Every Time I Think of You Read Free

speak. The few other boys whose bedrooms I’d visited had made me feel obligated to fill the non-sexual awkwardness of budding friendship with chatter about anything and everything. These had been pimpled fellow science lab nerd acquaintances for whom I’d felt no desire, other than to corroborate homework notes.
    Despite this, it being his bedroom (I would yet see his dormitory, a more primal and ripe environment, I hoped), I felt what Everett would later bluntly say of my own bedroom, “I wanna sneak in here and hump every surface.”
    As he finished changing into a sweatshirt with the name and emblem of Pinecrest Academy, I sat on a chair at his desk, secretively looking for some small memento to pilfer.
    “We should go into Pittsburgh. I want you to meet my sister, Holly,” Everett said with sudden enthusiasm.
    “We could take the train,” I suggested. “I’ve done that a few times. It’s only, like, an hour.”
    Actually, I’d only done that a few times with my mom when I was a kid. We had gone shopping before Christmas while Dad was at work, before she got her own car. I remembered the trips as special adventures as we’d chosen gifts for Dad. I don’t remember ever believing that Santa brought presents, but that they were shipped by rail. Even my own gifts were rarely surprises after the time I was eight. I’d begun making little lists of potential gifts, arranged by price and referring page numbers according to whichever catalogs we had in the house. Clearly, I had inherited my dad’s accountancy skills.
    Everett interrupted my thoughts with, “Don’t you have a car?”
    I resisted the urge to snap, “Don’t you have a chauffeur?”
    “I don’t have a driver’s license, see,” Everett said. “Never got one.” That would prove to be one of many lies Everett told me; inconsequential, all of them, compared to one great lie.
    “Why do you want to visit your sister?” I asked, in an attempt to divert him from my uneasiness in asking to take a family car into Pittsburgh. “Why isn’t she here?”
    “Oh, she stopped by for Christmas, but she works. She was done with the ‘holly jolly’ jokes a long time ago. And well, you know, sitting around with the family gets tiresome after the big day.”
    I did know, but in a different way. My mother’s brother and his wife ended up becoming the most fertile of pairings in our peasant lineage. After their fifth child, they bought a huge home in a suburban development outside of Scranton whose square footage probably matched Everett’s home, but whose design and décor more resembled a Days Inn.
    They became the default holiday host, since their assembled entourage didn’t export well. We endured the four-hour trek across Pennsylvania on usually snowy roads. My father’s parents were annually retrieved from a retirement village outside of Scranton. I disliked a few of my much younger cousins, for reasons that involved their habits of screeching, violent dares with toy weapons usually aimed at me, and their infrequent bouts of projectile mucous.
    Understandably, my parents and I spent the remainder of our holiday recovering by reading books and generally enjoying a rather non-Christmasy Christmas.

    “So, how about Saturday?” Everett pressed.

    “To visit your sister.”

    “That’s not the point, brainiac.” Everett softly punched my shoulder. “We can be alone together; spend the night. Together.”

    “Oh.”

    It was Wednesday. The new year approached on Sunday, and a new semester would begin the next week. I’d just abruptly become a man, of sorts. I hadn’t left the town border in months, aside from a Kansas concert at Three Rivers Stadium with a herd of the guys on the cross country team.
    Everett beguiled me with his sudden anticipation. The fact that he was so quickly adhering me to his family, his life and his plans, was heartening and so unlike the post-coital rejection I’d expected.

    That he employed a sort of bargaining chip