Free Hungry for the World by Kim Barnes Page B

it freed me somehow.
    My father gave easier approval of my spending time with Thane. By all accounts, he was a respectable young man, liked by his teachers, admired by his peers, the shining star of numerous sporting events. He was polite and respectful, never surly or secretive. More often than not, there were others who accompanied us on our outings, groups of friends intent on a long evening of pizza and pinball. Such activities—ball games and pool parties, even the occasional movie rated G—were all new to me, and my father continued to surprise me with his acquiescence. Perhaps he had come to believe that this secular socializing might prevent the kind of fixation that had possessed me in my relationship with Tom.
    I shared Thane’s family dinners, came to the parties he held for his classmates—the boys and girls coupling up andfinding the darkened back rooms of the basement, while, upstairs, his parents—the adult supervision on whom my father’s approval depended—watched
The Odd Couple
and mixed another gin fizz. I wasn’t interested in the beer secreted in beneath coats and book bags, nor did I care to let the other boys whisper me into the laundry room for an extended bout of French kissing, their zippered jeans grinding my hipbones raw. I was not a cheerleader, already claimed by the team’s top scorer, nor was I the plump girl in glasses who braced herself against the wall and lifted her sweater without hesitation, urging the boy to hurry. My choices were to stay and remain a part of the dim light and the music, or leave and go home, back to my solitary bed and the lackluster night. I sat on the couch, paralyzed by my separateness, an unopened can of Coors warming in my hand, listening to America sing, “I’ve been through the desert on a horse with no name.”
    When a boy I hardly knew pinched my arm and asked me to dance, I hesitated, trying to remember the steps my father had taught me, trying to remember the ease of his lead.
    “Like this,” the boy said, and pressed my head against his shoulder, his arms raising my wrists to drape around his neck. We swayed in a small circle, and I breathed in the clean smell of his shirt, the complex odor of his skin, which made me feel animal and hungry and close to tears. He rocked me into the hallway, pushed open a door, then gathered me like a bride in his arms before laying me across the guest bed, musty with disuse.
    “It’s okay.” He shushed my protests with his mouth. For a moment, the movement of his hands was a comfort, but then his patience with me thinned, his need became more urgent.
    “Wait,” I said, but he wouldn’t, pummeling more than petting, burying his face in the softness below my ribs. When I pushed against him with the heels of my hands, said, “Stop,” he covered my mouth, his breath heavy in my face.
    “Be quiet. Someone might hear you.”
    I wrestled myself from beneath his weight, felt him roll away from me. “I don’t want to do this,” I said.
    “Yes you do.” He ran a finger down my arm, kissed my shoulder. I shivered, sat up. I could hear the music, the sound of other voices. He will hate me now, I thought, even as he smoothed his hair and left the bed, stepped out of the dark room and disappeared. Every time such closeness came, it ended in my feeling even more isolated and alone. If they all turned away, who would be left to love me?
    It was not this boy whose affection I most craved, but that of the boy who rolled and moaned in the next room. I knew that Thane was with his girlfriend, but I could not forget how, only hours before, he had kissed me for the first time. Had he felt me hesitate, nearly give in, the second or third or thirteenth time he tried to touch my breast? I longed to hold him against me, even as I told myself that such contact would destroy whatever existed between us. Some nights I allowed myself to fantasize that Thane might actually fall in love with me and leave his girlfriend, that we