‘Shut the fuck up. Don’t talk about my mother.’
After the clit pierce – Barbra had lied to my father and said it was her belly button – my father said I could not hang out with Barbra so much. He had to put her on antibiotics because she’d had a 101-degree fever two nights in a row.
My father thought Barbra should get her own friends.
My mother had believed in and nursed Barbra’s trauma.
My parents, united, had not recognized in Barbra a growing, intractable need for transgression. They did not feel it, intractably, the way that I did.
The best way to imitate God, I’d read on sabbatean.com after the clit pierce, is to cross every line, mix the sacred and profane.
Joel smoked down the rest of the joint as he rifled through a few baggies of white powder. He poured out and corralled the powder into nickel-sized lumps. I wondered if she knew when she was technically crossing a boundary. Like, what if I left her to fend for herself here in Joel’s pot-lit pit?
‘She seems to get into more trouble with you,’ my father said.
‘I think I might just go home now,’ I said.
I’d tried ghb once, not snorting, in a capsule. A few seconds after I’d washed it down with Coke, my tongue got so dry that I forgot how to talk. I remember coughing from that dryness like I was going to shoot out a lung. My cock didn’t feel good. It didn’t even get hard. I remember Joel told me to drink water, so I tried to drink water – he had one of those automated upside-down water machines – but I gulped it too quickly and it made a bubble in my stomach. It felt like a tiny piece of dung.
‘Date-rape drug,’ I said to Barbra as Joel portioned out powder to sell to his UCC friends. ‘People choke on their own tongues. They vomit in their sleep.’
‘We’re not going to sleep.’ Barbra smiled at me.
After my ghb night, I remember I woke up in the morning with my face covered in chunks. It took me a second before I realized that the chunks came from me. I was a sour-faced clown who’d skirted death in his sleep.
‘Thing with G,’ Joel said, changing the channel, ‘is that your cock grows twice its size.’
‘Total lie,’ I said to Barbra.
‘I got no cock,’ she smirked. ‘Yet.’
God, I felt powerless to stop this inevitability.
Joel had a file of porn that he accessed on his forty-inch screen. For some reason, all the dudes he watched were hairy, tanned men. I stared now at one of his bears basically doing squats on top of the heads of two sorority-style girls in white lingerie. The guy bounced up and down like he was in the gym. The girls looked like mummified corpses underneath him with their arms crossed and tongues sticking stiffly straight up. That guy was trying to stake his asshole right onto their tongues.
‘Truly fucking disgusting. This is like a horror movie,’ I said. ‘Like, a director actually told those girls to do that.’
‘It’s a job,’ Barbra said. ‘Those girls are getting paid.’
‘Don’t even listen to him, Barbra-girl. My G is premiere. You spew buckets of cum and wake up feeling fucking refreshed!’
God, I hated Joel in front of Barbra. I hated them together.
I hated how they pretended to like the same things.
‘You know, some freaks even plug it.’
‘Plug it?’
‘Up the anus, babe.’
Onscreen, the tanned bear kept bouncing on upturned dart tongues. Finally, he started splooging from all sides.
‘I dare you, girlfriend! Look, I got this syringe.’
I watched one girl-mummy onscreen trade cum with the other, their spit strands stretching and fluctuating.
‘This is not horror,’ Barbra said. ‘No one is dying, no one’s dead.’