Read Online Original Sins by Lisa Alther - Free Book Online Page A

Raymond and Emily and Donny had been older and had bossed him around. Teachers always mentioned how smart Raymond was, how well he’d done on the tests Jed had just flunked. But he was showing them now. Raymond maybe had the brains, but Jed felt like that he had everything else. He lifted weights every day and probably had the best body in town. Sally said so. He dated Sally, who was the prettiest girl at school in a lot of people’s opinions. Their class always voted her “Most Popular Girl.” True, she wasn’t putting out for him much. But it was just a question of time. She made him angry sometimes, though—she could be such a prissy little hypocrite. She’d get out there on the gym floor during a pep rally, like this afternoon, and wiggle her ass at the whole entire student body. She’d leap up and try to touch the soles of her saddle shoes to the back of her bouffant hairdo. She’d flash her panties all over town. But get her alone in a car, and she became Miss Goody-Two-Shoes. She’d dribble her tits all up and down the basketball court, but just try to get ahold of one. Either she should put out, or she should make it clear she wouldn’t. As things was, about half the time when she said no, she meant yes. But you never knew which was which. Sometimes he suspected she’d like him just to go ahead and do it to her, so she wouldn’t have to take responsibility. Girls was like that. They wanted it, but they knew they wasn’t supposed to want it, so they tried to get you to force them into it. It got confusing. Sometimes he wished he was a girl and didn’t have to be the one to make everything happen. If you was a man, you wasn’t supposed to get confused. You was supposed to know all the time what you wanted and how to get it. That was partly why he loved football. Never any question what your goal was. Like Coach Clancy was always saying, “Winning ball games isn’t the most important thing, it’s the only thing. Why, I wouldn’t give the steam off of my shit for a man who don’t go out there to win.” But win or lose, you knew you could count on every man on that team if you was in trouble. You loved those men like they was your own … brother , he started to say, but he hated Raymond.
    Raymond locked his door. Sometimes he thought he’d go crazy in this madhouse if he weren’t able to lock himself in here. That chart—either it or he had to go one day soon. It made his insane family and their random matings and birthings and wanderings look like the whole point to the universe. There was his name in the center of that demented bunch, with the implication that he was not only accountable to them but inseparable from them. They’d pass some drunken hillbilly on the street when he was little and his mother would say, “Say howdy to Bill Flanders, your fifth cousin twice removed on your daddy’s side.” Everybody in this town was related; it was why they were all maniacs. His family were distant cousins to Emily’s, as his mother insisted on showing everyone who set foot in the house. One big happy family. One big happy, crazy-as-treed-coons family.
    Against one wall was a table holding his stamp albums. Over the table hung a map of the world. Better than anything he loved sorting through the packets of stamps he ordered from New York City and finding one from Mauritania or Sumatra or Afghanistan. In the beginning he’d had to check the map almost constantly. Now he knew where every country was and had a few stamps from most. There were people out there he was not related to. That knowledge was an incredible relief.
    People looked at him strangely and asked why he wanted to collect stamps from foreigners. He was never able to answer. He remembered seeing an English stamp on a Christmas card his father received from an army buddy. He’d salvaged it from the garbage and studied it for weeks. One