Kiss Me, Genius Boy (No More Dreams #1)

4. Fire // 4.1 What kind of animal?

4. Fire

4.1 What kind of animal?

The morning after, I felt wretched. Exactly how many people, I wondered, had watch me fuck a girl reputed to be the biggest slut between Frankston and Portsea? Never mind that I happened to hold her in massively high regard.

And then—my head!

I’d had enough to drink that sometime in the middle of the night the urgent need to vomit awoke me and I managed to rise from the dirt in which I lay, pull up my pants, then stumble around the party house before finding the bathroom. There, I retched my guts out in the sink. It’s lucky I didn’t have genuine alcohol poisoning—though I contemplated that I might—since no-one bothered to investigate my crashing against hallways, or the sonic violence with which I disgorged the contents of my stomach. I could well have died.

Stepping to the toilet to piss after a last dry spasm of the oesophagus, I’d noticed a stale gooeyness of the pubic region, and got a whiff of the scent of Lily’s sex, which remains an indelible memory, pleasant in spite of the inglorious circumstances.

Waking around eight the next morning, I rose, still half drunk, from a couch in the living room, scattering the seat cushions to the floor. I’d piled them on top of me to keep warm. Returning to the bathroom, I found the sink three-quarters full of pungent, multicolored vomit. 

Disgusting! I thought, briefly enraged. What kind of animal … ? And then I realized that it had most likely been me. 

I pulled up the chain looped around the cold water tap until I was sure the plug was free, but that didn’t do it, even when I ran the water. I plunged my hand in and cleared the drain of the chunks of whatever it was. Pizza? When had I managed to eat that? I did this several times with the water running, until the sink was empty enough that I had only to scoop up the remaining solid bits—the biggest ones—and flush them down the toilet. I wiped the sink clean with my palm, and hoped there were enough teen binge-drinkers still crashed out in the house that if anyone else had been to the bathroom since my last visit, they couldn’t pin the filth on me.

In the kitchen out back, the house’s owners—and only now I realized that I didn’t know the hostess or her father—were clearing away glasses, dishes, and the scattered and crushed pieces of assorted dry snack foods. I refused their offers of concern, breakfast, and a lift to the bus stop, then walked almost two kilometers out to the highway alone, to avoid any awkward conversation about my last night’s abuse of their hospitality.

The hangover was so bad I wanted to die. I felt like vomiting again, but kept it down. I needed to drink, but had no water. The sun was only weak, but the sky was clear, and the light beat at my eyes with hammerlike intensity. I felt chilled enough to shiver, but my armpits were damp with sweat.

The bus driver eyed me strangely when I boarded, but said nothing unusual. When I got home, Dad called after me. “What happened to you?” I ducked out of his sight up the ground-floor hallway and into the bathroom. Only there did I discover that parts of my fringe were matted with vomit, my jeans were dirty from being cast aside and crushed into the ground, and there were dark, stained patches on my gray t-shirt around the neck and chest, the results of my less-than-perfect aim when I’d been defiling the party house’s sink. I’d deserved whatever looks I got on the way home.

In the shower, I turned the water up strong and hot, and imagined it leaching the sickness and the ache out of me. I felt dirty inside and out, and yet the thrill of success thrummed in the back of my mind. I’d got what I’d gone for. Not in the style I’d imagined it—no scented candles, no gentle music, no hint of romance and not even any great, extended pleasure—but I’d got it. I thought I’d feel different, sans-virginity, but I was still just the youngest boy in my year, and only a day closer to being a man, as I’d been the day before and would be the day after. Fucking Lily hadn’t been beautiful or rare or moving, but then, I supposed, there was the lesson: sex isn’t like that. Nothing special, just necessary. I hadn’t wanted to think that way about it, or to debase Lily by doing so, but there it was.

And what would God think of me? With my meditations, and my exploration of the Gita and of Nietzsche, I’d thought I was moving away from letting the Church tell me what I should believe, what I should do, how I should feel about it, and what the consequences would be. But I couldn’t help feeling stained. I didn’t go to mass anymore, but should I go to confession? Had I just committed a mortal sin? There must have been some sort of wisdom in the teaching of saving sex for marriage, at the very least. Since I’d just destroyed the possibility of doing it for the first time with my one true love as a holy act in a pristine marriage bed (four-poster, white sheets smelling of fresh laundry, overstuffed down quilt), I felt I’d lost something.

Yet, considering what might have been, I also lingered on what had. This was Lily, after all. Many afternoons she had laid her head on my shoulder as she shared her stories with me, and revealed her brutal intimacy with the ways of love, or whatever passed for it in her world. I thought her beautiful. I had wanted her.

The alcohol still in my system had my inhibitions down, and the pain of the hangover made me long for comfort. I touched myself as I savored the indistinct memory of my hand sliding up her shirt to her smooth bare breast, the way my fingers had sunk into the slickness between her legs, the pressure of her lips, the tightness of her around me, and the sense of homecoming on releasing into her. It was all followed rapidly by that familiar sense of remorse and loneliness, which I felt again as I came under the hot water, the semen rubberizing instantly on my fingers and in the hair on my inner thigh.

After that, I was ready to dry myself and sleep. No-one troubled me further about my appearance on returning home. Mum and Dad knew enough about teenage parties to be glad I’d made it home alive and able to clean up on my own. They didn’t want to press me with questions that might give me reason to avoid talking to them in future.