To Be Ugly And Stay Kind

Paul got undressed while the water poured into the tub. He unbuttoned his shirt and took off his pants and underwear. He sat on the toilet and pulled off his socks. He put all of his clothes into a pile on the floor and pushed it against the door.

He got in front of the mirror and looked himself over. He had to wipe it with his arm. He poked and prodded at his naked body and then he smelt his crotch. When he didn't wash for a few days his genitals started to smell like copper.

Silvery stretch marks ran from his armpits all the way down to the underside of his thighs. He followed them with his fingers. They were like regular scars, except he could feel a sort of coarse tissue sliding underneath whenever he touched them. They were thickest at his waist, where they crossed the sweaty tracts left by where his rolls folded over.

He looked at his flabby face and his muddy skin, at the purple birth mark on the left side of his nose. He touched the acne scabbing between his eyebrows and looked into his brown eyes. The skin below them was pale and unhealthy-looking, but the flesh was still smooth and firm.

He tried to look at himself as objectively as possible, from different angles, trying to be reasonable, but the same thing kept passing through his head: I'll never have sex. Who'd ever want to rub against all those stretch marks and zits and oil? What kind self-respecting person? Maybe another fat, ugly, pimply person. But Paul didn't really want to have sex with someone like that. He wanted to have sex with someone he found attractive. He wouldn't even be able to get hard with someone like that.

He climbed into the tub. He lay there and listened to the water ripple and the sounds from the floor below. Paul's sister Liz was having a big sleepover. She'd turned fourteen that day, five years younger than Paul. He could hear her friends moving around beneath him.

He closed his eyes and let his head fall beneath the surface. His lips parted and he slowly exhaled. His whole body seemed to relax and soften then.

Paul stood up in the tub. He brought a towel down from the rack and dried his hair. He stepped out of the tub and ran the towel down his arms, his front and back, down his thick legs, then tossed it on the floor. He put on his underwear. He stepped into his pants and put on his shirt. He sat on the toilet and pulled on his socks.

He walked down the hall and into his room, shutting the door behind him. He sat down at his computer and, after going through a series of encrypted folders, opened a twenty-second porn trailer.

He liked this particular trailer because the girl in it had these huge, unlikely tits. With nimble skills to her fingers she bends over the laid-back guy and starts jerking him off. Their skin looked soft and polished, a plasticky orange colour, with no stretch marks, pimples, or any strange discolorations.

Paul played through that twenty-second trailer at least half a dozen times before he heard someone coming to his door. He closed the media player and turned just as the door was flung open and Liz and her friends came crowding in. He tried to act cool about it.

"Hey Paw-el," drawled Liz, making a show in front of her friends, "wah-tcha doo-win?"

"Sitting at your computer with no windows open?" asked one of Liz's friends from across the room.

"He was watching porn, probably anime hentai shit," said his sister. Her friends laughed. "No, really, I've been through his computer. He's got a whole load of that shit. Can you believe that?"

Her friends were making grossed-out noises as they shuffled about Paul's room. Liz looked at him when she spoke.

"My brother is such a loser. He's such a Japanophile. He listens to such gay Japanese music because he thinks it'll turn him into a Japanese anime character or something, so he can jump into his favorite unfunny retarded anime shows."

She paused, looking around. He had a chance, right after she'd finished talking, to say something. But he lost his anger. He missed it and she continued. "So he can have sex with the cartoon characters and they'll all fall in love with him so he can escape this horrible cruel reality where he's a Japanophile faggot."

Some of her friends were still laughing, but a few others, among them a very westernized Japanese girl, were looking a little uncomfortable. They left his room. Paul noticed right away the different smell. Whenever there'd be a bunch of her friends over for the night the whole house would reek of pussy in the morning, and it was like that, only to a much lesser extent, and more cosmetic.

Paul got some of the pizza for dinner and drank Tab from his stockpile underneath his bed. He drank four at once to get a head spin. He drank a whole case. He wanted to sleep but he couldn't.

He had a hard time finding music that wasn't Japanese or made for a videogame to drown out the music pounding away below him.

Liz and her friends ate almost everything in the house. They went out to get more, and Paul watched them walk down the street to the Mac's on the corner.

He got so bored he even started to work out a little. The glow of a streetlight popped softly in and out with the breeze as he did push-ups, sit-ups, and soon he was hungry again.

So he tiptoed down the staircase and into the kitchen. The light was on. There was some water left in the water cooler so he poured himself a glass. He looked around. Not expecting to find anything, he came across an old box of frosted flakes pushed to the back of the pantry. He emptied it into a bowl and dumped the last of the milk over it.

He sat down at the kitchen table, the bowl held between his arms as he hunched over. He had his face right down to the bowl when two of Liz's friends walked in from the main hall.

One was Sandy Mcmurry, who came over a lot. The other was that Japanese girl he'd only seen today. The gradation of the colour of her skin reminded Paul of the silicone flesh of one of those life-sized sex dolls. She was shiny and glistening, indirectly lit from the inside, but with this eerie, Vermeer-like stillness to her.

They both walked stiff. They hesitated in the kitchen while Paul watched. Paul saw that Sandy carried a stuffed Mac's bag.

In the silence Paul heard a clock ticking but couldn't see it, and he resisted the urge to turn his head back and look.

"Hey," said Sandy. The Asian girl waved.

Paul shot up his free hand in a sporadic, tic-like salute and said "hi." They just stood there. "Are people still up?"

"Everyone is?" answered the Japanese girl demurely. She had this way of appending questions marks to her statements. "But I want to sleep. I'm so tired?" He watched her face as she spoke. He liked everything about it. Her sharp dark eyes, her small precise lips, and specially her dimples.

"Me too," yawned Sandy and, after a pause, added "let's get back to the group."

They looked at Paul one last time and he nodded. He watched them turn the corner. He was staring at the back of the other girl, thinking about how her actuated hips slid and swung as she walked. He crazily imagined cutting her a bit, not in a kind of violent perv way, but just to see what came out, picturing something like mother of pearl goo oozing out, and her ass full of maple syrup.

Afterward he walked back to his room, shutting the door behind him. He unbuttoned his shirt. He took off his pants and underwear. He sat on a chair and pulled off his socks. He climbed into bed. He lay there and tried to sleep.

His face couldn't keep still. It kept grimacing, grinning, and soon the tears began to flow and sobs shook him. And the more he tried to stop it the harder it went.

Later on he felt disgusted with himself for being so self-pitying, so intoxicated with feeling sorry for himself, but he still felt that life was being unreasonable.

The alarm went off and Paul woke up. He flipped open the covers and swung his legs out of bed and sat on the edge with his hands on his knees. The first thing he thought of was something stupid he'd said in sixth grade.

His erection was a bar of lead. He pushed it up and got out of bed and put on some of the clothes that were lying around. He buttoned-up his shirt and stepped into his underwear and jeans. He sat on a chair and pulled on his socks.

He went out into the hall and walked into the washroom. There, on the toilet, sat one of Liz's friends. He saw how her jeans and panties were in some knotty scrunch at her ankles but didn't really have time to capture the visual before he dashed out, just as the girl on the toilet shrieked, back into his room.

He put on a sweater. He went downstairs, past some girls waiting for the washroom, walked out the back door and took a leak behind the juniper bush.

As he pissed he thought about what it'd be like to have a vagina, about how different it would've been if he was a girl, and about how much of a roll gender had played in determining who he was. But Paul liked being a guy, or at least the idea of it. And at least he didn't have to really worry about being raped.

He'd heard somewhere that there were more females than males. That, over history, females were more often born than men. So he'd "won" that small likelihood. And his sexual orientation was also a fortunate thing. But that was an easy lottery to win; the usual statistic given was that only ten percent of all people were homosexual. But he'd also been born into a decent family, into a safe, rich part of the world, probably in the one of the safest places there's ever been in human history. But he couldn't think of any statistic for that. A world without flush toilets, abundant food or proper medicine created a vision upon which Paul did not want to dwell. So he'd been lucky, sort of.

Back inside he kept his sweater on because it was thick enough to hide his man-boobs. At his thinnest, they only poked out just enough to be visible bumps on his shirt, and he thought if people saw him infrequently enough they wouldn't notice. At his fattest, a thick sweater was to be worn all day.

Paul walked gallantly into the kitchen, intending to affect an expression of indifference at all of the strangers in his home. He tried to bring to his glance an expression of weariness, like he was used to so many girls being in his kitchen. There were four at the table, and Sandy with his sister at the fridge. Bowls filled with cereal covered the table.

He was hoping she would be there, but she wasn't. They all looked up at him as he entered, silent, their eyes looking like they'd stayed up all night.

"Mom got groceries," said Liz. She took out a carton of milk and poured it into her own bowl of cereal, then passed it off to Sandy. The girls took spoons from a heap on the table.

Paul went for the table but his sister stopped him. "Those are for my friends," she said. He went to the cupboard to get a bowl. There were none. "Sorry," Liz said unapologetically. They all watched him shuffle about, looking for something to eat.

He got a box of stone-wheat crackers down from the pantry and set it on the counter. He got out some cheese and a squeeze bottle of sub sauce from the fridge and put them next to the crackers. Taking out a knife, he cut six thick slices of cheese, set them on six crackers, and put a big dollop of sub sauce on each. He put it all on a plate and into the microwave for thirty seconds.

He waited, looking down at the white counter, listening to them chew their cereal. He took it out a few seconds early. He looked at his breakfast. The melted cheese, bubbling and popping, swam amongst the crackers.

"That looks nasty," said Liz, inspiring similar comments from her friends.

"Totally gross."

"Sick."

Paul left them and went up to his room. He got a Tab from underneath his bed and drank it as he ate, checking some forums he regulared. He drank more Tab. He drank three cans of it. His stomach rattled constantly, and the space under his ribs felt empty and ached.

He started feeling queasy so he went to the washroom. He knocked this time. Someone inside responded with an aggressive "hey," followed by a small thump. He waited in the hall, leaning against the wall and holding his hand to his stomach.

A minute later the door opened and two girls slowly walked out, acting like there was no hurry. Paul waited for them to leave.

Paul fell upon the toilet. He opened his mouth and gagged. Nothing happened. He coughed, puffing air around a lump in his throat, stuck at the unbearable threshold of sickness. Frantic, he rammed his right hand to the back of his throat and had his stomach contents blow up in his face. His hand fall into the water. His throat shuddered and his jaw locked as he threw up frizzy pink mush.

He dropped back and his vision gelled. He crawled forward and looked into the bowl. He fell back again and lay there. Someone knocked and he groaned. He got up and wiped his face, washed his mouth, face and neck, rinsed and brushed his teeth.

But when that brush hit his tongue it sent him into another heaving fit. He couldn't control his face, all the cords on his neck stretching out, pulling up his arms and shoulders.

He was looking at himself in the mirror again, looking at his body. He turned to his side. His stomach stuck out over his pubic hair and his dick and balls. "I'm a man," he thought out-loud, and didn't know what he meant by it. He put his hands on his waist. He twisted this way and that, pivoting at his hips. He smiled at his face, trying to be kind, then quickly frowned.

He opened the door. Liz was standing in the hall with a few of her friends, the Japanese girl behind her. As Paul stepped out someone went in. The toilet flushed.

"What the fuck took you so long?" asked Liz. "Jerking off?"

Her smile dwindled. "What's the matter?

"Nothing." He shook his head and that was all.

He looked at her friends standing there, and then walked into his room. She followed him in, her friends stopping at the door.

Paul slumped down at his computer. He turned on his speakers. "Gonna jump into my fake anime world now," he said, plugging in his headphones.

She was there, standing in the doorway. He knew she was there and he didn't care. He exhaled slowly, letting his stomach hang loose, relaxed, in its default position. He settled into his gut jelly. He'd fuck anyone then. He'd fuck the fattest, ugliest, pimpliest person on the planet.