It was a knee to the balls.
Even though later Ricky said it was because he was kind of drunk from pre-gaming with the pineapple vodka his mom kept tucked down into the couch cushions next to her big ass imprint and that was why he barfed corndogs into that Freddy Halloween mask in front of Olyvia de Luca who he’d been in love with since second grade, it wasn’t. It was Brianna’s knee straight up into his balls, I saw it and felt it in my soul the way you feel sympathetic ball pain. That’s what made him puke. But before that was a bunch of other shit that led up to it like Brianna hurling that Slimer mask onto the roof of the traphouse Ricky wanted to break into to impress Olyvia and me getting half a hand job from Brianna in the back of Ricky’s Honda Fiesta even though we had a history like she was my cousin or something plus she had the Slimer mask on so it was weird. But you gotta really and truly appreciate handjobs, even half ones, even from a sorta fat girl who you’re kind of almost related to, even if her face is kind of bulging out of Slimer’s mouth. That’s a golden rule of mine. So I was feeling grateful. That’s another part of why.
I need to back up.
Ricky wasn’t what I would call a friend. More like he was someone I knew since forfuckingever so I was used to him and now he had a car. And the raddest job at this storefront his uncle owned that he changed depending on what time of year it was. Christmas shit at Christmas, pinwheels and flags and under the counter illegal fireworks in July, Halloween costumes through October. What was rad about it was that his uncle also sold weed out of the back and that’s mostly how he paid Ricky, so when he started working there regular our closeness had a little revival because I had no weed hookup to speak of.
The way it started was one day close to Halloween, I was sitting behind the counter sharing a joint with Ricky even though his uncle told us he would break our skulls if he caught us at it in the shop, but stuff like that just didn’t seem to matter to me longer than it took the adults to say it. Anyway he said, “Joey.” And he paused all soulful with his eyes squinted in the smoke. I stared at him. “Olyvia de Luca is the hottest fucking shit walking the earth.”
Immediately I’m not interested. This was not new. Also she wasn’t that hot. Skinny and she dressed slutty and she did that bored as fuck thing guys like Ricky lap up. I couldn’t really tell her apart, to be honest.
“She’s real tight with Brianna What’s-Her-Face,” Ricky said, and I knew who he meant, and now I knew why he was talking to me about this.
“Brianna Dorsey,” I said, and took the joint from him and it was wet and that was fucking gross but I guess that’s how bad I wanted to be stoned. You do what you need to.
“You know Brianna,” Ricky said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Think you could hook that up?” Ricky asked, all intense into my eyes. “Maybe we go out the four of us the Friday before Halloween, get messed up, fuck around the neighborhood?”
“I’m not like that with Brianna,” I said. “And why would Olyvia de Luca want to hang out with us anyway? Isn’t that your whole fucking deal, why you can’t bang her, because she’s too good and shit?”
“You get Brianna interested and she’ll come,” and I asked why and he said, “Because we’ve got a car and weed.”
I guess it was simple like that sometimes.
I agreed because I was sixteen and bored as fuck and on a constant low grade mission to make something happen in my completely weak- ass uneventful life. So I talked to Brianna and she seemed into it, which surprised me but did I mention she was kind of fat so that could be why. I wasn’t any big deal to look at but I don’t think she got a lot of offers to hang out with guys.
And yeah, like Ricky predicted, she got Olyvia to agree to go, so the Friday night before Halloween me and Ricky spiffed up a little, as best as we were able which really was not at all, and they met us at the costume shop at closing time.
He was walking weird, coming towards me and Olyvia and Brianna where we were hanging around his car under the orange streetlight which honestly wasn’t doing anything good for either of the girls and their kind of bad skin. We all stared at him with our hands in our hoodie pockets bouncing around in the cold. I said, “What’s with you, man?” kind of embarrassed because he could be truthfully hard to deal with sometimes and I was thinking he was going to make a joke about how his dick was chafing his ankle or something. That kind of thing was his jam and honestly probably why he couldn’t get a girl like Olyvia and why I suspected even with the car and the weed and Brianna along for safety in numbers or whatever reason girls had for flocking together, he was going to come up short again.
Then he got to the car and stuck his hands down his jeans and I tried to catch his eyes all panicky like what the fuck but before I could react too much he flopped these rubber masks out onto the hood of his car. And I relaxed a little.
“I lifted these for the night,” he said all proud. “I have to have them back tomorrow but for tonight they’re ours.”
“Why?” Olyvia asked kind of bitchy and that’s why this kind of girl wasn’t my type. I wanted a girl who was down for shit, down for something at least, and all Olyvia was down for was acting pissed to be wherever she was.
“Halloween,” Ricky said like it was obvious, which it was.
“And you brought them out in your underwear?” Brianna asked, flicking at one with the tip of her finger.
“Yeah, baby, I smeared it with my dick cheese for you,” Ricky said all leering, and again. Again with that shit. This was why he couldn’t bag a girl like Olyvia in the first place and he just didn’t get it. But that was Ricky so what were you going to do.
“Killer,” Brianna said, and put her hands back in her pockets.
“In my jeans, Christ, not my underwear,” Ricky said. “Anyway, these are top of the line. None of that dime store shit. Real rubber, not plastic, some of the best horror movie characters. Here.” He sorted them out. Freddy, Slimer, Chucky, and generic head wound ghoul type thing. Ricky snatched up Freddy for himself. I got Chucky. Brianna picked up Slimer. That left Olyvia with the generic one but she was looking all the hell over the place instead of picking it up. So Ricky took it for her.
Brianna put hers on. I’m not gonna lie. She looked stupid. Her face stuck out and the little Slimer arms waggled on the sides of her head.
“What is this thing?” she asked.
And me and Ricky both went, “Slimer!” like who doesn’t know Slimer? “The, you know, green ectoplasm ghost thing from Ghostbusters,” I said.
Brianna was about to say something back when Olyvia practically shouted, “God, can we please get in the car? It’s freezing out here.”
What a bitch. So we did, and Ricky put on this Def Leppard tape that he thought was cool because it was classic but it definitely wasn’t. Guys liked shitty stupid music. Girls liked the radio, even I knew that, so they could dick around with it. But that wasn’t the kind of thing Ricky knew.
He drove us to this place called the Dairyette and got out and without asking got a bunch of corndogs, which seemed like a weird choice, but okay.
“On me,” he said, getting back into the car. Now, I could tell Brianna liked a corndog, the girl could eat a corndog obviously, which I’ve got no real problem with. And she put away a couple. But there was no way Olyvia was going to eat something like that. If it was me trying to get in her pants and I gave a shit I would have bought that girl a lemonade or something so she could pick at the straw and dick around with the ice. That was her type of shit, for sure. But Ricky wanted corndogs and he was bankrolling so that’s what we had.
“You don’t want one?” he asked Olyvia with his mouth full.
“Pass,” she said like he had offered her dog crap, and stared out the window. I looked at Brianna but she didn’t notice. She was digging with her teeth at that little hard dough thing on the corndog stick. Slimer arms jiggling.
Then he got out a joint and that was the most action I saw out of Olyvia, her pinching the joint out of Ricky’s fingers without touching him and taking a drag and then passing it. That was the most her mannequin ass moved. Probably the whole reason she’d come. Ricky kept saying, “Good shit, good shit,” and we all just stayed quiet because it was decent weed, not that great, so there was nothing to go on about really. He filled the silence and I just zoned out.
Finally Ricky turned the car on and said, “Now for some mayhem, guys and ghouls,” and basically when he said guys and ghouls I wanted to die or throw up or gouge my eyes out or something, it was so fucking awful, you just cannot make this shit up. I was regretting this whole thing. Like was it really worth the weed to be hanging out with him? Other people had weed. Other people had cars. Guys and ghouls. Good Goddamn. I sank down in the seat and picked at the hair on that Chucky mask and closed my eyes and decided I would just say and do as little as possible until it was over. Like playing dead like if a bear was trying to eat you. That’s how embarrassing it was. As bad as a bear eating you.
So he was driving towards something, I didn’t even know what, and I was lying there with my eyes closed, when Brianna’s hand landed on my thigh. I opened my eyes up quick and she was staring at me all intense through the Slimer mouth with teeth on her forehead and teeth under her chin and her fat face kind of bulging and, you know, the little arms, but her hand was moving with little to no hesitation up to the crotch of my jeans where my dick lay totally asleep. Hadn’t thought I’d need it. But here we were. And it woke up fast, as they do. I was watching her and there was light passing over us and away in the dark car and she didn’t seem to need anything from me. Like she didn’t seem to want me to kiss her or anything. So, cool. So I dropped my head back against the seat and closed my eyes again and let Brianna maul my hard-on through as best she could with her hand kind of twisted around backwards. Bringin’ on the Heartbreak was playing and that song is the shit and it was just not bad at all.
Then Ricky stopped the car and Def Leppard fell silent and Brianna pulled her hand away. I had to open my eyes and face this shit again. Maybe we would get somewhere private and I could see what was up. Get her to keep going. I don’t care if a girl is a little fat. I straight up do not fucking care.
I looked around, blinking, and figured out that weirdly enough we were in my neighborhood, in the worst part of it. Ricky had parked by an alley. He put on his mask and talked to us through it and it was muffled as hell and the mask was a little crooked so Freddy looked more like Sloth from The Goonies.
“Put on your disguises,” he said. “We’re gonna fuck some shit up.”
I looked one last time at Brianna with my regular face and made this expression like, I don’t fucking know, we’re not that close, and put on the Chucky mask. It smelled like a million dead condoms and it itched. I thought about what Ricky had said about dick cheese. And then tried not to think about it.
Olyvia goes, “Okay I am not putting on this mask and fucking up my hair, so.”
“Come on,” Ricky said, coaxing her, “it’ll be fun. It’s a hatchet wound.” Then through my small ass eye holes I saw him turn his Sloth Freddy head towards me. “Hatchet wound,” he said, and I could feel him grinning under there. “Get it? Hatchet wound.”
“Yeah, man, I fucking got it,” I said. My voice sounded like a hand was over my mouth.
“I don’t get it,” Brianna said.
“Don’t worry about it,” Ricky said, and opened his door and got out. Olyvia got out too, I watched her hair swing out behind her through my mask and the backs of her thighs under her short as fuck skirt. She was going to bitch about being cold. No question.
So we grouped together on the sidewalk, Freddy and Chucky and Slimer/Brianna and Olyvia with her hands in her hoodie pockets and no mask because of her hair. Ricky had her mask shoved in his back pocket.
“What the fuck, wait,” Brianna said. “Why do we need disguises? Mine’s not even a disguise. There’s a hole where my face is?”
“Whatever, it’ll still work,” Ricky said dismissively. He turned to walk up the sidewalk and we all kind of trailed after him. “People will be like, who was it? And they’ll be like, Oh it was fucking Slimer.” He laughed his high pitched laugh, alone, his breath rising in the air like smoke out of the mask, above his crooked ass rubber burn scar head. It looked weird without the fedora.
“What’s the plan?” I asked really loud so he’d hear me, not because I cared or because I wanted to do whatever he had in mind, but because we were literally a block away from my place and I was trying to figure if I could get Brianna through my window without my mom hearing and bang her on the floor because my mattress was squeaky as fuck. It seemed like a thing that could happen, if we could wrap this up and skate without Olyvia losing her shit about Brianna leaving her alone with Ricky. Which, I mean, I kind of wouldn’t blame her for.
“We’re gonna break into a traphouse and see what kind of freaky shit they have in there.” Okay. So Ricky was wanting to do some hoodrat shit to impress Olyvia, who wasn’t rich or anything, but everyone knew her scary Italian dad was a coke dealer which meant they had a pool and she had a cell phone. So she was definitely a cut above our poor asses.
“Well whatever, can we just do it already?” Olyvia said. “It’s fucking cold out here.” There it was, as predicted.
“Just do it already,” Ricky repeated. “As you wish, m’lady,” and that shit was worse than guys and ghouls, I actually tripped over my fucking feet with the force of how bad I wanted to die. Who said this shit? M’lady, holy Christ. “Here we are,” Ricky said, making this sweeping gesture with his arm like he was, what the fuck if I know, a knight or something. M’lady. I turned my fucking Chucky head all the way towards Brianna to see if she was grossed out by Ricky’s existence the way Olyvia seemed to be, given that Olyvia was now walking on the curb like a tightrope and kind of falling off of it to get away from him, and Brianna’s face stopped me. Fucked me up.
Okay so now I need to go back again.
I said she was kind of like my cousin. That was when we were little. So here’s the story with that. Our moms worked together at the CVS on Peavy Road. My dad was already gone by then, he was knocking my mom around and shit and she booted him. Brianna’s dad was doing that shit too and, I mean I was little, but even little I could tell it was way worse. From the shit I would hear the adults say and from the way Brianna was. There was worse stuff that went on at her house.
What happened was when she finally got the balls to leave him, Brianna’s mom I mean, they came and stayed at our place. There was only just the two bedrooms so Brianna the whole year we were in third grade and the summer before and after too, she lived in my room and we slept on the floor on a pallet. It seemed weird for us to both sleep in my bed and I felt like a dick sleeping up there with her on the floor so we slept on a bunch of blankets and pillows in the middle of my floor.
So for a while there we got kind of crazy close the way little kids do. And, you know, I mean, I don’t like to make a lot of it because everybody’s been through this shit, but the stuff that went on in our houses made us close too. Like we’d been through a lot of the same shit. Our dads knocking our moms around and drugs and fighting and shit. My dad, he was a cokehead pretty brutal. I don’t mess with the stuff because of him. Her dad, it was meth. He was a dealer and he cooked it at their house. He would get crazy on Brianna’s mom. She was fucked up good when they came to stay, I remember seeing her bruises and shit through the kitchen door where she was crying and shaking and smoking with my mom. Brianna was real quiet in my room with me. We sat there in the dark for a long time, leaning up against the edge of my bed. I didn’t know what to say. I’d been through it, sort of, and really I knew there was nothing you could say. It was just life, fucking with you. Just your parents living out their fucked lives.
Then what happened was her dad showed up. My mom had a bunch of chains on the door because our neighborhood is shit so he couldn’t get in but he tried. He beat on the door and screamed until they threatened to call the cops and then he took off because there were warrants out for him.
After he was gone I looked over at Brianna in the dark and she was crying silent and her head was down and then I smelled it and I realized she’d peed on this blanket she was sitting on. Peed because of her dad’s voice. And shit, I was afraid of my dad like we all were, but I never did that shit. That’s when I knew it was something worse, something deeper and meaner than what I’d gone through, and I felt all this fear and sadness and misery sliding down inside me like when I saw my mom cry and I felt like I had to fix her hurting or I would die.
So I took hold of the edge of the blanket and pulled it out from under her and went to my window and tossed it out into the side yard and said, rambling the way I always do when I’m nervous, “That blanket’s always been shit, like, my least favorite of many least favorites.” Like I had big blanket opinions. I don’t know. I was a dumb little kid. Then I opened my closet door and pulled the chain to turn on the light and saw her face wrecked up with tears and it made my heart beat all fucking high in my chest but I didn’t react. I pulled a shirt off the hanger and found some sort of halfway clean pajama pants on my floor and a towel that I later realized had a big come stain crusted on one side because I started young with that stuff, but she didn’t know or care. I held it all out to her and she got what it was for. She heaved herself up and went into my closet and cleaned off. We slept on the floor, on other blankets, and she sort of smelled like pee but I didn’t care.
That was like eight years ago. Then eventually her mom got on her feet enough to move out and we drifted apart like kids do. Shit got distracting and I kind of forgot.
But I remembered it all fast like something crashing down inside me when I saw her face that night, in the Slimer mask, under the streetlight outside the traphouse Ricky had a mind to break into because Jesus Christ. As if Ricky wasn’t already fucking bad enough at life. It wasn’t just some abandoned place, it was Brianna’s house foreclosed on after her dad finally got popped and went to jail and of course her mom couldn’t make the payments. It was the house where her dad had cooked and sold meth and beat her mom and done whatever he’d done to Brianna that made her pee on my bedroom floor when she heard the sound of his voice. Still boarded up after all this fucking time because why would anyone want to come here. It was that fucking house. I know because she showed me. Because we walked there holding hands like Hansel and Gretel or some shit looking at her fucked life from the safety of distance, the safety of being together and knowing what it felt like to come through it.
And now Brianna was standing there outside the house with her mouth open and she was going to fucking come apart if I didn’t change what was happening on the fucking double and maybe even if I did but at least if I could just get her out of there then she could lose her shit in the privacy of my bedroom where she had before. That’s when I had my second realization that it was weird weird weird that I’d thought about fucking her on the floor of my room where she lived for more than a whole year, as a little kid, where we lay there sleeping and sometimes she sucked her thumb and it woke me up but I never told her. Because I didn’t want her to feel embarrassed. And I still didn’t.
Yeah so I had to stop this or try at least.
“Hey,” I said to Ricky through my mask which was now totally slick inside with sweat and condensation from breathing. I felt stupid talking through it, and stupid talking to Ricky with his crooked ass Sloth looking Freddy head. “Hey, let’s bail on this, this is dumb.”
“Don’t puss out, Chucky,” he said, and he started up the dead lawn to the front door. The neighborhood was weirdly quiet for a Friday, usually you could hear somebody with music on or sirens somewhere or some couple screaming but it was like the whole world was asleep around us. Creepy. I felt it up my spine.
“Dude,” I said. I pulled off my mask and the cold air was like ice on my face all wet and slimy as fuck. He was going to return these to the fucking store? Disgusting. I mopped off my face with my hoodie sleeve. I went back to trying to reason with him. “Ricky. Stop. This is fucking stupid. There’s nothing in there, it’s a fucking traphouse, it’s the same shit they all have and I don’t feel like getting AIDS from some junky needle, so can we bail and figure out something else to do?”
“What’s your problem?” he said, and he was getting sort of nasty. I looked around at Olyvia and it was like she was waiting for the bus on the curb and had nothing to do with us. I looked at Brianna and she was breathing fast. Fast as fuck. Steam coming out of her open mouth. Slimer arms kind of trembling. I got this rush of heat all over, of something, like protectiveness. Like when I held her hand walking to look at her house when we were little. Then I felt her hand on my dick in the car and it seemed sweet, like I don’t know, like a handjob what was available to us now that we were too old to hold hands. It had to be something else that we did to get close, something more intense. I don’t know if that’s how she meant it. But that’s how it felt in that moment. And I felt like I was going to explode with that need to fix her hurting. So I drew in my breath.
But see, she didn’t need me anymore.
“We’re not going in there,” she said to Ricky. “You’re not going in there.”
Ricky turned full around. He pulled off his mask and his face was slick with sweat, his hair standing up in peaks. He gave her this little smile and I felt my guts sink. I had seen him get mean. Real fucking mean. He wasn’t a good guy, really, that’s why we just smoked weed and drove around in his car and I didn’t really count him as a friend. Because he was kind of rotten inside. I knew it. I didn’t like to think about it but I knew it.
“What are you gonna do about it?” he said soft.
And Brianna stepped up to him. She squared up to him in her fucking Slimer mask. Honestly, as stupid as she looked in it, that mask was dope. Those little arms were real detailed and the white teeth and red gums and all that bright green rubber. It was the coolest one of the four, which meant it had to cost the most, and his uncle would be most likely to miss it if Ricky didn’t have it back in the store by morning.
She pulled that shit right off her head. And her hair was all flat and wet, greasy, but she was nothing like Olyvia. She didn’t give a single fuck. She reared her arm back and flung that Slimer mask as high as she could and it landed on the roof of the house.
“Fuck you,” she said right up on him like a dude who wanted to fight and I grinned. Because I mean, it was fucking rad.
“Fuck,” Ricky screamed, and then for reasons I would never understand, he yanked his gross ass Freddy mask back down over his head. “You fucking fat cunt,” he screamed into her face, his voice flattened by the rubber between them, and in the neatest cleanest move I would ever see in my natural born fucking life, Brianna took hold of his scrawny arms and turned him towards her like a child she was positioning to put on his winter coat or something, and then she drove her big knee straight and calm and with full power directly up into his balls. The most vicious hit to the balls I ever witnessed.
I hated the bastard but Goddamn, my leg came up like to protect my nuts from the idea of it, one leg up like a flamingo or some shit, and I felt that shit like I said in my very soul. Holy Christ. Brianna backed up a step like she knew what was coming and then he belched huge and corndogs partially digested shot out from under that Freddy mask and through the little mouth slit and I shit you not, I shit you not, out the fucking eyeholes. Like he was crying puke.
It was gross. But he had it coming like a motherfucker, so believe that I laughed my fucking ass off.
Brianna came over to me and I half expected her to take my hand like we did walking back to my house eight years ago, but she didn’t. Instead she took my Chucky mask and tossed it as high as she could over her head into the tree branches above us. We left Olyvia there doing whatever the fuck she was doing and Ricky there howling and puking and falling over in it and walked to my house, slow, quiet like that first night in my room.
I didn’t know what would happen when we got there. I knew my head smelled like a rubber mask and we were neither of us looking any kind of good. I knew Brianna would never be my girlfriend not because she was fat but because we knew too much about each other. I knew we were deep deep down the same in ways that mattered and connected in ways that mattered but it didn’t need talking about. I knew I would take her in through the front door instead of my bedroom window and she would stop and say hi to my mom.
I didn’t know much but I knew that.
Chelsea Laine Wells is a graduate of the Columbia College of Chicago Fiction Department. She served twice as a co-editor of Hair Trigger, Columbia College’s yearly literary anthology, as well as a judge in Columbia’s Young Author Writing Competition for many years. Her work has appeared in Third Point Press, The Other Stories, Litro, Cease, Cows, The Butter, PANK, wigleaf, Heavy Feather, Change Seven, Split Lip, Molotov Cocktail, Paper Darts, Little Fiction, and others. Honors include first place in the Columbia Scholastic Press Association Awards, first place in the Guild Complex Literary Awards, finalist in Heavy Feather’s chapbook contest, nomination for two Pushcarts and four Best of the Nets, and a 2015 Best of the Net win, among others. She is also founding editor of Hypernova Lit, an online journal dedicated to publishing the writing and visual art of high school students, which she runs with her husband Bryan Lindsey. Chelsea works as a public high school creative writing and English teacher and lives in the Oak Cliff area of Dallas, TX. Her work is represented by Maria Massie of Massie McQuilken. Find out more www.chelsealainewells.com.
