He’s a little less excited, but he still hasn’t budged. I think he believes he can pout his way to victory. “You have a choice,” I say, mimicking his mom and how she gets all calm and reserved when he tries to pull a scam. “You can either go inside and get a condom, or you can go inside and do your homework while I go home. Either way. The choice is yours, Matthew John.”
“Mark Conrad says Tonya lets him do it without a condom all the time, and she hasn’t gotten knocked up.”
“Well,” I say, “you’re not Mark Conrad, and if Mark Conrad jumped off a—”
“Mood killer.” He sighs so hard it makes my belly shake. “Pretending to be my mom is not hot.”
I snap the band of his boxer shorts. “Then you’re going to do homework?”
“I’ll be back,” he mumbles. He doesn’t make eye contact when he pulls his pants on and gets his keys out of his backpack. He walks funny going up to the house.
When he comes back, it’s over pretty fast, so I don’t think I killed the mood all that much.
What I don’t get about sex is why the actual doing it part isn’t as great as all the stuff leading up to it. I always want to do it, but then, after, I wish we could go back to the moment right before, when it feels like I’ll go out of my mind if we don’t. It’s like an itch you have to scratch, but then it turns out the itch felt better than the scratching, and it fools me every time.
I turn the key in the ignition enough to get the radio to play without starting the engine, and rest my head in Matty’s armpit. We share one of my glass-bottled Cokes. He talks about the job he’s going to get when he graduates in spring, and how Mark Conrad says the factory is paying three bucks over minimum now. He’s calculated how much we could pay for a trailer and beer money, and if he went hunting with his Uncle Barry, we could have deer meat in our deep freeze and save a ton. I stop listening when he starts in on the awesome venison burgers his Aunt Gloria makes and how she could teach me.
Bob Dylan is playing on one of the presets. It’s Lay, Lady, Lay, and I laugh because it just seems too appropriate. Matty says, “No really, it’s like the best burger I’ve ever had, and it’s like free from nature.” When Bob gets to the part where he sings about not waiting for your life to start, just having cake and eating it now, I know what he means is pretty much the exact opposite, but I start to feel like I’m a million years older than Matty and maybe even from another planet. I start to feel like Matty is the opposite of cake.
We’re stuck in our own stale breath and it’s fogging up the windows. “I have to go,” I say, sitting up, grabbing my jeans.
Matty tries to pull me back into his armpit.
I twist away. “No, really.” I kind of shout it. “My dad doesn’t know I have the truck. I have to go.” I pull my jeans on and lean back to do the button and the zipper. My shirt rides up. There’s a wet spot on the seat.
“Oh, okay,” Matty says, giving me that broken Tonka truck look again.
I rub at the wet spot with my hand behind my back, trying to pretend like my panic is about my dad getting mad and not the life Matty is spreading out ahead of us. “My dad just—he got laid off and he’s all pissy and Irene doesn’t know…” The clock says it’s 4:23, and pretending I’m panicking about my dad starts to make me actually panic about my dad. He probably isn’t sleeping anymore.
Matty says, “See you tomorrow,” but then he tries to stretch it out by kissing me more. He moans gently, like he thinks he can work me into going at it again.
I rub my hand down his leg until I get to his knee, then I reach over and hand him his backpack. “I gotta go.”
He’s walking funny again. I stay to make sure he didn’t lock his keys in the house when he went to get the condom. As soon as he opens the door, I honk twice and drive away like my tail’s on fire, kicking up a trail of dust. Rocks hit the underside of the truck like a barrage of bullets from one of those boring war movies my dad used to watch on Sunday afternoons before Irene made him spend the day at church.
Matty left the condom on the floor mat, full and floppy like a jellyfish. I don’t notice it until I’m at the end of Woodland. This isn’t exactly a busy road. I know I won’t get caught, so I open the car door at the stop sign and drop it, praying it will get driven over and dusted up before anyone can see what it is. It leaked on the mat. I search my dad’s pockets for a tissue or a napkin, even a handkerchief, but I don’t find one. I do find a small box in his inside breast pocket—black velvet with a rounded top. The hinges creak when I pull it open. The ring inside has a diamond so big I start to wonder if my dad has any stashed money left anywhere. It’s real too. I scratch it against the window and it leaves a thin etched line. I put the ring box in the left pocket, where he keeps his wallet, as a warning, so he’ll know I know about it. I flip the mat over and wipe it on the carpet underneath. When I flip it the right way again, it looks even cleaner than it was to start.