PRECIOUS METALS
-An Excerpt-
Click Here For Audio
Freddy Marks and I were riding in the back of his parents’ Town Car, looking at the quarters I’d stolen from a felt-lined box hidden beneath the underwear in my father’s dresser. We were on our way to a double-date at the Roller Dome. Our dates hailed from Freddy’s summer camp in the Poconos. I alternately showed Freddy the coins and clutched my jacket pocket where my gift for the girl, a bronze necklace, coiled in the down.
Freddy wanted to know if I had enough quarters to pay for both me and the girl. He said the word quarters like it had an aftertaste.
Sure, I said. I wasn’t. I jangled the change and looked at the back of his mother. She was a young woman, a tennis player, and she wore her copper hair piled atop her head so I could see the light fur on her neck. I stared until each of her small freckles took shape, connecting the pale dots into a constellation that spilled into the darkness beneath her blouse. My lap started to tent. I turned from Freddy, toward the window. Outside, the street lamps had come on. Freddy had shown me a grainy, green-tinted Polaroid of my date, whose name he claimed he couldn’t remember, taken at their camp. The shot was cluttered with kids in profile huddled around a picnic table beneath a canopy of leaves. My date perched at the far end of the table, away from Freddy’s camera. Only half her head was visible behind the blonde girl in front of her, but I could tell she sat with her arms pinned to her sides while the others had their elbows on the table, securing their space. She had little room on the end of the bench and seemed too shy to let the others know that. The blonde before her was laughing, caught in mid-joke. My quiet girl was unaware of her own distinction.
Freddy was still looking at me. He had oily, kinky hair and webbed toes. I pulled up my sleeve, jutted my elbow toward the back of his mother, and set a small stack of coins atop the bone. The quarters sounded strange as I swung my hand and snatched them from the air.
Only twelve? Freddy smirked.
Thirteen, I said.
He straightened his pant legs and shrugged. You don’t have a clue how much money it takes to get in the Roller Dome, do you?
The only person either of us knew who’d ever been to the skating rink was Chris Tack, a high school kid who lived at the end of my block. Tack’s parents ran a breakfast place on the boardwalk, and after working there as a cook on the weekends (he could crack and pour eggs with one hand), Tack would come home and practice his skating in the street. He owned his own skates, those numbers that looked like running shoes with wheels attached. He’d feather his shoulder-length blonde hair with a comb he kept in his back pocket as he rolled backward in sweeping arcs, one skate just behind the other, turning along the curbs as I and the other boys watched. When we thought he couldn’t go any faster, he started doing jumps, figure eights, and then he’d spin in a tight circle, arms above his head. He’d reappear outside hours later in one of his bright polyester shirts open down to his hairless chest, throw his skates alongside him in his Cobra, which had gray primer on the left front fender, and burn rubber. He never spoke to us, but we never tired of this mysterious ritual. We could only imagine what his nights were like. The disco balls were blinding.
At fourteen, I got a job clearing tables in the restaurant. On breaks, I’d smoke the discarded cigarette butts I’d collected from the dirty dishes and throw rocks at the gulls teeming through the dumpster for dead fish. Tack must’ve been twenty-one by then. He’d graduated from Roller Dome devotee to rink referee, blowing his whistle at boys who were skating too recklessly then ushering them to the penalty area where they’d have to sit out the remainder of the song and watch him skate a few laps with their dates. He went from minor god to asshole through little fault of his own. Time passed, that was all. Early in the mornings, hair amuck and still in his zebra shirt, he’d meet me on the boardwalk and do a couple of lines as I smoked.
Do the girls ever ask you out? I eventually said, sun bleeding across the unforgiving green of the ocean.
What?
The roller girls. I tried to mash the last of my cigarette on my bare heel like I’d seen my father do, but the fire burned and wouldn’t go out. I picked myself up from the splintered boards. Waves boomed then hissed up the beach before receding back into the bowl of the sea. Grass rattled in the dunes. You know, have you ever gone to the movies with one of the girls?
Shit, no, he said, stretching the words as if on a rack. He licked the end of his pointer finger, then examined the middle and sucked on the chewed nail. Nothing like that. The hot embers started to hurt my hand. Tack took out his Sucrets tin of coke and jabbed his chin at my cigarette. Those things will make your teeth yellow, he said.
To Read The Rest Of This Story,
Order now from:
Amazon.com,
Barnes & Noble,
or the
Publisher