Irony

The chairs in Mr. Moke’s fourth period senior English class are arranged in a circle. As far as Hunter is concerned, the good thing about this is that he sits straight across from Sara Ellen Smith. Hunter has such a crush on Sara Ellen Smith. She has blond curly hair and blue eyes and a dancer’s body that makes Hunter blush just to think about it. On the other hand, he is all the way across the circle, and usually Mr. Moke stands in the center of the circle, rambling on about one thing or another—allegory, irony, poetic justice—all too often obscuring Hunter’s view of pretty Sara Ellen Smith. Lee Lolly, the lucky dog, sits right next to Sara. Sometimes Hunter thinks there is no justice in the world, poetic or otherwise.

At baseball practice that afternoon, Lee asks Hunter to help him write the paragraph or two of description due tomorrow for Moke’s class. “You have a way with words,” Lee says. “Me, I can’t even type. The way things are at home, I can’t even think.”

“Why don’t you get your pal Sara Ellen Smith to help you?”

“Sara Ellen!” Lee snorts. She’s a Lesbo for sure. She wouldn’t give me the time of day.”

“Really?” Hunter says. “How do you know?”

“Cuz she’s brainy and beautiful,” Lee says. “Dead giveaway. Also she has short fingernails. That’s so she can penetrate her pussy without scratching herself. Short fingernails—it’s one of the top ten proven Lesbian indicators.”

“What are the other nine?”

“I don’t know,” Lee says. “Short fingernails is the only one I can remember.”

“You’re too much, man,” Hunter says, but he agrees to do Lee’s paper for him.

“Fucking fantastic,” Lee says. “I’ll never forgive you for this. I mean ... shit, you know what I mean.”

At school the next morning, when Lee asks if Hunter has the paper, Hunter says sure, but he hadn’t printed it out yet—he’ll give it to Lee before class. “And what’s your code?” Moke had assigned each student a number so that the descriptive paragraphs could be presented anonymously—the better to foster forthright discussion.

“Oh, yeah, I’m number six-two-six,” Lee says. “What number are you?”

“Five eighty-four,” Hunter says. In fact he is number three fifteen, but what difference does it make to Lee what Hunter’s number is?

Hunter prints out Lee’s paper in the computer lab before fourth period and hands it to Lee as they walk into Moke’s classroom. “Cool,” Lee says, dropping the paper into the assignment bin on Moke’s desk. “I’ll never forget you for this. Hey, see, I got it right!”

“Right,” Hunter says, and he drops his own paper on top of Lee’s.

At first it looks like things couldn’t have worked out better—Moke shuffles the papers and hands them out to be read, and as luck would have it, Sara Ellen Smith gets Lee’s paper.

Hunter finds this out when Sara reads the title. “The Way to a Man’s Hurt.” What a beautiful voice Sara Ellen has. Just the way her lips part when she speaks ... every word, every syllable—beautiful, valuable, exquisite, like a perfect kiss. Hunter watches her from across the circle, entranced. How lucky that Moke is sitting on his desk, swinging his legs, instead of standing in the circle blocking Hunter’s view.

The dinner of pot roast with potatoes and carrots couldn’t have been better, and Mrs. Smith even served wine with the meal, a rare treat for Lester. At home he’d be lucky to have water. Lester had two full glasses of the Pinot Noir and felt tingly all over.

Oh, Hunter loves the way Sara Ellen pronounces Pinot Noir. He wishes he had taken French. If only he’d known back then that Sara would be in that class. But now he wonders whether he should have had Mrs. Smith make something else for dinner. Something French. Last night when he’d composed the paragraph, all he could think about was Sara sipping the wine. The liquid touching her lips, her tongue. The flavor of it filling her mouth, sending its message through her body. Surely she has wine with her supper. Hunter’s mom often makes pot roast. Excellent pot roast. Write what you know.

After the meal, Mrs. Smith says, “Why don’t you two lovebirds go downstairs and find something for dessert?”

Sara reads the sentence as if nothing is amiss. She glides over the words.

Lester and Sara fold their napkins and get up from the table, and Lester follows Sara down the basement steps.

Now Hunter wishes he had written linen napkins. Too late. But wait—paper napkins wouldn’t be folded, would they? Unnecessary description. In his mind, Hunter can see the napkins resting on the linen tablecloth, Sara’s and Lester’s almost touching. Earlier the napkins had been resting in their laps, Sara’s and Lester’s. Hunter wonders whether he should have said something about what they were wearing. A pretty skirt for Sara, ordinary trousers for Lester. And then he could have said something about the napkins on the table, about the small stain of gravy on Lester’s. What a pig!

At the foot of the stairs, Sara pushes open the heavy door and steps through. It’s dark in there. “Come on, don’t be a scaredy-cat,” Sara says to Lester. He follows her into the darkness, bumping into her. It isn’t a hard bump, but Lester is embarrassed, because his boner has brushed Sara’s hip.

Hunter had debated whether to include Lester’s boner. While working on the story, he’d added it in and taken it out several times. He’d tried erection and hard-on, but in the end he decided boner was the exact word he wanted. And Sara read it without a stumble, as if a boner brushing her hip were the most natural thing in the world. Hunter loved her for that.

“What is this place?” Lester mumbles, trying to cover his embarrassment with words.

Hunter’s ears burn as he waits for the critical next sentence.

“It used to be my dad’s darkroom before he ran off,” Sara says, “but now it’s my panty.”

Only Sara has not read panty, as Hunter had written it. She’s read pantry. Hunter is both relieved and disappointed.

“Let me get the light so you can see.”

Hunter holds his breath.

The click of the light sounds almost like a zipper, and then Lester can see. There’s the bare bulb, bright and swaying, and there are the shelves, bare themselves, and there is Sara, standing before him, smiling as if she’s just performed an expert magic trick. “Go ahead,” Sara says. “Prick something out.”

Except Sara reads pick something out. And Hunter thinks he sees a small smile on Sara’s lips, almost as if she’s performed a magic trick of her own.

Lester is bewildered. “I don’t see anything,” he says.

“Oh, dear,” Sara replies. “Were you expecting a pubic display? Maybe you just have to look harder.”

Sure enough, Sara has substituted public display for pubic display. But her smile has disappeared. She seems irked. She’d paused at pubic. Almost stuttered.

Sara takes Lester’s hand. “I was hoping somewhere down here you’d find a perfect peach. One firm but ripe, covered by the softest down, filled with the sweetest juice. Do you like peaches and cream?”

Sara stops there. She looks up at Mr. Moke.

“Is that the end?” Moke asks.

“I think so,” Sara says. “There’s one more line but...” She shrugs.

“But what?” Moke says.

“But it’s not typed like the rest. It’s hand-written.”

“Hmmmm,” Moke says. “What does it say?”

Sara looks down at the paper. “It says, ‘Can’t finish. Pen is out of ink.’”

But Hunter knows that’s not quite accurate. Intending the words to be nearly illegible, he’d scrawled in blue ballpoint, Cunt finish. Penis outta ink.

“Okay,” Moke says. “Okay. Interesting. What do you think of it?”

The room is quiet. Lee appears bewildered as usual. Sara is studying the page. After a moment, Sara looks up. She says, “I think whoever wrote this is a real asshole.” She’s looking straight across the room, straight at Hunter.

Fifth period is half study hall, half lunch. Usually Hunter goes to lunch first, but today he isn’t hungry. He goes to the library and finds an empty table in the far corner facing the wall and a badly faded map of Antarctica. A moment later Lee Lolly slides into the seat across from Hunter.

“Whew!” Lee says. “That was something else.”

“Right. Something else.”

“But you know what? I’m safe. And you know why?”

“No, why?” Hunter says.

“Because by mistake I gave you the wrong code number. I had them mixed up. I’m two-sixty-two, not six-twenty-six. Isn’t that lucky? Isn’t that fantastic?”

Hunter is about to say, “Fantastic,” but there is Sara Ellen Smith, slipping into the seat next to Lee. “Isn’t what fantastic?” she says.

“Nothing,” Lee says. “We were just talking about some of the stories in Moke’s class.”

“Oh yeah?” Sara Ellen says. “Which one was yours?”

“Um,” Lee says. “They kinda didn’t get to mine.”

“That’s too bad,” Sara Ellen says. “Maybe tomorrow.”

“Yeah, well,” Lee says. “I didn’t actually write one.”

“No?” Sara says.

Hunter stands up. “I think I’m gonna get the early lunch after all.”

Sara Ellen nods. “Probably pot roast again. Better hurry before it’s all gone.”

But Hunter doesn’t leave. He stands there watching Sara play with one of the small silver rivets in the upper corner of Lee’s jeans. “You know, Lee,” Sara Ellen says as her forefinger circles the tiny button, “maybe I could help you write a story.” Around and around her finger goes. Hunter thinks her fingernails are beautiful. Perfect. As perfect as everything else about her.

“You know what else?” Sara says. “These little silver things on your jeans remind me of something. You know what they remind me of?”

Lee shakes his head. Sara’s finger goes around and around, but in ever-widening circles.

“They remind me of a clitoris,” Sara says. “You know what a clitoris is?”

“Um,” Lee says.

“Of course a clitoris isn’t exactly silver. It more a pink. And it isn’t exactly this hard. Even when it’s erect. Did you know that, Lee?”

“Uh-uh,” Lee answers, barely able to get the words out.

“It’s funny, though,” Sara says. “When a girl gets an erection. When her clit is all stiff with excitement, they don’t call it an erection. Or a stiffy. Or a boner. Do you know what they call it?”

Lee doesn’t answer. Hunter can see that Sara isn’t so much circling the little silver rivet as using it as a base, and she is stroking from there along the crease in Lee’s Levis. Clearly Lee has an erection beneath the crease. With each foray from the silver rivet, Sara’s forefinger nudges the head of Lee’s penis. Soon the head is extended nearly to the rivet. Sara’s finger presses and smooths, working the material and the flesh towards the silver button.