Your Body’s Expendable

Jazmyne spent the morning going through photos of last night’s party posted on Facebook. There was one taken with Tanner spread up on Phil parents’ bed between two frilled, pink-shaded nightlamps; Phil standing in bushes; Tom kicking bricks and a few planks into a bonfire. Jazmyne looked for herself in the crowd, searching the blurred grey background, and in friend’s album found herself sharing a chais lounge with Albinus, out on the dock when they were setting off fireworks over the lake.

She went to his profile. She glanced at his interests and taste in music and movies, all neatly listed, and then his notes, mostly quizzes and games. There was a small entry about his depression with zero comments.

I'm supposed to be a senior in junior highschool right now but I fell behind the year after I was diagnosed with atypical depression. i am currently on 225mg of Effexor and 100mg of Wellbutrin. I've never cut, nor felt the desire to cut; i've had suicidal thoughts but i've never acted on depression manifests itself at first as a lack of motivation. i usually cannot be bothered to get out of bed..i'm constantly tired. if I could, I could sleep fitfeen hours a day. my work ethic is low, as is my attention span. I don't go to class and I don't do anything to meet deadlines. If anything, I miss them and not give a damn. i'm as sensitive to criticism as all heck. sometimes, I find myself crying for no reason at all. it's really easy to hurt my feelings.

Albinus was too lazy for feelings or friendship, completely bereft of activity, never with shit to talk about. But Jazymne knew, it's the extreme bacterial environment and the lowered endorphin levels in his brain which make him constantly tired and needy. He should beat off less, clean his room and go read some books. But his self-pity moved Jazmyne. After a couple rewrites she brought her message down to: Albinus, I had no idea. I’m bipolar and I know exactly how you feel.

Jazmyne wasn’t bipolar, but she didn’t consider herself a liar either. She was often depressed, and she might also be developing avoidant personality disorder. She’d often run away from her problems. Sensitive newsreels would pick up on the post and more than a few would read it, but the lie wouldn’t be too difficult to maintain. For one thing, her parents didn’t use Facebook (and if they kept blogs they never admitted it). Plus she had a deluxe account with extensive security and personalized privacy and tracking options her parents had gotten after a scare with an old boyfriend.

Behind Jazymne, Cheryl turned on the couch, pulling her knees in. She wheezed and sniffled in her sleep because of a mild allergy to dogwood tree pollen, making her eyelids swollen and stinging red. Jazmyne turned back to the screen. She knew Cheryl’s password.

Cheryl had done things last night - her inbox had 18 new messages. Allison Shires wrote something incendiary in response to a picture with Cheryl and Allison’s boyfriend together in the back of a truck, covered in blankets. Jazmyne had been around for that, and she found a few other pictures of the same scene. She looked for herself. She went through a series of photos focusing on a group of girls smoking bongs inside the pool shed. She stopped at one. Crouched in a coil of tubing was a girl in Jazmyne’s Careers class. Two weeks earlier they’d worked together on a summative assignment dealing with male personality types. Her name was Bekki Laurel. They knew each other vaguely from fifth grade, where they’d been on opposite sides of a two-class mould rotation. As it turned out, she had asked Jazmyne to be her partner because she read the teen male column and letter responses her father, Humbert Mann, wrote for some magazines, and even claimed to be an esteemed member of a few of the forums her father was paid to post on.

Jazmyne didn’t go along with the idea. Humbert weighed over four hundred pounds, and he would often just lie in the bathtub naked, writing. Jazymne didn’t really talk to her father. At night, sleeping, every few minutes he would burst into an explosive coughing fit, veritable bombs, and then suddenly lapse back into sleep, snoring loudly, and then would suddenly stop snoring, with his chest rumbling, trying to breathe, then typically there was a deep gasp usually followed by the resumption of snoring, except like one time last year he didn’t go back to snoring and his face started to get distended and dark like a lot of blood was building up, her mother had said, before she woke him. Jazmyne didn’t know how her mom managed to sleep in that room. She didn’t sleep his bed, of course, but in her own single at its base. But still. Jazymne hadn’t even seen the inside of their room. She didn’t think much conjugal felicity happened between her parents a lot. But that was it. Her dad had money and her mom was pretty.

Jazymne could hear him coughing through the wall even then. She heard Cheryl squirm. Jazymne looked back. Cheryl pulled the pink quilted comforter from her face.

She checked the clock: five o’clock, on the dot. It was five o’one when her phone rang. She took it from her pocket and snapped it open, putting it to her ear.

‘’Speaking?”

There was a small pause. “Hey.” It was Albinus. “Cheryl’s phone’s off. Can I speak to her?”

“She’s in the shower.”

“Uh, well,” Albinus stammered. Poor guy. ‘Tell her I called.”

“Will do,” she said and snapped the phone shut, slid it back into her pocket and went to wake her friend.

Funny thing is, Cheryl wasn’t avoiding him at all. She was just busy whenever he wanted to see her. She worked after school every day of the week, coming home late almost every night and almost always ended up hanging out exclusively with Jazmyne. But Albinus was still a friend. The problem was that his appearance depended too much on what he wore or how he’d washed; when he wore those old plaid shirts and second-hand sweaters out of Army Surplus he’d look scruffy and poor, and if he used too much conditioner his hair would cling to his scalp and sit on his skull like a helmet. But if he wore something like his green ribcage hoody two sizes too small with his one pair of black jeans, and if he hadn’t used much conditioner for a while, depending on temperature and humidity, he could actually look pretty good. It wasn’t just a mere novelty of composition either. He actually had some handsome features that just needed to be brought out by decent clothes and proper grooming. After all, he’d only just discovered the dignity of looking after himself and caring about his looks, and slowly he caught on, learnt the concept of an outfit and the benefits of hygiene, good shaving, expensive clothes. He’d worn his green ribcage hoody and black jeans every other day until he spilt rose all over its front and collapsed the zipper, testing out the Automatic, Continuous Clothing Closure he’d ripped off from the tenth floor of the COV mall in a gym bag lined with tin foil, along with the rose.

Cheryl wasn’t easily woken. Jazymne snagged her nail on Cheryl’s shirt and it broke off on her stomach.

The first thing she wanted was a cigarette, so from a back pocket Jazmyne took out her pack of Expanded P lights. Cheryl provided the light, now sitting up, rubbing the dust from her eyes.

‘Three puff pass,” said Cheryl.

Jazmyne crossed the room to her bedside table and brought to the couch a square glass ashtray. She sat down next to Cheryl and placed the ashtray on her lap.

“How do you feel?” Jazymne asked.

“Dreadful,” said Cheryl. She slowly opened her eyes, red and bleary, wet with smudged mascara and sweat.

Puke had caked on the bottom of her chin. Jazmyne stared and Cheryl rubbed it off. Her hair was oily and matted to her moist forehead, and in a gloss of sweat she had a small, sore-looking pimple budding right under her nose.

“You should clean up,” said Jazmyne.

In the next room Humbert started to choke violently.

“Smoke at the window!” yelled her mother through the wall. They both rose from the couch. They went over to the window. Cheryl pitched her elbow on the sill, her chin leaning on her interlaced fingers. She gazed upward and out the window at the drifting smoke. She passed the cigarette to Jazymne who knocked the ash off with a tap of her nail. Jazymne had three wry puffs.

‘What was that mix you had last night?” asked Cheryl, turning on her elbow to receive the cigarette.

“Oh, with the cream soda it was much better.”

“But that one you had,” Cheryl said, “I liked it because I couldn’t taste the alcohol, it just tasted like fruit juice.”

“It had orange juice and grapefruit juice. Oranges,” began Jazymne, “orange always goes well with vodka, but-”

“It tasted so good.”

“But the c-plus put the fizz. But then the cream soda was just delicious…” She tapered off, seeing how Cheryl didn’t look interested anymore.

“Hey, wanna know something gross?” asked Cheryl suddenly.

“Sure.”

Cheryl hesitated. “It’s a little embarrassing.”

“What?”

“Well, Albinus’ was the first dick I touched.”

“Oh yeah?” Her story was already bullshit. Jazymne knew for a fact that Charles Holmes debauched every one of his mother’s little chargers in the private home-run summer camp at Kalk Bay, Cheryl included, which the two of them had attended during the summer of second grade.

“You know PPP?”

“What?”

“Pearly Penile Papules…” Cheryl trailed off. She thought about it, decided to approach it from a different angle. “Last night I fucked John, twice, actually, and he had them too. Have you seen them before on a guy? Is it common?”

“Pearly Penile Papules?” Jazmyne popped off the three Ps to stress the abbreviation.

“Yeah, but smaller ones. Albinus’ were like barbs, sticking out, but John’s were like domed-topped and a lot smaller.”

“Ribbed for your pleasure,” said Jazymne, and they both got a good, memorable laugh out of that, understanding smiles. In the next room Humbert was writing this week’s male column. He was eavesdropping on their conversation. Here is what he wrote:

1. Crying BAD. Don't do it. I don't care how sensitive you think it makes you look. It makes you look like a wuss.

2. Going out to a restaurant? YOU PICK IT. Asking her to pick is wussy. Furthermore, don't go cheap, don't talk about what Zagat said about it, and for crying out loud, don't even talk about the bill. You pay it. She doesn't even get a choice.

3. In public? Let her cuddle you. Not the other way around.

4. Don't talk about your exes, at all.

5. Another guy's talking to her? Don't get silent or mopey. Out-wit him. You don't win battles by surrendering, so be friendly and talk with EVERYONE in the conversation, including him.

6. Basically, don't be a wussy little emo bitch-boy.

After their cigarette Cheryl showered and Jazymne did her nails. She remade her broken nail and attached a crystal prism, a clear block about the size of a sugar-cube covering the end of her finger.

Jazymne got to thinking about all the dicks in her life. Phil had Fordyce's spots on his, a semi-non-issue, and Tom might’ve had mild PPP, but otherwise her experience with cock was spotless unless they were new to shaving and had in-grown hairs, or when, when they were younger, they were only beginning to grow hair. Circumcision was the norm, but foreskin wasn’t usually a problem. All were normal healthy dicks.

“Charles Holmes died in Iran,” said Jazymne as Cheryl returned, her face covered with the white skeleton’s profile of an intensive lift facial mask. “He used to tell me how he practiced with a tube-sock full of Bengay.” Cheryl smile bent the joints of the mask. She knew what Jazymne was on about.

“He used to ask me what it feels like to stick your penis into a vagina,” said Cheryl.

“Me too. I told him it was like a fleshlight.”

Cheryl and Jazymne left just after six for coffee and a matinée screening at the youth center, co-produced by a distant relative of Cheryl’s from China. They wore callipygian chain belts and black jeans, tight shirts with changing surfaces, both of their outfits very similar, the main difference being a cummerbund made of bright red cloth Cheryl found while digging through the lost-and-found on a school trip to Wonderland. Jazmyne wore steel-toed brogues while Cheryl sported a pair of D Flawless sneakers criss-crossed with thick pink-and-white checkered laces and these flexible flesh-coloured plastic spicates that sort of looked like PPP circumferentially encircling her heels. They used Jazmyne’s phone to request coffee from a vending machine outside a Money Mart /Mac’s Milk. Ten dollars for two coffees, sugar was a buck and cream was another three-fifty. They sat on a shaded section of sidewalk in front an antique parlour, looking through the chain link at the fountains and vacant swing-sets of a private park.

They listened to the demure murmur of the street, occasionally hearing the crack of a bat or a spurt of vivid laughter coming from within the park, and talked a little, and they guessed there was a baseball game, but it was all really too far for the eye to see the diamond. Albinus called at one point. Cheryl had forgotten to screen her calls. He wanted to know if she wanted to hang out, maybe go see something at the youth center or maybe get some coffee or something. Just the two of them. Cheryl said she was with Jazymne and they didn’t feel like going to see a movie. What about Coffee? She already had some. Maybe some other time. What was she doing on Saturday? She and Jazzy were going to go to Regina Spektor concert. In fact, the whole social calendar seems kinda full. I’ll tell you what, I'll make a little note (what was your name again?) and maybe I can squeeze you in. Yeah, alright, why not. Bye. She closed her phone.

Albinus hung up. He was lying in bed, and in his hands was this week’s issue of Young Men. The only reason he read it was for Humbert de Kok’s column, which he knew was based on Jazymne and Cheryl and anything else he might have heard when he listened to girls talk. He found it in the index and flipped to its page. Tips for a Virgin:

Don't drool too much when you kiss, no one wants to be swallowing mouthfuls of someone else's spit. Hold her firmly but gently. No tickle-touches, but no leaving bruises either. Having your throat/nipples sucked feels very good. While making out with her, lightly drag your nails over her cooch through her panties until they are soaked. Being clumsy at this point can suck if your nails snag on any of that flesh because it can hurt. You can now put your hand in her panties and run a finger through her slit. Be sure to swirl some of the wetness over her clit but don't spend too long doing that. You should start rubbing the head of your dick between her folds while the clit is still sensitive, then wait for her to tell you to put it in. Somewhere in there you should be finding a comfortable position. If she doesn't initiate some kissing and touching of her own then she sucks, but whatever. Push your cock in and out going deeper each time. Once it's all the way in have her play with her clit while you fuck her. Make sure she tells you if she wants you to do anything particular. Eating girls out is easy enough, just grind your tongue into her clit rhythmically and if you're fingering her you should hook your fingertips against the upper wall and rub it as you slide in and out. Make sure you trim your nails and brush your teeth before all of this. Trimming your pubes in case she wants to suck your cock would be thoughtful.

Albinus set Young Men down. He checked Facebook and it looked like Cheryl was already banging some fucking collar-popping faggot. Allison’s boyfriend. Albinus had failed seventh grade for that girl and she’d never even touched his penis, not once. Making-out (which, by the way, used to have a pretty high “exchange value,” as Marxist economists would say) wasn’t enough; it barely even registered on the thrill scale.

Cheryl and Jazymne walked a block to the bus stop. When it arrived they went to the back of the furthest coach. Jazymne concentrated on the seatback in front her. A plastic blank. Gray. Sit-up buses were only nominally ventilated, and in the summer smelled of sweat, hairspray, and vomit. Cheryl used her phone to check Facebook on Jazmyne’s suggestion.

“I hope you like the movie,” said Cheryl after closing her phone. She pushed her face into her friend’s shoulder. “That guy over there’s watching,” she said.

“Let him.”

The bus accelerated and the tires gave a little scream. A fat man looked at them over his stale newspaper, perspiring heavily, with large dark semicircles under his armpits.

“Who’s your fat friend jazzy?” asked Cheryl. “He’s really a fatty.”

Jazymne pulled the crystal prism from her finger. Her nail was coated in a millimetre of convex glass the colour of blood that looked vaguely afloat. She looked over at the fat man. He was still watching. Jazymne laughed and shook her head.

“What’s so funny?”

Nothing. God. She laughed again. At the next stop three college guys sat across from them, $60 H&K, Hollister and American Eagle jeans, tight $10 clearance shirts from Abercrombie, thinking they’re fucking set, with Tag sprayed on and everything. They switched busses at the next stop.

Same kind of coach design, a little older and more worn-down, with less people and fewer stops. Again they went to the furthest coach, this one empty, and they took pictures with Cheryl’s phone: them together, their overlapping feet, up their whole attire, then down along their hair, shot after shot after shot, and almost every one blurry and summarily deleted except for only a couple that made their way on to Facebook.

Albinus needed something to do. He hadn’t used any of the energy from the Daytrana transdermal he put on in the morning or from the Monster he’d drunk at lunch. The pulled pork sandwich he’d warmed up from the fridge festered in his bowels. He could actually feel the bottled energy, unreleased, rotting in his body, the idle calories turning over into fat. He didn’t know peoples’ numbers. He listened to binaural beats until he started to get a really bad stomach ache.

So he went to take a dump and nothing came out. He went back about five minutes later and this time it came gushing. It was like he’d been fucked in the ass by a soldering iron. So after wiping he soaked a wad of toilet paper and held it to his asshole, which helped a little.

Wincing, he wet a washcloth and jammed it between his cheeks, got it to stay in place. Every step back to his room squeezed out cold water between his thighs.

Burning, Albinus lay back on his clammy bed. He slowly stretched his legs. The washcloth stayed in position. He could feel it start to soak through his pants, on to his sheets already damp with the cooling sweat of his afternoon nap.