The Brutal Language of Love Read Online Free Page B

misspelling quietus, I could tell he thought he had the whole thing wrapped up. After losing, however, I went to the library to see what the word meant, and found the main pronunciation to be qui- ee -tus, not qui- ay -tus, as Mrs. Googan had said. My face burned with injustice. Had she not been so obscure I would never have spelled it Q-U-I-A-T-U-S, and, furthermore, would still be in the running. I lugged the dictionary back to the classroom to plead my case.
    Mrs. Googan was shocked and appalled. Frankly, so was I. Jennings had a lot of friends—mean friends, who were already deeply offended by my weight. It wasn’t like spoiling Jennings’s chance to win the bee was going to make them treat me any better. At the same time, I wasn’t sure things could get all that much worse.
    In the end, Mrs. Googan allowed me back into the competition and I won. After school that day, I went across the street to apologize to Jennings, for what it was worth. He lay on his bed, inconsolable. I waited for him to kick me out of his room or call me fat ass or something, but he didn’t. I went over to his bed and put my arm around him, and was momentarily surprised at how easy it was to get close to a popular person. Of course, Jennings and I had grown up together, so even though he was more popular than I was at school, there was a different hierarchy in the neighborhood. All the kids I baby-sat for adored me, and even though they were several years younger, the sheer volume of them conferred upon me a vague status of local, albeit fat, hero. Jennings knew this. He could call me names and play mean tricks on me at school all he wanted, but in the neighborhood we were nearly equals.
    I had spent the weekend preceding the spelling bee with Jonquil and Vic, studying the dictionary and learning what an orgasm was, and all the ways a woman could get one, if she was lucky. “Jennings,” I said that day in his room, “would you like to make love?” He stopped sniffling so much and said yes. I might not have offered except I believed his secondary sex characteristics had come in over the summer, and Jonquil told me when this happened, boys weren’t so little and slippery inside you anymore.
    After we had done it, Jennings thanked me and said he’d like to do it again soon. Having experienced my first orgasm with the minimum of effort, I agreed. Mostly we did it after school, before his mother got home. Then it didn’t matter how noisy we were, or how long it took, or how often we wanted to do it. Through all of this, Jennings started to become a different person. In school, he was crueler to me than ever before, or so it seemed. We staged scenes where he shoved me against lockers for being so fat, then caught me just before I hurt myself and banged his own fist against the metal, so it just sounded bad. He grabbed me in front of his friends and whispered threats in my ear, which were really words of love such as, I can’t wait to see you this afternoon. When we were alone, he told me he wanted to be a stunt coordinator when he grew up, so this was all just practice for him. He assured me constantly that my main problem was not so much that I was fat, but that I smelled bad, which I appreciated, since at least I could do something about that.
    Now, standing in his doorway after returning from Dr. Flay’s office, I announced, “Jennings, I’ve been hypnotized.” He was lying on his side in bed, looking at Playboy. He set the magazine aside and I could see he had an erection inside his pants. He patted the bed for me to sit down beside him, and I did. “I think I got ripped off,” I said, even though I hadn’t overeaten at Wendy’s.
    â€œWhy?” Jennings asked. He rolled over on his back so that his erection pitched a tent inside his khakis. That was what he called it.
    â€œBecause,” I said. Absently, I put a hand on his crotch. “I didn’t feel weird