Too Much Too Soon by Jacqueline Briskin

Author:Jacqueline Briskin [Briskin, Jacqueline]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 1985-01-28T16:00:00+00:00

37

Crystal’s anticipatory pipe dreams about the lark she would share with Alexander bade her adieu as she entered the brown stucco in St. Francis Woods. The Vargers being on a trip to Japan, the kids had the house to themselves.

The less than two decades since Crystal, an English schoolgirl, had burst on the American youth scene could just have easily been a million years, or so it seemed to her. Had these been black Oakland adolescents or hippies from the Haight, she would have been primed for drugs, casual sexual alliances, foul language. But this was Alexander’s crowd, private school students, offspring of San Francisco’s best people.

They congregated around the crackling eucalyptus fire in the basement playroom, ten of them, male and female alike wearing tight, faded Levi’s and a rainbow variety of tops, entertaining themselves by watching their host, Avery Varger, a skinny spider of a boy, studiously roll marijuana in zigzag papers, then handing around the tokes from one to the next, closing their eyes to inhale deeply and appreciatively.

“My mom’s such a fucking hypocrite,” said a little girl with bare, dirty feet. “She’s been dried out a hundred times and all she does is rave on and on about the evils of grass. As far as she’s concerned the first goddamn puff sets you on the yellow brick road to being a dope fiend, sticking yourself with needles.”

A boy nodded his overlong bush of brown hair in agreement. “I mean, they don’t know the first fucking thing about grass, that it’s organic and won’t hurt you. No, they munch that chemical Miltown shit and guzzle their vodka and fuck their minds and livers, and then dump on us if they discover we’re holding.”

Crystal could not for the life of her comprehend what pleasure these juveniles derived from nursing on their saliva-slimed marijuana. At first she simply passed on the loathsome thing, but Alexander turned on her. “What’s wrong, Cryssie? You chicken?”

His voice shook. A plea? It occurred to her that she was jeopardizing his social life by not entering wholeheartedly into the masquerade.

Resolutely stimulating pleasure, she took her turns. But no matter how deeply she dragged or how long she submerged the heavy smoke in her lungs, she felt no effect. Thank God for that. From earliest childhood the mere thought of losing control had filled her with uneasy dread—and that night in San Rafael with Curt Ivory had been an object lesson.

Somebody had put on a record, a grating blast she recognized from Alexander’s collection. The redheaded girl with the face of a ten-year-old was skinning off her tie-dye T-shirt to display breasts larger than Crystal’s own—although not as shapely. The girl raised her arms, revealing tufts of auburn axial hair as she gyrated her torso to the violent beat, her bulbous nipples rolling like a madman’s eyes.

Crystal huddled back in the ancient, dusty-smelling couch. Until now the sexual banter for all its obscenity had a certain innocence—she could remember playing the fraudulent game of sophistication with her dates.

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