Free Tats by Layce Gardner Page A

laughing, it’s not that funny.”
    Vivian taps her fingernails against her chin. “Let’s see...”
    But before she can guess, I offer up, “I wore white after Labor Day.”
    “Ooooh.” She smiles. “I hope they didn’t go too easy on you.”
    I grumble, “Twelve years.”
    “You deserved it.” Vivian sighs contentedly, putting her hands behind her head. “I just adore women in prison movies.”
    “Can we change the subject?” I ask.
    “Sure.” Silence for a while. “You want I should give your parole officer a blow job so he’ll go easy on you?”
    “It’s a woman. And my parole ended last month.”
    “I don’t like blow jobs anyway,” she says. “It just bothers me that they’re called blow jobs and you don’t really blow.”
    “Yeah, blow jobs suck,” I say, happy to just be onto a different subject.
    “You ever have sex with anyone from high school?”
    I ponder. I have a cheerleaders-are-a-bitch story, but no way in hell I’m telling that one to Vivian. “Do hand jobs count?” I ask.
    “They do when you’re fifteen,” she pronounces.
    “Then I slept with three guys from school,” I say. “When I was a sophomore, Clint Green and I used to park in the school’s parking lot and feel each other up.”
    “Really?”
    “Kinda freaked me out. His dick felt like a chicken neck.”
    Vivian laughs. “They all feel like chicken necks.”
    “And I let one of the Hampton twins feel me up on the dance floor at Junior Prom.”
    “Which one?” she asks.
    “I don’t know,” I answer truthfully. “It wasn’t a very good experience. He kept shoving his finger up my butt.”
    “On purpose?” she asks.
    “I don’t think so.”
    “Who was the third?”
    “You probably don’t remember him. We had first period speech together. I just walked up to him and whispered in his ear, ‘What’re you doing tonight?’ He said, ‘Nothing.’ So I said, ‘You are now. You’re doing me.’ I showed up at his house that night and he took me to the garage and we did it in the backseat of his daddy’s Town car. It was awful. He just like pounded me for ten minutes, my head banging against the door. When it was over he spewed some kind of grape liquor all over me. I had a headache and smelled like grapes for two days.”
    “What was his name?” Vivian asks.
    “I don’t remember his name. He played football, I remember that. He was tall, kinda cute, blond.”
    She sits up and looks at me. “Joey?”
    “That’s it,” I say, “that was his name. Joey.”
    She sits straight up and stares me down. “You fucked Joey Hanes ?” she demands.
    “Yeah...” I say apprehensively.
    “Goddammit!” she yells. “I wanted him so bad and he wouldn’t give me the time of day! Goddammit! I was throwing myself at him and all the time he was fucking you ?”
    “Well, you don’t have to be mad about it,” I say. “And it wasn’t all the time.”
    “I can’t believe this shit,” she bitches. “I was the cheerleader not you.”
    “Look at it this way. I saved you from getting thrown up on.”
    There’s a weird vibrating sound. BZZZZZ. I hear it again. BZZZZZZ. It’s Vivian’s tits. She sticks her hand down her shirt and pulls out her phone. She looks at the caller ID then sticks the phone back from wherever she got it.
    “Boyfriend?” I ask.
    She sighs with an exaggerated roll of her eyes.
    I shake my head. I can’t believe I’m jealous of a phone call. A phone call she didn’t even answer. Plus, she’s lying here with me, not him. Maybe I should make my move now. Maybe I should just grab her and pull her to me and lay one on her right now.
    Vivian derails my thought train by sitting up Indian-style and asking, “Ever been to France?”
    “No,” I giggle, “but I’ve been to Funkytown.”
    “Really? What’s it like?”
    “Not as fun as Margaritaville.”
    She laughs, accepts the joint from me, licks two fingers and snuffs it out. It disappears back down into her magic hat. No