CanIHelpYou?: They Always Call Back
“My parents are in there,” Ian says, pointing to the faux-British pub. “I should go see them. I bet they’re beautiful.”
My phone is filling up with texts from clients. I can’t even read them. I couldn’t do business now anyway. Can’t even understand money. Clients can wait. They always call back.
Ian wants to walk around the neighborhood so we do, but I make sure we avoid Main. Block by block, street by street, we look at people’s rough pre-spring lawns and flower gardens. We trip over uneven sidewalks and go single file to avoid late-night walkers. I have no sense of time. I don’t know whether Ian and I are talking to each other or whether we’ve become telepathic. I don’t hear sounds the way I usually do.
There’s a grin plastered on my face like I love the whole world. Ian has it, too. It’s almost creepy how we can’t get rid of them. We hold hands sometimes because it explains our late-night walk to people who see us even if it’s a lie. Ian even kisses me once just because it seems like the right thing to do. Somewhere on Elm Street. I won’t find out until Monday if anyone saw it.
“I’m inside your tunnel,” Ian says.
“Are you?”
“It’s scary. Everything echoes.”
He can’t be lying because that’s a detail about my tunnel that no one else knows. Everything echoes. His mention of it makes me hear it. I listen closely to what’s echoing now. Everything is echoing now.
“You okay?” He bends his eyebrow down.
Ian is looking at me and I’m looking at him and his eyes are beautiful. Pupils dilated almost completely, he looks like he has black irises and I know I must look the same way and I don’t know what time it is.
“Is anyone home at your house?” I ask.
“Trivia night,” Ian says. “They won’t be home till the pub closes.”
We walk.
Ian’s house is layered in books—all kinds of books from picture books for little kids to huge books about art that Ian and I used to press flowers in when we were young enough to care about pressing flowers.
We sit in his living room and he puts on some music and it sounds like a painting in my head and my chest. It’s hard to explain. It’s as if I’ve lived my whole life underground and just found the hole to the surface.
My parents don’t like me hanging out with Ian. He’s not allowed to hang out at my house. Not even when we were little. My mother rang her bell once, and she and Dad tried to talk to me about it. How maybe I shouldn’t get too close. How maybe it looks bad for our family for me to be friends with a boy like him. Now, Ian gets good grades and leads the debate team. I’m growing my client list to nearly sixty and will scrape through junior year with my worst grades yet. I’m pretty sure having Ian as my best friend is the only good thing I have going for my reputation.
I check my phone. I look at the numbers on the clock but they still make no sense to me. Ian is lying on the couch with his eyes closed.
I decide to lie next to him.
We kiss and it’s a longer kiss than when we were on Elm Street. I can feel every nerve in my body. It’s like Ian’s kiss is a million times more powerful than my mother’s stupid bell. I’m breathless when we finish.
“Wow,” I say.
“Yeah,” Ian says.
I am out of my tunnel here, lying in the crook of his arm, curled in on his body. I can feel him breathing. I can hear his heartbeat. The grin on my face won’t calm down. It may be bigger than ever.
I don’t know what I’m doing. He’s just lying here and I’m just lying here but something makes me reach down and touch his penis. I think of the word penis and start laughing slowly. The laugh builds and I don’t take my hand off, but I squeeze it with each giggle and Ian laughs, too, and we’re lying on his couch, me with my hand on his penis, laughing, when my phone rings again. My hand hesitates. In order to reach my phone I will have to take my hand off Ian’s penis and I really don’t want to because it’s growing in my hand and that’s far more interesting than anything anyone could tell me on my phone.
“You getting that?”
“No.”
We fall into a hysterical fit and Ian nearly falls off the couch but I hold him steady by his penis. The phone rings again and it makes us laugh until I feel like I’m going to pee in my pants and I leave the ringing phone on the coffee table and make my way to Ian’s downstairs bathroom.
“It won’t stop ringing!” he screams as I’m peeing. I try to block it out and stare at the two green hand towels on the rail in front of me. The towels breathe as I breathe. The floor is a sea of movement and I glance up at the towels and then back at the floor and I realize that I’m tripping my balls off—the way my clients have described it to me. And then I remember touching Ian’s penis and I laugh so hard I fart and that makes me laugh even harder, so I pee more.
I finally finish and wash my hands for what feels like twenty minutes, and I come back to the living room and my phone is still ringing and Ian’s hard-on went away because he’s holding my phone, staring at it.
“I think you should read your texts,” he says.
“Your towels breathe,” I say.
“No. Seriously,” he says, but he’s laughing while he says it so I don’t take him seriously.
I can only read one text. The latest one. It’s from my mom. It says: When u get home we have to talk about spending time with that boy.
I read the last part aloud in a white dickhead voice. “We have to talk about spending time with that boy.”
Ian and I fall off the couch laughing even though nothing about this is funny.