Waiting in Line for the New iPad (3 page)

"And Dylan, this is Ellie, Chrissy, Sasha and
Marie.

"Hey, how's it going?"

"We had the feeling you might be joining us,
Dylan," Chrissy said, and to his utter surprise handed a brown
paper bag to him. "Quarter-pounder okay? We figured if you're man
enough to stand up to Noelle here, you probably wouldn't want
anything less."

"Seriously?" he asked, but felt overjoyed at
being included in the meal.

As proper darkness came, Dylan was surprised
to find people in the queue actually bedding down in sleeping bags
and - a few - in tents. It seemed ripe for some unscrupulous types
to find ways to jump the line, but he supposed that everyone knew
well who was in front and behind them in the queue, so it would be
easy to self-police the line.

Over a pleasant supper, Dylan found himself
fitting into his new circle of adopted friends comfortably. They
seemed to make certain social assumptions about him based on the
fact that he was hanging out with them - that he liked certain
bands, that he must be a regular party-goer and all round social
alpha-male at St Josephs.

He did his best not to lie, but saw no reason
to correct their views of him, either.

He found out more about Noelle and her
friends - they seemed so normal to him, even though they were all
like minor deities to him. They didn't seem to talk much about the
whole reason they were all there - the upcoming iPad launch - and
he began to suspect that only Chrissy was anything close to being
an Apple geek. 

They seemed quite impressed that he was
queuing through the night on behalf of his sister - that got him
some brownie points, and a lovely smile from the enchanting
Noelle.

Conversation was easier when there were more
people to share in it, and Dylan found that although he was grilled
quite a bit as the newcomer to the group, he was able to leave the
talking to the others when the subject came round to areas in which
he was not an expert. 

Compared to everyone else in the line, their
group seemed to stay up much later - into the small hours. Until
midnight came and went, the girls' conversation appeared to steer
clear of the kind of dirty subjects they had been talking about
before Dylan came along. But as they passed into the day on which
the mighty iPad would be launched, things began to loosen up a
little again.

All through the evening since he'd joined
them, Dylan had been given the strange sense that the other girls
were trying to get him interested in Noelle. He thought at first
that it was just his ego going nuts because a pretty girl had
actually shown him a tiny bit of attention that night. 

But as things drew on, it was hard to mistake
it. 

There were the unabashed attempts to impress
him with something about her.

Ellie saying at one point, "You know,
Noelle's, like, one of the best swimmers in the Marchmont
team?" 

Chrissy telling him: "Noelle's going to get
into law school, you know that, Dylan? She's so brainy. She's Ivy
League brainy."

Or the fact that she'd once been on Good
Morning America as a seven-year-old, or the fact that she used to
be the best gymnast in middle school before she took up swimming
because it was less traumatic on the joints. 

There was the way that every now and then
when some small detail about Dylan emerged - his passion for
travel, for example, or his love of movies - they tried to point
out how his interests fit so well with Noelle's.

"Noelle drags us to the movies, like, all the
time."

"Hey, haven't you been to Italy, Noelle?"

Noelle seemed to be good at fending off the
more obvious attempts, and Dylan just found himself ignoring it in
order to protect himself from blushing. What was going on?

After midnight, and a lot the queue-goers
around them seemed to be fast asleep, all bedded down and blanketed
up, and the girls' voices might have gotten a little quieter out of
respect for the sleepers around them, but their conversation topic
took a distinct turn for the filthy again.

Somebody had said there was a rumor that St
Josephs people had regular rainbow parties, or at least that's what
Chrissy had asked Dylan about once things started getting more
relaxed and there were less concerns about the queuers around them
overhearing.

Dylan wasn't entirely up to speed on what
rainbow parties were, but he had five faces eagerly after
information on whether he could substantiate or deny these
rumors. 

He was a little put out that they should
assume a normal guy would know what one of these 'rainbow parties'
was. Was he so sheltered? Did normal guys know all about this?

He assumed it was some kind of drug thing.
Psychedelic drug-taking, perhaps. People seeing rainbows as they
hallucinate. Or maybe it was a gay thing - wasn't a rainbow flag a
symbol for the gay community?

"Sure, I've heard they happen," he said
dismissively. "It's not really for me."

"Not for you? You ever been invited?" Chrissy
pushed him.

"Sure."

"So what, you said 'no'?"

"It's not really for me."

There were a few eyebrows at that. Noelle
gave him a funny look, and he couldn't quite work out whether she
was somehow impressed at him - no doubt for keeping his nose out of
drugs - or baffled as to why he should pass up such an
opportunity.

Or maybe she could tell he'd told a white lie
hoping they'd just drop the subject.

She said: "I thought you said guys from St
Josephs were above all that demeaning stuff."

He was a little confused himself. Maybe he'd
got the meaning of the term 'rainbow party' wrong. He said: "I
didn't say all of us, did I?"

She said, with a skeptical note: "And you're
seriously telling us you turned down a whole night of free blow
jobs?"

His ears burned. A whole evening of
what-what? Now he suddenly found himself wanting a quiet corner
where he could consult Google via his iPhone. 

"I don't know, sounds like a weird thing to
me," he said.  

She said: "Doesn't it?"

He felt a sudden drop in tension in the air -
he did not like lying to this girl. It really was not worth it.
Ellie said: "Robbie Fallon and Archie Settler have been trying to
talk girls in our school to throw one for ages."

"It's an urban myth," Sasha said. "Nobody
really does that." 

"But they do at St Josephs?"

"Well, I've never actually seen one," Dylan
said, feeling himself hot under the collar, really wanting them to
drop this subject.

"I bet you have," Ellie said. Were they
taking the wrong interpretation of his blushing?

Noelle looked at him and gasped, putting her
hands to her mouth - was she kidding around again? She said: "You
have, haven't you?"

"No, I - "

She said: "I thought you said you were all
read up on, you know, how to please a girl in bed. You're all in
tune with how to make them… you know. And you've been to a rainbow
party?"

Dylan felt sick. Maybe he had been wrong to
think Noelle had ever really liked him, and that this group of
girls was simply setting him up for a fall. Toying with him. He was
disappointed in the revelation that he was an idiot, though.

He said, pointlessly, "Maybe some of those
girls like it."

Jesus, he was defending an urban myth
now.

"Like it? A whole evening of giving guys blow
jobs? And what do they get for their trouble other than a face full
of jizz?" Noelle huffed again. She said: "That's the thing, isn't
it? Girls will do that sort of thing to make guys happy, but guys
won't do it for girls."

"Sure they will," he said. Well, he didn't
have the experience to back it up, but he read around the subject
enough. There were plenty of male authors of erotic fiction writing
about that kind of thing for him to know there were some guys out
there who liked it. 

The whole idea thrilled Dylan himself no end
- if only some willing girl would let him.

"They will? Can I quote you on that, Rainbow
Boy?" Noelle's friends laughed at that, at her new nickname for
him.

He wasn't sure why they called it 'rainbow',
but he was sure it probably wasn't the best nickname someone could
have. 

Dylan felt awkward, he felt cornered. He let
his mouth wander again, and that was always dangerous. It said:
"Here's the thing - a lot of guys love doing that, but there's no
way any of them can if girls won't ask them to."

Noelle rolled her eyes. "Here we go again,"
she said, seeming to coil herself up ready for a return to the
earlier argument.

"No, hear me out," he insisted. "Girls can
assume if they offer a guy a blow job, he's never going to say
'no'. But girls have all kinds of paranoid fears of letting a guy
do it for them, that he won't like it, that he won't like how it
tastes or smells, that he'll never want to see her again. So they
never seem happy to let guys do it, so guys figure they don't like
it anyway, so they don't offer to do it. It's a vicious
circle."

"You're saying it's our fault?" Noelle was
irritated at him again.

Dylan heaved a sigh. He didn't know what to
say now, every word that left his mouth seemed to be the wrong
thing.

He said: "Look, you know what the teachers
told all the guys in St Josephs when they were freshmen?"

"I don't know, what?"

"They took all the guys aside, and sat us
down and explained to us that we might be starting to like the look
of the girls right now, and that we might find ourselves tempted to
do something about that, but that if we laid a single finger on any
of them, there was a chance we might be accused of rape."

Dylan spoke the truth. St Josephs might not
be like most high schools out there, with its strong Catholic
traditions, but that particular 'sex ed' class had certainly left
an impression on its male students. 

"Seriously?" someone said.

Noelle remained quiet, one eyebrow raised
skeptically.

Dylan said: "We were told fairly clearly that
if we touched a girl on the god damn ankle, and she wasn't happy
about it, she'd be capable of going to the authorities - and that
would be the end of our hope to get into college, the end of our
future careers, everything."

"Jesus."

"So you know what?" he said, "For the guys I
know, if a girl doesn't explicitly ask him to do something to her,
they're pretty nervous about doing anything with her."

"Wow."

That was Noelle. Dylan looked up, and he
could tell she'd believed his story - why shouldn't he? He'd
sounded as earnest and truthful as he was. 

She said: "And that's why guys at St Josephs
like girls to tell them what to do?"

"I guess."

"Sounds kind of nice," one of the other girls
said. Sasha, Dylan thought.

"Nice? Those poor guys! Probably scared out
of their heads!" That was Ellie.

"Not about the sex ed class - about liking
girls telling them how to do it."

"But it probably got the message through
their heads about assaulting girls, though, huh?" Noelle said. But
then she looked at Dylan, and her expression seemed to soften. "So
what would you do if a girl asked you to?"

He felt his insides turn to molten led, his
manhood thickening up quite suddenly in his pants. Somehow,
everything seemed to have gone quiet, yet his ears were ringing.
Nothing quite seemed real. 

He heard himself say: "Anything she wanted me
to do, if it was the right girl."

Noelle's friends seemed to have gone deathly
quiet. 

He felt a little stupid when Noelle finally
unrolled her sleeping bag, and it was quite clear that he was the
only person in this part of the line who was going to be without
any form of bedding to help him through the night. 

She was the last of them - by the time she'd
got her sleeping bag in place, her friends were already bedded
down, Ellie and Sasha already asleep.

"You're going to be cold," she said, looking
over at his modest little place between her sleeping bag and the
nearest emo.

There was a distinct chill in the air - his
mother had been entirely correct about the heat suddenly
evaporating after the sun went down. He was shivering a little
already, though trying not to show Noelle.

"I'll be okay - the sun'll come up in a few
hours."

"You're insane."

Then suddenly she seemed to make a decision,
silently to herself, looking at him and standing up, saying: "I
have some emergency blankets in my car."

"Huh?"

"I have them in case I ever break down, you
know? If I have to wait for roadside assistance in the cold. Come
on, let's go get them."

"Oh, really, you don't have to - " He
protested, but she flashed her eyes at him.

"I thought you were okay about the whole girl
telling you what she wants," she said, tapping her feet. Dylan
heard a stifled giggle from one of her friends. 

"Sure, of course I am."

"So come on, then."

Another soft giggle from somewhere over
toward Chrissy's sleeping bag.

She held out her hand for him, and for the
first time he touched her. 

He tried not to show it affected him, though
it was hard not to. It wasn't just that her hand was so delicate
and soft - somehow the touch made her real to him. The evening
had taken on a magical quality ever since he'd intruded on the
girls' conversation, and Noelle hadn't turned her back on
him. 

As an ordinary run-of-the-mill guy without
any kind of lofty position in the school social hierarchy, he had
been frankly astonished that these girls would give him the time of
day, let alone share a meal and spend all night allowing him in
their circle.