Hydroplane: Fictions by Susan Steinberg Read Free Book Online

guests pounding on the door from the other side, insisting we let them in to get their coats, screaming, Let us fucking in, and the last guest trying to unlock the door but my hand is over the lock, and the last guest saying, Let them in, and, before I can explain, the last guest, standing behind me, succeeding in pulling my hand away from the door, quite roughly, and unlocking the door and allowing the guests to rush into the bedroom to peel their coats from the heap, so that they can leave in the rain.
    In the cafeteria, the boy-looking girl watching me walk to return my tray, watching as the new kid grabs my tits, roughly, from behind and presses his cock against my ass, and yes in seventh grade, and yes his cock, though in seventh grade we call it a dick, and Idon't have to say what it feels like, seventh grade or not, and I don't have to say again how he calls me ugly, how his dick is pressing hard enough to make me crumble, and this boy-looking girl running over as if to get me up off the floor after I crumble, as if to save me, but kicking me, instead, in the legs and trying to kick his legs, as well, before he walks away laughing, pushing through the crowd and disappearing.
    Standing in the bedroom and the two friends walking back in to retrieve their coats which have been on the bottom of the coat heap all evening as they were the first to arrive, and the two friends finding, beneath their coats, the cat, small, curled beneath the coats, and finding, too, that their fucking on the already heavy weight of the drying coat heap has hurt the cat.
    The boy-looking girl's mother calling my house on Friday evening, and my mother saying, No she's not, and, Yes she's home, and, Yes you can, and handing me the telephone with a look on her face as if to ask if I am in trouble, and taking the telephone and telling her mother, when she asks where the hell her girl is, that she's at school for a club I think, Which club, I don't know which, Well, what did she say, Nothing, Well, you said a club, A music club, She doesn't do music, Science then, Put your mother on the phone.
    The hostess getting herself off in her bedroom in the evenings, and hearing from my bedroom the faint sounds of her and pressing my ear hard to my floor, singing softly all the while, yet pressing to my floor, her ceiling, to better hear her.
    Realizing the crossing guard has given me one of the new kid's shirts, that there are no instructions on washing it and returning it, that she has most likely forgotten that she even lent out the shirt,and my mother trying to wash it to return it before I rescue it from the pile of laundry on the laundry room floor and hide it in my pillowcase, taking it out at night, reading the letters on the front of the shirt which spell something, the name of a school, not ours.
    Hearing sirens from my house when cops go past in search of this boy-looking girl, and the cops, later, coming to my house and telling me and my mother that they have searched the girl's house where her mother is frantic, that they have searched the schoolyard, the classrooms, finding nothing, no one, except those who are truly in clubs for things like music and science and have not seen her, ever, and the cops questioning me about this girl's whereabouts, saying, Come on miss, trying to make me spill how this girl is going to kiss the new kid with her tongue and do other things in the woods, saying, Where is she miss, I don't know.
    The two friends calling it an accident, calling it uncanny how the cat is hurt, blaming the noise, the crowd, saying that the cat had to hide somewhere, blaming the hostess, deciding that the cat could not take the crowd, the noise, and hid, and how uncanny as cats are not easily crushed but slide out from under piles with ease, saying that the hostess should have put the cat in a neighbor's place to sit with one of those pathetic always-home neighbors always doing nothing in the evenings, deciding that the hostess is to blame