Free Hick by Andrea Portes

about a man, if you ever find one that you like, is, he’s gotta know how to fuck you. Rich. Poor. Cute. It don’tmatter. He’s gotta know how to lay you down on your back, spread your legs and fuck you.”
    I stare at the corn.
    “I know, I know, maybe I shouldn’t talk like that in front of you. But It’s good you learn it now. Lotta girls just go with any old boring suit or some fatso with a job sending her flowers, then they wonder why they’re so miserable and why they get so ugly and sad and old. They say to themselves, staring at the ceiling, husband snoring away beside them, ‘What the hell happened? Where’d all the time go? When did I get so old and sad and wrinkly?Ù I’ll tell you when, when you were lying underneath that fat shitbag who couldn’t fuck a woman if he had a step-by-step guide. And they never say, ‘This is not enough. Laying here, yawning, while this fat fuck pokes at me until he rolls over and starts snoring.’ Because if you don’t say that, listen to me, here, if you don’t say that, they’ll reel you in. They’ll play nice and buy flowers and reel you into their pathetic little life and the next thing you know, you don’t even remember your own name. It’s just Mrs. Something-or-Other. Mrs. Shitbag. See what I mean? No way. Not me. Not fucking me.”
    “Wull, um, do you even like guys?”
    “Phumph.” I feel like I said something stupid but then she smiles to herself. “I like em when I first meet em. When they’re putting on the Ritz. But, you know, It’s all downhill from there.”
    She takes the vial from between her thighs, opens it up and snorts again. she’s starting to lose that halo around her. In the morning light, she’s not all glamour. she’s starting to look a little less heaven-sent and a little more like someone you might see down at the track. In the mirror, I see now about how she has tinywrinkles threatening to spread across her forehead. I’m watching her and I’m thinking to myself that I can’t tell if she’s good or bad. she’s one of those people you don’t know about until something happens, something big. And I’m wondering, as I look at her wheat-spun hair in the golden light, what, exactly, that something will be.

TEN
     
    Now, I am not a lesbo, and I do not intend on signing up, but it just so happens that when I look at Glenda, when I listen to Glenda, I get this feeling in my gut like I want to jump inside her, like the space between me and her is too great, too distant, and if I could just smash up against her maybe I could see the world through her eyes.
    She catches me looking at her.
    “Do you know where we’re going, kid?”
    “Nope.”
    Nothing I say comes out natural because I’m too busy trying to sound natural.
    The sun is straight up in the sky now, blazing down in a line, boring a hole through the top of the roof. The bunny rabbit sits listless in the front, tired of this new back-seat tag-along. The flatlands spread out in beige and green square patches sprawled out into the horizon for miles and nothing there. None too colorful, not like the McDonald’s commercials where the sun comes up against afarmhouse and someone’s rooster starts to cock-a-doodle-doo into the golden light, ringing in the arrival of hash browns and sausage. Not here, this is mostly shades of drab and drabber, stretching out to eternity and no promise in it.
    I saw pictures of the East Coast in school. It was green and everything was scrunched up together, like they had no idea everyone was coming, so they just make-shift stuck everything together and hoped it’d work out. And I read that sixty-two percent of everybody in America is just sitting there between Boston and Washington, D.C., waiting for something to happen, piled on top of each other, like a beehive, this box inside that box inside that box.
    The East Coast is where you get to go when you’re out of school, if you’re from Lincoln and a member of the Knolls Country Club and