Uses for Boys Read Online Free Page B

and brags about how he can put them on with one hand. I like the way he looks at me
     with his eyes mostly closed and the way he kisses, like he’s breathing in my mouth.
     Afterward we watch the gray sky darken behind heavy pine trees and listen to nothing
     at all. It rains silently on the house.
    I’m fourteen. I go to school. I dress the way all the other kids dress. I wear my
     Levi’s with expensive twill shirts. I wear the right tennis shoes, the white leather
     ones with the green stripes. But the outfit buys me nothing. Everyone has heard how
     I let Desmond Dreyfus feel around under my shirt while Carl Drier and Michael Cox
     watched. Everyone knows about Joey. The boys make V signs when they look at me and
     tongue the crack between their fingers. The girls call me a slut.
    Joey lives in a thin-walled apartment at the bottom of the hill near the freeway.
     His mom works and his dad, like mine, is gone. His brother drinks beer and watches
     daytime television. He asks if we’re fucking and then kicks us out. We go back to
     my house. Joey loves my big clean house.
    He loves the way it smells on Wednesday after the cleaning lady leaves and there are
     lines in the carpet from her vacuum cleaner. He takes deep breaths through his nose
     and leads me around, inspecting her work. Sometimes, when she’s still there after
     we get home from school, Joey talks to her, and she gives me a look. I’m too young
     to have boys over she thinks, but she won’t say anything. She piles her worn leather
     purse and heavy coat on our kitchen table and before she leaves she collects my mom’s
     check from the table in the entry hall.
    Joey and I take the bus home together after school. We sit close together. No one
     talks to us. Nancy Baxter stares at me and whispers to her friends and I stare back
     at them until they look away. Nancy Baxter. It’s hard to remember there was a time
     when she wasn’t staring and whispering. Joey holds my hand. He doesn’t notice the
     stares. All they see when they look at him is his no-name jeans, his worn shirts,
     the dirty Skoal cap he wears. Joey changed everything for me, I want to tell her.
     I’m not alone. The place where my hand fits in his, that place, that feeling? I belong
     there.
    I hate Nancy Baxter. I hate the school bus.
    We get off on the corner of a tree-lined street near my house and it’s raining but
     the sun is shining and it’s so bright I have to squint. Joey stops, right there at
     the bus stop, and kisses me. He likes to put his hand up under my shirt and shock
     the adults driving by. The other kids scatter slowly toward their own houses until
     it’s just Joey and me and the cars are going so fast that we’re not shocking anyone.
    The closer we get to my house, the quieter it is. There’s no traffic here and the
     houses are locked, windows dark. I take Joey’s hand in mine. His fingers are cold.
     He stops and looks at me intently like he’s going to say something. His cheeks are
     wet from the rain, like he’s been crying, and I realize that I must look like that
     too.
    I keep the key to my house in my book bag and have to put it down while I unlock the
     lock and the dead bolt and when we get into the entry hall we’re really careful. We
     take off our shoes and our jackets because my mom likes a clean house and she doesn’t
     know about Joey.
    In the kitchen we decide between cereal and frozen pizza. Some days we choose the
     pizza, which takes longer, but today we have cereal and Joey says I use too much milk.
     Afterward he wants to kiss me in the kitchen and take off my shirt and kiss my chest
     and I always feel kind of funny here because someone could see me if they were looking
     through the kitchen window.
    “You’re so beautiful,” Joey says. And we kiss and kiss and our hands run up and down
     each other’s backs and soon he leads me to my bedroom and I lie down on the bed. Joey
     likes to sit next to me, unzip my pants and help me