White Oleander - Janet Fitch [64]
The pot wasn’t first class, not like Ray’s, which you could smell right through the Baggie. This smelled like burning straw and tasted dry and brown, but it was sweet as sunshine to me. I sucked in the smoke, turning my head away from Caitlin so she wouldn’t get stoned. She squirmed in my arms but I couldn’t set her down, she’d be under the first car that drove by.
“Wanna buy some?” The boy named PJ had dyed his hair blond. His T-shirt said Stone Temple Pilots in orange psychedelic writing.
I had three dollars in my pocket, for ice cream for the kids. “How much?”
The others turned to the chunky boy, Mr. Natural, seated in the passenger seat of the car. “Five a gram,” he said.
I switched Caitlin to the other hip, the bad one, took the joint from the Stoned Temple Pilot. It felt so good to be high. I felt the lid of the pencil-gray sky lift and I could breathe, I didn’t dread the rest of the afternoon now. “I have three.”
“How come I never saw you before? You go to Birming-ham?” the chunky boy said, getting out of the car. He had rosy cheeks and wavy brown hair, he looked about twelve.
I shook my head, aware of how he was looking at me, and for once I wasn’t embarrassed. He was interested. It was my currency, my barter goods. I exhaled away from Caitlin, in a way that showed my neck, drawing his eyes where I wanted.
“Got a boyfriend?” he asked.
“Juice,” Caitlin said, tugging on my shirt, pulling the strap off my shoulder. “Assi, juice.”
I changed hips, jiggled her quiet, feeling their eyes stroking the smooth ball of my shoulder. “No,” I told the boy, watching him touch his lips with his fingers.
He leaned against the open car door, foot on the sill, thinking. “Suck my dick, I’ll give you a quarter O-Z.”
The Stoned Pilot laughed. “Shut the fuck up, dickhead,” he told him, turned back to me. “Half,” he said softly. “Half a bag, that’s a lot for head.”
The other boys watched to see what would happen.
I hitched Caitlin high on my hip, looked back at the playground, how far away it was, the swings opposing, like a machine in a factory, the product hurled down the slides. Did I want to? The fat boy bit his lower lip, chapped, unkissed. He was blushing under his light tan, trying so hard to look tough. Suck his dick for half a bag? If anyone had suggested this before, I would have been disgusted. But now my lips could remember holding Ray’s column of vein, jerk, and pulse, soft skin of the head, the salty come. I looked at the fat boy and wondered how it would feel.
Caitlin burrowed herself in my neck, trying to make farts, wet and buzzing, against my skin, laughing to herself. I didn’t know these boys, I would never see them again. The pot made me brave, curious at how far I would go, as if I was somebody else, someone Olivia would be proud of. “Somebody’s got to hold Caitlin. You can’t put her down, she’ll run off in a second.”
“Al’s got four little brothers.”
I gave her to the quiet boy with short cropped hair and straggly beard, followed the fat boy back into the bushes behind the bathrooms. He unbuckled his pants, pushed them down over his hips. I knelt on a bed of pine needles, like a supplicant, like a sinner. Not like a lover. He leaned against the rough stucco wall of the bathroom as I prayed with him in my mouth, his hands in my hair. Just like Miss America.
With Ray it was never like this. Then it was one pleasure after another, mouths, hands, the richness of skin, every surprise. This was the opposite of sex. I felt nothing for this boy, for his body moving. It felt like working. It cut the heart out of making love, turned it into something no more exciting than brushing your teeth. When the boy was done, I spat out the bitter come, wiped my mouth on my shirt. I thought he would walk away, but he gave me his hand, pulled me up. “My name’s Conrad,” he said. He was a foreign taste in my mouth, a scent in my hair. He gave me the half-bag of pot. “If you ever want anything,