Free Raising Stony Mayhall by Daryl Gregory Page A

said.
    “I’m not going to—this is not …” He shook his head.
    Junie put an arm around his waist. “We’re not trying to embarrass you. We just want to help. You haven’t exactly had a normal childhood. And with your condition, well …”
    Alice said, “We didn’t know what your sex drive was like.”
    “There is no sex. There is no drive.” That night, Kwang had nonchalantly wiped himself clean with a tube sock and put his pajama pants back on. Stony just stopped rubbing. Since then, every time Kwang made a joke about jerking off, or loaned him a porn mag he’d found, Stony would laugh conspiratorially. But Kwang never again did it in front of him, and Stony never made a second attempt on his own. His penis remained quietly in its place.
    “Can we stop talking about this now?” he said. “And why am I doing the dishes at my own party?”
    In a break with protocol, Mom decided that they should eat dessert in the living room, all the better to watch Stony unwrap his gifts. The Chos had bought him a Skilsaw, something only Mr. Cho would know to buy. Alice presented him with a boxed, two-volume set of the
Oxford English Dictionary
(abridged) that included a magnifying glass in its own drawer. Junie gave him a twenty-five-dollar gift certificate to Ace Hardware, as well as a handmade certificate for messenger services, promising to go back to the store as many times as it took to get the right screws.
    His mother went to her bedroom and came back with a JCPenney garment bag. Alice frowned. Stony took the bag, unzipped it.
    The jacket and pants were navy blue. Inside were two shirts, one white and one blue, and two paisley ties. He looked at Junie, whose eyes had gone wide in surprise. He couldn’t look at Kwang—he’d crack up.
    “Wow, that’s …”
    “A young man needs a suit!” his mother said angrily. “That’s true,” Mrs. Cho said.
    “What for?” Mr. Cho said. “He going to a funeral?”
    Kwang lost it then. He collapsed sideways on the couch, hooting in laughter. Stony stood up and said, “I’ll try it on.”
    Mom snatched the garment bag from him. The pants slipped from the hanger and fell to the floor. “Never mind.”
    “Mom, I like it! Let me try it on.”
    She stormed out of the room. Alice stood up. “Mr. Cho, would you like more coffee?”
    His mother didn’t return from the bedroom. The Chos left soon after, with Kwang carrying a Tupperware bowl full of Italian beef.
    Junie hung around for a while, then announced she was going to another graduation party for some burnout named Tony. She still went to her youth group meetings, and she still wore a gold cross around her neck. But she also maintained a separate and nonoverlapping circle of friends, mostly big-haired seniors who partied hard, listened to heavy metal, and smoked pot. In the Venn diagram of her relationships, Junie was the point where the two circles met, the intersection of Jesus and Judas Priest. She always told him not to wait up, but of course he was up every night, and knew exactly when shesneaked back into the house. He’d never told Mom about her comings and goings, and Mom had never asked—all of them complicit in maintaining the force field of Everything Is Fine.
    Stony tried to do some work in the basement, couldn’t get into it, and finally went back up to the dining room and sat down across from Alice. She’d covered the surface of the table with books and papers, and was pecking at a portable electric typewriter.
    He picked up one of the books,
Human Virology
. “Mom’s still pouting.”
    Alice didn’t look up. “Don’t worry about it. She’ll be over it soon.”
    “I should have acted happier.”
    She grunted, kept typing.
    He dropped his voice. “I just don’t get it. A suit? She might as well buy me dance lessons.”
    Alice kept working. It was like this every time she visited, even at Christmas: relentless cramming. He wondered if she ever wished she could be like Stony and go without