Burro Hills Read online

  “Split it with me later?” he asked quietly, when the other boys were out of earshot. I nodded, though I felt nervous.

  We downed the bourbon pretty fast, blaring rap on Max’s portable speakers. The water felt good even though it was pretty warm, and I floated down, testing how long I could hold my breath as the bottom of the pool spun around me.

  When I came up for air, Connor was in front of me, holding out the pills. One was green and one was blue.

  “Very Matrix,” I said, but I didn’t reach for one. “What is it?”

  He only smiled. Shirtless in the water, I felt scrawny compared to him, even though my build was fairly average. He had an impressive set of abs, and up close, I couldn’t help but notice the deep scars on his wrists that he’d never discussed. I wondered if the guys noticed them like I did.

  “Alright, fine, fuck it,” I said, popping back the green one, choking a little as I tried to force it down. It was chalky and hard to swallow. “But rescue me if I drown, okay?”

  Connor swallowed his easily. “You won’t. But I will,” then called out, “Any bourbon left, Toby?”

  I’d thought I had a high tolerance, but Connor was on another level. He threw back the liquor as easily as he had the little blue pill, of what he still wouldn’t tell me. I hoped it was ecstasy or some kind of upper, because the weight of the liquor was making my head feel heavy.

  But things slowly got brighter, the water starting to seem more interesting, the way it rippled and splashed around my body, and I wondered how all those atoms held us together and moved so effortlessly while still remaining stable.

  I tried to explain it to the boys, but by then they were out of the water, wandering around the deck trying to get better service and call some girls over.

  “I’m plastered, and it’s a fucking sausage fest!” Toby yelled into the empty air. Max tripped over the pool chair Connor was sitting on and started laughing even as the blood ran down his leg. Connor rolled his joint and smiled at me, and I dipped underwater and opened my eyes, enjoying the silence.

  In a matter of minutes a bunch of girls came over, including Jess’s girls Anna and Lizzie, wearing barely-there bikinis, massive sunglasses, and clutching bottles of Stoli. There were about six of them in all, and I stayed floating in the pool even as the boys tried to call me over, watching them gawk and drool like hungry wolves at their soft curves and breasts, the way they threw their heads back when they laughed, warm smiles glowing in the light of dusk.

  “Are we gonna get arrested or something?” Anna asked, grinning and snapping her gum just like Jess did.

  “That’s what I said!” laughed Max.

  “Babe,” Toby said, wrapping an arm around Anna’s waist. “The cops don’t give a shit that we drink here, dope here, or that people fuckin’ die in the streets in this town. You think they give a fuck about our little party here?” He snatched her sunglasses and put them on, then pummeled his chest and screamed like a wild animal while the girls cracked up, chugging the vodka straight before jumping into the pool.

  It comforted me to know that Jess was home, busy cramming for some exam, far away from this drunk and horny mess.

  “Where’s Jess?” I heard Toby ask before I went underwater again, swimming to the deeper end, wondering how long I could hold my breath before I passed out.

  When I surfaced I felt a presence behind me, and I turned to see Connor with that expectant smirk of his. I noticed how good he looked with his hair wet, water dripping from his face and down his throat. Maybe it was just the drugs talking, but I wanted to keep looking.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey.”

  He just kept treading water, staring at me like he wanted to say something. I felt my stomach tighten.

  “So, uh, you don’t want to mess with that?” I asked, motioning to the girls at the other end of the pool. “They’re pretty hot.”

  “You think so?” he asked, splashing water across his face and slicking back his hair.

  “I guess,” I said. “They’re alright.”

  “They want to fuck me,” he said. It was then I noticed that his eyes were glazed over, not looking directly at anything in particular.

  I laughed. “You’re gone, bro.”

  “I am,” he said. “And I feel fantastic. The pills do work their magic.” He swam closer. “They want to fuck me. You want to fuck me. Everyone wants to fuck me.” My stomach dropped, and I swallowed hard.

  “You’re cocky as hell when you’re gone,” I said.

  “And you’re a scared shitless drunk,” he said.

  I faked a laugh, but he wasn’t smiling. “I’m not scared of anything.”

  He moved over to me, and I could feel his breath on my neck, smell the bourbon on it, his lips moving to my ear. “Bullshit,” he whispered. “You’re scared of everything.’”

  Then he plunged underwater and swam away, towards the girls and the music, leaving me breathless at the edge of the water.

  12.

  I was so restless that weekend I could barely breathe. Every time my phone made a sound of any kind, I half-expected it to be him.

  Breathe, Jack. It was all I could do. Mom spent her weekend passed out in front of the TV, snoring softly with Gunther curled up at her ratty bunny-slippered feet. Dad was working at the bar. I was attempting my history essay, slogging through it in between smoke breaks and nervous glances at my phone.

  Get a grip, Jack.

  At around noon on Sunday my phone finally rang, and I almost jumped out of my skin. Mom mumbled something about quiet from her spot on the couch, even though the TV was blasting Maury.

  My pulse returned to normal when I picked up and heard her voice.

  “Can I come over?”

  It wasn’t Connor, but it was just as good.

  Stepping inside my house was probably like stepping back into the 1970s, or at least what I imagined the seventies to be like from movies and TV. The wallpaper in the kitchen was old and ugly, outdated and blackened at the corners from years of cigarette smoke. The floors were cheap linoleum, the living room furniture ugly colors and patterns that clashed against the bright orange wall. We even had a zebra print rug in the dining room where Old Gunther liked to lie. It always smelled like smoke and dog and whatever woodsy potpourri Mom had put out to freshen up the air.

  I hated it. It felt like living in a time warp. Jess loved it. She said it felt like home.

  “Hi buddy!” she squealed. Gunther’s nose went right between her legs the second I let her in.

  “Hey buddy,” I echoed, and I pulled her into a hug, immediately melting into her. She smelled like body lotion and sugary perfume and girl.

  “Oh, it’s the lovely Jessica Velez!” Mom called out from her seat at the kitchen table. She tapped her cigarette into an ashtray and smiled affectionately. “Come over here, doll. Let me read your palm.”

  I groaned. “Mom, do we have to do this every time?”

  It was a game we’d played since I was little, some off-shoot based on Grandma Selena’s stories of her days as a teenage fortune teller on the boardwalk of Venice Beach, selling readings and homemade jewelry for rent money. I always wondered what it would be like to live that way, your life uncluttered, straightforward, simple. But Grandma Selena wasn’t alive anymore to ask.

  “Hmm, let’s see,” she said, pretending to frown deep in thought while she traced the lines of Jess’s palm. “This line here indicates that you freely express yourself and your emotions, while this one shows you are very strong-willed.”

  She smirked at Jess and we tried not to laugh.

  “Now the shape of your hand indicates you are perceptive, at times sympathetic, and at other times moody. Oh, but here Jess, this line is important. It looks like there will be a break, a sudden change in your life.”

  Jess gasped in mock surprise. “Is that bad?”

  “Oh no, honey, you’ll be fine. See your life is strongly controlled by fate—”

  I put my hand
on Mom’s shoulder. “Okay, ma, I think that’s enough for today.”

  She tossed back her hair. “You know, Jack, when I’m old and wealthy and living in a retirement community with dumb, demented, wealthy birds who think this is a legitimate science and pay me under the table to learn about their last days, you won’t be invited over to my loft overlooking the city.” She smirked and went back to chain smoking through her pack of Marlboros.

  We went upstairs to my room. While I hated the rest of the wilting house, I loved my room—the dusty wood floors, the sloped paneled ceilings with the one skylight, and the view of the woods out back. Jess flopped down on my plaid comforter while I took out my Ren & Stimpy bong and lit up, taking a deep hit, the smoke curling from the side of my mouth. I love the sound of it bubbling. I offered it to her, and she took one hit before choking and coughing like she’d just tried to inhale a cigar.

  “You fucker,” she said between coughs. “How do you do this?”

  I grinned and shrugged. “Practice makes perfect.”

  I had posters on the wall, autographed ones from concerts we’d been to, even one that we’d snuck into in the early hours of the morning. I remembered the smell of wet grass in the rain, mud on our sneakers, a metal bass that to us may as well have been angels singing even though we’d barely known the band.

  She flipped on the TV and started up my vintage Nintendo 64 while I finished toking, letting the sweet Mary Jane fill me up to the brim with a buzzed, sated euphoria. “You’re gonna get lung cancer,” Jess said. “You smoke way too much.”

  I laughed and plopped down next to her, grabbing the other controller as we deftly moved through the motions of level one, a level we’d played many times before. It was a good talking level, something to do with your hands while you spoke.

  “Other things will probably kill me before that,” I said, and she elbowed me in the ribs, causing my little character to fly into a toxic puddle on-screen.

  “Don’t say that,” she said. “Seriously, don’t talk like that.”

  “Keep your attention on the screen, Velez,” I said. “You’re gonna get us both killed in a second—figuratively of course.”

  We finished up the next few levels in silence, the only sounds our fingers mashing against the keys and the electronic blipping and bleeping of the Mario Brothers game.

  After a while we got bored and just lounged on my bed, flipping through the magazines Mom never read. I kept all of her Cosmos, and we laughed at the outrageous sex tips, the bizarre articles like “How to be the master of his man bits” and ways to give a hand job that sounded painful and embarrassing for everyone involved.

  She lingered on the page of a busty blonde dry-humping a shirtless man, sweat dripping down his shiny photo-shopped skin. “Sometimes I wonder why I’m friends with them,” she said.

  I kept my eyes on the page, trying to read some secret hidden in the model’s swollen watermelon boobs. “Mmm. Who? Anna and Lizzie?”

  “Yeah.” She rolled onto her back and stared up at the ceiling. “Sometimes I think they like each other more than they like me.”

  “I don’t know them well enough to judge.”

  She nudged me with her foot. “Oh come on, Jack, you know them well enough to at least comment.”

  I finally closed the magazine, pushing it aside, but not before marking the page with Watermelon Boobs for later study. “They kind of…I don’t know. They’re not like you, Jess.”

  “What do you mean, not like me?”

  “I don’t know, you’re smart,” I said. “But not just book-smart, you get things. I can talk to you for three hours straight and not get bored. I don’t know if I could talk to Anna and Lizzie for fifteen minutes.”

  “Maybe it’s like you said, you just don’t know them that well.”

  “You would know better than me, I guess.”

  She shrugged. “Then of course there’s my mom, who suddenly wants to be all mother and daughter Gilmore Girls with me now that I’m moving in for a while, even though we’ve barely spoken since the divorce. I guess now that Kellie’s in college, she needs a new plaything, you know?” I winced at the name of her sister. “A new doll to take shopping and dress up. She keeps going on and on about how my grades are so stellar I should be going to school out east, but it’s like, why do you suddenly care?”

  My phone buzzed, saving me from this conversation. It was Connor. My stomach did a somersault.

  “Hang on, I got to get this,” I mumbled, all awkward and sudden, ducking out of the room to catch him on the other line.

  “Hey, what are you doing?” Connor asked.

  “Nothing.”

  Smooth, Jack. Way not to sound like a loser.

  And a total dick. I hoped that Jess hadn’t heard me.

  Why was it so easy to talk to Connor in person, but on the phone, it was like I’d forgotten half of the English language?

  I licked my lips. I imagined him biting his, swirling his tongue across them, and it awakened something in my groin. I slid down to the floor in case Mom came upstairs and caught me standing there with a boner.

  “So,” he said, taking me by surprise, as he continually did. “What’s the hardest drug you’ve ever done?”

  I laughed nervously. “What, why?”

  “Just curious. I may be looking to buy, and your tolerance level at the pool proved to be pretty solid. Thought you might want something. Toby says his cousins have good deals on certain prescription pills.”

  What the hell was he doing? “I told you, man, stay away from them. They’re bad news.”

  Jess’s shadow fell over me as she leaned against the doorframe, mouthing: Who is that? I shrugged and she nudged me with her foot.

  Connor just laughed. “If you say so. But you didn’t answer my first question.”

  I wanted to. I wanted to stay on the phone with him forever, but Jess was giving me this look. “Let me answer that later. I got to go.”

  “Oh, okay. Is your mom there or something?”

  “Sort of.”

  After we said goodbye and Connor promised to text me that night, which sent a round of butterflies flapping furiously through my stomach, Jess just stood there and cocked her head at me, arms crossed against her chest.

  “What?”

  “Who was that?”

  “No one.”

  She smirked. “You were talking to no one about doing nothing?”

  Shit, she’d overheard me. I got up off the floor and gave her a playful shove back into my room. “Don’t sweat it, Velez. You’ll always be my favorite no one to do nothing with.”

  I thought I saw a look of hurt flash across her face, but then she was grinning again, chucking the game controller at me. “Well, this no one can still kick your ass in Mario Kart.”

  13.

  Look at the woman.

  After Jess left to go home for dinner—Mom had said she’d make us chili, but then just sat at the kitchen table staring at her hands for a while—I unearthed the page in the magazine with the watermelon-boobed woman and the shirtless man.

  Look at the woman.

  I tried to focus on the curve of her back, the pinch of a waist between her hips and chest, the long, sleek legs and manicured toenails. I felt nothing. It was like looking at an ancient artifact at a museum, an arrowhead you’ve seen a million times—interesting at a certain angle, but not intriguing enough to want to wrap your hands around it and feel it from the inside out.

  Look at the man.

  Warning bells went off in my brain. The ripped man grinned up at me from the page with his movie star teeth. His biceps. His chest. No. I wasn’t going to fall for that. I closed the magazine and tossed it across the room.

  “Act like a man,” Dad always used to say. “Men don’t wave like that. Wave like this. Hold your arm straight. Don’t let your wrist flop like a…like a…”

  He said it in the grocery store. After my soccer games. At the carpool lane at school. He never said the word itself, ne
ver finished the sentence, but I always knew what he meant. And every time I felt like I had to cry, but I couldn’t. Not in front of him.

  But then I thought of Connor again, of how he’d looked at me in the pool, water all over his skin. What he’d said to me. The way it made me weak just to talk to him.

  This will go away, I told myself. He’s new and kind of rough around the edges and maybe a little weird, an artifact in the museum that’s actually a piece of art. Something you can’t quite wrap your mind around.

  14.

  We’d just put acid under our tongues, strips of paper printed with Scooby Doo and Donald Duck. We decided on Max’s basement for the trip. It was empty and cool down there, a humming air-conditioner and stained coffee table littered with old copies of National Geographic and Time. They had some trippy pictures in that shit.

  I think Toby started to feel the drugs working first. All four of us were kicking back on the couch, our kicks on the coffee table, when mid-conversation, Toby rolled up the sleeves of his Iron Maiden t-shirt and stared at his arms as if he’d never seen them before.

  “Put the beer muscles away, Tobe,” Connor said. He leaned back into the ratty couch, probably taking it all in for the first time: the dark oak wallpaper, the carpeting a dull gray, stained with beer and cigarette-burned holes of parties past. Max’s folks never came down here. The dart board over the pool table was only touched by us now, the plastic talking rainbow bass mounted over it collecting dust on the wall, its mouth hanging open in a permanent dumb stare. The basement was our headquarters, a treehouse of sorts for rambunctious boys who were snorting something harder than Pixy Stix and no longer chucking pebbles at girls. Now we welcomed them.

  Toby started humming to himself, and Max and I exchanged a smile. Toby jumped up from the couch and kissed his biceps, turning to face Connor.