The employees felt it. And to hear them talk, most of them got it at their beach parties every weekend, the ones I missed because I stayed home with my mom. I was concerned for my friends. Or feeling left out. Or very angry at my dad for impregnating the human resources manager while my mom slept longer and longer every day and slowly ground to a halt. The next time my dad sent me to the wholesale club for paper towels and soda straws for Slide with Clyde, I also bought the world's largest box of condoms. My dad never checked the receipt anyway. He just wanted me to show up with the toilet paper and the pickle relish. I gave condoms out to anyone who asked. I also gave condoms to people who didn't ask. If I heard rumors about them, I slipped condoms through the vents in their lockers in the break room.
Brandon found me poking a packet into his locker one afternoon. I was mortified. We were friends at school and I'd gotten him the job, but I didn't know him well enough to stuff his locker with condoms. He was really nice about it, though. He asked me for advice about the chick he was doing. I wanted to help him. And that's how we became buddies.
For the rest of the summer, chicks winked at me and said, "Yeah, you and Brandon are just friends," meaning, How could you be just friends with a piece of meat like that? But we honestly were. He came to me for advice about a new girlfriend every week.
Girls fell all over Brandon. Threw themselves at him. It rained girls through the sunroof of his Buick. A lot of his complaints had to do with girls he went out with getting mad at him about the other girls he went out with. I didn't want a boyfriend like that. And he didn't want a girlfriend like me. All the boys at school knew I was just Zoey, everybody's friend, and I didn't put out.
Until now. "Just a sec," I said as we passed my Bug on our stroll through the parking lot. "Let me get something out of my car." While he finished another cigarette, I unlocked my trunk and leaned into it for the king-size box of condoms. I pulled one out and poked it into my pocket, hoping Brandon wouldn't notice. Not yet. I turned around.
He stared at my pocket. Then he looked straight at me with blue eyes I would have sworn were innocent as a baby's if I hadn't known him so well. He seemed to see me with perfect clarity.
He didn't say a word about it, though. He just turned toward his Buick again and asked as we walked, "Y know that girl Phoebe who does the ou airbrush tattoos at Slide with Clyde?" He unlocked the passenger door of the Buick and pushed it open a little for me. We couldn't open it wide because it was huge and would ding the car in the next space. Carefully I squeezed inside and closed the door behind me.
Brandon sat in the driver's side, still talking. I suspected he'd been talking outside the car too, and hadn't noticed I wasn't there to listen. "--down at the beach right now with her cousin from Destin who is hot, Zoey, and somehow I have to find a way into that without scaring both of them off." He put his elbow on the steering wheel and his chin in his hand, staring into space with his brow down, perplexed.
When I'd first discussed such matters with Brandon, I'd thought he was kidding. No real person could take problems like this seriously. But Brandon did, and once you realized this about him, it was easy to like him. He had no malice. He just loved girls, and sex.
I leaned back against the door and pointed my knees toward him. "Can I ask you something?"
"I know, I know," he said. "Why can't I hit on Phoebe and be satisfied with that, instead of chasing her cousin? Why do I always want the one I can't have? I don't know, Zoey. If I knew, I wouldn't need you."
"Y wouldn't?" I slid my hand onto his bare thigh--the hand without the chip in the fingernail polish.
A lot of boys would have asked me what I thought I was doing. Brandon did not. Either he knew exactly what I was doing, or he was easy. That's why he got as many girls as he did. I wanted to be easy for once.
"That's not what I was going to ask you." I smoothed my hand down the crisp blond hairs on his tanned leg. "Why haven't we hooked up?"
He laughed. "Because I want to keep my job?"
"My dad doesn't care." It hurt to say this. I kept smiling.
Brandon shrugged. "I only see you at work. Y ou've hardly come out with us a single time all summer."
"I'm here now," I said.
His brow furrowed. I was busted. He knew there was something wrong with me, and he would refuse to help me make it worse, some line like that.
But no. Rising from the steering wheel and scooting closer across the wide seat, he reached behind my head and pulled his fingers along the length of a lock of my hair. "I don't know, Zoey. I guess I figured you'd say no. Y ou're such a nice girl." He leaned in and kissed me.
My body was there in the car with him, making out with him. My mind raced through a lifetime of warnings about sex. Before this night I'd assumed I wouldn't be doing it for a while. I had too much to look forward to--graduation, college, a job, travel. I couldn't risk losing it all to satisfy my raging hormones.
But as he pulled my shorts down, these lessons didn't make sense to me anymore. Where was the risk? We were only doing it. It was amazingly easy. His fingers found the condom in my pocket and pulled it out. I kept kissing his neck as plastic crinkled, and then he scooted me down until I lay on the long seat.
He paused at the edge of me, not pushing in but maintaining pressure there, threatening. I was putting up barriers, even now, that were hard for him to get past. I tried to relax for him. I visualized opening for him, letting him into me.
Something inside me screamed Noooooo, this is crazy. Something else inside me reached up with one hand to cover my mouth. It held me down so I couldn't escape until the damage was done. Brandon slid himself all the way inside me, the point of no return, so swiftly and so deep that I gasped. I felt a little sick to my stomach, and my arms had gone tingly and cold, like I had some strange disease.
"That's it," he whispered, pushing farther in.
I hadn't realized how far in he could go, but it was best to trust him since he'd done this before. I let him push into me, pull out, push in again, until he found a rhythm, and the sex turned into every p**n ographic snippet I'd ever walked in on boys viewing on the computer in the break room at Slide with Clyde. This was familiar. It wasn't comfortable, but at least I recognized it. I was doing what everybody else had already done, which made me normal. My arms still tingled, but my whole body flashed from cold to hot now, and I understood the animal nature of it, doing it to reproduce. Brandon was the biggest, best example of my species, and I felt an animal pride in having caught him. ***