The Smell of Other People's Hou - Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock Page 0,6

because don’t forget, I have a rich boyfriend who flicked me on the butt one day with his wet towel at swim practice and said, “Want to come to a party at my house after the meet?”

After I stayed over that first time, all I wanted was to stay over again. But Gran only lets us go to a friend’s house once a month. Until next month, I have to settle for calling Ray late at night, from the phone in the hallway.

The long red cord stretches into my room, where I put his shirt over my head and listen to his voice telling me about the northern lights outside his window, streaking across the sky and then bouncing off the frozen lake in big, fat, wavy swaths of green and red and yellow.

We talk about swim practice and I lick chlorine off my arm, pretending it’s his. He tells me where I should touch myself and promises all kinds of things for the next time I sleep over. I ask him why his family likes Richard Nixon so much and he says he doesn’t know, but that his dad sometimes calls him “Tricky Dicky.” He says he wants to come to Birch Park sometime, but I hope he’s just saying that to be nice. I would die if he saw where I live.

“Your house smells so much better than mine,” I tell him.

I’ve realized over time that houses with moms in them do tend to smell better. If I close my eyes, I can just barely remember my mother’s wildflowers in their whiskey bottles. The very distant scent of my parents lingers in my brain, as they laugh and twirl around the kitchen. Deer blood on my father’s hands tinges all my memories of them—their skin, their hair, their clothes. The smell of too much love.

I don’t say any of this to Ray, who still has two parents and a house that smells like store-bought everything. I don’t want to scare him away.

—

Finally I get to stay over again, and this time Ray has a little foil packet the size of a tea bag that he says we should use, just to be safe. But every Catholic knows that’s the worst sin of all. After asking me about six times if I’m sure I don’t want to use it, he gives up and we get drunk on each other, practically drowning in a blur of skin and hair and tangled sheets. I don’t even think about how this part is probably a sin, too. Ray keeps calling me “beautiful” over and over and over, until I even start believing him. It’s as if someone is seeing me for the first time in my life.

I fall asleep right there next to him, totally naked, and forget to go back to Anna’s room. Suddenly Mrs. Stevens walks in with a pile of freshly folded shirts. It’s morning; the sun is streaming in through the big glass windows and I have never been more embarrassed.

“Oh, sorry,” she says when she sees us, “didn’t mean to barge in.” As she backs out the door, her cloudy blue eyes look sad and weirdly guilty, as if she’s the one who’s been caught.

“Oh my God. Isn’t she mad?” I ask Ray, pulling the sheet over my head. If that had been Gran, they’d be ordering my coffin.

But Ray just laughs and tries to roll on top of me.

“What can she say? It’s not like Anna isn’t here because my mom did the same thing back in high school. Why do you think she had to get married so young?”

He reaches out to touch my breast but I push his hand away, struggling to get back into my nightgown. I feel queasy and can’t stop seeing his mother’s blue, blue eyes, as if they are the sea and I have just swum way too far from shore.

Crazy Dancing Guy is on the corner and we pretend not to see him, which is sort of impossible. He’s always in that big fluffy hat with the pom-pom; an insulated Carhartt suit; and white, clomping bunny boots dancing away like he’s in his own kitchen, radio blaring. He does disco-pointing, hip-swinging, foot-stomping, jumping-around-looking-weird dance moves on this corner every single day. How could we not see him? He is out here even when it’s forty below. But at forty below, at least dancing around makes sense.

Everyone who lives in Birch Park has to walk by him when we leave