By Susanna King

“Look at her boobs,” Zach hissed, side-eyeing some college-age girl in a yellow bikini.

Ivan and Andrew looked. Ivan mostly focused on the girl’s regal unibrow.

Andrew gave a cursory nod. “Yuh,” he said.

The line to the nearest ride stretched to oblivion. An old woman in front of Ivan picked a wedgie. She was trying to be discreet, so he averted his eyes. At first, he stared at a dry ornamental bush in a bed of wood chips, but his eyes kept returning to the woman’s shoulders—they had a complex pattern of freckles and shiny birthmarks, some of which very well could have been melanomas. Ivan felt, against reason, that he wanted to reach out to her, to tap her on the shoulder and warn her. Maybe she looked a little like Aunt Irina. Maybe she wasn’t that old, anyway. Her hair was like straw, and she seemed to be alone.

“…when it comes to real girls, you know, it’s just, hard,” Andrew was saying to Zach.

“So then, what celebrity would you fuck?”

“Scarlett Johansson,” Andrew replied. “In the superhero bodysuit.”

Ivan untied and retied the drawstring on his trunks. “The Black Widow,” Ivan said. “That’s her superhero. The Black Widow.”

“Yuh,” Zach replied.

The liver-spotted woman took one step forward, and the boys shuffled behind. All Ivan could smell was sweat and sunscreen. Mostly sweat.

“Who would you fuck, Ivan?” Andrew asked.

Of course, they knew that Ivan was gay. They also knew that Ivan would never tell them that he was gay, so they asked him as an experiment, to see what he would say.

“I think…,” said Ivan softly. He knew he wasn’t going to tell them, I want to fuck Michael B. Jordan. Andrew and Zach wouldn’t tease him. It wasn’t cool to be homophobic anymore; that wasn’t the problem. But the idea that other people could imagine him happy, enjoying himself, made Ivan want to flush himself down the toilet. So, he would say that he wanted to sleep with a woman. 

But which woman? What could he say that would make the other guys so uncomfortable that they would start doing obscene things like swearing in progressively louder voices until someone noticed and glared at them, or whispering “dump truck” to each other until the liver-spotted woman’s steps forward became more and more self-consciously clenched?

The skin on Ivan’s face stretched like a deer hide drying in the sun. His upper lip tasted like a pork chop. His eyes stung.

“Hm,” Ivan said. “I’d fuck Sylvia Plath.”

Ivan assumed a placid expression and stared forward. Zach let loose a frothy laugh. But Andrew, who loved to read, asked earnestly, “Really? Why?”

“She was hot,” Ivan said, raising his eyebrows as he turned to look at them. “Really. There’s this picture of her on a beach, and she’s wearing this white bikini….” He whistled in the way that guys on old sitcoms whistled when they were talking about a girl. Then he looked at the liver-spotted woman in front of him, wondering if she was listening to what he was saying, and if she was, what she was thinking.

Zach googled, “sylvia plath swimsuit pics.” He and Andrew bunched around the phone, holding their hands up as shades. The lady in front moved up, and Ivan took one step forward. The other boys lingered behind.

“Yo, I think my grandma has this bra,” Zach laughed, but he had missed the comic timing by half a second.

The liver-spotted woman shifted from foot to foot. She ran her hands down her conservative-cut tankini as if to smooth it into place. It did not need smoothing—it clung to her, too tightly. The tankini had a pattern of little purple butterflies.

Ivan stared at the butterflies, and his stomach turned. He needed to fix what he’d done. He needed to take it back. “I think she’s beautiful,” he said very loudly, and he meant it. He stared at the woman in front of him carefully, trying to gauge whether she seemed at all reassured, holding his gaze to her like it was a thermometer, and she was a child, and he was checking for fever.

The line lurched forward. Behind him, Zach and Andrew had begun to pinch each other, slap each other, kick each other in the shins. They hopped from cool shadow to cool shadow. Ivan stood on the brightest part of the concrete, trying to trick himself into not feeling the way it singed the bottom of his feet, trying even to savor the pain somehow. He felt it was a spiritual exercise. He felt it was what he deserved.

By the time they got to the front of the line, he was nothing more than a fifteen-year-old again: a boy with a belly button piercing, standing in line at a water park, wet, with feet like cooked lobsters.

The liver-spotted woman went down the slide first. As she ricocheted through the chute, she threw her hands up and let loose a wild cry: “Aiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!” Seconds later, she crashed into the water at a sideways angle. Ivan craned over the railing, but the lifeguard waved him forward before she resurfaced.

Then, he was sitting down on the light blue plastic. The water jets pushed him, and he was flying, and he was roaring down this cold mountain of water, and he, too, was screaming “Aiiiiiiiii,” and then he soared off the lip of the slide. There was a single brilliant moment of suspension. Then, he came crashing down into the water, cold and clear and perfect and alone.