Free Blue Boy by Rakesh Satyal

then send an intercom announcement all over the mall, the calumny echoing off the marble floors and into every crevice of every dressing room, where my mother, blouse tangled up like a turban around her torso, hears the words, “PAGING MISSUS SHAW…SHAW-WHAT?…SHAW. WE HAVE YER PERVERT SON…WHASSYER NAME AGAIN, SON? KEE-WHAT? KEITH. KEITH SHAW.”
    Were Krishna’s amorous pursuits so depraved? How can I expect to be a paragon of godly behavior when I’m curving around a pillar in the mall to find a bounty of bosoms? Part of me wants to run away from this mall and all the way to our temple, where I can kneel on the floor and curl myself back into a ball, begging God’s forgiveness. But another part of me wants to live bravely and learn as much as I can about the body and its pleasures. What to do? I can either slither in there and risk total derision and desolation but have an idea of what happens in flagrante delicto, or I can wait out here, lead a perfectly happy existence and be a kid, putting off sexual complications until later.
    I think the choice is clear: Tits tits tits.
    I wait until the cashier has left his post and then make my way through mallgoers and a few potted plants to enter the store again. From what I can see, there are only a few people in the store. As I pick up a copy of Disney Adventures magazine and pretend to scan its cartoon contents, I realize that the people in here—the guy in the gray blazer reading Robert Fulghum at the front table display, the curly-haired woman cracking the spine of an unbought Danielle Steel paperback, the high schooler flipping through a Superman comic in his puffy Starter jacket—have an air of secrecy, privacy, stealth. Reading, it would seem, is a forbidden act in this town.
    I sneak a glance back at the cashier’s post and see it is still vacant. I put the Disney Adventures down and slide over to the cozy corner of the rack, where the pouting lips, blond hair, and barely clad bust of a minx ooze under the Penthouse title. I am just about to reach up and snatch one of the copies away when I hear two deep voices approaching. I turn away and grab up the Disney Adventures again.
    Two gruff-looking guys walk up to the rack. One of them has a coffee-colored goatee around his mouth and a backward Reds cap on his head; the other has a shaved head and is wearing a plain blue mesh jersey with a long-sleeve white T-shirt under it. The goatee guy reaches up and takes the very copy of Penthouse that I wanted. He looks briefly at the front cover, a short but tough grunt escaping him, then tips the cover so that his friend can see it. The friend grunts his assent. A seasoned pro, the goatee guy flips straight to the center, and both men blow air through their nostrils in acknowledgment of the content.
    The irony that these guys are looking at a glossy titfest while I’m nose-deep in Mickey Mouse is not lost on me.
    From where I stand, I can see bent refractions of tit, but I am not afforded anything more than my usual viewings with Cody. The goateed guy flips through the pages, each time tipping the magazine friendward as if to say it’s his handiwork.
    “How ’bout that?” Goatee says, and I glimpse four tits rippled on a two-page spread.
    “I’m there, I’m there,” says the other, sliding one hand up and over his bald head.
    They communicate this way for minutes on end, always with these tough-guy expressions, “How ’bout that?” and “I’m there, I’m there,” and all I want to scream is “No, you’re not there! You’re here , and you’re stealing my tits!” I am seething so much at the way they have inserted themselves between me and the magazine that I almost forget my original goal: I am not here to see tits. I am here to see sex. And they seem to be looking only at the former. Blasphemy.
    Then I glimpse it: the wax-like chest of a man, two brunettes licking it with bubblegum tongues, and at the base of this shiny flesh, a well-cropped square of