Read Online Flings by Justin Taylor - Free Book Online

out of school.
    When I slept over we were allowed to stay up as late as we wanted playing video games and watching movies. If Jake had an appetite it was like a miracle. They’d have Claudette make anything he asked for. And there was always stuff to snack on—Fruit Roll-Ups and Kudos bars, fresh-made peanut butter oatmeal cookies and frozen yogurt. They had this big ceramic bowl—Mrs. Adelman had made it in a class she took—that sat on the breakfast bar and was always filled with clementine oranges. I would beg my mom to buy us some when she went to the store.
    Mr. and Mrs. Adelman were usually in bed by ten thirty, and it was never long after that before Claudette retired to her room to watch TV with her headphones on. By this point Jake would have fallen asleep during whatever movie we’d chosen after dinner. I’d nudge him awake and help him down to his room while Isaac set the timer on his digital stopwatch for fifteen minutes. We’d pass the time playing Street Fighter II Turbo . He always had to be Ryu, who wore a white karate suit and had a hurricane kick and shot energy blasts out of his hands. I liked Guile, the American special ops vet with camo pants and a flat top, but I could kick Isaac’s ass so fast with Guile that it wasn’t fun for either of us, so I’d usually hit random and let the computer decide, though if it made me be Chun-Li—the Chinese girl—then we had to reset. When the stopwatch beeped we’d peek down from the top of the stairs for one last security check, then shut Isaac’s bedroom door.
    When Mr. Adelman converted his office into a room for Jake, he’d moved some boxes into the front hall closet underneath the stairs. While most contained tax returns and business records, one had turned out to be full of dirty magazines. Isaac had grabbed a handful of these and stashed them in his closet, in the boxes of board games and the deep pockets of winter coats. Isaac alone got to choose which magazine we looked at and the pace at which the glossy pages turned. He liked to talk about the girls in the pictures, what they were doing and the guys they were doing it with and if we’d ever be like them. We compared which of us had a bigger thing, and more hair around it, and who could shoot more stuff, which was pretty much impossible to determine as long as we were shooting into socks from the laundry since the point of the sock was to absorb the stuff, so we stopped using them and did it into each other’s hands instead but it was still hard to tell. He tried to make it seem like these were just more games we were playing, friendly competitions like pool jumps or Street Fighter rounds or whatever. When Jake got better, Isaac said, we could all play.
    I wanted to tell him to shut up about it, but I didn’t know how. (Plus I knew if I made him angry he might take the magazine away.) I wished that he had gotten sick instead of his brother, who was bald now, thinner every time I saw him, and wheezing in his sleep so bad that when the house settled at night you could hear it from all the way upstairs.
    Jake’s funeral was the first one I ever went to. It was an overcast April morning, and I remember how the family lined up to receive the mourners: his mom’s mascara running, Isaac flanked by his grandparents and pallid in a suit he’d half outgrown, eyes glued to his shoes. And Mr. Adelman, how impossibly tall he seemed, leaning down and in close to shake my hand. I remember his big wet eyes and how I avoided them, terrified his grief might somehow allow him to read my secrets if I met his gaze. I don’t remember the service, only afterward, standing by the open grave, and even that I don’t think I remember the way it happened. There must have been a crowd gathered, a rabbi, my mother’s hand on my shoulder, but my mind seems to have erased all these things, or else never recorded them in the first place. I can see