The Brutal Language of Love Read Online Free PDF Page A

or anything. I didn’t feel dizzy.”
    â€œDid you black out?” Jennings asked me.
    I shook my head. “No.”
    â€œWhat stinks?” he said.
    I smelled under my arm. “Me.”
    â€œHow about I give you a bath?” Jennings asked, turning to look at me. He laid a hand over mine, which was still on his crotch.
    â€œWith your mother downstairs?”
    He shrugged. “She’s leaving in a few minutes.”
    â€œOkay,” I said. We waited until we heard the front door slam then went into the bathroom. It wasn’t the first bath Jennings had given me. He liked to wash between my legs then get in with me and do it underwater. Sometimes we fell asleep in the tub afterward. My mother always said I smelled good when I came back from Jennings’s, and I told her it was Ms. Jennings’s air freshener.
    Before I left that evening I gave Jennings the picture of the lady Santa from the Porta Potti. He told me it was beautiful and that she looked just like me.

    Jennings helped me study for the next round of the spelling bee, a citywide competition. For every ten words I got right, he touched me between my legs; for every ten words I got wrong, I sucked him off, which was no kind of punishment, really, since I enjoyed being intimate with Jennings.
    In school he was getting tired of pretending he didn’t like me, and sometimes, accidentally, he’d smile and wave when we passed each other in the hall. I wished he wouldn’t do that since it only further infuriated his friends, who were still fuming over the way I had insinuated myself back into the spelling bee. They couldn’t understand why Jennings wasn’t angrier with me, and as far as I could tell, he had made them no explanations.
    His friend Garrett was particularly mad. Garrett had the face of a desperate baby bird, framed by long yellow hair that he constantly shook out of his eyes instead of pushing back with his hands. His legs were bowed and he wore aviator glasses, just like my brother-in-law, Vic. It seemed unfair that I should be attacked for being fat when someone like Garrett was running around free, but that was the way it went.
    Garrett sat behind me in music class and kicked me hard in the behind while we listened to Beethoven’s Fifth, trying to decipher the cello parts. I kept waiting for Mrs. Krieg to hear the sound of my chair squawking across the floor, which it did every time Garrett’s foot landed on my ass, but he was careful to kick me only when the music got loud. What could I do? He had two friends sitting on either side of him, laughing each time he made his move. My neck began to hurt more than my butt from the whiplash of being jerked around. I reached back to rub it and Garrett stabbed me in the finger with his pencil.
    One afternoon when Jennings washed me, he said I had a yellow-and-blue bruise on my backside. I told him Garrett had done it, hoping he would offer to kill him, but he didn’t say anything. Later, in his bedroom, he took out a porno magazine showing two people doing it doggy-style and suggested this might be more comfortable for me in my condition. It did ease the pressure on my back, but I still hoped for a little bit more. As we lay together afterward beneath his down quilt, I said, “Jennings, I’m beginning to fear for my safety.”
    â€œI can see that,” he said sympathetically. We always lay sideways, facing each other and hugging. Jennings’s breath smelled of peanut butter and rum.
    â€œDon’t you fear for my safety?”
    He looked me straight in the eye and said, “Yes.”
    I touched his hair, which was curly and dark. “Jennings,” I said, “are you my boyfriend?”
    â€œYes,” he said again.
    Even though he was still looking straight at me, I suspected this was a lie and began to cry. I would have cried if he’d told me the truth, too. People said all kinds of crazy things to make others