Boy Crazy: Coming Out Erotica by Unknown Read Free Book Online Page B

pretty of the two sisters, and there was reason to believe that she’d also been my grandfather’s favorite. The aggravating fact that Aunt Vangie had married someone richer than our father was compounded by the fact that she was still married to him.
     
    A shadow of pain passed swiftly over our mother’s face, and I hated Eliza for it.
     
    My sister leaned back histrionically on the sofa in the living room and stretched her long legs. Already in June they were tanned, and the nails were painted pale pink. Eliza rubbed her eyes like a spoiled child and twirled her thick blonde hair between her fingers.
     
    It didn’t seem odd to Eliza that I was also expected to have a summer job, even though I’d spent three years away from home at boarding school, except for holidays. It seemed to me that if anyone had the right to complain about working all summer, it was me. And I liked working.
     
    “I don’t know why I can’t just spend the whole summer at Gran’s and see you and Jem in August,” Eliza said, pouting. “I’m sure Gran could use my help around the house. And it would give me a chance to work on my poetry.” Eliza had discovered the works of Anne Sexton in the past year at Brown, and had decided that she would become a great poet. I’d grown accustomed to the metallic clack of her pale blue Selectric as she sat in her bedroom in the early afternoons, after she woke up. Occasionally a heavy sigh, meant to be heard, issued from behind the half-closed door of her bedroom. After an hour’s work, she would step outside of her ruffled inner sanctum and read her poems aloud to my mother and me. The poems were all about boys she knew, and what she called the pain of being a woman. Even at sixteen, I knew they were dreadful, and made the mistake, once, of telling her so. Her fury had been quick and annihilating.
     
    My mother sighed. “You can write here just as well as at Gran’s, Eliza. You know what your father said about you working. If you had taken time to look a little harder, you wouldn’t still be waitressing this summer. Gran doesn’t need any help, as you well know. She never has. She’ll be running that house when the rest of us are in our graves.”
     
    “Poetry,” I said, leaning forward, muffling my laughter in a pillow from the sofa that Eliza had flung to the floor. “Eliza, you don’t want to go to Flyte to write poetry, you want to go there to lie in the sun and pick up guys. You’re not a writer. Your poems suck.”
     
    “Jem!” my mother snapped.
     
    “Shut up, you little piece of shit,” Eliza said reflexively. She barely glanced at me when she said it, and it made me laugh harder.
     
    “Eliza, please. I will not have that language in this house.”
     
    “He is a little piece of shit, Mother. He started it. He’s making fun of my poetry. I don’t know why you coddle him.”
     
    “Eliza,” my mother repeated, and this time there was an edge. “This isn’t about your brother, or your poetry, it’s about the fact the you are behaving like a spoiled child. You’re nineteen years old, and it’s unbecoming. Your father is happy to pay your tuition, as am I, but your side of the bargain is that you work. Your brother works, too. Someday you can marry someone rich who can keep you in the style to which you would like to become accustomed. Until then, you can either come to Prothro in August with the family or you can remain here in the city throughout the month of August. I’m sure the restaurant could use the help.”
     
    My mother and sister seemed to be speaking a private language to each other, one with subtitles. If Eliza had hoped to wound my mother by obliquely reminding her that our cousins could spend the summer in Europe because my aunt and uncle were still married to each other and could afford it, my mother was reminding Eliza that this was her house, and it had one mistress. Eliza sighed, and threw back her head.
     
    “Yeah, Eliza, I work too,” I