Free Spanking Shakespeare by Jake Wizner

smiled. “You want it? I’ll sell it to you.”
    “How much?”
    He looked me up and down. “I’ll give you a good deal. Ten dollars.”
    “Ten dollars? That’s too much.”
    “You don’t want it? Fine with me.”
    All night I thought about that picture on the cover of the magazine. Even though I had paintings of naked women in my room, they were nothing like what Will had shown me. It occurred to me that if I bought the magazine, my parents would probably find it, and I would have to escape to a cave in Tibet to live out my days in utter humiliation. It’s not that I would get in trouble. My parents didn’t really believe in punishment. No, what would happen would be far worse: They would want to talk about it.
    “Where did you get this magazine?” they would ask. “Do you enjoy looking at these pictures? It’s normal, you know, for boys your age to think about these things. Do you have any questions you want to ask us?”
    I bought the magazine the next day.
    It turned out that Will had lots of magazines, and he soon established a profitable little business.
    We quickly became friends out of mutual need. I needed someone who raised my cool quotient and improved my chances of impressing Lisa, and he needed someone who would follow him around like a lost puppy and do whatever he said.
    “Where do you get all these?” I once asked him.
    “Steal ’em,” he said.
    “What? How? Where?”
    “Stores, magazine stands. It’s no big deal.”
    “Oh my God, I’m friends with a criminal.”
    He gave me a dirty look. “You better not say anything.”
    My voice took on an increased sense of urgency. “Aren’t you afraid of getting caught? They put kids in jail these days.”
    “Chill out. I’m not gonna get caught.”
    I realized that if Will ever got caught while I was with him, I would probably be named as an accomplice. Everyone in town would read about it in the paper, and for the rest of my life, wherever I moved I would have to register with the police as a convicted sex offender.
    Meanwhile, I had plenty of other things to worry about, first and foremost making sure no one discovered the magazine I had bought. I had agonized for days over the best place to hide it. The problem was that no matter where I put it, I was able to come up with a perfectly plausible scenario in which someone would find it. I had stuck it between the box spring and the mattress of my bed the first night, but then I thought, What if my brother and his friends start jumping up and down on all the beds in the house and mine collapses? Then they try to put it back together, and…hello, what’s this? So I buried the magazine in my closet, then hid it behind a picture, then put it inside an old notebook on my shelf. But no matter where I put it I knew deep down that the only sensible course of action was to get rid of it as soon as possible.
    Of course, this was totally out of the question. The women in the magazine had become more familiar to me than my own family. There was Marina, who had short blond hair and enjoyed going to the movie sand riding motorcycles. Then there was Angela, who liked to travel and go skinny-dipping in the ocean. Will had offered to sell me other magazines at a discount because we were friends, but I felt a fierce loyalty to the women I had come to know. Didn’t Patricia, on page eighty-seven, say that loyalty was one of the qualities she most looked for in a man?
    One woman who could legitimately compete for my affections was Ms. Mitchell, who looked more like an Amazon warrior than a seventh-grade math teacher. She was young and tall and blond and strong and, miracle of miracles, not yet married. But more than anything, what made her so incredibly desirable was the fact that she liked me. I knew this because she always smiled at me and asked me to solve the hardest problems on the board, and because sometimes she would put her hand on my shoulder while she was walking around the room.
    I had always