Jack Kerouac is Dead to Me - Gae Polisner Page 0,38

his voice circle around me, like the butterflies, seeping through me, all warm and raspy and mellow.

The music stops. I open my eyes.

“Pay up, Jailbait,” he says.

JULY

BEFORE FIFTH GRADE

THE NEXT DAY

I awaken at 5:00 a.m. to all my lights on, and you snoring loudly on my phone. We both fell asleep. My battery is almost dead.

My eyes dart to the bowl and I panic. It’s not empty, though. Instead, a short, ugly moth-looking thing has broken free of the chrysalis, and hangs there, wet and stubby, not looking much like a creature I’d want to hatch at all.

Maybe they are cocoons and not chrysalises.

Alarmed, I hang up, shut my door gently against the early morning quiet of the house, open YouTube, and type in: “Butterfly emerging from chrysalis,” then open the first one I come to: “Swallowtail Emerging: Two Minute Time Lapse.” It’s from the US Fish and Wildlife Foundation, so it should be reliable.

I find my charger and plug in, and watch in amazement as a gross, stubby-winged thing just like the one in my bowl breaks free of its cellophane casing while dramatic music plays. I turn up the volume a little.

“Right after emerging,” the woman’s voice explains, “the butterfly’s abdomen is large and filled with fluid. At first its wings are very small. Over the next several hours, the butterfly pumps fluid from its abdomen into its wings, causing them to inflate.”

I watch, sleepy and mesmerized, as the butterfly’s abdomen grows smaller, and the full span of its beautiful wings fills the screen.

Later that morning, I walk carefully from my room with the bowl, and set it on the table in our backyard, watching and waiting, all by myself, as the butterfly finally takes off and flies away.

LATE MAY

TENTH GRADE

Max unzips his jeans and steers my hand inside. I don’t stop him; I help. I want to. I move my fingers down, run them over the surface of his underwear.

“Jesus, Jailbait—” he whispers, as I slip them under the waistband and in.

My fingers touch skin. Max, warm and hard in my hand.

“Don’t stop, please,” he says.

I don’t let myself think, just wrap my fingers and move my hand up and down the way I hope I’m supposed to. He’s sweaty, and my hand sticks, and I don’t have much room to maneuver. He grows thicker and harder and moves more enthusiastically, bumping my hand against the fly of his jeans. It all feels sort of alien. Not bad, just weird, but nice, too, the way he rocks and moans in rhythm with my hand. As if I’m directing him—conducting him. As if I’m helping him to float away, from his dad and this shithole house, from all the people who don’t understand him. He moves faster and faster, and moans some more, and almost as soon as I started, it’s done. He grows soft again, and my hand is gooey and warm.

He rolls onto his side, propped on an elbow, and smiles at me.

I’m not sure what to do or say, but he gets up right away, anyway, so I don’t have to worry. He pulls off his T-shirt and tosses it at me. “Here, you can use that. I’m gonna wash up and take a leak,” and he disappears into the bathroom.

I lie back on his pillow, my head spinning, and for one split second I think how crazy it will be when I get home and tell Aubrey everything. But that’s wrong; that won’t happen. She and I are barely friends anymore.

And suddenly I feel like I’m going to cry and I don’t know why. Maybe because it hits me that we’re really not friends anymore. Forget barely. Not at all. And what I wish most in this moment is that I could have her back, the old Aubrey, the one who ran through sprinklers with me, the one who played House and lugged Mary Lennox up on her canopied bed, sharing her deepest, darkest secrets with me. The one who fell into fits of conspiratorial laughter when we caught Ethan looking at porn on his computer. The one I could talk to, who wasn’t so different from me.

Lying here in Max’s bedroom, I want to feel good about how I’m finally doing in real life all those things Aubrey and I only imagined back then, pretending on hands and dolls, in hopes that one day we’d actually know what we were doing. I miss that Aubrey, the one who would have wanted to know