The Sea of Light by Levin Jenifer

Author:Levin, Jenifer [Levin, Jenifer]
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: Untreed Reads
Published: 2012-07-19T07:00:00+00:00

Christmas Dinner

(JACK)

Mom and Dad.

Lucy and Ricky.

Ricardo. Delgado.

A couple of fighting machines.

One day, though, they’ll bust a fucking gasket. It’ll be like some scene in a movie, only you won’t be able to figure out whether it’s a horror or a comedy: she’ll be bitching at him, he’ll be sniping back at her, and all the time they’ll be driving this car, a gray BMW, and they’ll get so pissed off they start screaming and forget to steer and before you know it they’re over a cliff, boom, screeching down into a gully in the California countryside. Or Massachusetts. Wherever.

Anyway, it’ll definitely be pancake time. For them, and for the car—scrape the whole mess up with a spatula.

“Jack! Jack!”

I don’t answer.

“Jack! Where are you?”

I wonder how long I can hold out.

“James Delgado! Please come downstairs this instant!”

Around here, you always prepare for a hasty getaway. I shove my wallet into a back pocket, grab keys and a CD and shades, and thunder down each step like I’m squashing something evil. Supershades on, reflective mirrors hiding my eyes, hard to see anything but who cares?! Now all I need is, like, a fucking sawed-off shotgun. Like the film where Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a cop and he parks in front of some joint and flattens a couple of scumbags with one open-handed blow. Then he pulls out this twelve-gauge automatic number and turns around to see all the compadres of these flattened scumbags, who are sitting on his car being worthless—and he’s wearing his own mirrored supershades, too—and he waves the twelve-gauge at them and says something like, By the way, my name is John Kimble, and I love my car. Then he busts into the place and starts blowing everything apart.

Everybody go home, he says, the party’s over.

Who are you? someone asks.

He looks at them from behind the supershades; he doesn’t change expression. And he says: I’m the party pooper.

I saw that one with Cindy. We spent some time in the back row in the dark making out, she let me touch her tits under the bra and they were soft, gushy almost, a little wet with sweat, the skin felt satiny. We were kissing with our tongues and I thought I’d lose it, I thought I’d bust right through my zipper. There was this high, hot and cold, rushing feeling in my stomach and chest that almost hurt, brought tears to my eyes, made me say the words—not to her, thank God, but to myself, in my head: Cindy, I love you.

Maybe she heard them anyway, in her own head, and freaked. Maybe that’s why she pushed my fingers gently out from under her bra and her shirt, and whispered, Ja-ack! Let’s watch the movie!

I was glad in a way, too. Because I didn’t miss the line about the party pooper.

*

But this is one party I will not poop out of, with or without my supershades—Christmas dinner, the two of them going at it like rabid dogs, the way they have basically been doing since Babe went away to school again.

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