Play Me Backwards (10 page)

“Partly.”

I thought it over. Going on a Slushee hunt sounded like fun. I have a collector's mentality in my DNA, I guess. My dad buys rare junk to sell online at thrift stores and the flea market at the fairgrounds all the time, and he's always on the lookout for old cookbooks to feed his food disaster habit. Sometimes in winter, when the flea market at the fairgrounds is closed and garage sales are out of season, he just gets the itch and starts driving around looking for pawnshops and stuff, hoping for a good score.

I liked to go along with him. I used to collect old record albums with embarrassing covers, and you could usually find a few at any given thrift store—my favorites were one called
Sex Education of Children
(which showed a smiling old priest sitting in a library on the cover) and a bluegrass album called
Satan Is Real
(which had two singers standing in front of a cardboard devil that didn't look real at all). Before I got into bad album covers, I was collecting old stereo speakers—enough to cover an entire wall of my bedroom. I wasn't into actual hunting, like shooting ducks or whatever, but I guess I had hunting instincts in my DNA.

So looking for a rare Slushee flavor sounded like fun, and it would give Paige and me something to do besides hanging out with her friends or fooling around. Not that I didn't
like
fooling around, but one thing leads to another, and my past experience in that realm hadn't exactly been encouraging. Just thinking of going much further than we had brought back that gnawing feeling in my guts.

“Speaking of gas stations,” said Stan, “do you know which one Dustin was at when he met that girl?”

“No.”

Stan grinned.

“Kum and Go,” he said.

And we laughed.

If there ever comes a day when I don't think that gas station has a hilarious name, I'll know that my heart has died.

The morning after our first date I found Paige in the hall at school and told her I was planning a quest to find the Great White Grape Slushee, and every other Slushee flavor, and asked if she'd come with me, starting that afternoon.

“That sounds sort of weird,” she said.

“Yeah, but it'll be fun,” I said. “Can we at least try it?”

“I guess. I have a yearbook meeting, but I can go after that.”

So after her yearbook meeting we spent an hour or two in my car, listening to
Moby-Dick
and seeking out Slushees. She thought it was awkward just to go into a gas station, look at the Slushee machine, and then leave without buying anything half the time, but she went along with it the same way I went along with going to dinner with all of her friends at Hurricane's, I guess. We had three kinds of Slushees that day, but found no sign of a white grape–flavored one.

The next day, Tuesday, I went to Casa Bravo, since Paige was working that night. They couldn't get me a seat in her section, so I sat at
the bar and she slipped me some free appetizers when she could get away from her tables. One of the other servers, a middle-aged woman that I think used to be a substitute teacher that I had once or twice, came over and congratulated me. “You're a lucky boy,” she told me, in her raspy smoker's voice. “Paige has a great ass, doesn't she?”

I didn't know quite how to respond to that without looking like a complete douche bag.

I wound up sitting at that bar for several hours; about the only time Paige and I got to talk at all was when she came to the bar to roll silverware into napkins at the end of her shift. The nice thing about restaurant work is that you never know for sure when you're going to get off work, so she could be cut from the floor at nine thirty but tell her parents she was there until ten, giving us a solid half hour to fool around in my car without arousing suspicion.

On Wednesday after school we were back on the road, heading out to West Des Moines to go to a Quick Trip that I seemed to remember having a bigger Slushee selection than average. Paige seemed a bit baffled that I was really serious about the quest, but I was. I was under orders, after all. And if I filled up on Slushees in the afternoon, I could just get the soup or whatever the cheapest thing on the menu was at whatever restaurant we met her friends at later. It looked as though group outings to chain restaurants were going to be a regular feature of my life from now on.

Those first few days set a pattern that we stuck to for the next couple of weeks.

Most days we had about an hour between school and work to go out on Slushee hunts. On the occasion that neither of us was working, there was always some group of her friends going to one of the
chain restaurants to hang out in the evening, but on those days we'd usually have several hours between school and dinner, and the hunt took us all over the Des Moines metro area. The gas stations with the most unusual flavors tended to be in the parts of town that needed a new coat of paint, where aluminum siding was the dominant architectural feature, and where you were always seeing busted cars and construction equipment by the side of the road. Those places were only about ten minutes down I-35 from Cornersville Trace, which by comparison looked so idyllic that you wondered how any kid in any house could ever have anything to complain about.

On the group outings that usually followed the Slushee hunts, I did what I could to hold up my end of the conversation, which was usually just a matter of turning the subject to poop, which worked most of the time, though now and then Paige would gently suggest that I should think of something else to talk about.

With so much to keep us busy, we didn't have too many chances to do anything I wasn't sure I was up to, sexually. Kissing and some minor groping were as far as we got until one day in early March, when what we hoped was the last snow of the year was falling, and the puddles that had formed on the ground during a brief thaw that melted most of the snow were turning back into ice.

On that day we were out in Paige's SUV and pulled into a Kum and Go in Waukee that we hadn't tried before. Inside they were selling a cherry limeade–flavored Slushee—a new one for us, which by then was a minor victory. We high-fived and took one to the parking lot, where I stepped on a patch of black ice, slipped, and fell on my ass.

The Slushee flew out of my hand, and I felt like I was watching
in slow motion as the cup flew into the air, turned upside down, and emptied its dark red contents onto my chest.

Paige turned back and almost screamed as I fell. But once she realized that I hadn't cracked my head open or anything, she started to laugh.

“Are you okay?” she asked, as I got to my feet and let the goop drip off of me.

“Yeah. Just cold.”

“Oh my God, you look like a murder victim or something!”

I looked down and saw that the cherry limeade Slushee had created a large red stain on my chest. It was spreading and dripping towards new territory by the second.

Paige started laughing as I stood up, and bits of the Slushee dripped down under my collar. I shivered and swore, and she gave me a sort of wicked smile. “We'd better find a place where we can get you cleaned up, baby,” she said. “You're all messy.”

I wiped myself down with the paper towels they kept next to the donut case, then laid out some of the free
Job Finder
newspapers over the passenger seat. I thought she'd drive to my place, so I could get changed, but instead she drove us into Oak Meadow Mills and up to her place.

I could hear music coming from what I assumed was her sister's bedroom, but her parents weren't home yet.

In the stainless-steel kitchen she took a few pages of the
Des Moines Register
off the table, set them on the floor, and had me stand on them.

“Okay,” she said. “Now lift up your arms, Mr. Harris, so Nurse Paige can remove your shirt.”

I raised my arms and she peeled my shirt off and set it down on the newspaper. My whole chest was stained red, and still cold. And sticky.

I had never had a naughty nurse fantasy or anything, but hearing her talk like one was totally hot.

She got a paper towel damp with warm water and started wiping down my bare chest, which felt incredible. Water dripped down my body and pooled at my feet. When my chest was reasonably clean, Paige looked up at me with a grin.

“Now, Mr. Harris,” she said, “did any of that Slushee get into your pants?”

I started to panic. I hadn't been so turned on in years, honestly. There was no danger that I wouldn't be able to get it up.

But I was still nervous. What if I screwed up completely? What if I went one step too far and she got really pissed off? You can never tell with girls. Every sign she was giving me made me think she wanted my pants and underwear on the newspaper right that second, but what if she really meant for me to go into the bathroom and clean
myself
up? And what if she got my pants down and didn't like what she saw?

“I don't know,” I said.

“I think some did,” she said. “There was a trickle of it that went all the way down, Mr. Harris.” She traced a fingertip from my belly button to the waist of my jeans. I squirmed, because it tickled like hell. She snickered.

“Are you ticklish, Mr. Harris?”

“A little.”

“Well, don't worry; I'm a nurse. And I think we'd better get those
pants off, just to check. We have to clean you very thoroughly so you don't get cherry lime disease.”

“Isn't your sister right upstairs?”

“She won't come down. And if she does, she won't tell.”

She took hold of my zipper and started to undo it, and I tried to decide whether to move her hand away. Any worries I had that she didn't really want them down were gone now, and it would be rude, really, if I stopped her. She'd probably be all upset and worry that I wasn't attracted to her or didn't like her or something, even though she had to be able to see the bulge for herself.

Still, I wasn't convinced that I wouldn't completely disappoint her if we tried anything.

My problems vanished when we heard the sound of the garage door opening.

“Oh, fuck!” she said. “That's probably my dad.”

She stood back up and handed me my shirt. I started to put it back on, and she rushed to throw the paper towel and newspaper into the trash.

“Should I get out of here?” I asked.

“Probably not,” she said. “It'll look worse if he sees you running away.”

The door opened, and a middle-aged guy with gray hair and a tan stepped in. A tan. In February. In Iowa.

“Hi there,” he said.

“Hi, Daddy,” said Paige. “This is Leon.”

“Hi, Mr. Becwar,” I said.

“Gene,” he said. “Just call me Gene.”

He shook my hand and smiled. It did not seem like a sincere
smile to me. It was an “I just caught you alone with my daughter, but I'll act friendly to get your guard down” smile.

“You okay?” he asked, looking at my shirt.

“Yeah,” I said. “We just had a little malfunction with a cherry limeade Slushee.”

He laughed a sort of half laugh that was probably fake. “You look like somebody stabbed you.” He leaned closer and whispered, “Which, incidentally, is what happens to boyfriends who misbehave.”

Then he slapped me on the shoulder and offered me a can of Coke.

“We have to go, Dad,” said Paige. “Leon has to work at five, and I'm meeting Leslie to go over yearbook stuff.”

“Well, I'm sure we'll meet again,” said Gene.

Paige took me by the hand and let me out of the front door and back to her car.

“Did Dad say he was going to stab you?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Pathetic.”

“He never stabbed Joey, did he?”

“Well, he hated Joey. But he never
stabbed
him. He just threatened him a lot.”

“He'll probably hate me, too.”

“Probably. But he won't really stab you, obviously.”

That wasn't really as obvious as it probably should have been.

Paige hadn't taken me to the mall and tried to give me a makeover or anything, but now and then, while we were talking during the first couple of weeks of being together, she had worked in some notes for me that gave me some clues on what she expected of me
as a boyfriend. Perhaps the most memorable instance was when she told me about one of her exes.

“He lied to me,” she'd said, “and that's one thing I can't stand. And I'm pretty casual. I could probably get over it if I found out that some slut got her hands in your pants at a party, you know.”

“That won't happen,” I told her. “I'm not like that.”

“I'd be more upset if you were holding hands with one of them, honestly.”

“That won't happen either.”

“But if you ever
lie
to me, I'll come after you with a butcher's knife.”

Then she'd given me a very serious look and started laughing. The laugh didn't make the look seem like it had been less serious.

That day had been the first time she threatened to stab me. I think it was the first time
anyone
did in my whole life. But one thing I never realized about adult relationships is that when you're in one, people threaten to stab you a lot.

The day after Paige first made that threat I ended up getting paired up with Claire Downing, who had been friends with Paige since kindergarten, to diagram the parts of a cell on a worksheet (now
there's
an activity that takes two people).

“Some people are saying Paige is crazy to go out with you,” she said, “but I think you guys might make a good match.”

“I wouldn't have thought we would be,” I said. “But she's really nice, you know? We have fun together.”

“Good,” she said. “But just so you know, if you ever hurt her, I'll stab you in the eye with a butcher's knife.”