Alissa Nutting

On his way out, he stopped and pointed his arm across the rows of empty chairs. “But luckiest of all are all these kids. You’re fantastic with them. I know.” He winked. “I’ve got my ear to the ground.”

That night at 7:23 P.M., I picked Jack up for the first time in front of a combination Taco Bell/Long John Silver’s. It wasn’t dark yet, but in the low light of sunset, eyes could easily be mistaken—passersby thinking they saw Jack entering a red Corvette might have to admit that it could’ve been any boy his size who looked similar, and though they were nearly certain of the make and model of the car, perhaps the color, tinged by the sunset’s pink glare, had only looked red in that moment.

“Thanks for coming.” I smiled. “Buckle up.”

He’d changed into a different, preppier outfit than he’d worn to school; in fact he looked ready to go to a casual job interview at a supermarket—khakis and a striped polo shirt—and the very ends of his hair were slightly wet, telling of a recent shower. His skin bore a soapy-sweet fragrance of cologne; I smiled thinking of the bitter flavor its spice would leave on my tongue. “I like your car,” he offered.

I began to head out of town toward the nearby bay area and its long rows of mangroves where we could park undisturbed. The traffic soon began to perturb me—it was an unwelcome contrast to the adolescent morsel strapped into my passenger seat. We immediately became trapped behind a livestock truck of chickens; when I was finally able to pass, a hideous woman simultaneously operating a station wagon and cramming a Whopper into her mouth came into view. “Aren’t people revolting in general?” I complained.

Jack offered back a polite smile. I noticed him eyeing the car’s center console, my hand gripping the top of the gearshift.

“Can you drive a stick?”

He shook his head. “I wish. I can’t drive at all. I can get my learner’s in February though.”

“Well we’ll have to give you some lessons,” I offered. This seemed to please him a great deal, although it wasn’t a genuine proposal. But I followed it up with a more earnest suggestion. “Jack?”

“Yes?” He was so nervous that it was hard for me to gauge his level of horniness.

“You can touch me, you know. Anywhere you want while I drive. My windows are tinted.” He swallowed and looked straight ahead for a moment, rubbing his sweaty palms against his pants while giving himself an inward pep talk.

“Okay.” He finally nodded. He placed a sweaty hand on my bare knee, then sat motionless for a minute before his fingers began to gently move in one direction and then another, sliding incrementally farther up my thigh. I began to moan but my enthusiasm was slightly dampened when we passed a graphic pro-life billboard, then an advertisement for septic repair service whose mascot was an anthropomorphized plunger. I sighed—Jack and I needed a highway all our own, devoid of reminders about life’s daily vulgarities. Even the rusted exteriors of the jalopies we sped by seemed ominous harbingers of unwelcome news, announcing that my time with Jack, that our bodies and everything we’d each ever known, would all inevitably decay and fall apart.

In an attempt to get his hand closer to my genitals, I lifted my pelvis off the seat, pushing it forward against his fingers in a way that forced me to widen the placement of my legs on the floor and the gas pedal and hunch over the steering wheel for balance in a crablike pose. I reminded myself not to scare him at first with