The weight of water - Anita Shreve [110]
The tape started again with what felt like a snap, once more zooming in on the girl’s face. Mike saw, to his dismay, that no matter how experienced she had seemed earlier (and also seemed now, in her fairly convincing expression of ecstasy), she was, in fact, as he had suspected, very young indeed. A freshman, there could be no doubt about it. He thought he could almost retrieve the face and body in a uniform — field hockey? Soccer? JV? thirds? — and he was certain that she was a boarder, not a day student like Silas, who seemed to have collapsed upon the girl, who was smiling now, actually smiling. Is this good or bad? Mike wondered.
There seemed to be a great deal of chaos. Perhaps the unseen hand had lowered the camera for a moment. Mike narrowed his eyes to keep the nausea at bay while the lens momentarily came to rest on the perfectly innocent corner of a desk leg, with a boy’s dirty white sneaker, its laces untied, leaning against it. Mike felt an ache in his throat at the sheer innocence of that image, since it seemed to represent, at that moment, a universe of loss. In the background, there were sounds — none of them very articulate. Mike was fairly certain he heard Hey and Go for it and Your turn (and not necessarily in that order), and then the lens, with a sudden, wild swoop, settled upon the body of the third boy. (Boy, Mike thought, isn’t at all accurate in this case. There was a subtle moment in time when boys turned into men, and it had nothing to do with age or facial hair or voice timbre. It had to do, he had decided — and he had seen this happen hundreds of times over the course of nearly twenty years in a secondary-school setting — with musculature, the set of the jaw, the way the male held himself.) The young man was quite literally holding himself, masturbating over the supine body of the (Mike had to admit) heartbreakingly lovely girl, who appeared to be urging the young man on with rhythmic movements and even various contortions, doubtless learned from watching movies. The unseen person behind the camera had moved his or her vantage point, and one saw now, saw all too clearly in fact, the utter determination on the face of the young man, who was, Mike instantly recognized, a PG (postgraduate) brought to the school to take the basketball team to the play-offs. It was then that Mike quickly calculated and arrived at the number nineteen just before the PG, whom the other students called J. Dot (as in J.Robles@Avery.edu), came all over the chest and neck and chin of the girl who was at least four years younger, causing Mike to reach forward and push stop, the way he wished he could push a stop button on the future long enough to figure out what to do with this very unwanted piece of celluloid now poised to explode inside his camera.
He sat back against the sofa in the TV room. Mike had tried, in the early years of their residence in the impressive Georgian, to refer to the room as a library, as befitted his position in life, but in fact Meg and he had spent more time there watching television and DVDs than they had reading, and so they had started calling it what it really was. Mike was panting slightly, his mouth dry. That there was probably more to the tape seemed unthinkable. (And, after all, hadn’t all three boys come within minutes of one another? But then again, these were teenage boys.) He doubted that he could watch any more.