All In How You Look At It

 My name is Curtis. I am twenty-eight And when I was sixteen, I was a father for a moment. 

 In school, our sex education teacher, Michelle Ramlin, warned us daily on being sexually active. Talking about sexually transmitted diseases, and the risk of pregnancy. "A child," she would say, "should always be planned. You should be financially secure and married. Without those two things, the child will not have a happy life." It wasn't until long after I graduated high school that I would learn she had an unplanned pregnancy with her boyfriend when she was fresh out of college and, in turn, the boyfriend moved to California or some s**t and she never saw or spoke to him again. It made me sad to think that she had been talking about her own child that day. 

 She moved her way through the room, whispering different names for diseases. When she walked by me, she whispered, "AIDs." The other kids laughed.

 "Abstinence," she would say, "is the best form of protection." 

 Wendy Hamilton sat in front of me on this particular day and all I could think about was putting my dick between the strap of her shoe and the top of her foot, letting her purple-painted toes graze across my balls until I came. She had hair on her arms, but the rest of her was so beautiful that it made the hair kind of an exciting feature. I leaned forward and gently poked her with the eraser end of my pencil. 

 She turned around and shyly smiled. 

 "Come over today," I whispered. 

 "What about your parents?" 

 "Dad will be at work and my mom's at some kind of retreat," I told her. 

 She quietly laughed and said, "You're so crazy." 

 "Come over and be crazy with me," I said. 

 She said okay and said she would follow me home after class. 

 I met her by the buses. I wanted my friends see me walking out of the parking lot, and on my way home, with her. To see her hand interlocked with mine. They saw us walking away together, but there was a good half a foot between us. She kept saying, "This is so crazy. You're so crazy." 

 

  We walked into my house and I closed the door behind us. She stood in the foyer for a moment, just kind of looking around, but not moving. "Nice house," she said. 

 "Thanks," I said. "I bought it myself." She didn't laugh and neither did I. 

 "Got anything to eat?" she asked, turning around to face me. Her bag still resting on her shoulder. 

 We walked into my kitchen and I made us both a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I didn't eat much of mine because I spent the whole time watching her eat. Her pink tongue licking the peanut butter off of her bottom lip. 

 "So your mom is on a retreat?" she asked, wiping a crumb from the corner of her mouth. 

 "Yeah. For her work. Or something like that." I took a bite of my sandwich and ate it slowly so she couldn't hear me chew. 

 "So you're not worried about her or your father coming home?"

 "No," I said. "Like I told you, my father is at work. And my mother is definitely out of town." I laughed to myself and said, "Even if she was here, she wouldn't notice you. She would be too busy cleaning. She's always cleaning." 

 "My mom doesn't clean anymore. Not since she got sick. She lies on the couch a lot." Wendy seemed to think about this for a while, and then looked at me. 

 "You want to watch a movie?" I asked her.  

 "Sure," she said. 

 I washed the dishes off and threw the crust of our sandwiches into the disposal. Didn't need my dad thinking someone else was here; or that I ate two sandwiches by myself.

 We made our way to the stairs and she walked up ahead of me. She had beautiful legs. Meaty in all the right places, thinning out near her ankles. Everything led to her knees. Those knees. Wendy's knees. In my house. 

 I had everything planned out in my head. We would start watching a movie I knew she would be bored with. Then we'd get antsy and play-fight. Then, as I was holding her close to me, I would kiss her. Kiss her like I did every time I would dream about her. But none of this happened. As it turns out, Full Metal Jacket is one of her favorite movies. She talked through the whole thing, telling me how her and her father watched this every year together. How they would say their favorite lines and write up detailed back stories for the minor characters -- like the two Asian people who steal their camera. They needed it to get money to pay their dad's health insurance. 

 I just laid there next to her, nodding my head, getting increasingly more annoyed that I couldn't even watch the movie, let alone make a move on her. 

 When it ended, she said, "I should probably get home. I don't want to miss dinner with my family. Thanks for inviting me over." She said all of this as she was gathering her shoes and backpack and making her way out my bedroom door. 

 "See you tomorrow at school," I said. 

 She smiled and waved. And then she left. 

 I grabbed the pillow that she had been using and pushed it down hard onto my face. She had the scent of cotton candy and sweat from our walk. I began to jerk off, thinking about her kissing every part of me. Sometimes, in my fantasy, she would stand at the end of my bed, completely naked, and bend over to touch her toes. For no reason other than to drive me wild. And it would. 

 I came thinking about how, after the wild sex we would have, she would stay in bed with me and we would pretend that it was our house, and we both had the day off, and we just decided to be with each other, naked and together. 

 I was so lost in my own fantasy, I hadn't heard my dad come home. I crumpled up the tissue and tossed it under my bed and hurried into the living room. 

 "Hey dad, how was work? Good?" I needed to calm down. He didn't know what I had been doing, but he would if I kept acting queer. 

 "Yeah. It was good." He had his back to me, looking into our backyard through the window. His suit jacket was on one of the dinner table chairs. "You hungry?" he asked. 

 "Yeah," I said. 

 "I'm going to make dinner. Pasta okay?" 

 Pasta was the only thing my father knew how to make. Sometimes I imagined that's why he married my mother in the first place: so she could cook him meals so he didn't starve. 

 I told him pasta sounded great. I sat at the table as he boiled the water and put the pasta in. He didn't add anything to it. No sauce. No meat of any kind. Just boiled pasta noodles. And we sat in silence and ate them together.

 After the news and some show about depressed housewives, I said goodnight to my dad and we both went to our rooms. 

 I lied there on my bed, staring at the ceiling, still reeling from the fact that I had Wendy Hamilton in my house. I had wanted her since I became old enough to want girls. 

 My thoughts were interrupted by a faint screaming. I sat up a little, to hear better. It was constant, but very small. Like a mouse. I stood up from the bed and went to my window. Everything seemed calm outside. A car was slowly driving through the neighborhood. I saw my next door neighbors kiss. Their child was upstairs on his computer. No one seemed to be in any trouble. 

 But the screams continued. I ended up following the noise to underneath my bed. When I lifted the blankets up, there was my used tissue, lying on a dirty sock, propped up against the wall. The bottom corners of it were stretched as far as they could go and the top corners were holding onto the middle of the tissue.  

 I felt stupid, but I asked, "Are you okay?" 

 "No," it replied. "I'm giving birth." 

 I laughed hysterically. I wondered if my father had put some drugs into the pasta he had made, but I had watched him the entire time and knew he didn't. My laugh turned into silence as the tissue continued to scream and, slowly, another tissue produced out of it and onto the sock. It was wailing as well. Closely following was another. And then another. Three baby tissues lying on my dirty sock and the original tissue still propped against the wall, breathing heavily. 

 "Holy f**k," I said. "Holy f**k. What the f**k? What the f**k just happened?" 

 The tissue pointed towards me and said, "I just gave birth to your children. Congratulations. You're a father now." 

 This couldn't be what Ms. Ramlin had in mind when she said we didn't want an unplanned pregnancy. 

 "Hold them," the original tissue said. "Hold our kids." 

 I got down on my stomach and wiggled myself halfway underneath my bed and picked them up gently, letting them rest on my open palms which were side-by-side. 

 They were all crying. Not annoying cries, mind you. More like, "What the f**k am I?" cries. And I just kept whispering, "You'll be okay. You'll all be okay." 

 "What are their names?" the original tissue asked. 

 "What?" I said, looking up at it. 

 "Their names. What do we call them?" 

 I stared. Still trying to figure out if I was on drugs. "I, uh, don't know? What were you thinking about?" 

 "Well, since my name is Charmin, I was thinking about variations of that." Charmin stood on its bottom two corners and moved over next to me. "This one," it said, pointing with its top right corner, "could be 'Char'. This one next to it could be 'Rach' and this one could be 'Carmin'." 

 I looked at the tissues in my hand and said, "Sure. Yeah. I like that." 

 That night, Charmin, Carmin, Rach and Char slept next to me on the pillow that had once been occupied by Wendy's blonde hair. Charmin fell asleep quickly. The children cried for an hour or two until they finally fell asleep. I stayed up all night, wondering what I had gotten myself into. I wasn't ready for kids. 

 The rest of the week, when I would go to school, I would gently place all of them back under the bed. I had removed the dirty sock and given them a clean t-shirt to be on. Charmin would rub up against my cheek and say, "Have a good day. We'll see you when you get home." Charmin smelled like old fish. 

 I couldn't wait for the school week to end. I felt I needed to be home. To take care of my children. And take care of Charmin. I felt like a dead beat dad always being away from them. 

 At the beginning, Wendy would come up to me and tell me how much fun she had had with me at my house. "I told my mom about you. She said you sound nice." 

 I just nodded. "That's great," I said. "Glad you had fun." Then I would go back to worrying about the kids. 

 She finally lost interest some time on Wednesday. She had asked me if I wanted to hang out after school and I told her I couldn't. I told her I needed to be home to take care of the kids. She asked, "Kids?" and I said, "Nevermind."  I heard she had started dating Brad Tompkins a week later. He was the nerd of our grade. I never saw him without a book about Star Wars. Apparently he treated her well though because they got married shortly after we graduated. Good for them. 

 Friday had finally come. I could spend the weekend, two uninterrupted days, with Charmin and the kids. Classes actually breezed by and I passed by Wendy and Brad on my way home. At that moment, I hadn't given it much thought. Figured she needed help with school work. 

 I pretty much ran home. When I got there, my mother's car was in the driveway. She was back. When I went inside, my parents were standing in the foyer, kissing. 

 "Hi, babe," she said as she turned towards me. 

 "Hey, mom. How was your trip?" She answered me but I was already up the stairs and in my room with the door closed. 

 "Charmin. I'm back. How are the kids?" I got down on my knees and lifted the blankets and revealed a clean floor. I looked again to make sure I hadn't just missed them in a corner or something. But there was nothing. Even the shirt was gone. I panicked and ran back downstairs. 

 "Has anyone seen the shirt under my bed?" I asked. Sweat was running down my forehead. I felt dizzy. 

 "It's in the wash," my mother said. "By the way," she moved closer to me and further away from my father and whispered, "We need to talk about what else I found under there." 

 My heart was pounding. "What did you do with Charmin?" I yelled. 

 "Charmin? You're calling it by its brand name now?" she asked in disbelief. "I flushed it, if you must know. And I had to wear gloves to pick it all up. You've been busy this week." 

 "What are you two going on about?" my father asked. 

 "Nothing," my mother and I said in unison. 

 "I can't believe you did this," I said. "I will never forgive you for this." 

 My mother scoffed and said, "I'm sure you'll get over it. I'm sure there will be other Charmins."

 

Reviews

[Tim M]

I'm really enjoying the surreal direction a lot of your more recent writing is taking. Things like this and Baghead show a real uniqueness and originality in your work, and when I read them I feel like I'm reading a "David Melton" story. Etgar Keret would be proud, and he'd also be taking notes.