“You know Bonnie, right?”
“No.” I lied. I didn't want to be bothered, not by Tim Snyder, not in the middle of a quiz in the math class I was already failing, and definitely not about Bonnie.
“Sure you do, I see you with her all the time.”
“Oh, yeah. She lives in my neighborhood. She drives me to school. That's about it.”
“Ah, is she your girlfriend?”
“No.”
“Yeah no shit. But you like her, right?”
“No, but I like her car better than the bus.”
“I think you like her. And I think you'll like her a lot more once you see these.”
Tim reached over my desk and dropped three Polaroid pictures on the quiz in front of me. As soon as I saw the image on the top picture, I was immediately fearful of the teacher catching me looking at such a thing. We were all the way at the back of the room, six rows of desks away from Mr. Simmons, but I still slammed my hand over the picture fast enough to kill a housefly.
“Look at it,” Tim said.
I cupped my hand over the picture so it was just visible to me. Nobody else was paying attention to my dialog with Tim anyway; they were doing their quizzes, punching numbers into their calculators, remembering the notes I didn't study the night before. The night before... I was laying in bed, tilting my head up against my window, gazing at Bonnie's house across the street. I was looking at the light in her bedroom window and wondering what she was doing in there.
I looked down, uncupping my hand.
Picture 1: Bonnie is totally nude, save for a red headband. Her pubic hair is trimmed short and left in a neat triangle above her vagina, and her nipples strike me as being very pink. She's standing up and she has her pinky finger in her mouth, trying to be seductive and from my angle, succeeding.
I flipped it to the back.
Picture 2: Bonnie is laying on the end of her bed, where I would sit with her and watch movies on her little 13 inch TV, with her breasts exposed again. This time she's wearing light blue underwear and she has her left hand inside of it. You can see through her panties so you can tell that she's entering herself with her index and middle fingers.
I flipped it to the back.
Picture 3: She's in the same position on the bed but this time her panties are off, they're on the bed next to her and they're so tiny and twisted up they look like a blue hair scrunchie. Now she's got a little pink vibrator and she's got it above her vagina, so the end rests on her clit. She's biting her lower lip.
I flipped the whole pile over.
“Who took these?”
“I did.”
“You did.”
“Yeah, this is her idea of foreplay.”
“Wow.”
“I mean this is how she got off a little before we fucked.”
“Yeah, I know what foreplay is.”
“You look ill man. I thought you said you didn't like her.”
“Just shut the fuck up.”
Tim reached over and snatched the Polaroids off my desk.
“She's fucking crazy anyway,” he told me.
“Great.”
“She went totally insane, and she was a lousy fuck anyway. You're not missing much.”
I pretended to be really engrossed by my math test, which appeared to be written in another language now that I was finally examining it closely.
“Why would you show me this shit? Why are you telling me this?”
“Because I don't like you and I know it pisses you off.”
“Congratulations, faggot.”
Tim punched me in the arm, hard. He played lacrosse. Strong arm on that kid. Mr. Simmons, saw this and stood up to accost us.
“Tim, Ronald, pass your tests to the front. You both get a zero.”
***
Bonnie didn't give me a ride home from school that day because she had to go somewhere right after class let out. Instead I rode the bus home and the whole time I thought about her naked body. She was my best friend; I loved her, but I never thought about her when I jerked off because I thought she deserved better than that. I felt like I wouldn't be able to look her in the eye if I went home at night and thought about fucking her. I forced those thoughts out when it was possible, or I toned them down. I tried to focus on the part of me that dreamed of holding her and looking at a clear sky of stars above our town, not the part that wanted to throw her on that bed and rip her blue panties off and do that thing I'd never done before. That thing that she seemed to crave to do with every asshole in the school except me.
I ate dinner with my parents in silence, as usual. Afterwards I went to my room and played video games until I got bored. Boredom lead to distraction and soon I was thinking of her naked body again. It became impossible to help myself; I got off thinking about her right there in my beanbag chair and wiped off in a dirty sock that I buried at the bottom of my laundry hamper. After I got back from washing my hands in the bathroom, the phone rang. My dad picked it up, and then called up the stairs for me.
“Ronald, Bonnie's calling.”
I picked up.
“Hello?”
“Hey, come over. My parents went out and I'm bored.”
“What do you want to do?”
“Just watch a movie or something. Why, are you busy?”
“No, not at all. I'll be over.”
Brushing my teeth, I caught a glance of myself in the mirror and thought grimly that I didn't look too much like a human being. Braces covered each of my teeth, hunks of metal that an Orthodontist tightened up every month, unsanitary globs that my parents were paying thousands of dollars for. They stuck out of my thin, rodent-like face and made me repulsive even to my own eyes. I had learned to avoid showing my teeth when I smiled. I did that by learning not to smile very often.
Bonnie answered the door in dark blue boy-shorts and a tight black hoodie. She had the hood up and her hair draped over one eye. She wasn't wearing makeup but she looked beautiful, at least to me. When she spoke I looked at the way her lips move and couldn't help thinking of the way she bit them in the Polaroid Tim showed me.
“Hey, come on in.”
I followed her to the living room and we watched a movie in which this pretty young pop star plays a Christian girl who makes a list of things she wants to do before she dies. I didn't notice myself doing it but I was inching closer to Bonnie on the couch from the acceptable distance we started at, which was no different than where I'd be sitting if I was watching a movie with a male friend, until we were right next to each other.
Then, she was in my arms. She didn't react to this at all. Just sort of fell into it naturally and let me wrap myself around her. My hand rested on her leg, my fingers curling towards her inner thigh. I was close enough that I could feel the heat coming from between her legs. The sensation was new to me; I had never been that close to a girl before.
I became conscious of my every breath and tried to quiet my breathing so I didn't offend her with how anxious I was becoming. Slowly but surely, and of it's own volition, my hand drifted closer to the source of heat at her center. The movie was nearing it's climax and deep inside, I knew I had to work fast. When Mandy Moore's character died, so would my hopes of not being the only guy I knew that Bonnie didn't let inside of her.
I felt my fingers cross the waistband on her shorts and go deeper. I had just felt the stubble that lay above that trimmed patch of pubic hair visible in those photos when I tripped off some silent alarm and she jumped up and out of my arms.
“What the fuck do you think you're doing?”
“Uh, what?”
“Were you going to finger me?”
“I'm not doing anything.”
“You were doing something, you were going to finger fuck me.”
“I was not, I don't know, I don't know what's going on.”
“Every guy treats me like a fucking piece of meat. Every guy just thinks of me as a hole, not as a person. As a fucking hole.”
“Bonnie I think of you as a person, I just-”
“You just what? Thought you deserved to fuck me?”
“No, no, look I'm so sorry, I don't know what happened-”
“Just get the fuck out. After everything I confided in you, you'd try to use me just like everybody else. Get the fuck out. Take the fucking bus tomorrow.”
There was nothing to argue. I got on my shoes and walked home.
“How were things at Bonnie's?” My dad asked me as I walked through the door. He was on the couch watching TV.
“Pretty good.”
“Now is Bonnie just a friend or are you two seeing each other?
“I don't know.”
“You can tell me, Ron.”
“I don't want to talk about it, dad.” I was heading for my room.
“Say no more.” He gave me a 'knowing' wink before I turned around and marched up the stairs.
I lay under my covers, perfectly still. I couldn't get Bonnie off my mind so I jerked off to her again. There was nothing left to lose anyway. It took a lot longer this time, and instead of indulging myself in gentle fantasies that just happened to include my best friend, this time I thought about marching right down the street to her house, kicking her door down and fucking the shit out of her, cumming inside of her and leaving her there with no idea what had hit her before the credits to that dumb fucking movie were even done rolling. I finished on the sheets.
I was on my side and I looked on the floor. There was a teddy bear sticking out from under my bed, and its black button eyes caught the moonlight through my window so I could see myself reflected in them. It was like it was staring at me. My parents gave it to me when I was three. It stared me down until I felt compelled to cry, and I watched a few tears dampen its dark brown fur.
