And in that moment, as Mr. Cronk tried once again, prodding the class for a response, any response, a simple goddamn sign of intelligence in the universe, it connected with me—the
meaning
of the apathy Legs had been fighting, the enormity of it, the absolute weight.
Without warning a voice started coming out of my mouth— an unfamiliar, raw, gravelly sounding voice. And to my astonishment it said, “Justice is like sex, really. There are rules for when and how and what you can do, categories you fit into depending on how far you’ll go, and how often and with who. And it’s only when you buck the system and break the rules that you find out what it’s all about, isn’t it?”
All across the room, dull slouched bodies were coming awake. Straightening in their seats, kids turned to give me dubious looks.
“Find out about what?” asked a guy in the far right corner. “Justice or sex?”
“Um,” said one of the front-row keeners, “I don’t really think this book is about
that
.”
“About what?” asked Mr. Cronk quickly.
“Well,” hesitated the girl in the front row, “
sex
. I mean, you asked us about justice...”
“Of course, it’s about sex,” said the gravelly voice coming out of my mouth. Once again it had managed to bypass the thinking, reasoning,
sane
part of my brain, and cut loose with my secret thoughts. “Everything we do in life is sex, isn’t it?” the voice continued, while I sat there hardly able to believe what it was saying. “I mean, it all comes from the same place inside you, doesn’t it? And that place is either a place of following rules and doing what you’re told, or figuring things out for yourself. Besides, Foxfire was an all-girl gang. Their justice was completely about sex. It
was
sex for them. Or maybe a replacement for it.”
“You mean if they were getting laid properly, they wouldn’t have been doing the gang thing?” asked the guy in the far right corner.
“Properly?” I shot back, too quickly to think about what I was saying first. “You mean with a guy, don’t you?”
“Of course,” shrugged the guy.
“Dyke city,” muttered the girl sitting in the desk ahead of me.
Bye bye, sane reasoning brain
. Suddenly I was leaning forward in my seat, my blood pounding furiously. Like I said, the body is devious.
“That means you’re thinking universal, doesn’t it?” I blurted to the guy in the far right corner. “As in mainstream, what
everyone else around you is doing? But I don’t think that just because Foxfire was a girls’ gang, they had to be dykes. I mean, maybe they were and maybe they weren’t, but what matters is that they were a group of girls who decided to think for themselves. Because isn’t that the way you really learn—about sex, love, justice, reality, anything? I mean, how can you figure out the universal meaning of something if you don’t work out the personal meaning for yourself first?”
“But you can’t have people running around kidnaping and shooting each other,” objected a girl near the front of the room. “You need universal things like rules and laws. And you should obey them. They’re there to protect you.”
“Sure they are,” interrupted a guy halfway down the window aisle. “But Dylan’s right too. If you don’t work things out for yourself, you’re a robot.”
“Yeah,” I said, nodding emphatically. I mean, I was so pumped, I was almost levitating. “I’m not saying you should break every rule,” I added, trying to backtrack a bit. I didn’t want Mr. Cronk thinking I was about to start a terrorist cell or something. “But if you live inside a rule, or a law, or
whatever,
all the time, without ever thinking about it, then you
are
that rule. Nothing but.”
“Hey Dyl, what’re you doing Friday night?” asked the guy in the far right corner, and a wave of laughter engulfed the class. For a second I stiffened, feeling it all being swept away—the raw, half-baked things I’d been saying and the pure uncoiled sensation of strength that had come with them. But then I relaxed and laughed along with everyone else. So what if we were back to mainstream universal thinking? I’d been able to say what I really thought, something weird and out of sync, and the class hadn’t written me off as a freak. Mr. Cronk was even giving me one of his specialty piercing looks, as if he’d just discovered the next Margaret Atwood. Sure, the only reason I was getting away
with it was because I was Cam’s girlfriend, and nobody would suspect, but—
Mid-thought I glanced at Joc, and my brain ground to an abrupt halt. Because out of the entire class, she was probably the only person not laughing. In fact there wasn’t even the hint of a grin on her face. Leaned against the wall with both eyes closed, she was frozen into such a careful hyper-alert slouch that she looked as if she hadn’t breathed since my first comment.
“Hey,” I hissed. “We’re talking about sex here. I can’t believe you haven’t said anything.”
She swallowed, the naked line of her throat rippling, then settling. “Dikker’s been over a lot lately,” she mumbled, without looking at me. “I haven’t started the book yet.”
Then the bell rang and she opened her eyes as if coming out of a long uninterrupted dream. Gathering her lean sprawled body, she unleashed it from the desk, got to her feet and sauntered out of the room without a backward glance.
That evening I lay in bed, thinking back to the class discussion and going over it word by word. The experience had been a rush, almost like a drug, but better. Sure, uncertainty had come crashing down on me as soon as I’d walked out of the classroom, but that was to be expected. I mean, there was the question of what Cam was going to think when he heard about it. Then there were his guy friends and the phone patrol. Even now, hours later, when I tried to imagine their responses, a vivid electric worm started crawling around my gut.
But then I remembered that voice coming out of me, so raw and determined.
Of course, it’s about sex
, I heard it saying again.
Everything we do in life is sex, really. I mean, it all comes from the same place inside you, doesn’t it? And that place is either a place of following rules and doing what you’re told, or figuring things out for yourself
.
I still couldn’t believe I’d actually said those things. How had I gotten away with it? I mean, no one had called me a dyke in the hall afterward, even as a joke. But then probably no one had wanted to take a chance on facing Cam’s wrath. He was my insurance, my disguise. And what would he have thought of the strange gravelly voice that had come out of me? Not much, was my guess. It wouldn’t have fit the queen image he had of me, sitting quiet and pretty on a throne somewhere inside his head. But that wasn’t me, it
wasn’t
. I just hadn’t figured out the best way to let him in on the secret yet.
Rolling onto my back, I loosened the tie on my pajama bottoms and slid my hand between my legs. As usual, the first thought that hit me as I started to do this was,
Yuck!
I mean, when you think about it, the groin is a really grotty area of the body. The smell is enough to put anyone off, there is rank stuff coming out of it on a regular basis, and if you’re female, you also get to do the bleeding thing once a month. I don’t know who was in charge of designing the original female body, but if it had been me, I would not have put the major pleasure center right next to the waste ejection sites. I mean, NOT!
Waves of sweetness started spreading slowly through my body, and I thought,
If only Cam could see me now
,
feel what I’m feeling
. This was what he wanted after all, dreamed about—me feeling this with him. A grin crossed my face as I realized that he was probably lying in his own bed right now, doing pretty much the same thing. But then my grin faded. Because I knew what he would be thinking about—me. And the truth was that I couldn’t say I was thinking about him. Not if I was honest.
Usually when I did this kind of thing, I made myself think about Cam for as long as possible. Closing my eyes, I would
imagine us sitting in his car and kissing, but the truth was that the hotter my body got, the quicker Cam faded from my thoughts. Not once had I made myself come while thinking about him, and the images that kept flashing through my head tonight were straight out of
Foxfire
, specifically the gang’s initiation scene, where the girls take off their shirts and crowd in against each other. Though I pushed it out of my mind, the scene kept coming back to me—all that skin, heat and fierce nervous laughter...the
forbiddenness
of it. Because, of course, girls aren’t supposed to think about breasts, at least not another girl’s breasts.
With a groan, I once again pushed the scene out of my mind and made myself think about Cam. And just like that I lost it—the body sensation, heat and sweetness. It all vanished and the whole thing became mechanical, as if I’d lost the
me
of it, the soul.
Suddenly I thought,
Why am I stopping myself? I mean, it’s just pictures in my head. It’s not like I’m actually two-timing
.
And so for the first time I actually let myself do it—let go of the rule, the
law
of Cam. With another groan, I stopped fighting the pictures in my head and let them happen any way they wanted. Immediately I felt myself flat up against it, the raw pleading need of myself. I’d never felt it this way before—brilliant, as if I’d been skinned alive, some rubbery surface peeled off me so I’d become complete sensation. And then, without warning, Joc was there with me in my mind, leaning over me, her hair in a long coconut-scented fall about my face. And we were kissing, kissing again, the soft drift of our lips sending an incredible sweetness everywhere through me. I cried out then, almost shouted at the fierce wave of longing that swept through me—I hadn’t known it could be like this, so intense, such a deep
opening
within myself. Lying on my bed with the imaginary Joc
leaned over me, I came again and again, the sweetness like an ocean crashing over me, like a scream, a crime.
Finally,
finally
, it faded, leaving me soaked with sweat, my bed sheets stuck to my skin. But my body was at peace, floating on a vast calm, without the usual lines of edginess that ran through it. Soaked and smelly in the dark, I lay quietly with a goofy grin plastered across my face. No wonder Cam wanted to give this to me, I thought. No wonder he kept after me, begging and pleading with me to try it. And the real wonder of it all was that he was actually holding himself back and waiting for me. I mean, I knew he wasn’t doing it with another girl on the sly—he really was
waiting
for me.
So what was I supposed to do now? Because if I’d needed final proof that this kind of sensation, this way of being together, would never happen between us, I’d just gotten it. For the first time I’d asked my body to tell me what it knew, to show me completely and absolutely who I was in that deep raw core where everything comes from—
that place without rules
. And it had. Sweetly. Explosively. Conclusively.
Should I phone Cam and tell him the truth? Break up with him without explaining? Or just let things continue as they were, while I explored this newness inside me and tried to figure out what it meant?
Nothing had to be done immediately, I decided finally. No one seemed to have figured out what was really going on with me, so why not let things continue as they were for a while longer? After all, it wasn’t as if anyone was
begging
me to change.
Kicking the stiffness out of my legs, I got up, stripped the sheets, and headed to the bathroom for a shower.
Chapter Seven
As I biked to Joc’s place the next morning, everything glowed, the houses wet and glimmering from last night’s rain, the trees a brilliant yellow gold. Everywhere the earth was giving out that sweet scent you get only in the fall, and the sky ached with a forever-going-on kind of blue. And I was pumped, my mind still full of what had happened to me the previous night, that new way of knowing and the feelings that had come with it. As I zoomed along, the entire world seemed to be in on the secret, trees nodding at me, houses smiling. Then I was pulling up in front of Joc’s place and the screen door bursting open as she came jogging across the lawn, jean jacket flapping over one of Tim’s old Metallica sweatshirts.
“Hey, Dyl,” she said. “I saved the last bite of my toast for you. Here, it’s loaded with strawberry jam.”
With a grin she held up the gooey bit of bread and the world lit up like a wish, my whole self living in my lips as she slipped the toast into my mouth. But if Joc noticed, she didn’t say anything, just slid onto the bike seat behind me. Then we were off, headed down the street, me trying to ignore the warm circle of her arms around my waist, then deciding not to ignore it at all. And that
just made the streets sing by faster, the earth smell sweeter and the sky go a sheerer, more forever kind of blue.
Part of me shouted that I was a fool, best girlfriends didn’t fall in love, and I was setting myself up for kick-ass pain, but the rest of me kept pumping away at the bike pedals, knowing I would probably spend the rest of the day just thinking about the soft secret of Joc’s head resting against my back. Secret, because I couldn’t let on to her what it meant, couldn’t even let on that I’d noticed it, but still I
could
notice, and for the first time let myself feel it in the deep private parts of my soul.
“Finish your French assignment?” I asked, knowing it was a dumb question, a boring one, but if I didn’t focus on something mundane, I might suddenly start belting out “You Make Me Feel Like A Natural Woman”—something obvious like that.
“Un petit peu,” murmured Joc, bumping her head slightly against my back, and I left it at that. I mean, Joc is très bien at French, a real conversationalist, and when she gets going, all I can say is, “Je suis stupide. Lentement, lentement, s’il vous plaît.”
So I concentrated on trying to pedal without moving my upper body so Joc’s head wouldn’t get bumped around, and then all too soon the Dief was coming into view and I was coasting slowly up to the bike racks. As I came to a halt, Joc slid off the seat and just stood for a bit, leaned against my shoulder. And in that little bit of time I felt the entire world come to a standstill, as if all of it, every last single part was focusing in on that small warm place where our shoulders touched.