“I killed you,” Avi said to me.
“Yes, you did.”
Avi put his controller down and shut off the Xbox.
“My mom says she saw a rattlesnake outside yesterday, right up on the deck,” he said.
“Scary,” I said.
“Don’t be such a pussy, Jeremy. It’s awesome. I’m going to catch it if it comes back.”
“What are you going to do with it?”
“I looked online and it’s really easy to do. You get a cage and put a funnel on top that’s just big enough for a snake to fit through. You put a rat in the cage and when the snake eats it, it gets too fat to go back through the funnel,” he said.
“Good luck I guess,” I told him.
Avi’s mother came down the stairs and into the room. She always smelled good and sometimes she didn’t wear a bra. Their kitchen and dining area was separated from the living room by a built-in bar. One time she was polishing the bar, bent over it, and I saw the pale and mysterious tops of her breasts. When Avi wasn’t around, the other boys we hung out with at school liked to trade fantasies they had involving her.
“Will you be joining us for dinner?” she asked.
“I can’t,” I said. “My mom said she wants me home for dinner.”
“Are you still staying over on Saturday?” Avi asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “I downloaded Evil Dead 2 if you want to watch it.”
“Cool,” he said.
The houses got older as I made the fifteen minute walk to where I lived. Avi’s house looked a lot like mine from the outside, boxy and made of brick. But the wood in the corner of his porch wasn’t rotting away and there weren’t any cracks in his ceiling like at my house.
We didn’t have a built-in bar or much of a dining area, either. The kitchen table where we ate was small, making meals between me and my parents cramped.
“Avi’s getting so handsome,” my mother said while we ate. “You both are. It’s so strange to watch the way boys sprout up,” she said.
“Thanks, Mom,” I said.
“You know what I meant. There’s no surprise Avi is turning out so attractive with the way his mother looks. He’s got that same black hair. And those green eyes.”
“Avi and Jeremy both have beautiful mothers,” my father said. He put his hand over hers. “And she doesn’t have the love of a husband. That poor kid without a dad around all these years.”
“Avi’s fine,” I said.
“Of course he is,” my father said.
• • •
It was Saturday night. Avi and I sat next to each other on his living room couch. My laptop was hooked up to the TV and the credits of Evil Dead 2 gave off a dim light from the screen. A girl named Marisa Killigan had slipped Avi a note at school the day before: Do you like me circle yes no or maybe.
“I don’t even know her. I have algebra with her and sometimes I help her with the problems. She’s dumb,” Avi said.
“At least you’re getting asked out,” I said.
“I won’t accept it. I’m circling ‘no.’ The least she could have done is actually talked to me, right?”
“Sure,” I said. “Did you like the movie?”
“Yeah. Bruce Campbell is the man.”
“He makes me kind of wish that I’ll be in a situation someday where I have to replace my severed hand with a chainsaw,” I said.
“For sure.”
When we got to his bedroom he undressed to his boxers and threw his clothes to a corner of the room.
“Just start out like usual, I’ll be back in a minute,” Avi said before leaving the room. I got undressed but there was a mirror on his dresser right across from the bed and I felt weird seeing my reflection so I looked down and read the cover of one of the video game magazines that were scattered on the floor.
“You didn’t start.” He stood in the doorway holding a crumpled, wet washcloth in his hands. Water dripped from between his fingers. He flicked off the lights and my eyes didn’t adjust to the dark until he got onto the bed.
“Why do you always have to be so weird about it? We’re not doing anything we wouldn’t be doing if we weren’t together right now,” he said.
Avi showed me how to jerk off over the summer. I used to rub myself on my mattress or up against the walls of the shower but he was the one who showed me how to use my hands.
“I’m not being weird,” I said.
He pulled his underwear down. He propped his head with his pillow and his hand, using the free one to start himself off. I pulled my dick out of my boxers and got in the same position. As he stroked himself his elbow would sometimes hit my arm and I’d move away from him.
“Do you ever feel like you just have to do it?” he asked, without stopping.
“Do what?” I asked. I kept going. I got hard. I looked at the washcloth on his nightstand, framed by his alarm clock and the shadow of the curve of his armpit.
“Have you ever done it at school?”
“No. Gross,” I said. “Have you?”
“Yeah,” he said, stopping his motions to reach over and grab the washcloth. He put it over his dick. He grabbed it and made short, tight movements up and down himself. For a minute it looked like he was cleaning out a wound. A squishing sound and the smell of soap came up from his crotch toward my face. He let out a little moan and I got a feeling like I’d been watching him too closely.
“I’ve done it in the bathroom by the swimming pool a couple times. No one knows it’s there,” he said. “Here, you try it with the washcloth. Do it like I did it. It feels awesome.”
The water soaked into the cloth was still warm. A lather was built up inside it from Avi. I let out a noise like a whimper.
“I told you it was awesome,” Avi said. A surge of feeling rose from my stomach up to my dick and I shot into the washcloth. It came unexpectedly and my vision went fuzzy for a second. “Now let me see it,” Avi said.
“But my stuff’s still in it.”
“What’s the difference?” he said, placing the cloth back over himself. The sound of the squishing cloth filled the narrow space between us. “Do you think Marisa would put her mouth on my cock?”
“Probably,” I said. “She likes you.”
“Fuck, maybe I should circle ‘yes.’” He slid forward, pointed his cloth-covered dick towards the ceiling and came.
Avi put the washcloth in his nightstand drawer and turned over to go to sleep. When his breathing evened out I looked down at him. The deep black of his hair that my mom talked so dreamily about was a clump of dark on the pillow. The blue light of nighttime in his room made his skin look pearly, like it was glowing. His back didn’t have pimples like I was getting. Hairs the same black as his head stuck out from his armpits.
The mirror on Avi’s dresser was unavoidable now, and I saw myself looking at him from the corner of my eye. I didn’t want to see me and I didn’t want to keep staring at Avi so I turned over too, forcing myself into sleep.
• • •
Biology was the only class Avi and I had together that semester. The class was taught by Mrs. Constanella, a woman at least in her 70s.
“Our babies are almost ready to come forth!” she announced after the bell for class rang. Mrs. Constanella had been teaching at our school for thirty years, and every single one of them she did a unit on butterflies.
In front of the rooms’ windows there was a large netted enclosure containing a bunch of hanging pupas. Every class, we would all get in a line and take turns observing the soon-to-be butterflies, while misting them with a little water bottle. They were due to split from their cocoons in several days, around the end of the semester.
“As you’ve already learned, after the caterpillar has eaten enough, it will form itself into a bag of fluids, known as a cocoon,” she stood behind her desk and read from a textbook as we began to line the room, waiting our turns to mist and observe.
“I’m so over this,” I said to Avi’s back, but if he heard me he did not acknowledge it. As we reached our space in front of the enclosure, Avi stared in. I turned to watch his eyes dart from pupa to pupa. The boy in front of him motioned to hand him the spray bottle but Avi seemed once again not to notice or care.
“I don’t get it,” he said.
“What’s that, Avi?” Mrs. Constanella asked.
“I don’t get it. What are they, what’s happening to them?” He kept staring into the netting and I tried to imagine just what he was seeing. I looked in too, as deeply as I thought was possible, each chrysalis presenting itself in focus.
“Well, bags of fluid,” she said, thrusting the textbook forward, a bony finger on the part of the page she was discussing.
“That doesn’t tell us much,” he said.
“They’re going through their metamorphosis. They are bags of fluid that will gather all of their cells together and turn into colorful little butterflies,” she said.
“But that sounds so painful,” he said.
He quietly finished his misting and went back to his desk. When I was done and took my own seat back he whispered to me “This whole thing is fucking stupid, I hate it.” Avi spent the rest of class furiously writing in his observation notebook while I just stared at mine blankly, tuning out the sound of Mrs. Constanella’s voice and watching the quick, fierce movement of his pen.
• • •
The next week, we were walking a wooded path that led through Avi’s part of the neighborhood and ended at the parking lot of a strip mall, where there was a pet store.
“Marisa gave me a blowjob in the back stairwell this morning,” Avi said.
“What?”
“She found me before I got to class this morning and we ditched out on homeroom and she took me to the back stairwell. She put her mouth on my cock,” he said.
“Did it feel good?” I asked.
“I finished really fast. So yeah, I guess it felt good. I tried to put my hand on the back of her head and she wouldn’t let me. She said she didn’t do it like that,” he said.
“Are you going to go out with her?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. I don’t think I actually did like the way it felt, except for that one second when I was finishing. The rest of it made me feel bad,” he said.
“How come?”
“I don’t know, it made me think things I didn’t like. Without even meaning to. I think I freaked Marisa out when I grabbed her head, anyway. I don’t really want to talk about it,” he said.
We didn’t talk again until we got to the pet store. Avi’s face looked pale. I couldn’t shake the image of her batting his hand away from the back of her head, and looking up at him. I don’t do it like that.
“I’m looking for the rats,” Avi said when we got to the store. The woman behind the counter eyed us over her glasses.
“The back wall,” she said.
At the back of the store was a wall with rows of plastic tanks built into it. Avi put his face up to one of the tanks where a number of white rats were nuzzled in a corner, sleeping. In the middle of the tank, the only rat that was awake munched from a bowl of food in the middle of the tank.
“The one that’s eating looks nice and fat,” he said. “I want it.” He tapped his finger against the plastic and the rats in the corner started to move a little and open their sleepy eyes. The one he’d picked out stopped its eating and fixed its sight on Avi. They stared each other down for a minute before Avi turned to the counter and pointed out the rat to the woman.
“Just a moment,” she said.
The sound of something unscrewing came from inside the tank and its back wall opened up. A pair of gloved hands reached in and grabbed Avi’s desired rat by its backside and pulled it away while its tiny hands still grasped for the food bowl. Avi paid nine dollars at the counter and it was given to him in a little cardboard box with holes on it that had the words My New Friend on the side.
“This is perfect,” he said. “I got a funnel already and I found a tank in our basement from that lizard I had when I was six. I just have to keep my mom from finding this rat until the weekend,” he said.
He held the box in his hands and I could hear the animal scratching around inside. Sometimes its nose would poke out from one of the holes and it would frantically sniff at the air.
“Can I just ask why you’re so obsessed with this rattlesnake?” I said while we walked the path back to the neighborhood.
“Do you not think it would be cool if I harnessed a fucking rattlesnake? If I, Avi West, captured that thing full of poison,” he said.
“Sure,” I said. “I guess that’d be cool. Just you know, be careful or whatever,” I said.
I chose to go straight home instead of staying at his house to hang out when we got back. I didn’t talk a lot at dinner that night and my mom asked me if it was something to do with him.
“Not really,” I said. It made me mad that she’d asked because it showed how much my life revolved around Avi, like there was no other reason I’d be in a bad mood.
“This is a hard time for kids, don’t push him,” my dad said.
“I’m not going to push. I’ll just say that this is a tough time for you both. Growing up starts to seem really quick. Know that if Avi loses you along the way you he’ll be losing a bit of himself, too,” my mom said.
In my room that night, I looked at the last year’s yearbook. There was a collage in the middle of it made up of random shots from around the school. One of them had two girls smiling together at lunchtime. The table me and Avi and our friends used to sit at was behind them. You could see Avi, he was leaning forward with his eyes kind of bugged out, in the middle of a joke. I was next to him with a hand over my mouth, laughing. I couldn’t connect the bugged out, joke-telling eyes in the background of that picture with the ones that had stared down the rat in the pet store. Avi’s eyes had something new and cold in them then.
I opened my laptop and searched for a movie Avi might want to watch that weekend. I looked up reviews and searched through the filmographies of a few directors before choosing Suspiria. The download would take all night. I tilted the screen and set it on the ground next to my bed before going to sleep.
• • •
I was at Avi’s door waiting for him to answer. It was Saturday evening. He’d called me that afternoon and told me that his mom would be out later, that I should come over. My computer was in my backpack and I was hoping Avi had snapped out of the rattlesnake thing and would want to watch a movie and hang out like we usually did.
“Hey, sorry,” he said after I’d waited for five minutes. “I was out back, checking on it.”
“Checking on what?” I asked.
“I got the snake,” he said. He was grinning.
He stepped away from the door to let me in and then turned his back to me. It felt like so long ago that I’d looked at his back while he slept the last time I stayed over. I followed him through his living room, past the built-in bar and out of the kitchen to the deck. He leaned over the deck’s railing.
“Come here,” he said. “It’s behind this bush.”
I stood next to him. I couldn’t see anything but the bush below the deck. But I knew he hadn’t been lying when he said it was there. I felt my stomach turn over.
“Look closer,” he said, like he’d been reading my thoughts. Something a darker and smoother green showed up behind the bush. I saw that it was fabric—he’d put a pillowcase over the tank.
“Do you want to see it?” he asked.
I hadn’t said anything for a couple minutes, I’d just been looking at the covered up tank. When I told him I didn’t want to my voice came out weakly.
“Don’t be so scared,” he said. “It hasn’t had sun in awhile so it’s lost a lot of energy. And see the bump there? I put a brick on top of the tank where I stuck the funnel. It can’t get out unless I let it out. Just stay up there and look, you don’t have to get close.”
He moved quickly off the deck and I peered down at him while he carefully pulled the fabric away. I leaned over and tried to get a look into the tank. What I saw at first was simply a mass of different brown patches, like a pile of dead leaves. But it started to move and I could make out its head in the corner of tank. Its tongue, the same black as its eyes, flicked at the plastic that held it. Avi looked like he was mesmerized, kind of the way he’d looked at the butterflies in class.
“Put the cover back on,” I said. He looked up at me with that same grin as when he’d answered the door.
“If you say so.” When he went to cover the tank up the snake rattled. The noise seemed as loud as a bomb.
I asked if we could go hang out in his room. He called me a pussy but turned away from the tank and let me follow him back through the house and up to his room. My head felt blank. I didn’t want to hear any more about the snake. I made myself say something.
“Where’s your mom?”
“She’s out with some guy. She said she wasn’t going to be home till late. He came over before, to pick her up. He was all cheery. I think they’re going to fuck,” he said.
“Jesus Christ, Avi. Gross,” I said.
“When I saw my mom go out the door with that guy, when he had that big smile on his face, I thought about me and Marisa. I thought about how I wanted to grab her head. About how I wanted to fuck her against the wall, really hard. I saw them and I wondered if that’s what he wants to do to my mom, too,” he said.
“I don’t know, Avi. You’re not making any sense to me,” I said. “I think I should go home.” I felt weighted down, like I’d just woken up from a long sleep and my body hadn’t caught up to my brain yet.
“Fine,” he said. “You can go.” Like I’d been his prisoner.
• • •
“Today’s the special day!” Mrs. Constanella announced in class that Monday. A few butterflies flitted around the netting, while some cocoons still shook with the escaping of wings from their insides. The desk next to me was empty because Avi wasn’t in school. I hadn’t talked to him since I’d been to his house over the weekend.
“Some of you are wearing bright colors. That’ll attract them. I wore magenta today so they’d come right up to me when I came in this morning. I just knew today would be the day,” Mrs. Constanella said.
I didn’t look much at the butterflies when I misted them, but I did notice a couple dead ones on the ground. I was trying to imagine where Avi might be, if he was in his room or watching TV downstairs, or peeking into the tank behind his house. I wondered if his mom found the snake and flipped out and that’s why he was home.
When class was over and I left the room it took me a minute to even realize where I was going. I wasn’t absolutely sure until the bell for the next class rang and I was still wandering the halls. There was a security guard at our school but I didn’t see him around anywhere. Rows of orange metal lockers went by as I walked to the other end of the school from Mrs. Constanella’s room.
The only entrance to the pool from inside was at one end of a long hallway. At the other end was the hidden bathroom Avi mentioned when we’d been jacking off. My heart beat fast when I walked in, like I expected him to be in there. But I was alone. I looked around because I knew I’d gone in there to look for something I just didn’t know what it was. The three urinals against the wall looked like they were staring at me and I wondered if Avi jerked off into them or if he went to the stall. I went to one of them and pulled my dick out of my pants. I put my palm on the tile wall and touched myself with my free hand. A few minutes went by and I couldn’t get hard and I felt scared being in that bathroom so I left and almost ran to class.
I sat with Avi and I’s other friends like usual at lunch that day, but I didn’t really pay attention to the conversation they were having. I looked at Marisa Killigan, a few tables down. She and her friends were leaning close to each other talking about something quietly.
“Jeremy’s so sad today without his boyfriend,” one of my friends said.
“Fuck you,” I said.
I kept looking at Marisa and suddenly she looked up too and her eyes locked on mine. She got up and started to walk towards me. My face got hot and red when she got close.
“Hey, Marisa,” I said. I looked around, at anything besides her.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with your little friend Avi,” she said. “But you need to tell him to stay away from me.”
“What’d he do? I haven’t even talked to him in a few days.” Then I added, “Either way, I don’t control what Avi does.”
“He called my house. Left a message saying all this weird, fucked up stuff,” she said. “My mom heard it and flipped out.”
Before I could say anything else we were cut short by a yell from the hallway. A few kids hurried toward the doors to look but everyone in the room could hear clearly when someone shouted “I think it killed her!” The people at the door backed off and the principal seemed to come from nowhere, slamming the doors shut behind her.
“Everyone to the back exits. Now,” she said.
We were directed through the back of the cafeteria and out behind the school. My eyes squinted in the sunlight and the sound of sirens was getting closer and closer.
• • •
It wasn’t long before the police report leaked to the papers. While me and the other kids at school milled around outside, waiting for things to clarify, Avi was darting through the stretch of woods that lay in between the back of our school and the freeway. Inside the school, Mrs. Constanella’s body was sprawled between two desks, a water bottle for misting still clinging to her fingers, not quite having fallen from her grasp when she went down. Two puncture wounds oozed on her left ankle, each swollen and black. The butterfly enclosure was slashed open, and they flew freely around the room.
Policemen armed with snarling German shepherds found Avi a few hours later. The trial was quiet and quick, closed off from the press. They put him in a juvenile detention center in the middle of the state and I haven’t heard from him since. They’ll look at the case again when he’s eighteen.
Sometimes I imagine going back in time and placing myself on Avi’s bed with him that last night I went to his house. I reach over and grab his hand and tell him he’s already harnessed me. That I’m better than poison, I’m warm-blooded flesh and bone. I tell him I’ll curl up and he can keep me in a tank hidden behind his house. That I won’t mind the lack of sunlight as long as he checks on me whenever he can.
But those moments are rare, and mostly when I think of Avi, I see his stare into the butterfly netting, I see the snake, the slow movements of its body. The clearest image, though, is always Mrs. Constanella, frail and lifeless on the floor, butterflies emerging from the torn netting and pausing on her chest, believing it a flower.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jimmy Newborg's work has previously appeared in drafthorse: a literary journal, Little Fiction | Big Truths, and NYLON Guys magazine. He holds an M.F.A. in fiction from the Bennington College Writing Seminars, and was a MacDowell Colony Fellow in January 2015. He lives in Brooklyn.
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LF #036 © Jimmy Newborg. Published by Little Fiction | Big Truths, February 2013.
