Mysterious Skin

• Coach squinted at the new troupe of Panthers, searching for defects. His gaze paused on me. Desire sledgehamered my body. If I saw Coach now, say across a crowded bar, that feeling would translate to something like "I want to fuck him." Back then, i wasn´t sure what to do with my emotion. It felt like a gift I had to open in front of a crowd.
• He shut his mouth over mine, pushing his tongue between my lips, trailing the line of my front teeth, moving back to circle my own, smaller tongue. It felt as though his tongue were gorging my entire head, tasting and licking behind my eyes, tracing the blue lober of my brain. Our teeth clicked together. His bottom lip curled over my jawline. My head was disappearin, he was swallowing me. I moaned and understood it was the right noise. Alfred and Mom made that sound at night.
• When the fight was history, Neil stood beside the same oak. He wore a hot rod T-shirt, a real leather coat with zippers like rews of teeth, and matching boots. Animals had died for those clothes, I thought. He would be perfect holding a switchblade in one hand, and me in the other...
  
• I leaned against another tree, (feigning nonchalance ?). "You are a queer, aren't you?" I said the Q-word as if it were synonymous with a movie star or Deity. There was something wonderful about the word, something that set him apart from everuone else, something I wanted to identify with.

"Yeah" said Neil

I felt as if I were falling in love. Not so much with him, though, as with the aura of him. It didn´t matter that he was a year younger than me. It didn't matter, all the distaste I detected in teacher's voices when they called his name during recess Neil McCormick, the barked, put down that stick I had caves dropped on Miss Timmons in her office, as she whispered to the school nurse how she dreaded getting the McCormick boy in her class next year. "He´s simply evil," etc.
To me, "evil" didn't seem all that bad.
Neil's long hair frayed in the breeze, as shiny black as the lenses in the spectacles fo the creepy blind girl who sat behind me on the morning bus. His eyebrows met ominously inhis forehead's middle. Up close, I could smell him.
The odor swelled, like something hot. If I weren't so eage to touch him again, I would have shrunk from it.
I breathed again, as if it were some thing I did once day. "But you're a tough queer, right?"
"Yeah." He examined the blood smear on the back of his hand. He made certain I ws watching, then licked it off.

• Neil strectched out, his foot brushing my hand. I wondered what he would do if I said, "I want to move to New York, too." If I said, "I'm falling into uncontrolable love with you." Save it four your journal, I told myself.

We got stoned, and half an hour passed. More murders and Mayhem. I glanced back at Neil and discovered he'd fallen asleep. A feeble red vein branched a cross his eyelid. Behind it, his eyeballs darted and wobbled, surveying the details of a dream. I doubted would feature me. I concetrated, attempting to psychically drive a message into Neil's brain: Hi although I've known you nearly 4 months, a large chunk of your life remain as strange and enigmatic as one of those unidentified people the authorities found in that circus fire I recentrly read about, their faces burned beyond recognition. The mystery that surrounds you only makes me love you more. Oh well, What can I do? I leaned over Neil's ear, wanting to kiss it, but instead whispering againts the skin "Sweet Dreams."

In the film, an hysterical woman crawled through an open window, only to drop headfirs into a roomful of twisted barbed wine. That's precisely how I feel right now, I thought. When her screams grew too loud, I muted the volume and watched him sleep.

Continua...