“No, Frank,” Geek said. “We’re against that.”
“Oh.” Frankie was disappointed.
“You have a lot to learn,” Geek said.
“Yeah,” Frank agreed, taking the joint and inhaling deeply. “You can’t learn shit in Ashtabula.”
They ate the kid’s excellent dinner, and smoked more dube. The kid started collecting dirty dishes, and Frank went to the sink and rolled up his sleeves. He ran some hot water and squirted detergent on a sponge. The kid bumped against him, gently shoving him out of the way.
“Hey, Charlie, dude,” Frank said. “I’m a janitor. I wash things.”
Char stared at him.
“That’s my job,” Frank said.
The kid clicked the silver tongue stud against teeth that were small and perfectly white. Frankie stared. He was still feeling the pot.
Y held out his hand to Lilith. “Bedtime,” he said, pulling her to her feet. He turned to Frankie. “May as well crash here.”
“Maybe Frank’s got a home to go to,” Lilith said.
Frank shook his head. “No way. I sleep on a guy’s couch.”
“Then crash out here with Char,” Lilith said. She spun in a circle, dropping a kiss on Geek, another on the kid, and then she danced over to Frankie at the sink. The Spudnik rocked as she approached. She draped her arms around his neck.
“Night, Frank Perdue,” she sang into his ear, and when he turned to face her, she kissed him for the second time that day. “Mmm,” she said, winking at Char. “Finger-lickin’ good.”
“Night,” Frankie stuttered. He stood there staring as Lilith followed Y into the small bedroom at the end of the trailer. When Char flicked him with a towel, he realized he was dribbling suds.
The kid laid out pieces of foam on the floor, around the base of the dinette table, and piled some blankets on top. Frank crawled under one side of the pile.
“Bonne nuit,” the kid said.
“Huh?”
“Bonne nuit,” Char repeated. “Good night.”
“Oh,” said Frank. “Yeah.” He lay there for a while. “Hey. Thanks for dinner. It was good.”
When Char didn’t answer, Frank closed his eyes. Just as he was drifting to sleep on the last gentle eddies of pot, he felt something wriggling across his stomach.
“What the—?”
He snatched at the movement in the dark and came up with the kid’s wrist in his hand. He couldn’t believe it. He twisted, and Char’s small, pointy face appeared in front of him. The next moment the kid was kissing him on the mouth.
He was being molested by a juvenile punk with a tongue stud. This could not be happening.
He sat up and backed away, underneath the dinette. “Dude! What the fuck—?”
Char sat up, too, then threw back the blankets and started to peel off sweaters and shirts, in layers, like an animal shedding skins. The streetlight shone through the windshield, creating a silvery glaze that outlined the slight body. Frank recoiled into the far corner of the dining nook. The last piece of clothing was a sleeveless undershirt, and the kid ducked, pulling it off quickly. For a moment the shaggy head was caught in the cloth, but after a brief struggle, it emerged again. The slim body unfurled, then straightened and arched, and Frankie found himself staring at a perfect pair of girl’s breasts. Naked, they gleamed in the light—was it the pot or the moonlight now?—and the transformation was complete.
Animal to human. Boy to girl. Girl to fucking goddess.
She took Frankie by the hands.
“Oh, shit,” he said. “I think I’m wasted.”
“Je m’appelle Charmey,” she whispered, leaning forward. “Pas Charlie. Charmey. Tu comprends?”
“I don’t understand,” said Frank. It was such an understatement. It was definitely the pot. Her laughter shattered like glass. She brought her mouth down so that her lips just brushed his. Her lips were soft, and they teased his lips with nibbles until Frank opened his mouth. Quick as a newt, she slipped her tongue inside. He felt her tongue stud click against the back of his teeth. The kiss went on and on.
“What the fuck?” he said at last, when she stopped to catch her breath.
“Pauvre petit Frank,” she whispered, pressing him down on his back, onto the blankets. “Petit Frank, qui est perdu.”
It was Frank’s first fuck. Accomplished by a girl with a pierced tongue, who kissed the length of his body from throat to groin, ran the trembling silver ball up and down his penis, used it to tickle him to the brink, then backed off again, over and over again until finally he couldn’t stand it anymore. And he came, and then they did it again until he got the hang of it, and together they rocked the Winnebago until morning.
In the dull dawn light, filtering through the mists that rolled off Erie, Frank stroked the girl beside him, taking in her sleeping face, her breasts, running his fingers through the thicket of her hair. She murmured and turned over, and he caught sight of something dark on the nape of her pale neck that took his breath away. He brushed back her hair and stared.
Frank was a suburban kid, and a foster kid to boot. He knew that the world sucked. He listened to hardcore. He’d grown up in malls. He worked as a janitor at McDonald’s and would have dropped out of school except he couldn’t think of anything more interesting to do. But all of a sudden things were looking up. He’d just lost his virginity to a girl with a pierced tongue, and if that wasn’t enough, now he’d stumbled onto a political stance he could wrap his mind around, one that bespoke a whole new world order. He traced his finger across the slim bone at the top of her spine.
What had made his heart turn over with a definitive thump was the delicate, two-inch-long bar code tattooed to the nape of her neck.
This, he told himself, was truly fucking radical.
lucky
Spudmen are gamblers, Lloyd used to say. It’s a hit-or-miss business, beset by the usual fluctuations in weather, bank rates, oil prices, random factors, and acts of God faced by any farmer. Getting the spuds safely in and out of the ground is only the beginning. After that you store them and wait. It’s a lot like timing the stock market: If you hit, there’s a lot of money to be made, and if you miss, you can lose the farm. As a result, spudmen are notoriously cagey. They keep an eye on their neighbor. They play it close to the vest.
The rapid growth of the fast-food chains was the random factor that helped fuel the
