Generación / generation

By: Lia Baldori

I didn’t know Jack was beautiful until Maddie said so. “Really?” I’d said between bites, to which she’d nodded, deadpan: “Yeah, that’s why Amy P. and I called him Boy God in Home Ec last year. He’s, like, a god among boys basically. Especially in jazz band.” 

Wedged beside her on the floor in the hallway by our high school’s cafeteria, I’d laughed, but I’d also felt embarrassed on our behalf. Look at us, huddled in reverence of a boy who didn’t know our names, like nerdy little mouse people. But once the veil was lifted, his beauty rushed into my eyes with such urgency that I found it hard not to be aware of my own blinking every time I looked his way. 

Before, I’d sit at the desk kitty-corner to his in first period absentmindedly, slouching and fidgeting and sighing the hour away without a second thought. 

Now, I can’t so much as pull my chair out without wondering how the gesture might look to him, and how I can make it look better. 

I resent the pen I lent him before winter break, not realizing the opportunity it presented to create a moment between us. I’ve had crushes all my life, but I’m a junior now. I kind of went to second base at the choir lock-in and I smoked weed out of an apple behind my cousin’s elementary school just this Mother’s Day. I have my driver’s license, and last week Maddie’s dad pinched my cheek when I bumped into him at the gas station, and then he kissed it kind of close to my mouth when he thought no one was looking. When the kiss happened, I felt terror and power. Jack is well-liked, but he’s not cemented in that group of popular kids who only date each other. There’s no reason why he shouldn’t want me too if I put my mind to it. The thought makes me shiver when I meet my own eyes in the mirror every morning before school and think I look good. 

Today I had time to straighten my hair, so I stop at his desk before our U.S. History teacher starts class. I do a little wave. He waves back. I don’t move.

“You never gave me my pen back.” I regret this as an opener instantly. That was months ago, I realize.

He looks amused as he pulls out an earbud. I can hear Mac DeMarco playing faintly in the background, ominous when illegible. “Sorry, what?”

I swallow. Something I might have read in a waiting room Cosmopolitan takes over: Make him feel like it’s his idea. “It’s gonna be really hot today,” I say. “Like summer almost.”

“It is,” he says. “I wanna go for a walk and take in the air or something.” He stretches exaggeratedly, as if he were an old baroness, and I think this is my exact sense of humor. I feel connected to him through that. His attention quickly waning, like an economic graph of depression figures, I think of the rarest and most impressive thing I can offer. It’s an idea I’ve had before, the pool on the hill. 

“I know a good spot. I mean, if you’d want to… like… do that together…” 

He grins, the gap in his front teeth making something pinch in my chest. “Sounds cool, yeah. What’s your Snapchat?”

At home, I put on a tie-dye T-Shirt and some running shorts just to seem nonchalant about the whole thing, but I also try a subtle mascara and eyeshadow combo. I go back and forth in my head until at 4:55pm, five minutes after I was supposed to leave, I squat in the bathtub and drag my razor over my legs, pits, and bikini line even though I just shaved yesterday and it might give me a rash tomorrow. 

My mom catches me on my way out the door, like she knows what I did in the bathroom after I said I was going to Maddie’s to study. She looks at me hard and I feel her see inside my head. I have a sense that she can do this any time she wants, but she likes to pretend otherwise, save for special moments like this one. 

“You know,” she almost stops herself, but the words fight their way out of her, a little labored and extra loud over the NPR that kicks off her dinner prep: “Just because a boy shows you special attention, doesn’t mean he thinks you’re special. At this age they’ll really say anything to get what they want out of you.”

I want to say, “Fuck you Mom, I’m not even hanging out with a boy right now. Are you having a hot flash or something?” But instead I just roll my eyes and say, “I know, I’m not stupid.” More true, but no less petulant. She says, “Don’t be.” and then, “I love you.” and goes back to chopping.

The walk is ten minutes through the subdivision behind mine. It’s a little after five, the sun still alarmingly hot for it being only May, the patches of shade nippy in comparison. I’m nearly twenty minutes late, yet I’m stunned that he’s already there when I round the corner. I’ve never really seen Jack on his own before, let alone in this setting that’s been the backdrop of my life for so long that it feels two-dimensional behind him. It’s as though he got teleported here, the way he’s ambling and laughing at the lawn ornaments. He gives me a side hug and says a “He-heyyyy” that feels both familiar and acknowledges that we’re doing something unusual. 

He’s quite impressed with my spot. I lead him between the two beige condominiums and up the little concrete path flanked by bricks that scales the small hill before the woods. At the top, there’s a locked gate, and within that gate, the community pool, no longer covered for winter, but with no shortage of dead leaves clustered on its surface. My mom used to catsit for this older woman in her exercise classes and in exchange she’d get the key to this place. It only recently occurred to me that I’ve never seen anyone else up here. And that the fence isn’t particularly high. Jack hoists himself up and over it, then climbs back again when he realizes he could’ve given me a leg up. I find this an adorable gesture. My mom’s warning —  they’ll really say anything to get what they want — is quick to follow. 

But thirty minutes and a half a joint in, Jack doesn’t seem to be trying to make me feel anything. I’m breathing like a rabbit. We’ve chatted a little, he’s shared some song ideas that his band is trying out, I’ve affirmed that they sound cool and I act like I’ve had a long-held respect for Parquet Courts. After what feels like an eternity I’m starting to think that’s as far as this will go when he looks at me as if in slow motion, his beautiful eyes bloodshot and glassy.

“You know, y o u c a n m o v e c l o s e r.”

“Hahokay,” I switch from my plastic chez lounge to the foot of his as his arms reach for me and too suddenly for me to savor it, our lips are mashed together. I’m so excited that I don’t even know if it feels good. I’m thinking to myself, “I won! I won!” I couldn’t really tell you how I did it if pressed for comment after the race. 

He pulls me onto him and his hands are a frenzy of activity across my body like he’s trying to touch everything at once. I hold still so that he can. I’m not confident in my weight placement and my knee is starting to slip between the thick straps of the chair. I suddenly feel weightless and then a pain in my hip as it collides with the ground, the chair now a sort of fort over us. Jack’s chest heaves over my face as he laughs, now on top of me, and he’s clutching me in a familiar way so it feels good when I laugh too. 

When we sit up and right ourselves, he scans the area, a touch more gravely. I raise an eyebrow and he goes, “I’m thinking…” and then, “come with me.”

He takes my hand and we head toward the bathroom marked with the family sign. Jack smiles when the handle clicks, even as we enter a mildewy room with a light that buzzes overhead. There’s an old pool divider coiled up in one corner, a forgotten serpent. I trace its weathered form with my eyes as Jack unbuttons his shirt and lays it down on the cement floor. He gestures for me to join him. I see no real reason not to. Just as I see no real reason not to nod when he moves his hand into my shorts. His actions feel like instincts — so fluid and sure that I’m swept up in their current. I nod again when he pulls a condom out of his pocket.

The bathroom light is on a timer. I remember this vaguely from changing in here as a kid when it switches off, leaving us in near-total darkness save for the crack under the door. I’m on top now, and I can see the outline of his hair around his ear, but not his face, and I’m glad not to have to think about my own. I don’t want him to see me wince. Jack seems to feel similarly emboldened by our anonymity because he starts to talk.

“Oh fuck,” he says, and I nervously repeat after him: “Fuck”. 

“That feels so good,”  “It’s so good yeah” 

“You’re so wet” “Yeah I am so wet”

I feel something building in the air between us, so I move a little faster and say his words back to him more urgently, and soon after he shudders and I know it’s done. A slight relief opens my chest to make room for a new fear as I hear his breathing slow, a silence taking its place. 

“That was crazy,” he says, and then, “hey…”

I am instantly hoping for some kind of romantic statement. Expecting one, even as he completes his thought:

“…could you hit the light?” 

I shove off from my straddle and nearly topple over in the process. I’m sore, and my legs feel brand-new, deerlike, as I rise and step to the switch. I push the button and its familiar buzz fills the room. 

“Hi,” Jack says from the ground, squinting up at me and grinning. There’s a dried splatter of something near his ear. “That was crazy,” he says again, and he half-laughs and looks down in a way that reveals his gorgeous dimple, but I feel a slight chill because I can tell that this laugh is more to himself than it is in conspiracy with me. 

He starts to pull at the wrinkled condom and I avert my eyes—it’s only then that I catch myself in the cracked mirror and realize I’m standing naked in this dingy light. I scoop up my clothes and yank them on as quickly as possible. Something feels funny and I see too late that my underwear is suspended in the leg of my shorts. I quickly tug them out through the bottom and crumple them into my pocket, embarrassed for a reason that doesn’t quite make sense considering what we’ve just done. 

Jack finishes his maneuver with the condom by throwing it in the tampon receptacle and then steps into his clothes, pulling each article on as smoothly as if they were sitting in place waiting for him to finish. He says, “Well, shall we?” in a dapper sort of way and moves past me to the door. It’s become blue outside. Jack seems unfazed by the transition and immediately uprights the chair we fell out of, feeling around underneath it. 

“Shit, we still have some.” He picks up the last of the joint and lights it, then makes his way to the edge of the pool and squats down. I peer over it with him. Our reflections are just barely perceptible. “Ghost people,” he says and I recall that’s some kind of song he’s been trying to write. He extends the joint to me and I’m thinking about what it means to be stupid when it occurs to me I haven’t looked at my phone since I got here. I startle away and spot my bag across the deck. I swipe past my mom’s missed calls and text her Leaving Maddie’s now before I can decide if I’m ready for that interaction. 

“Um. I think I gotta go,” I say, waiting. 

“See you tomorrow?” he says, not looking up from the pool. It’s Tuesday, I realize, and I exclaim it. We both laugh and it feels good like how it did under the deck chair. I’m realizing I want to chase this feeling.

“You’re funny,” he says, not rising to meet me. “This was fun.”

I take a couple of steps, then linger, hoping for more. The knobby base of his neck glows white against the aqua of the pool. He looks so tender this way that it’s hard to not to feel a certain kind of love, my knees still pebbled and stinging with the imprint of the concrete floor, the dampness in my shorts enshrouding a pain that’s become more sure of itself. 

“Yeah…see you.”

Down the hill, I smell something familiar, sweet and breathy. It’s daffodils, molting yellow all over the backyard of one of the condos, the last of their season by my guess. I’m suddenly reminded of the poison in them that ended up killing that cat my mom used to sit. We looked it up together to be sure, after her friend got the toxicology report back and showed us its name, which read like a pool chemical next to a bunch of Xs that indicated where trace amounts had been found in Maxy’s body. I remember learning that it has no scent, but a bitter flavor that alerts you of its poison only after you’ve had a taste.