Free Blue Boy by Rakesh Satyal Page B

Mrs. Nevins says, her eyes widening in shock. She is still wearing what she wore at school today: a green sweatshirt with an appliqué red apple stitched onto its front, a white turtleneck, and very blue jeans. “Mrs. Sharma, apologies again, but you don’t take issue with the sort of garbage that your son is carrying?”
    “Garbage! Vell, excuse me, but aren’t you a teacher? I can’t believe you vould object to poetry!”
    “Poetry! Is that what you call it? Unbelievable! Good night, Mrs. Sharma. And good night, Key-ran. God help you.”
    She storms away, giving one disgusted look back. I recognize in her posture the same unease that Mrs. Moehlman exuded as I confessed to her about the splinter.
    My mother reacts with a cough-like huff. “Vhat a buffoon,” she says. “Maybe ve should have you svitch classrooms. Let’s go, beta .”
    She slides two bags into my arms and heads for the exit. I follow, nonplussed, a mixture of skin, horror, and guilt weighing me down.
     
    My guilt is very strong, but my lust overrides my guilt.
    When my mother and I get home, I push away the encounter with Mrs. Nevins as I have learned to push away all of my other school-related humiliations. I focus on the task at hand. As my mother gets a quick talk from my father in his study (“Vhy do you need ten blouses at once? For each of your incarnations?”), I run upstairs with my magazine, go into my room, shut the door, and lock it. It is exhilarating to have a new thrill, a new pursuit. Yes, the makeup and dolls have yielded fun and fulfilling experiences, but the carnal delight of what I hold in my hands, the limbs that are wedged into the binding of this slippery magazine, carry more promise than anything I have undertaken before—as the pressure in my groin attests.
    I unwrap the magazine from the brown paper bag and flip to its center again. The dueling tits greet me once more, but it is the man’s body that I can’t shake out of my head. I turn the page to see it again. This man’s penis does not seem consistent with the rest of his body. It seems like it belongs to someone or something else; it has a life of its own. I am at attention like this man; like his, my dick seems to be stretching into some other space. I grip my dick, and the heartbeat I can feel through it seems separate from my own, like the time I held a chinchilla in science class and felt the rough beat of her tiny heart against her rib cage. Until now, I have thought of my privates as a part of my body, as simply an extension of myself. But the throbbing I feel, coupled with the way in which this man swaggers around, despite being frozen in pictures—the way he holds his dick up to the full, sticky, Fire Engine lips of one of the women, the way he pushes it into her, the way he places one hand on his hip as he stands over the other woman, who lies sprawled on a table, and lets it work its magic—makes me realize that my desires are a bubble around me, my body encased in another throbbing heart. Somehow, in the pages of this dirty magazine, I have discovered that we do not hold our sexuality but that our sexuality holds us.
    Over the next week, every time I pull out the magazine, which grows dog-eared, the ink on the cover smudged with my fingerprints—as if I am making as big of an impression on the magazine as it is making on me—the women’s bodies change. I can see not just their sexiness but the beauty of them. There is less of a desire to fondle the tits, to call them “tits” at all. As Cody continues to unload numerous epithets for the pendulous balls of flesh, I simply look at them as a lovely appetizer before turning the page and marveling at the ripe, searching penis of the latest charlatan that has swaggered onto the scene, and the ways in which he satisfies his girls.
    The man’s body, the ripples of his chest, remind me of something. The weight of these women’s breasts— that’s what they are, breasts! Not tits —remind me of