Uses for Boys Read Online Free PDF Page A

pull them down. He likes to watch
     the way his trailing fingers make goose bumps on my skin. He likes to stroke my hair
     and put one hand over my eyes so I can’t see what he’s doing.
    He covers my eyes with his hand.
    “I’m moving back to Seattle,” he says. “To live with my dad.”
    And then he doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t say he’ll miss me or that he’s sorry.
     Does he know he’s leaving me? That I’ll have to ride the bus home alone and come home
     alone and be home alone? They leave, I think, just like my mom says.
    In the tell-me-again times, when I was seven, before the stepfathers and the stepbrothers,
     before the big house in the suburbs with its big windows and landscaped yard, before
     Nancy Baxter and Desmond Dreyfus, when my mom and I lived in a little apartment in
     a little building downtown, I slept in her bed. It was a raft on the ocean, a cloud,
     a forest, a spaceship, a cocoon that we shared. I could stretch out like a five-pointed
     star and then she’d bundle me back up in her arms. I’d wake in the morning tangled
     in her hair.
    Sometimes I want to be back there so bad I can’t breathe. I can’t close my eyes tight
     enough. I can’t wish hard enough. Joey’s hand is still over my eyes and I can feel
     the weight of him sitting next to me. I hear a sharp crack from somewhere in the house,
     like a bird flying headlong into glass, and I’m really cold all of a sudden and topless
     and my pants are down around my ankles. I push away his hand so I can cover myself
     up with the blankets. I’m fourteen and I hate Joey Sugimoto. I hate my bed. I hate
     this house.
    I have to get out of here, I think.
    The sun is still bright through the windows and making little rainbows against the
     rain. Joey’s taking off his pants because he thinks we’re going to have sex. I turn
     away from him and curl up into a little ball.
    “Anna?” he says, but I don’t say anything. After we have sex and it’s dark out, Joey
     leaves like he always does. That night, when my mom comes home, she opens my door
     and sticks her head into my room.
    “Good night honey,” she says.

 
    after joey
    Joey moves away. It’s getting warmer and my mom has set the sprinklers to turn on
     automatically. They beat against the window when the sun rises and I wake early. In
     the bath I run my hands over my breasts, my stomach. I pretend they’re Joey’s hands.
    The house gapes. My key echoes in the lock. I wear his Skoal cap to school but someone
     grabs it off my head in the hall and I can’t get it back. I turn fifteen. We get a
     new cleaning lady. It’s spring, but without Joey the school year lumbers on. I’m waiting
     for something to happen.

 
    alone
    I decide to move downstairs into the stepbrother’s room. The younger one’s. It’s dark
     and colder than the rest of the house. The windows are level with the ground outside.
     I carry everything I need in one trip. Sheets, a blanket, towels for the bathroom.
     A pillow from my bed. A French magazine I found at the thrift store. I’m wearing the
     jeans the stepbrother left behind and my hair’s grown long again and tucks behind
     my ears. I go through a box of my mom’s and find a photo of her when she was my age.
     She looks serious and sad and I pin the picture to the wall near the bed and try to
     imagine what she was thinking. Her life when she was fourteen: her father leaving,
     her mom retreating. Does she remember? I pin my hair like hers and lay back on the
     bed. I take the picture down and hold it close to my face.
    When I visit the upstairs I feel like an explorer. I live downstairs now. A different
     life. A different person. My mom never comes down. She stands at the top of the stairs.
    “I’m leaving,” she calls.

 
    the dream
    I skip school and wander from room to room. I watch daytime TV. I make up illnesses
     and forge my mom’s name to the bottom of notes. “Please excuse my daughter’s absences
     this