Danny Read online

  Anyway, it hasn’t even been a second and my eyes flick down. His crotch is hairy and his schlong is long. Longer than mine. The skin is glistening a little and it takes me another tenth of a second to figure out why. Then I want to chuck.

  At least I’m wearing jockeys so he can’t look at me.

  All this in less than a second. The guy notices me and our eyes meet. He freezes, then sort of nods like a cop passing me on the street. He backs into Mom’s room and closes the door.

  I felt a little mean gladness that he wasn’t able to take a dump or do whatever it was he was planning to do because he saw me. I went back to bed and lay there, listening for some kind of noise. But I heard nothing. Eventually I fell asleep, and in the morning the guy was gone. Mom was hung over, so I didn’t see her until long after noon. She staggered into the bathroom and took a shower, then staggered barefoot into the kitchen to look for orange juice. There wasn’t any because I was pissed at her. She always wants orange juice when she’s hung over, so I drank all of it when I got up. I wondered if she would notice the newly-empty carton in the trash, but she just grumbled to herself and made coffee. She didn’t say anything. She almost never does in her ignore phase, and Uncle Zack’s death pushed her deeper into the ignore phase than she’s ever been. She hasn’t even asked me how I felt about it. She doesn’t care.

  Sometimes I want her to care. I want her to yell at me for drinking all the orange juice and for not cleaning my room and for getting Cs in school when I could get As and Bs. Most of the time, though, I’m glad she ignores me. Makes life easier.

  Mom sat at the kitchen table and dropped her bombshell while the coffee maker was filling the pot with a stream of shitty-looking water, like a sick man pissing into a jug.

  “We’re moving,” she said.

  I didn’t say anything. Some woman on TV was trying to sell me tampons. I wasn’t listening. All of a sudden my whole world turned on Mom, and I noticed a lot of little details all at once. Her hair, brown and straight, was pulled back into a wet ponytail by a pink hair clip. Her eyes were puffy, and wrinkles made heavy spider webs around them. Her fingernails were polished pink, and her right thumb had a chip in it. She’s getting a little heavy but isn’t really fat. Her bathrobe is sunset red, and it’s the same one she’s had my entire life. When I was little, I used to pet it because it was so soft. Mom is thirty-six, which means she got pregnant with me when she was nineteen.

  “Didn’t you hear me?” she said. “I said, we’re moving.”

  I got my voice back. “Where?”

  “Across the lake. I’ve met someone, and we’re moving in together. You’ll have to come along.”

  “What if I don’t want to move?” I said.

  She shrugged. “You can’t stay here. Developers have been trying to get me to sell this place for years so they can bulldoze it and put a McMansion on the lot.”

  “You never told me that.”

  “No reason to—I wasn’t going to sell. I like living on the lake, even if the house is small. But the other place is on Lake Trick, too. We move, we’re still on the water, and I can get the money for this dump.”

  “It’s not a dump,” I said hotly, though I’d thought that way plenty of times myself.

  “Sure, okay.” The coffee maker finished, and she poured herself a cup. “Whatever.”

  My mouth went dry as a lint trap. “Who’s the guy? Is he supposed to be my step-dad or something?”

  She shrugged again, and I wished she would tie the top of her robe closed better. “His name is Myron Kalos. You’ve never met him, but you will. You’re a little old to think of him as a stepfather, but whatever.”

  I hate it when she says “whatever.” It sounds like she’s trying to be a teenager or something. “When?” I said.

  “About a week. I’m gonna hold a yard sale to get rid of the junk we won’t need like dishes and pans and furniture, so if you want to sell anything, you better go through your room. Myron’s going to rent a truck for the rest of it.”

  “I heard my name!”

  I twisted around on the couch. It was a warm day out for September, and the door was open. A guy was standing on the porch, peering through the screen door. He tapped on the frame.

  “Can I come in?”

  “Sure, baby,” Mom sang out. “I just made some coffee.”

  The guy opened the door and strode in like he owned the house. It was the guy I’d seen naked the night before. The light was better now, and I could see he was in his forties, with a lined face and big hands. His hair was short and brown, though gray was starting to push through at the temples. He hadn’t shaved, and his cheeks looked rough, like scraggly desert undergrowth. His arms filled out the sleeves of his t-shirt. His nose was too short and his forehead too broad for him to be handsome.

  Mom was smiling, all charm and cheer. “Myron, meet my son Danny. Danny, this is Myron Kalos.”

  Myron stepped forward and thrust out his hand with a big smile, acting as if I hadn’t seen him walk naked out of my mother’s bedroom last night. I stared at his hand, then at him. I didn’t shake. Was I supposed to be a dog?

  “Danny!” Mom said sharply.

  “It’s all right,” Myron said in a hearty voice. “I take it you told him. You’re not happy about it, right, Danny?”

  “Whatever,” I said, and folded my arms.

  Myron dropped onto the couch next to me, his expression serious. He had blue eyes. “I know it ain’t easy. That’s okay. We’ll work it out. It’s not as bad as you might think.”

  I kept my eyes glued to the TV. A zit-free teenage girl with smooth skin tried to convince me that she got acne all the time but used Zit-B-Gone, or whatever the hell it was, and now she was pretty, popular, and allowed to fuck the entire hockey team in the locker room after practice.

  “I like your mom a lot,” Myron said. “That’s why I asked her to move into my house. And I’m looking forward to getting to know you, too.”

  He went on like that for a while. I watched more commercials and pretended I wasn’t listening. Now I’m outside at the dock, writing as usual.

  YARD SALE

  Put our old life on display

  and charge fifty cents a peek.

  Total strangers wearing my old skins.

  Brown-haired man with potatoes in his sleeves

  Collects money like a pimp.

  Paw through my life.

  Leave your fingerprints on it.

  Is it worth the cash?

  We move tomorrow.

  I’m writing this in a second notebook because I don’t want to throw this one in the lake. This one’s for me.

  I have a secret. Whenever I can’t sleep—which is most of the time—or when I’m upset—which is most of the time—I tell myself stories. When I was in sixth grade, I had an English teacher named Mrs. Wellborn, and she did all the usual sixth-grade teacher stuff. But one thing she did that no other teacher has ever done was tell us stories. I mean, tell us stories instead of reading them. She would put us on the floor while she settled onto a low stool like a hen sitting on a nest, and she told us stories.

  They were adventure stories, too—old myths and fairy tales filled with blood and gore. I mean, did you know that in the original version of “Cinderella,” her step-sisters cut off chunks of their feet so they could fit into the slipper? Or that the princess in “Sleeping Beauty” woke up not when the prince kissed her, but just after her twins were born? Wild shit! Mrs. Wellborn told us all of it, without flinching. And I loved it. I sucked her stories down like cold, sweet wine and then, drunk on words, I begged for more.

  Mrs. Wellborn showed me some books with more stories in them. One was a big yellow book full of myths from ancient Greece. I read it all in two days. The book was for kids, with poster-sized, color illustrations, but I remember thinking even back then that Zeus was a real horn-dog. I mean, he was king of gods and all that, but geez! Zeus’s hard-on came through loud and clear, even in a kids book. He fucked anyt
hing in a skirt.

  So then I went to the library and got more books on Greek mythology, ones written for adults, and I found out that Zeus fucked pretty much anything. Female, male, teenager, adult—he didn’t give a shit. If it had a hole, he stuck his dick in it.

  I read this one story about a kid named Ganymede. I liked him because the first part of his name sound like mine—Danny/Gany. His full name is pronounced “ganny-meedee.” I remember wondering if his parents called him Ganny for short. I hoped not. Danny’s an okay name, but Ganny just sounds stupid.

  Anyway, I thought he was a pretty interesting character because he was a teenager instead of an adult. I wanted to know more about him, but the books didn’t have much—only two stories. I read them both, and then complained to Mrs. Wellborn that there weren’t anymore.

  She looked at me over the top of her glasses. She was an old lady—at least fifty—with gray hair and a round, bumpy face that reminded me of an orange. “Then I guess you’ll have to make up your own,” she said.

  I sighed. Grownups always said shit like that. Later at recess I tried to get some other kids to act out some Greek myths and stuff, but they thought I was fucked in the head, so I shut up. I got on the swings by myself, swooping back and forth like an eagle chained to the ground, and I found myself thinking about Ganymede some more. I wanted to meet him, wanted him to be my friend. I wanted a friend really bad back then. These days I don’t—other people can go fuck themselves—but back then I wanted someone to play with. And I started talking to myself, but inside my head, and I pretended Ganymede was there. He was a friend inside my head.

  You can’t have a friend—even a head friend—without knowing all about them, so I made up Ganymede’s story. I realized months later that I was doing exactly what Mrs. Wellborn told me to do, but by then I was hooked. Sometimes it felt like Ganymede was talking to me or walking beside me, and I was glad. Ganymede did cool shit. In my stories about him, he had adventures, and he went through serious fucking pain, and he fell in love with two people and he kept me from taking a pistol to school and blowing everyone’s head off. He still does.

  Sometimes when the world pushes in on me, I think about Ganymede. His problems were—are—way worse than mine. I tell myself one of his stories and for a while, I don’t have to deal with the world. It’s better than drinking—no hangover and you don’t spend money on it.

  When my gramma got old, her mind went fast. She forgot everything—who I was, who she was, who Mom was. She didn’t know where she was or what she was doing. It was scary to watch. Her past drained away like water down a sewer. She lost everything that made her her, you know?

  Ganymede only exists in my head, and I don’t want to lose him the way Gramma lost herself. So I’m writing about Ganymede in this journal for myself. Then, when I get old and I forget shit, someone can read them aloud to me. Maybe I’ll remember them, or maybe it’ll be like hearing them for the first time. That might actually be kind of cool.

  Anyway, I started this part during the yard sale two days ago, when people picked through our old stuff and offered a few pennies for old memories. I hated watching it, these people with their whining kids and filthy fingers pawing through my stuff. So I went away. This is where I went.

  0o0

  Ganymede’s stomach tightened into a drum and he almost hurled his lunch. Minos was walking toward him. For a moment he thought about running away to hide in the palace gardens. The stone palace was enormous and the gardens around them were enormous, with trees that touched the sky and paths that wound among emerald bushes. He could easily dive into a hiding place, a green cave that would keep him safe.

  But Minos had already seen him. It would look bad if Ganymede, a prince of Troy, ran away from Minos, the king of Crete, even if the king was an asshole. Minos was a tall man, slender as a whip, with a curly black beard. He liked to wear robes, usually purple ones because in those days, purple was really expensive and only the richest kings could afford it. Ganymede came from Troy, which was hundreds of miles to the north and east across the Aegean Sea, and even though Ganymede’s father Tros was rich enough to start his own country, he was wasn’t rich enough to afford the color purple. That was why Ganymede and his brother Ilos were visiting Crete, in fact.

  Crete was—is—a huge island in the Aegean Sea south of Greece, and it got trade from all over ancient Europe. Minos had the biggest navy, the biggest palace, the biggest treasure room, and that meant Minos had the biggest dick. Ganymede’s father Tros founded the kingdom of Troy, and Minos thought the Trojans were a bunch of hicks. Except Troy sat at the mouth of a channel, a long strip of water that led into the Black Sea. You want to get up to that part of the world, you go by Troy and you pay Trojan taxes.

  Minos wanted cheap access to the Black Sea. Tros wanted lower prices on Minoan stuff like cloth, lumber, and wine. So Tros sent his sons Ilos and Ganymede to negotiate with Minos. Actually, he sent Ilos to negotiate. He sent Ganymede to watch.

  Ganymede was a good prince of Troy. At sixteen, he knew how to hunt and fish and ride and shit like that. And everyone said he was gorgeous. He had blond hair that curled just a little bit and eyes as green and wide as the summer ocean. His skin was smooth, and every muscle in his body was hard from all the outdoor stuff he did. Everywhere he went, people stared at him. Ganymede didn’t like it much—it felt weird to have people’s eyes on him like flies on meat. Lots of people think that being really good-looking must be the coolest thing in the world, but Ganymede knew it also caused a lot of problems.

  Problems like Minos.

  Minos caught up to Ganymede under a big oak tree and clapped him on the shoulder. Ganymede wore a short blue tunic that left one of his shoulders bare because Crete was hot in summer, and Minos had grabbed Ganymede’s naked skin with long fingers. A servant had painted his nails purple because he was the king, and he left his hand on Ganymede’s shoulder. His palm was cool and a little sweaty. Ganymede swallowed and forced himself to smile at Minos. That made him look even more handsome. Minos tightened his grip.

  “Your Majesty,” Ganymede said. His shoulder sweated under Minos’s palm.

  “Your Highness,” Minos said. “Enjoying my gardens?”

  “They’re really nice,” Ganymede’s mouth was dry. Acid sloshed in his stomach. “I was… I mean, the negotiation talks are done for the day, so I came out here to clear my head.”

  Minos smiled behind his beard. He smelled like sweat and perfumed oil. “The talks do get tense, don’t they? Fortunately, there are many, many ways to relieve tension.”

  Ganymede’s smile froze and he wondered what it would do to the talks if he threw up all over the king’s expensive robe. “There sure are,” he said.

  “You know what I would like?” Minos said. “I would like to see you perform for me.”

  “Perform?”

  “I’ve seen you turn flips and play small magic tricks for my daughter Phaedra. Perform now for me and I will watch. It’ll clear both our heads.”

  Minos trailed his fingers across Ganymede’s shoulder, then settled down on the grass beneath the oak tree. Ganymede moved a few paces away, then glanced up at the sky, hoping for help. The gods—Zeus, Hera, Athene, Hermes, Hades, and all the other Olympians—were supposed to be there, watching, sometimes even helping. But they were fickle. You couldn’t count on them or their help, and the stories said that sometimes they would help someone, then turn around and stab them in the back just because it would be a big laugh. In the sky, a few puffy clouds hung in blue nothing. One looked a little like a falcon or an eagle, but the others were shapeless blobs. No help there. No one ever helps you without wanting something for themselves anyway, and what could Ganymede give a god?

  Ganymede bowed to Minos like a proper prince, then turned a one-handed cartwheel. Without stopping, he leaped into a forward handspring. He performed somersaults, rolls, and even a back flip. After a while, Ganymede forgot Minos and started to enjoy himself. This was his own secret. Ganyme
de didn’t want to be a prince or a diplomat or a judge or anything like that. He wanted to be an entertainer. Whenever traveling performers came to his father’s small palace in Troy, Ganymede was the first to greet them, and he followed them around like a hungry puppy hoping for a treat. Since he was a prince, they let him watch and learn from them, but Ganymede had to be careful—princes were supposed to be entertained, not do the entertaining, and Ganymede’s father Tros would have gotten pretty pissed if he had known how much time his youngest son spent with mere performers.

  But this time Minos had asked Ganymede to perform, and he was enjoying the chance to leap and jump and turn beneath a green oak tree under the hot summer sky. Muscle moved beneath skin with the feeling of both blood and power, like water flowing around stones.

  Ganymede finished his routine when he landed practically on Minos’s feet. He was panting. Sweat darkened his golden hair and made it curl. The grass was soft beneath his bare toes.

  “Wonderful!” Minos laughed and applauded. “That was… enjoyable.”

  On a whim, Ganymede reached toward Minos. “Excuse me, my lord, but you have something stuck in here.” In a smooth motion, Ganymede pulled a small silver coin from Minos’s left ear. He grinned and held it up. Easy sleight-of-hand, but fun. Minos laughed again, then caught Ganymede’s wrist in a hard grip. The coin fell to the ground.

  “You have a beautiful smile,” Minos said. “It must be the treasure of Troy.”

  Ganymede didn’t move. His stomach started to churn again. How had he let himself get so close? He had lost his head performing, and now the king had him trapped.

  “M-my lord,” Ganymede stammered, “I don’t—”

  “And so shy and modest,” Minos added. “That makes you even more beautiful, did you know that?”

  He turned Ganymede’s hand around and brushed his lips across the palm. It felt like a pair of warm, hairy worms. Ganymede didn’t know what to do. He knew Minos wanted to do him. He’d known since he and his brother Ilos had arrived on Crete two weeks ago. Minos had thrown a great banquet to welcome the princes and had arranged to sit next to Ganymede. After a very little wine, Minos had used every excuse to touch Ganymede’s shoulder, his arm, his back. And once, the royal hand had slid under Ganymede’s tunic beneath the table. It didn’t seem to matter to Minos that his wife Pasiphaë could see. Ganymede shifted position so Minos couldn’t touch him so easily, then pretended to be tired so he could leave the banquet early. For the next two weeks, he’d been careful not to let Minos get him alone, or even get too close.