Ben bent double and grabbed his sweat-slicked knees, heaving deep breaths. He knew he should keep moving at a gentle pace after such vigorous exercise to keep the blood flowing, but his body just wouldn’t budge. It wasn’t the first time he had sprinted up the hill. In fact, it was probably the fourth time this week he had gone full blast from the main street up to the cul-de-sac where he lived. That kind of exertion at that incline was more than most sane people could bear, and he wasn’t getting used to it very quickly.
Ben was a lean and lanky young man. He had lived, worked, and gone to school in Raleigh, North Carolina, all of his miserable 22 years. School had been a terrible experience for him, work was a hassle, and he had a meagre excuse for a family. Being socially awkward his entire life had made Ben hate going out in public. He hated seeing people he knew he could never be friends with. He hated passing by women who he knew he would never stand a chance with. But most of all, he hated knowing that he, in all his being, was so much different and less desirable than those he saw around him. If there was one thing Ben did love doing, however, it was running. It let him forget about everything. Forgetting was what helped him make it through his day to day life without having to think. Without having to feel.
When Ben opened the front door he heard a high-pitched squeal. A greyish-white cat jumped at his ankle, scratched it, and darted away in a flash. His grandmother’s old cat was long gone before Ben realized that the old thing had been lying on the floor behind the front door when he had opened it forcefully, pinching the cat’s tail between the door and the floor. Ben shrugged and made his way to the kitchen. He hated the fucking thing anyway – it was ugly, old, and it pissed just about anywhere it pleased.
He went straight to the kitchen and poured himself a tall glass of iced tea. The cool liquid felt great running down his throat. In this hot weather, he didn’t know what he would do without his trusty jug of ice tea. He poured himself another full glass, searched the pantry for a bag of chips, and made his way up to his room.
The kitchen and Ben’s room were the only clean rooms in the house. His aging grandmother was confined to the living room chair with her medical oxygen tanks. Decades of cigarette-smoking along with plenty of other bad habits had rendered her incapable of doing anything even mildly productive. She had been old and immobile since Ben had known her, and as a result the house had always been a pigsty. Occasionally Ben would clean up some of the mess in the hallways, but only enough to safely make his way through the first floor. The rest of the house could easily be classified as a junkyard. It reeked of mothballs, rotting furniture, dead mice, and the excrement from all the other neighbourhood cats that visited the house.
Before he flopped down on his soft twin sized bed, he placed his bathroom towel on top of the sheets to absorb the sweat on his body. He didn’t actually mind having his bed all sweaty, but he realized that if he ever had a girlfriend, he would have to change some of his habits as to not gross her out. The good thing, he told himself, was that he was completely and utterly single, and so had absolutely no need to quit any of his less than civil habits. He laughed at the thought as he fired up his laptop. There are always two sides to everything, he thought. No girl means you can watch all the porn you want, cum anywhere you want, and go any number of days you please without showering. Life was good when you thought about it that way.
Porn hadn’t been satisfying Ben as much as it used to. In fact, it wasn’t doing anything for him these days. Nonetheless, he went to his favourite porn website and typed in ‘milf blowjob’. The search showed links that were almost all in purple lettering, meaning he had already opened those links and seen those movies. He decided to try ‘blonde college girl fuck’, and opened the first link. Five minutes of watching had yielded no results, and after ten minutes of seeing the busty blond scream and writhe on the screen, Ben decided to give up. He tucked his limp member away, wondering why visual images weren’t stimulating him anymore. I hope it doesn’t mean I don’t like sex anymore, he thought. He had heard stories of men who watched too much porn and the resulting problems. A lot of the time these people preferred pornography to the real thing, and to think that the image of a gorgeous twenty year old woman moan in pleasure while being sodomized on a couch didn’t even cause a stir in his pants… Ben shuddered at the thought. Maybe junior just needs a rest. He clicked on the Facebook tab.
Four new notifications. He opened the notifications tab and nothing struck him as important. A girl he didn’t know personally had commented on ‘Daniel’s graduation party.’ There was also an invitation from Daniel, a kid whose brother Ben knew from high school. He didn’t know Daniel at all. Daniel’s older brother, Zach, he did know. The two of them, along with their other friends, had smoked tremendous amounts of weed in the forest surrounding the neighbourhood back in high school. Ben’s mind conjured an image of them getting high in the secluded forest when they were in high school. How old had he been? Fourteen? Fifteen? He remembered that they had been his first group of friends in high school, and he had hung out with them for years.
His attention snapped back to the invite. He opened it and saw a picture of a bright blue swimming pool with sun umbrellas surrounding it. The kid must have downloaded the picture from the internet, Ben definitely didn’t remember Zach’s pool being that big and blue. The image was pretty enticing nonetheless. He scrolled down to find that eight of the 17 people invited had already said they were coming. Three said they might be coming, and the rest hadn’t replied yet.
Would it weird of a young adult who was supposed to be almost out of college went to a high school pool party? A pang of excitement rose in him. Well, they were practically out of high school, he reasoned. Damn dude, he thought to himself. You’re one sick motherfucker, lusting after high-schoolers. Of course, he had heard of larger age gaps between two people dating. He looked at the bottom right of his laptop and realized he had less than an hour left before he had to go to work. He sent Zach a quick message about his brother’s party and closed the Facebook tab. Ben figured he might as well get to work a little bit earlier, It’s not as if he had anything else even mildly important on his schedule.
***
The money Ben made scooping ice cream for annoying children wasn’t near enough for the level of pain he was taking. His long shifts were tiring and mind-numbingly boring. The good thing was that a lot of the time he could just sit around and do nothing, which happened to be one of his favourite things to do. He would sit and stare into space, lost in his own thoughts for what felt like hours at a time.
The clock showed nine-thirty. Ben decided to close up a little sooner. Surely the manager wouldn’t mind. In his entire eight hour shift only four customers had visited. Ben went to the back room and picked up his backpack. He closed the ice cream vats and locked them, then took off the ridiculous visor he had to wear as part of his work uniform. He was halfway around the counter when he heard the door chime ring. Ben sighed. Although he couldn’t see the new arrival with the large fridge blocking his view, he knew it was another customer.
Ben scolded himself silently for not putting up the ‘closed’ sign earlier. Guess I’ll just have to leave ten minutes later. He pulled his visor back on and unlocked the freezer door. He stuck his hand in the sink and searched around for the dirty old ice cream scoop in the mucky dishwater. When he found it he turned around, at the same time expertly flicking the scoop so that the last few drops of water sprayed onto the floor and wall behind him. He lifted the glass door of the display case open and waited for the order to come. When none came he looked up at the customer. He froze in place. She was gorgeous. The girl was quietly looking down at the ***********ions of ice cream and biting her bottom lip. She didn’t seem to notice Ben, and took her time carefully reading the de***********ion of each flavour of ice cream behind the glass. She had a slight build, from what Ben could see. Her eyes were a deep brown, as was her hair. She was very well tanned and could easily have been mistaken as Hispanic. She was wearing a thin line of eyeliner, but not much else on the way of makeup.
The girl moved over to the right of the ice cream display and continued her focused exploration. Ben found himself moving along with her, ogling her the whole time. She had a tremendous amount of natural beauty, and although Ben wasn’t particularly fond of skinny girls, he felt an intense attraction for her slim body. Of course it wasn’t unique for him to be entranced by a girl within seconds of laying eyes on her. He was the type of person who would sit on a park bench and fantasize about a woman he was watching. He had always felt self-conscious and ashamed of it, as if someone would peer into his sick mind at that very moment and call him out. But he had grown past that point. He didn’t care about trivial things such as shame anymore. He loved watching women and imagining them opening their legs for him, just as he was imagining the girl in front of him laying naked on her back, right there in the store. The girl ordered strawberry cheesecake ice cream, “in a cone, please,” and didn’t look up from her phone until she left the store again. It was as if Ben never existed.
***
His grandmother was in her sofa chair as always when Ben walked in through the front door later that evening.
“Ben! Ben is that you?” Came the squawk from the living room.
“Yeah, I’m here Grandma,” He replied, tossing his backpack aside.
“Ben, is that you?” She asked again.
“Yes Grandma!” Ben yelled. He forgot that the old lady was losing her hearing by the day, and every time he had to yell louder so that she could hear him.
“Bring me some ice cream,” her voice came again.
Ben rolled his eyes and shouted an affirmative. He was rummaging through the deep end of the huge old box freezer for an unopened tab of vanilla ice cream when he heard her voice again.
“Jeremy, bring me some God-damn ice cream!”
Ben couldn’t help but chuckle when he heard his father’s name. Her Alzheimer’s was getting worse every day. He found the ice cream tab and brought it in to his grandmother. The television was on a game show, the channel was a typical Southern channel with local news, stupid game shows, treacherous religious programs, and lots of awful country music. It was the only channel Grandma ever watched. She watched it with a focus so deep that she was completely oblivious to the world around her. Other than the occasional cackle, she never seemed to move a muscle. She wasn’t the best of company, and she definitely wouldn’t be mistaken for the most caring person in the world.
She didn’t look up as he placed the ice cream and a large carton of cheap cigarettes down on the small table next to her. She grabbed the pack of cigarettes, tore it open, stuck one into her mouth, and glued her eyes back on the television. Ben found it hard to believe that anyone could still smoke after they had already been on oxygen for two years. But the old lady didn’t seem to mind one bit. She happily puffed on her cigarette, eyes transfixed on the screen, the tub of ice cream lying forgotten on the table. Ben left her be and made his way upstairs
“And don’t forget to feed Rumbler!” Came the yell from behind him.
This time Ben burst out in a fit of laughter. Rumbler – his grandmother’s utterly annoying parrot had, by the grace of God, died six years earlier. The damn thing kept Ben awake more nights than he could remember, listening to it squawk about democrats, homosexuals, and the lottery.
Ben made his way up the stairs and flopped down on his bed again. He thought about his grandmother calling him Jeremy. It was strange. Ben never knew either of his parents, his grandmother was the only family he knew of or had any contact with. When Ben was younger, Ben had wished that the story his Grandmother had told him wasn’t true. He would often fantasize about his parents having been a loving couple who had tragically died in a car crash. But Ben knew that wasn’t the case. Although Grandma’s account wasn’t likely to be very accurate, he had come to accept the real scenario in which he had probably been conceived.
Ben realized he hadn’t showered in a number of days, and would probably get in trouble with his boss if he showed up to work smelling like a pile of shit and with hair greasy enough to cook bacon. He stood up and made his way down the second floor hall and turned into the small bathroom. The house would have been considered appropriate for a family of two or three to live in – four would be pushing it – but with what must have been six decades worth of useless garbage stacked into shoulder-high piles, just one person would struggle to find room to move freely. Ben turned the shower on, and while he waited for the water to heat up, he leaned on the sink and looked at himself in the mirror.
According to his grandmother, Jeremy, his father, had disappeared shortly after his girlfriend’s pregnancy. The girl Jeremy had been seeing was seventeen when he had left her pregnant and broke all those years ago. The young girl had tried to find him for a few years after Ben’s birth so that he could help out with finances. Upon finding Jeremy’s supposed address, she had been upset to discover that he had left for Columbia to live with his new girlfriend. She had just been his whore, and he had just been another cock for her to suck on. In the days when Grandma had still spoken, her vulgarity knew no bounds, and her brutally honest words were free of any sensitivity towards young Benny. Grandma said that the girl, then nineteen, had been diagnosed with HIV, “either from all the needles she used to shoot up” Grandma had said, “or all the men she blew for a few quarters.” The girl probably knew she didn’t have much time left, so she decided to leave the tiny Ben with his paternal grandmother. No-one knew what had become of her. As far as Ben knew, Grandma was the last person to have seen her.
The water was running hot. Ben pulled his clothes off and stepped into the shower. He turned the rusty old shower head down and stood toward the back end of the tiny shower while he fidgeted with the tap, trying to get the best temperature. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a spider scurry from the drain hole to a corner of the shower. Ben recognized it as a wolf spider, a common species around the East coast. He had done research on it when he realized that they were all over his house. He found that although it looked damn ugly, its bite would cause a headache, some swelling, and – at worst – a fever. He used the long wooden back-brush laying in the corner to squash the spider into the floor. It left a yellowish goo behind which Ben washed off with shower head, and the floor returned to its previous hue of greyish brown grime.
Ben was frequently riddled with disturbing thoughts of his mother’s decomposed corpse lying in a ditch somewhere in the country side. He couldn’t recall anything about his mother, he didn’t even know her name, but he did know that she had been a ne’er do well who constantly got herself into trouble. Ben couldn’t even be sure that he was related to Grandma, which made him feel a little less guilty about disliking her. Jeremy, Ben’s father, had only been one of the many men who had taken Ben’s young mother behind a dumpster outside a dirty street bar and nailed her. A dirty way to be conceived, if there ever was one.
The thought used to bring tears to his eyes, but as he had gotten older he tended to become enraged by the mental image of a grown man pressing a young girl against the wall as he roughly shoved his penis deep inside her, the girl moaning with the intense pleasure, or pain, or both. Ben had no idea where this image had come from, he had no idea why he got so worked up about it, but the fact of the matter was that it bothered him a lot.
After he rinsed the soap out of his eyes, he turned to let the stream of hot water catch his left shoulder and the side of his neck. He was facing the glass shower door and could see part of the bathroom mirror. His reflection matched his mood: gaunt, grim, and lacking life.
***
The next morning Ben rubbed his eyes and groggily made his way down to the kitchen to boil some hot water. The old stove usually took about 15 minutes to actually bring the kettle water to boil, so Ben went back up to his room and opened his laptop. As his mind cleared from the morning fog he became increasingly aware that today would be another ordinary day, filled with his usual mundane tasks. He opened two tabs on the internet, one for Facebook, and another for porn. He opened his notifications tab and noticed that there had been more commotion on the ‘Daniels Graduation Party’ page. It occurred to him that he hadn’t responded to the invite yet, nor had he been contacted by Zach thus far. The party was this coming Friday, which was – he checked the computer calendar – tomorrow!
Shit. Ben pursed his lips while he looked at the screen, weighing his options. He knew it would be damn weird if he showed up at a pool party among a bunch of kids he didn’t know. He played a few scenarios out in his head. In the first he visualized himself sitting tentatively on a bench by the pool, hands nervously fumbling with his phone. People were ignoring him, completely oblivious to his presence. A familiar feeling entered the pit of Ben’s stomach, as if ice had suddenly materialized in his abdomen. He realized that he was frantically chewing on the inside of his cheek, a nervous habit he had developed back in middle school. Ben was about slam the laptop shut when another picture entered his mind.
He was lying on a sun chair outside. The atmosphere was pleasantly warm and comfortable, and the sun was hanging low in the sky, casting a deep orange light over the world. He wasn’t the only one on the sun chair; a girl, about seventeen, with long, dark hair was lying to his side, one leg straddling his. His arm was around her slender body, his hand resting comfortably on her waist. He turned his head to face her. She looked at him with beautiful brown eyes, and Ben could feel his heart starting to beat faster. The girl leaned over him, resting her chest on his. He felt her soft skin on his. She lifted her head towards him and closed her eyes. When her lips met Ben’s, a cool breeze sailed through the late afternoon sky, raising goose bumps over his whole body.
The piercing whine of the kettle snapped Ben out of his delirium. He moved the mouse arrow over to the options bar and, with a smile curling on his mouth, clicked ‘Attending.’
***
Noon, the last Friday of July. There were only four hours left until the party started, and Ben had overslept. He hurried down the stairs, making a loud thump as he landed on the floor.
“Mariana, is that you?” came the voice from inside the house.
Ben froze. Who the fuck is Mariana?
“No it’s me, grandma.”
No reply. He shrugged and grabbed his bag. Once outside, Ben went around the side of the shaggy house, hopped on his bicycle, and headed down the street. The mall was Ben’s usual hang out spot, a place where he didn’t feel so utterly alone and depressed. Instead, he frequented the mall and had a habit of sitting in the food court and watching the passers-by, perving over the high school girls, and sulking at the sight of happy young couples. The cool air-conditioned interior of the mall hit his face. It felt amazing after having biked four miles in the July heat. He made his way past some smaller stores to the food court and ordered his usual meal – orange chicken with fried rice and veggies. He took his seat toward the back, facing the inside of the large food court.
He hadn’t eaten breakfast, and his stomach grumbled when the sweet smell of food drifted from the polystyrene box. He started shovelling spoonfuls of rice into his mouth, followed by some chicken and deep fried vegetables. His mood improved considerably as he ate, restoring a feeling of alertness and optimism. When he had wolfed down his entire lunch, he picked up his large drink and took a few long sips of cold ice tea. The anxiety he had felt earlier in the morning had drifted away and was replaced by a feeling of fullness. He sat back lazily and surveyed the distance.
The mall was brimming with noise from conversations, laughter, the scraping of chairs, and the sizzle of food being fried. He spotted a group of girls walking from the East end of the food court. They couldn’t have been more than sixteen. They were all attractive, but one of the four was exceptionally pretty with straight, dirty-blond hair hanging down her back. She was walking at the back of the group and had an air of “just don’t care” about her. Her eyelids were slightly lowered, as if she were either stoned, or utterly bored of the situation she was in, and there was nothing on this planet that could impress her. Ben assumed it was the latter. He felt a fluttering in his stomach as he gazed at her as the girl and her posse slowly made their way in his direction. They stopped at a table in the center of the food court, twenty feet short of him. At the table they met a group of boys and greeted them with hugs. The five boys were maybe a year or two older than the girls, probably high-school seniors. Probably football players. Kids who just didn’t give a shit in life, yet somehow still managed to get the girl. Ben smirked at the thought and took another sip of ice tea.
The group jumped into conversation right away, and although he was too far to make out what the conversation was about, Ben thought he caught the words “Beach” and “Week.” Holy shit, he thought, those fuckers went to Beach Week with those girls. Ben wondered if they had all fucked the pretty girl with the long hair. His heart started racing as he pictured it. She was on the bed on all fours, her long hair falling to one side as she took one of the guys’ penis in her mouth. Another boy kneeled behind her, his pants around his ankles, ramming into her.
The thought disgusted him, and the rock hard erection he was suddenly sporting under the table irritated him even more. How was it possible that a bunch of losers like them could get girls that hot? He could see the group saying their goodbyes. They exchanged hugs once more, and the girls were on their way again, leaving the group of boys sniggering quietly amongst themselves.
The girls walked off to the other end of the food court, chatting happily, and disappeared around the corner. Ben sat completely still, staring at the empty polystyrene food box in front of him. He would have done anything to have her, anything, even if it was for just a moment of attention. His good mood had all but disappeared, leaving him feeling dull and empty. He was pissed at himself, not only because he wasn’t good enough for her, but also because he let his imagination run free and cause havoc in his mind. Despite all the radiant energy of attraction he was beaming at her, the girl hadn’t even noticed his existence.
Ben milled around the mall for another hour, after that he stopped by the liquor store and stocked up on beer and whiskey. When he finally got home in the early afternoon he slumped down on his bed, letting out a long, loud groan. Occurrences like what had happened at the mall left him with a deep sense of sadness. He felt pitiful knowing that that girl would pick a high school boy over him any day. He was angry knowing that although he was at least four years that boys’ senior, she would be creeped out by him – that was just who he was. What tugged at him most was that, despite trying so hard, despite doing his best to be a good person, and despite him putting every ounce of effort into changing himself into the man women wanted, he never seemed to be repaid for his efforts. No payment for his work in the least. He turned on his side, slid a tattered blanket over himself, and curled into a fetal position, pressing his face into the pillow. The day was sweltering, hot, and beautiful, and Ben felt cold and dark on the inside.