy or something.”

Don said, “Or maybe they just want to see what that big son of a bitch is going to do to our quarterback before they put Danny in.”

Josh Kramer had been instructed by Coach Quinn to run a seven-three-nine rush, a running play to the right side, as the first play of the game. He called the play in the huddle and made his way to the line of scrimmage. The play required him only to take the snap, then turn around and hand the ball to Tanner Hodge, who would run it through a hole that was to be made on the right side of the line. Overcome with nervousness at the thought of making any kind of error in his first play as a starting quarterback, Josh Kramer turned left instead of right after the snap to find that Tanner Hodge was not there. He was, instead, running in the other direction, the proper direction of the play. Having no real choice, Josh gave in to instinct, tucked the ball, and tried to run it himself, making the most out of a broken play. After three steps he was met by the defensive end, Kevin Banks, who tackled him in an excessively violent manner.

Don said, “Jesus Christ. Is this pro wrestling? He fucking body-slammed that kid.” The crowd gathered in the Goodrich Junior High School bleachers collectively gasped as Josh Kramer lay motionless on the ground. Mr. Kemp and Coach Quinn ran onto the field to find Josh still conscious but having trouble breathing. Mr. Kemp said, “Can you talk?”