Read As I Die Lying for Free Online Page B

as
she ridiculed me. She was beautiful.
    "But you have to be married to have babies,
don't you? Or to make the bedsprings squeak?" I asked.
    More laughter. "You silly boy. Remember that
day your father called in sick to work, and your mother went
downtown to do the shopping? She asked my mom if she wanted to come
along, but my mom said she had housework to do. I didn't see you
around anywhere."
    Of course not. I wasn't going to stay in the
apartment all day with Father, though he was too sick to put his
boots on. I came to the nest with a couple of comic books. When it
came down to Batman or a possible beating, even a dumbbell like me
made the smart choice.
    "Well, your mother was gone all morning, and
your father came over to our place. He gave me a whole dollar to go
buy some candy. Then I knew something was up. Has he ever given you
a dollar?"
    "Are you kidding?"
    "So I snuck around the back of the apartment,
outside my mom's bedroom, and I heard the bedsprings squeaking. And
my daddy was at work down at the plant, so I know it wasn't
him."
    I shuddered at the thought of Father
squeezing his big babymaker inside Sally's scrawny mother. It must
have hurt her a lot.
    "How come your mother let him hurt her? She
didn't have to let him, since they weren't married," I said. Or
maybe she hadn't let him. Father had ways of getting what he
wanted.
    Sally sliced me again with
the knife edge of her laughter. "It doesn't hurt , stupid. It feels good. That's
what love's about. It doesn't have anything to do with being
married. It's about sharing secrets and holding hands and kissing
and then playing babymaking.”
    My hand went to the spot on my cheek Sally
had kissed the night before. I tingled with the memory. A leaf fell
from somewhere above, from one of the big straight hickory trees
that bordered the junkyard. It feathered through the hole in the
roof, landing on the back of Sally's neck. She reached up, thinking
it was a bug, and batted it away.
    While she was leaning back, I glanced between
her crossed legs at the shadow under her dress.
    "How come you kissed me last night?" I
asked.
    "Because I loved you."
    "Like boyfriend and girlfriend."
    "Yes. Real love, like grown-ups."
    "But now you don't love me?"
    "Not anymore. I just wanted to see if I could
get you to love me. I did it all the time back in Pittsburgh. I had
a different boyfriend every week."
    How could somebody love so many people so
fast?
    "Did you kiss them all?" I asked, not sure if
I wanted to know the answer. I wanted my kiss to be special.
    "Of course. That's why all the boys wanted to
love me."
    "Did you...do anything else?" I tried to
picture her naked, in bed with a boy, making the bedsprings squeak.
I could only picture her with a big patch of soapy black hair
between her legs.
    Her voice dropped to a sneaky whisper. "I
Frenched them."
    "Frenched?" I was picturing Napoleon, whom I
had read about, trying to put his babymaker into Sally, his big
pointy hat falling down over his face.
    "It's a kind of kiss. Come here and I'll show
you."
    I slid over beside her, my heart beating
faster than squeaking bedsprings. I closed my eyes. I felt her warm
breath inches from my face.
    "Wait," I said, opening my eyes. Her eyes
were closed and her dark eyelashes twitched like dying butterflies.
Her lips were curled up like Angel Baby's and were shining with
saliva.
    "What is it?" she asked impatiently.
    "If you don't love me anymore, why do you
want to French me?"
    "Because it's fun. It feels like something
I'm not supposed to do. And it makes me tingle. And that's what
grown-up love is all about."
    "What if I don't want to be Frenched?" Now I
was afraid of kissing her. I had already braced myself for the
horrifying thought of loving Sally, like boyfriend and girlfriend,
and I had run through a hundred dead-end hallways of the Bone House
to get to the one thing I knew. That it felt good to be loved, even
if it was scary. And now she was taking it back.
    "You crossed your