The house settling, someone jumping up and down on the improvised dance floor, the dull bass thump from the speakers below. Everything is so fucked up.Ī creaking noise behind him, and he starts. God, he wants Craig so bad he thinks it might kill him.
The very thing he has wanted for over two years now, but will never fully admit, not to himself or anyone else.
The one his mind has conjured too many times: Craig’s mouth pressed to his instead, the smell of his best friend’s beery breath as his tongue snakes its way between Jesse’s teeth. We’ll do it then.Īnd soon the intrusive thought appears. Let’s wait until Saturday night, okay? At Craig’s party. The hungry way she straddled him, the pasty icing taste of her lipstick as she fumbled with his belt buckle.ĭon’t, he’d said, and grabbed hold of her wrists. Pulse loud in his ears, his brain judders back in time, to last week and making out with Beth on a dilapidated lawn chair behind her house. Okay, he thinks, this is going to be, like, nothing. He closes the door, rocks on his heels, and he waits. Barely large enough to call a walk-in, but he can stand inside well enough, the airy flutter of clothing and the cling of dry-cleaning plastic lapping from their hangers. Jesse grabs the matches and leaps up, wipes his damp hands on the seat of his jeans. We could play seven minutes in heaven instead, Beth says, and slides Jesse’s hand into her lap. If you hear something and you don’t light the match, they say you’ll be plunged into everlasting night. But when you do, you have to light the match as quickly as possible. You might hear whispering, or scratching.
His eyes tick toward Jesse, who looks away, shifts in place on the spongy carpet. Beth is not the one whose hand he wants to hold. How will you know when it’s time? Tina asks, and Beth reaches over and takes hold of Jesse’s hand. Show me the light, or leave me in darkness. You wait for at least five minutes, and if it’s time, you hold out an unlit match and say, Next, you stand inside the closet and close the door. Up in Craig’s parents’ bedroom sharing a joint with Tina and Beth, the four of them seated in a rough circle as the kegger rages below, he takes a slug of beer from his Solo cup as Craig explains the rules.įirst, you turn out all the lights. Later a longhaired spindleshanks at seventeen, forehead splotched with a constellation of acne, Jesse is popular enough to be invited to parties of his own. He smiled with an air of disinterest, but his arms goosefleshed nevertheless. You can open a door to another dimension, she whispered across the kitchen table, breath thick with the tang of spiked Red Bull. Sleepover shenanigans when you lacked a Ouija board, bullshit kid stuff, he knew that much. Jesse first heard about it at twelve from his older sister, after she came home drunk from a party and was trying hard to scare him. You know the game, don’t you? All you need is a closet, and a book of matches-and a willing participant.
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