The Book of Joby (35 page)

The vampiric crowd scrunched aside enough to let them by.

“
That’s
who you should meet,” Jamie said, when they’d gotten to the bathroom. “Seth’s got a brain
,
unlike Skat ’n’ Anna down there. I bet you guys would totally relate. When yer cleaned up, just introduce yourself and hang out up here for a while.”

Joby nodded, relieved at any excuse not to go back into the full melee downstairs.

Unable to do much with the towel Jamie had given him but spread the dampness around, Joby finally gave up and left the bathroom. Back out on
the landing, he found Seth reading poetry from a crumpled piece of binder paper. Not wanting to interrupt, Joby waited politely to squeeze past them.

“ . . . And since these things are bound to die,” Seth intoned, continuing:

“Why drag their corpses after you?

Surrender them.

The looming shadow we call death
is only freedom after all,
backlit by the sun.”

Seth folded up the crumpled sheet, and stuffed it into a coat pocket.

“That was sooo cool,” sighed one of his female entourage.

“Yeah,” cooed another. “I loved the part about the night eating the moon.” She looked at Joby, and asked, “Wasn’t it beautiful?”

“I—um—I only heard the last bit,” he said, “but it was pretty interesting.” He thrust his hand out to Seth. “My name’s Joby.”

“Seth,” the poet answered, ignoring his hand, but waving him to sit and join them. “I’ve never seen
you
at Jamie’s parties.”

“No,” Joby conceded, sitting down. “I . . . Jamie just invited me this time. I’m . . . I’m kind of out of my league here, I think.”

“Honesty!” Seth mused. “How refreshing! Jamie’s taste in friends must be improving.” He offered his joint to Joby, but Joby shyly refused.

“You’re cute,” said one of the girls, smiling, her lips blackened, her eyes heavily lined in mascara. “Your girlfriend here too?”

“She couldn’t come,” Joby said, unnerved by the calculating smile this elicited.

“Ah, so you’re lonely,” Seth commiserated. “Loneliness can make you wise, you know. Wiser than those morons downstairs.”

“Yeah,” one of the girls concurred mournfully.

“Wise and free,” Seth said. The others all nodded gravely, as he took another hit off his joint. “It’s the things we love that destroy us in the end,” he grunted, holding in the smoke.

“That is soooo true,” gushed one of the girls.

Joby’s head felt strange. He suspected it was the smoke, and decided to brave the downstairs crowd again after all. “I’m kind of thirsty,” he said, standing up. He looked sheepishly at his slacks. “I didn’t get much of that first drink. I guess I’ll go try again.” He stepped across the bunch of them, and started down the stairs.

The music had gotten loud and fast again, and everyone was hurling about in some kind of mad slamming dance. Joby was trying to find Jamie in the crowd when someone ran into him from behind and sent him flying onto an end table beside the couch. The lamp sitting on it crashed to the floor in a burst of broken glass and laughter from all around him. Joby sat up to find the tall skinhead who’d run into him still gyrating to the music and leering at his half-drunken partner as if nothing had happened. Feeling honor bound to apologize for the lamp before he left, Joby got carefully to his feet to continue his search for Jamie. That’s when he saw her.

Her sequined, knee-length dress seemed to catch all the light in the room, as if she were a bright silver fish darting through a fetid pool. She glanced at him suddenly, as if aware of his attention despite the chaotic crowd between them.

Forgetting to look where he was walking, he ran straight into someone large, and found himself belly to belly with Bobby Boggs, a senior lineman on the football team.

“What’er you, a
faggot
?!” the beefy giant bellowed. Then he recognized Joby, and laughed. “
Joby Peterson!
At a
party
? Didja wander in here lookin’ fer a gay bar, ya little squid?”

The music stopped abruptly as Bobby shoved Joby roughly away and opened his mouth to humiliate him some more. But, suddenly, the angel in silver sequins was standing between them, frowning up at Boggs.

“We haven’t met,” she coyly told Bobby, “but I thought someone ought to tell you that you smell.”

Bobby leered down at her, beginning to smile. “Maybe I should take a shower then. You wanna help?”

“I don’t think a shower will do it,” the girl said, wrinkling her nose. “What is that, rotten hamburger?”

Suddenly, Joby smelled it too. From the gasps and rude exclamations around them, it seemed that everyone had noticed. Even Bobby’s face crinkled in distaste, then he looked surprised and, without seeming to think, raised an arm and sniffed his own armpit.

“What the fuck?”
he said, looking up in shocked mortification.

“You know,” cooed the sparkling girl, “I’d stay on ice if that’s how you smell when you heat up.” To Joby’s amazement, she turned briefly and flashed him a conspiratorial smile, then looked back up at Bobby and said with sexy ease, “By the way, Joby and I go
way
back, and I can
assure
you that he’s
no
faggot.”

Though stunned, Joby had the sense to keep quiet.

For one strange, long moment, the silver girl just stared up into Bobby’s eyes as his expression shifted from anger, to bewilderment, to plainly visible fear. Then he shoved his way through the crowd and out the front door as if he’d seen a ghost. Except for a few quiet objections to the smell of Bobby’s passing, the room remained eerily silent until the girl smiled again, and said, “Come on, Joby. Why don’t you get me a drink?” She tucked her arm under one of his and led him off, still speechless, while the music came back on and the dancing resumed.

When they got to the kitchen, Joby turned and said, “Who are you, and—and why did you—”

“I gather from our departed friend,
the jerk,
” she cut him off, “that you’re Joby Peterson.” She flashed him another of her devastating smiles and reached out to shake his hand. “I’m Allaystra Bennit.”

Joby was overwhelmed by her sheer beauty. Her large, liquid eyes were the color of perodite. Her thick, silky brown hair fell like a feathered veil around her face and throat. Her skin was flawless and pale, her lips full and dark, the shape of her under that dress was like a smooth ride over rolling country in a fine car. As he took her hand, he had trouble speaking. “Thank you,” he managed. “I . . . I owe you.”

Her smile widened, and Joby realized two things at once. The first was that he felt strange all over. His skin seemed to burn, and there was a pleasant, tingling pressure building underneath his nearly dry soda stains. The second was that he would die of humiliation if she noticed.

“Well, thanks,” he said again. “Really! I’m sure you’ve got people to see though, so I’ll . . . I’ll just go now, but I sure do appreciate—”

“Wait a minute.” She frowned. “Don’t I even get to meet the guy I just rescued?”

“Well . . . well, sure,” Joby stammered, “I didn’t mean . . . I’ll get you something to drink first, okay?” He turned away quickly, hoping to get himself under control down there before she noticed. That’s when he saw Lindwald already at the beverage counter, and wondered how long he’d been there. “What would you like?” Joby asked Allaystra as he moved toward the liquor supply.

“Just soda,” she said. “I’m not much of a drinker.”

Relieved, Joby moved in next to Jamie to grab another 7 Up.

“Way to go, Joby,” Jamie whispered. “Yer ship’s finally comin’ in, eh?”

“What are you talking about?” Joby whispered back.

“Come on.”
Jamie grinned and said under his breath, “She
wants
you, dude! And I saw you puttin’ up that little pup tent.” He nodded unobtrusively at Joby’s crotch. “It’s nice to see they’re wrong!”

“What? Who?”

“All those dickheads who say you’re queer.” Jamie grinned. “This’ll shut ’em up.” He nudged Joby’s shoulder. “Go for it, stud.” He left with a drink in each hand before Joby could close his mouth. Happily, Joby’s other difficulty seemed to have settled down, so he went back to Allaystra with her drink.

“Thanks,” she said, lifting the cup to her lips without taking her eyes from Joby’s. “There must be somewhere in this house where we can hear ourselves think. Why don’t we go talk, okay?” She smiled down at her sleek silver dress. “I’m not really dressed for slam-dancing anyway.”

Under control or not, Joby still felt terribly self-conscious, but she had saved his butt, and he wasn’t about to be rude. “Okay,” he said. “Wanna go outside?”

“Not so much,” she said, wrinkling her pretty nose. “It’s hard to make intelligent conversation with people puking in the bushes all around you. I’m sure it’ll be quieter upstairs.”

Joby had no argument to counter that, so he followed her through the crowd of dancers, who parted very courteously this time, and up the stairs past Seth and his poetry circle, in the midst of a decidedly more erotic poem, and finally found themselves in a nondescript bedroom where Allaystra closed the door behind them—against the noise, she said.

She sat on the bed and waved Joby down beside her. Joby tried to sit at the other end of the mattress, but Allaystra simply scooted up to join him. His palms were sweating, his skin was tingling, and he didn’t know what he’d do if . . . if things started getting out of control again, but to his relief, Allaystra simply began to talk. She asked where Joby lived, how he knew Jamie, what his interests were. She asked about his views, and expressed her own on an amazing variety of subjects, and Joby soon realized that this girl wasn’t just beautiful, she was really smart! He became so absorbed in their conversation, that he didn’t notice how close she’d come until she put her hand on his chest as he was telling her about his secret desire to talk with animals.

“Joby Peterson,” she crooned, “I’ve never met anyone so intelligent and, well,
deep,
I guess, at one of Jamie’s parties.” She leaned in even closer, and Joby noticed her perfume, too subtle to be detected from more than a few inches away. It was so lovely that his first instinct was to lean in farther just
to get a fuller breath of it. “In fact,” she sighed, “I don’t think I’ve met anyone like you
ever.
” Her fingers slipped between his shirt buttons to touch his bare skin.

He was as astonished by the swiftness of his body’s response as by its intensity. Hard in an instant, the desire to press himself against her went through him like a shout. One corner of his mind screamed back that this was
sin,
but as she began to undo the buttons on his shirt, the fear of betraying all he most believed in strained in stalemate with his body’s agonizing desire to capitulate. Then, something turned within him, and he stood, not caring what she saw, only desperate to leave before he lost all control.

“Joby?” she breathed, reaching for his hand.

He could not remember leaving the room, nor fleeing down the stairs past Seth, as he must have done. He vaguely noticed laughter as he bolted through the front door, fumbled in the near dark with the lock on his bike, and ran with it out into the street. Only after a car screeched around him, blaring its horn in protest, did Joby come fully to his senses. He mounted his bike and rode away as fast as he could, his body still burning with the need for release, resigned to the certainty that he had narrowly escaped one sin only to embrace another when he got home. He could only hope that God would understand.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” the boy’s voice came mournfully from beyond the screen. “It’s been three weeks since my last confession.”

Though a pretense of anonymity was germane to the sacrament, Father Richter could hardly fail to recognize Joby’s voice, any more than Joby would fail to know his.

Hearing the boy’s account of the previous evening’s excesses, the intensity of his desire to sin, and the remedy to that desire he had been unable to avoid later, the priest’s alarm steadily increased. The angel had emphatically warned him that sexual impurity posed the greatest threat to Joby’s spiritual destiny, and thus to Father Richter’s own ambitions as well. He had worked too hard and brought Joby too far toward holiness to see it all undone now by mundane adolescent urges.