Slow Dancing
by Nick Ostdick
Brian Peterson never takes off his camouflage backpack. He wears it around all the time, to the arcade or to the 7-11 for Dreamsicles, and when he walks home from middle school alone down Jarvis Street, passed crippled buildings and gas stations, it lies on top of the large hump on his back, concealing it seamlessly, almost making it disappear. His back is sharp and curved because of the hump, and Brian slowly drags his feet down the hill like he's asking for it while eighth grade boys with crooked eyebrows hide in the bushes at the end of the block waiting for him. Brian tries to outrun them but fails, and they don't say a word while beating on him, taking kicks to his chest and hot jabs in his stomach over words. They split his lip and Brian can't help but lick the cut as the boys tell him they hate him—He's a fucking freak!—and after a few moments of this, after licking his own blood isn't enough to prop up his courage anymore, he starts to cry as the boys start kicking him in between his legs.
Jenny O'Malley on the other hand is fat. With deceivingly slender arms and legs, but with a thick mid-section that pools her bellybutton into a sinkhole for her shirts. Her mother lets her know she is fat by offering to take Jenny clothes shopping and then buying her black sweatpants and sweatshirts from the men's department. Jenny doesn't want to seem ungrateful, which is what her mother calls if she protests, so she goes along with it and smiles and wears the sweatshirts and pants even though her older sister Angie says you look like Darth fucking Vader in front of Angie's cackling, skinny friends. Jenny lives above a long discarded storefront a few blocks down from Brian, and sometimes she plods alongside him on her Schwinn after school because she feels bad for him and his hump: Because Jenny really has no one else to walk with. She asks him things like what new movies he wants to see and she tells him about what a slut Angie is and how her mother measures her waist every night before bed, which Jenny always sucks in until she can feel her heart rise to her head, and how her mother is making her go on a diet.Then one day on their walk home, Brian pulls a Twinkie from his pocket and places it in Jenny's palm. This is something Jenny knows to be more than just a friendly gesture, mostly because of the way he handed it to her: How he moved very deliberately like he rehearsed the move over and over again in front of a mirror, all of it scripted.
"Thanks," Jenny says, holding the Twinkie in her palm and feeling like she's on a sugar-high.
"I saved it from lunch," Brian says. He grins like warm rain.
It's a little known fact that Jenny doesn't really like to eat. Her mother is a personal trainer and weaned Jenny and her sister off junk food long before they even knew what it was. Sometimes Jenny wonders why she isn't like her sister, why there's more of her than Angie, and when she can't reason it out, holding her and her sister's underwear up next to each other in the basement, hers almost enveloping her sister's, and looking at Angie, at the way her t-shirts cling flat to her stomach, all she can do to keep from sobbing is to cram handfuls of potato chips down her throat in jagged swallows.
"Can I show you something?" Brian asks.
"Depends," Jenny says. "What is it?"
"I'm building a fort."
"A fort?"
"Yeah. Wanna see it?"
Jenny follows him and ditches her bike at the foot of the woods behind the 7-11 and trails behind Brian through the muck and brush to a flat plane where a giant square of plywood lies in the dirt. The mud is thick and the plywood sinks some when Jenny walks on it. The two of them sit across from each other and split the Twinkie in half.
"No one can find us here," Brian says. "You could eat all the Twinkies you want."
"You think so?" Jenny says.
"Yeah."
"I'd be so sick." She smiles at Brian, at his invite for her to gorge herself.
"You like it?" Brian asks.
"What?"
"The fort. I know it needs walls and a roof."
"I like it," Jenny says. They sit quietly for a moment below the trees as Jenny notices that Brian is kind of cute with his whirling green eyes and mouth plastered with yellow bits of cake: At how you wouldn't think he's deformed in some way and that his backpack really does hide the hump well. She wonders what he'll look like years from now, if he'll wear the pack everywhere when he's forty, eighty, one hundred, if he lives that long. It's at this moment when Brian leans in, quickly darkening Jenny's world, and lands a small kiss mostly on her upper lip.
"Whoa," she says. "Easy." She scoots away from him on the course plywood. She rubs her index finger along her lips, wiping up the cream-filling Brian's kiss left behind. Jenny O'Malley has never been kissed before and doesn't know how this whole thing is supposed to work: If you're supposed to love the first boy who kisses you, or if feeling thick with fear and embarrassment is OK too.
"I'm sorry," Brian says. His face is caked with fear. "It just happened."
"That's a hell of thing to just happen," Jenny says.
"I thought you wanted me to."
"Why?" Jenny says, to which Brian doesn't answer. Even though she tells herself she doesn't think about it, this is not what she thought her first kiss would be like—she's never thought of the specifics, but she imagined it wouldn't be in the woods with someone like Brian Peterson. At night Jenny sits up in her room and watches her older sister Angie make out with boys on the back patio while their mother is asleep. She eats while she spies, whatever she can find that's bad for her. Angie lets the boys touch her too, on her chest and in between her legs and on her butt. But only for so long though, and after a predetermined amount of time, she slaps their hungry hands away, which makes Jenny chuckle and envious.
"I was just thinking about doing it," Brian says, "and then I was."
"Just like that?" Jenny feels somewhat flattered that it was instinct: That he was acting without thinking.
"I had no control over it."
Jenny creeps back toward Brian now and picks her half of the Twinkie up from the plywood floor. She dips her finger in the middle of her half and dabs some cream filling across her lips, letting it sit for a minute, before licking it off. "It's OK," she says. "I guess."
"I'm sorry," Brian says. "I don't know what I was thinking."
"No big deal."
"It was awful"
"No it wasn't. It was fine."
"Can I do anything to make it up to you?"
Jenny can feel the blood rush to her face now. She looks down at her gut, wishing Brian would just give it a rest: Wishing he would either stop being so apologetic or just disappear. How many times did he need to hear it wasn't something awful? Boys never regret kissing Angie. They never have complaints or think what they do is wrong, and they never apologize, even if by some chance Angie would want them to. And if they do, if they start talking about how she was such a tease and how she doesn't even go down on you, Angie hurts them, gives them shots in the stomach or brisk snaps of her wrist across their faces, and the one thing Jenny likes about her sister is how take-charge she is.
Let's be clear: Jenny O'Malley is not in love with Brian, she's pretty sure, but why can't he be in love with her without remorse? Why can't he want her, just take her, despite her objections? It's something she can't figure out, like why her sister is so thin or why her mother hates fat people so much. She glares at Brian who is sitting with his legs curled underneath him. He looks fragile like a snow fort, and she wants to cave him in.
Jenny takes a deep breath and says, "How come you never take off your bag?"
"My bag?" Brian looks up now, his eyes widening.
"Yeah," Jenny says, careful not to snap her stare. "Why is that?"
When he doesn't say anything, Jenny crosses her arms, knowing full well what she is doing. She imagines telling her sister about it later on, that it might impress her.
"You should take it off," Jenny says. "You want to make it up to me?"
"Yes," Brian whispers.
"C'mon," Jenny says. "Let's see it then."
Brian stands up, his legs rattling. He slowly arches his arms down behind him and, wincing, lets the backpack slide off on to the plywood where it lies in a heap like a small, dead animal. He stands in front of Jenny, the hump in sight. Jenny stares at it, mouth wide. It pokes through his t-shirt and looks like a giant mosquito bite, red and dimly glowing. She stands up to get a better look at it and notices Brian's cheeks are twisted in shame, his pimply forehead wrinkled.
She reaches her hand out over the hump but is careful not to touch it. "Does it hurt?" She's entranced by the curvature of his back.
"Tingles," Brian says, his voice choked. He is still and pale in the bothered forest light and looks fake like a diorama in a museum: an exhibit of man deformed. Jenny continues to inspect the hump and discolored skin around it, craning her neck over and looking down his shirt when she notices bruises and welts on his back. Black and blue. Red, jagged scars cut their way down and disappear into his pants. That skin is much worse looking than that around the hump, much more painful. She's only ever heard about what those eighth grade boys do to him, but she's never seen their work before. She leans back and looks at Brian's lifeless face, and her heart snaps in two with an echo only she can hear. Tears carve out new spaces in her eyes, and she brings both hands to cover her mouth, wondering how she is scarring Brian now.
"Brian?" she says.
"Yes?" His eyes crawl up to meet hers.
"Lift your shoulders." She picks up the backpack behind him.
"I'm sorry," she whispers.
"It's OK."
Brian lifts his arms straight up in the air and Jenny lets the backpack slide down them and over the hump. She catches her breath for a moment then as Brian's hands, which feel cool and make her feel less aware of her body, land carelessly on either side of her waist as he brings them down. She instinctively sucks in her gut, waiting for the measuring tape.
"No one can see us here, remember?" Brian whispers into her ear. "You don't have to hold your breath like that."
His words echo in her mind, slowly soaking into the softest parts of her brain.
They both stand still and Jenny leans in a little closer to him now, her head almost pressing against his chest like they're slow dancing. She can hear his heart beating like crazy, clattering against his ribcage, and she reaches her arms out and rests them on his waist too, allowing herself to feel consumed by him—her fingers make him feel dreamy, like he can see into the future, and while he can feel it in her body that this is not going anywhere beyond the woods, beyond this moment, the feeling of her touch is something he knows he'll never forget.
"I won't," Jenny says. "Not anymore."
Nick Ostdick is a fiction writer via Chicago. He was the editor of the now defunct RAGAD, a broadside and online magazine of fiction. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Pindeldyboz, Slow Trains, Our Stories, Annalemma, and elsewhere, and his story 'The Sleeping Shags' was a 2007 StorySouth Notable Story. He's read at venues and conferences across the country and is completing his BA in creative writing from Carroll University in Wisconsin, where he is set to begin work on his first collection of short fiction. He blogs at www.inthenickoftime.wordpress.com.