try to figure out what Lance’s type was, I started hanging out with Brian. Brian was every bit as tall, dark, and gorgeous as Lance, but he would let me make out with him. Sweet guy.
Brian might have looked intimidating with his miles of studded pleather accessories and manly physique, but he was a gentle, kindhearted, animal-loving vegan pacifist who only wore “cruelty-free” combat boots made from recycled potato sacks or some shit. Because he was such a sweetheart, Brian accidentally became Knight’s best friend—meaning Brian was nice enough to let him come over, and Knight would show his appreciation by insulting and physically assaulting him.
During the summer after my freshman year I spent a lot of time at Brian’s house. My mom would drop me off after lunch in her Band-Aid–colored Taurus station wagon, and Brian, who was a year older than me and already had his driver’s license, would bring me home before dinner. It was pretty glorious. We’d lounge on Brian’s twin-size bed—watching The Jerry Springer Show and making out whenever his little brother, August, left the room—and then head down to his crumbling neighborhood pool for a swim.
Every day at two fifteen sharp, while Brian and I splashed each other and practiced our diving tricks, Knight never failed to lurch his ancient, dented, tin can of a Ford F-150 into the pool parking lot as soon as he had been dismissed from summer school. Like clockwork—stomp, stomp, stomp—he and his perma-scowl would burst through the gate, pin us both with a murderous glare, and then slowly drag a pool chair across the concrete to where we were frolicking. The sound of the metal legs scraping the concrete always gave me a super creepy Freddy-Krueger-raking-his-nails-down-your-spine kind of vibe. Once we were sufficiently intimidated, Knight would straddle the chair backward, as if he were Slater from Saved by the Bell, and spend the rest of the afternoon trying to impress me by verbally and physically demeaning Brian and flicking lit cigarette butts at him.
No matter how hot and sticky it was outside (“Hot and sticky” is what Southerners like to call the thick putrid lava air that our bodies have to extract oxygen from in order to survive living here from May through September.), Knight never got in the pool. He never even broke a sweat. But he would occasionally hiss to Brian whenever he thought I was out of earshot, “I’m gonna fuck your girlfriend before you do.”
I tried to dismiss his threat—to tell myself that he and Brian were just having some kind of pissing contest—but deep down I knew that Knight meant what he said. And Knight always made good on his threats.
Brian and I never went further than first base. Summer came and went, and we just kind of went back to being friends who didn’t make out. I don’t really know what happened, but I’m guessing Knight had something to do with it.
I’m just happy that the ex-boyfriend’s bed I referred to in my limerick wasn’t his. It was actually Colton’s.
Colton was the only boy I’d kissed before Brian. He was a devilishly handsome spiky-haired little bad boy I dated in eighth grade. And by dated, I mean that we talked on the phone, held hands at school, toilet-papered a house together, and made out once. Colton reminded me of a male fairy—not like in a gay way, but in a pointy-eared, wild-haired, wicked gleam in his eye kind of way.
Wait. Shit. I might be thinking of Peter Pan.
Yes, Colton totally reminded me of Peter Pan, in a sexy, mischievous King of the Lost Boys kind of way.
Colton lived, off and on, with his bedraggled sad single mom, Peggy, who worked, like, four jobs. Peg was the quintessential poor white trash. Skinny as a rail with scraggly long dishwater-blonde hair, she could still fit into her entire skintight, high-waisted stonewashed wardrobe from 1983. Her long shaking fingers were never without an equally long Virginia Slim between them, and her voice was so hoarse that it sounded as if she’d probably gone for days at a time without speaking to anyone.
I suspect Colton’s dad was one of the founding members of Whitesnake. Peggy had former eighties hair-band groupie written all over her. Whoever his dad was, his place in Las Vegas had to be a hell of a lot better than Peggy’s shithole. That’s probably why Colton never stuck around for more than a few months at a time.
During Colton’s last stint at Peggy’s