The Metropolis by Matthew Gallaway Page A

just finished when a second group of freaks—all girls—showed up. Among them was Monica “Kittens” Gittens, who Martin was pretty sure had “liked” him the year before, in seventh grade. After a brief debate, they decided to go en masse to check out the woods up behind the golf course, where Dunfree claimed once to have found fifty dollars in the mud.
    “This is so lame,” Monica declared to Martin not long after they arrived. “Want to go for a walk?”
    Martin thought about how she used to look at him in math class whenever Mr. Pethil did something stupid—he was always transcribing the equations incorrectly from the book—because she and Martin were inevitably the first to notice. Martin had “gone out” with a few girls in seventh grade, but never for more than a week, and had been a little afraid of Monica because she was friends with some of the eighth-grade freaks. But he was taller now and almost an eighth grader himself, which made him more confident. “Okay,” he said. “Where?”
    “Follow me,” she said, but not more than twenty yards into the brush, she pulled him aside, away from the others. “Want to see something?”
    “Is it a perpetual motion machine?”
    “Don’t be a dork.” She pulled him up to her and put her face close to his, so he could stare into her irreverent eyes. “You like me, right?”
    “Yeah—I mean—do you like me?”
    She ignored the question. “How come you never talk to me then?”
    “Because I haven’t seen you all summer.”
    This seemed to please her, and when she smiled he did, too.
    She brushed her lips against his. “Do you know how to French?”
    “Yeah.” Martin adjusted the boner in his pants so it wouldn’t be so obvious and then kissed her for a while, far longer, in fact, than he had any other girl. Eventually she allowed him to put his hand under her shirt—he knew that guys were supposed to go for this, but no other girl had ever let him before—and rub it against her bra.
    “Should I take it off?” she asked. Martin nodded, and she told him to take his shirt off, too, which he did, after which they kissed some more. “Now take off your pants.”
    “Really?”
    “Come on,” she said and slid her hand down and unhooked the top button of his jeans. “Unless you don’t want to.”
    “No, I want to.” He raised himself to a kneeling position so that he could pull down his pants and underwear. He watched as she positioned herself in front of him and delicately wrapped her fingers around his cock. It took only a few tugs to jerk him off, but as amazed as he was to see it happen, he looked down at the ground and gulped when he realized that he no longer wanted to be anywhere near Monica Gittens.
    “That was cool,” he managed while he struggled to pull up his pants.
    “Was that your first hand job?” asked Monica rather clinically as she wiped her palm on the back of her jeans, down by the ankle.
    Martin shrugged, not wanting to admit or deny this. “Are we going out?”
    “Yeah, but I have to break up with Todd Mealy first.”
    “You don’t have to.”
    “Whatever you want,” said Monica, annoyed for reasons that eluded Martin, who couldn’t understand why she would ever be more interested in him than he was in her.
    In his room that night, he couldn’t decide what to think. One second he would tell himself that it had actually been pretty awesome to get a hand job from Kittens, but in the next he would admit that he felt a bit disappointed, since sex in any form was supposed to be “a” if not “the” highlight of life. If the thought of a blow job or going all the way—which he bet she would do if he could get a rubber—didn’t exactly thrill him, he knew that his ambivalence was another symptom of the ennui that had been infecting him since that morning, which now seemed a hundred years away. It occurred to him that he could no longer envision doing anything—whether playing hockey, painting masks, smoking, or