Free Original Sins by Lisa Alther Page A

but actually because he found her touching. She tried hard to participate in this crap. He found it difficult to believe she could want to. She was dressed like the other girls, but she couldn’t carry it off. She looked white and cold and self-conscious.
    He had already accepted that he would never be “one of the boys,” with a case of Bud in his trunk and a pack of Trojan Enz in his glove compartment. He was beginning to take pride in it. Last fall he’d gone hunting with Jed and two of his dumb football friends, Hank and Bobby. Raymond wanted to do a photo-series on hunting. Hank’s family had a hunting shack on the side of Buck Mountain. Their Jeep lurched along a rutted dirt track for miles. The shack consisted of a ten-by-ten room, lean-to kitchen, and attached latrine. Bunks along the wall, chairs and table, wood stove.
    The first night they sat around the table drinking Bud and playing stud poker and discussing who had done what to which of their female classmates.
    â€œSure Betty will blow you,” Jed assured Hank. “She loves it. Just give her a call.”
    â€œShe loves to blow you maybe. That don’t mean she’d blow me.”
    â€œBetty don’t love to blow me. She loves to blow, period. You call her and see if that ain’t so.”
    Once they were drunk, they rolled outside with their pistols and conducted target practice by the full moon, howling with laughter as bullets ricocheted through the forest
    When they stumbled back in, Raymond was feigning sleep in his bunk. After more beer and more poker, Hank took off his belt, and they used it to measure their erections.
    â€œChrist,” Bobby muttered, “you could use that damn thing for a crutch, Tatro.” They collapsed on the table with laughter.
    â€œJesus, you’re a goddam homo, Bobby!” Hank yelled.
    Raymond fell authentically asleep. Sometime later he woke up and saw the three still at the table. Hank and Bobby were smoking Pall Malls, holding them between thumb and forefinger. They were looking at each other, smiling and nodding, as they slowly lowered the cigarettes, burning tips first, toward their forearms. Repeatedly they glanced back and forth from the burning tips to each other’s eyes. Raymond watched, fascinated, as the tips got closer and closer to flesh, each waiting for the other to back out
    Hairs on each forearm flared and shriveled. Raymond felt his stomach turn as both tips burned into both forearms. Neither Hank nor Bobby made a sound or ceased to smile as he ground out his cigarette in his arm. The odor of seared flesh filled the cabin. Hank and Bobby laughed and shook hands.
    Raymond had been here before—out at the lake once with some boys from school. They dove from a cliff into an impossibly small pool with submerged boulders around its edges. As more and more beer was consumed, they climbed higher and higher up the cliff. Raymond squatted to one side, watching as one boy after another made his dive and surfaced in one piece. He couldn’t remember what had finally stopped them.
    Throughout junior high and high school he was witness to dozens of fights in response to real or fabricated insults, which were preceded by an elaborate round of challenge and rebuttal, conducted by friends of the combatants, culminating in the setting of a time and a place for the fight Once he himself had been swept into this ritual. He’d been standing outside the junior high doorway chatting with friends. Louanne Little slunk by in a full skirt with many crinolines, a cinch belt, and a tight short-sleeved angora sweater that revealed massive tits at a time when most girls still wore slips. Raymond had been impressed, and a little bit awed; also somewhat frightened. A friend muttered something about how “trashy” she was. Her boyfriend Clyde stalked up in his black leather motorcycle cap and jacket and stomping boots and asked, “Hey, you guys seen