‘I mean ... who’s Gayl, then? I mean, really, to you?’
‘You’re trying to figure her out now? You’re smart, aren’t you?’
I didn’t know what to say. I’m not smart when it comes to you, I wanted to say. I would be smart if you fucked me! Please fuck me and I’ll know everything I need to.
But Elijah got up from my bed and walked out of my bedroom where I thought we would’ve done something. I followed him through my own house. He looked at Jody’s old room first, reached under her pillow and opened her closet. All she had in there were stacks of old shoes, boots and clothes. Then Elijah skipped across the hall into my parents’ room, straight into their walk-in closet. He noticed that the side where my mom’s clothes were supposed to be was empty. There was just one thing hanging, a white off-the-shoulder dress, something she hadn’t worn in years. Elijah didn’t poke much around in Jeff’s baby-blue room with all the posters of anime. He walked back down the hallway, then down the stairs. In the kitchen he looked in our fridge full of takeout containers. My pan of pre-stirred, pre-made spaghetti bolognese had thick yellow spots congealed on the top. Elijah grabbed a couple of old purple grapes that were rolling around on the bottom of the fruit drawer. He didn’t wash them before he popped them in his mouth.
‘These are anti-estrogen,’ Elijah said. ‘Not like that flesh.’
I felt too embarrassed to say something. It didn’t even occur to me that Elijah was a vegetarian but now the robes he wore made a bit more sense. Rastafarians are vegetarians, I was sure Jody knew that.
‘Animal is bad for you,’ Elijah said, as he flicked my boob through my shirt.
Even that crappy flick made my nipples hard.
I followed Elijah down to the basement, my father’s lair. I hadn’t been down there since my mother left. My dad had strung makeshift curtains around a mattress on the floor. Inside the hut was his computer too, on a cheap brown desk.
‘I like this,’ Elijah said. ‘Privacy. Men need that.’
Elijah turned on my father’s computer from a switch at the back. It smelled like my dad inside these curtains, but sharper, like the inside of a boot. I had no idea why he’d walled himself off in a fort but it felt kind of creepy being inside it. Elijah didn’t look at me as he waited for the computer. He sat down on my dad’s swirly brown chair and spun around in it a bunch of times. It was really weird now to have him here. I didn’t feel brave at all anymore. Elijah hadn’t wanted to stay in my bedroom. He wanted to be in my father’s chair.
I think it would have been my mother, though, not my father, who’d be the most shocked at this scene: an older man, a Rastafarian vegetarian in a white angel robe, MYRA’S LOVER, twirling around in Neil’s curtain-walled, stinky, unnatural fort.
Elijah was pulling up a bunch of files. He seemed to know what he was doing.
‘Don’t do that!’ I said. ‘It’s my dad’s stuff.’
‘Your daddy watches Girls Gone Wild?’
‘Don’t,’ I said again, going closer to the screen. I was getting worried about Elijah fucking up all the programs.
‘Looky look,’ Elijah laughed.
A photo came up on the screen full-size: it was a twenty-year-old girl in a bright pink string bikini who was using one red-nailed finger to pull the elastic away from her thigh. Elijah clicked. Another photo came up of that girl with the red-nailed finger inside herself. Her teeth were ridged. There was this blurry naked guy in the background holding a beer.
‘Cum shot,’ Elijah said, talking to the screen. ‘Fuck her. Fuck her.’
‘What is that?’ I said.
I knew what it was. My fucking computer upstairs was overrun with it too.
‘Your family photos?’
Elijah laughed again. I didn’t believe that my father was looking at this. Elijah kept clicking, there were thousands of pictures and videos too of college girls in bikinis rubbing oil on their tits. I remembered that porn in Key West, my very first porn. Oh god, my father. I was going to throw up. Me in his fort and our porn was a revolting kind of link.
‘I can find Gayl on here too,’ Elijah said.
But now a blond girl in a bright pink bikini danced with her top hanging off and her fingers digging up in another twenty-year-old’s bikini. Their tits were touching, they were rubbing and giggling.
Sweat prickled under my arms. Elijah twisted around in my dad’s swirly chair and got me to sit on the edge of his knee. Our basement had walls that looked like wood.
‘Who are these girls, is this all from the States?’ I don’t know why I pretended I didn’t know about porn.
‘Yeah, Angel. Key West, maybe.’
Is that why we could find Gayl in the porn?
Elijah pulled one of my hands behind me and stuck it on his crotch. His cock was bulging under his robe. With my arm twisted back, the videos kept playing. Bikini tops off, the bottoms off too. I could see inside the girls, they were parting themselves. I felt myself slipping off Elijah’s knee. Those girls didn’t have any hair on their vaginas. I was happy when I started growing hair down there.