Free Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever by Justin Taylor Page B

advertised defunct products or commemorated the company picnics of yesteryear. Sometimes she would pick out a plain white shirt and scribble some band’s lyrics on it with a laundry marker. And always the red-and-black flannel, worn unbuttoned all the way (cuffs too) so the outsize shirt hung on her like a drape. She kept her wallet clipped to her pants with a long shiny chain that she was hopeful would scuff with time.
    Stan sat in the living room in the big chair by the picture window, sometimes holding a comic book, sometimesnothing at all, staring out at the street waiting for that first righteous glimpse of her on her walk home from summer school.
    Naturally, she had him totally figured out and some days called him a baby and sent him off and so the days when she felt like putting up with him were extra special for them both. On those days she treated him like an equal, sort of, and took him down to the basement, which had been converted into a den by the first husband and decently appointed by the second.
    Aunt Lisa had inherited the home from her mother. Aunt Lisa’s sister—Stan’s mother—had gotten the cash and Aunt Lisa had gotten the home. Aunt Lisa had never had doubts about who got the better deal, especially seeing as how Stan’s parents had pissed theirs away. The house still stood and still was hers. Men came and went, leaving their improvements behind as testament to the degree and duration of their best intentions.
    There was a TV in the basement den and a nice comfy couch and a pool table even. Mandy would put on MTV just to have it on but she didn’t like to watch with Stan, who asked too many questions and didn’t get it . Having to explain why things were cool made the fact of their coolness less certain, and certainty was the rock on which she built. He was a summer baby, would turn twelve there, but in the meantime she didn’t need the grief. What he needed to do was learn.
    They would stand behind the pool table, in the farthest corner of the basement, where there was no view from thestairs, where Lisa or Charles would come from if they ever came down to check on them, which neither ever had nor ever would. Mandy put her cool hands inside Stan’s clothing and touched him all over. “Let’s see what’s going on here,” she’d say. Or she’d put his sweaty hands inside her clothes and when she did that she said, “I’m going to teach you something today. When you’re older your girlfriends will thank me.” This was a variation on something a boy at her school—a senior—had said to her the previous winter, before teaching her something she hadn’t exactly wanted or not wanted to learn.
    Stan didn’t understand how Mandy would know his girlfriends for them to thank her, since he didn’t actually live on Long Island. Wasn’t he going to get to go home—back to his familiar school and shouting parents? Maybe if he got married one day there would be a wedding and everyone would come. Mandy might go up to his bride on his wedding day and say, “You better thank me for what I taught your husband, Stan, back before you even knew him, that summer he stayed at my house.” Anything was possible with Mandy, who smelled sour in a sort of good way and that was only the tip of the iceberg of how she was strange. He tried to imagine what the thing he touched looked like based on what it felt like but everything he thought of seemed insane. It made no sense for anything like what he was thinking to be a thing that was a part of a person.
    So he asked if he could see it. She said she’d show him, but that if she did he had to kiss it. He didn’t want to do thatso he never saw. She got angry and called him some things that he didn’t know what they all were—but he got the gist anyway, and some of them he did know—and she stomped up the stairs. He stayed behind the pool table and cried and felt bad about everything, like what had just happened and Mandy being angry with him but also how