n that moment, Ryan Wolff felt like he'd always existed outside the men's room at the north end of the school, his sweaty ear pressed hard against the thickly-painted wood. There was no sound except the thrum of blood speeding adrenaline to his paralyzed body, but he had to be certain no one was inside. Kevin Crowley and his entourage of sidekick dirtbags ruled this end of the school with a collective fist. If they discovered that he'd secretly been using their official smoking hangout to shit, the verbalized harassment would escalate to physical violence, and with five against one there would be no chance for Ryan.

He gritted his teeth as a stomach cramp forced him to make a decision, fight or flight. The reckless silence continued unabated, the hallway during class was deserted and Kevin and company were in shop class. The odds were with him for a change. Ryan broke his paralysis and gently inched open the spunk colored door into an uncertain future.

The air was stale with recent smoking but currently unoccupied. Ryan darted into the stall, yanked his pants down and squatted just in time. He relaxed into the cool curve of the black seat once the emergency passed and thanked the god who had allowed him to hold out long enough. The boy exhaled and breathed in his own stink, then sputtered as he read the message on the wall beside his head. An alarm shivered over his skin and almost sent him flying out of the bathroom before Kevin or one of his boys had a chance to return.

Etched carefully in the yellow paint of the stall: "Call Frankenstein. Hell suck you dry day or night." Ryan ignored the missing apostrophe and concentrated on the stiff, masculine handwriting. He traced the letters with his delicate fingers in an attempt to understand the boy who had written it. The missing apostrophe pointed to someone in remedial English, and the structured lettering reminded him of the rigid forms of architectural plans. He pictured one of Kevin's crew, a flannel-wearing, Marlboro-smoking boy with dirty hair, sitting here bare assed and stenciling those words in the paint with some sharp instrument, perhaps a hunting knife. His bare ass, he thought again, right where mine is now.

A detailed pictogram accompanied the message, clearly portraying the service Ryan was to provide if phoned. The draftsman had spent countless minutes relaying his vision; the artist's exaggerated cock and balls covered a large portion of the wall and pierced the portrait of Ryan's thin face and "open-wide" mouth. He felt an anxious pride steal over him at being the focus of someone's sexual derision.

The thin boy took a marker out of his knapsack and made a few alterations to the message itself. He blocked out the phone number for his father's funeral home and transformed it into the base of an arched headstone, carefully lassoing the text. He changed the verb "call" to RIP, not an easy task, and added a bouquet of flowers at the base. He left the original message intact, it was probably true.

He studied his changes with a nod and then raised his ass off the seat to wipe himself. Jeff Tate's cowboy whoop in the hall froze him in mid-swipe and his mind frantically searched for a way out. Ryan looked plaintively at the ceiling for an escape hatch, but there was nothing there but water-stained sound absorbent tiles. The bathroom door slammed open and four boys piled in, laughing and lighting up, then fell provocatively silent. Kevin Crowley's unmistakable growl voiced, "Who the fuck's in there?" His ratty sneakers took a stand beneath the door. Ryan yanked his pants up with one hand and stood on the toilet seat, desperate to climb over the top of the stall.

"I said, who the fuck is in there?" Kevin rattled the door and one of his mignons laughed, a lopsided chuckle that implied inbred idiocy. Lou Rambowski separated the doorjamb from the stall and popped it open to reveal the thin boy squatted on top of the toilet. "Hey, it's our friend Freaky Frankie. What the fuck are you doing in here, Frankenstein? Looking for some dick?" Lou Rambowski laughed his stupid laugh again and Henry Geurts nodded, cigarette dangling from his lip. Jeff Tate wolf-whistled and did a tap dance in his construction boots.

"No," Ryan said. "Just taking a dump."

"I'm just taking a dump, mister sir," Kevin mocked in falsetto. "How about I take a dump on your head, faggot." He pushed his way into the stall reeking of smoke and teenage rebellion. Ryan simultaneously cowered and basked in the heat of his body as it drew closer to his own. Kevin grabbed him by the back of the neck, pulled him off the toilet and chucked the skinny boy onto the bathroom floor.

"Frankenstein, Frankenstein, Frankenstein," the four boys chanted. It was the perpetuation of the chant Derek Karmann had started in the second grade, only strengthened through years of repetition. "Were you waiting for me, Frankie? Ready to suck my cock?" Kevin trilled and flitted like a manic butterfly, his long blonde hair flipping up at the ends. He grabbed his denimed crotch and sneered. Ryan sat on the cold tile floor and worried that he had not flushed the toilet. "Or do they got to be dead dicks before you suck on them, Frankenstein? I'm really curious, so why don't you tell me, faggot."

"Yeah, dead," Lou Rambowski chuckled, a step behind as always. Henry Geurts snubbed his cigarette out on the wall and Jeff Tate grinned maniacally behind the red stubble on his chin. Ryan got to his feet and stood up cautiously.

"Wanna suck on this, faggot?" Kevin massaged his crotch again, then flew at his target and slammed him into the wall. Ryan folded around his persecutor's body and absorbed the phermonal brilliance emanating from him. Ryan inhaled dirty hair and the smell of changing leaves. The boy's skin tingled where they touched: across his chest, left arm and finally crotch as Kevin flattened against him. The dirtbag's breath was hot against his ear. "I'm gonna get you," he panted.

Kevin spun Ryan around and yanked his pants down. The younger boy braced himself for a poke in the ass, but instead a knee came up between his legs and sent him sprawling into the white tiled wall. His head thunked against the hard surface and he saw a dark field of green stars before dumping himself onto the ground.

Lou Rambowski grabbed both of the boy's wrists and forced him to get up. "Gotta nice fat turd for you, shit eater," Henry Guerts said as Lou marched Ryan into the stall. Lou chuckled and forced the thin boy down on his knees.

"But wait, there's more," Kevin emceed. Lou Rambowski guided the boy's head into the bowl and Ryan struggled blindly against the much larger adversary behind him. Lou used his significant weight to thrust Ryan's head into the bowl and the boy's face broke the surface of the water and reemerged christened by his own shit. Kevin laughed. "Now how much would you pay?" Ryan returned to the cool, soundless world of the water as it flushed away. Jeff Tate took the second turn, Henry Geurts the third, and the last was saved for Kevin Crowley whose long legs straddled the boy like a horse. Kevin's crotch burned across Ryan's neck as he leaned over to hit the handle and Ryan thought, If I just turn around, it will be in my face.

"Watch where you shit, Frankenstein," Kevin whispered and dropped the soaked boy into the bowl. The dirtbags lit up cigarettes as Ryan crawled onto the floor, trying to catch his breath. The boys discussed the merits of their most recent victim and found him unworthy of their time and the mess he had created. Kevin hovered in the stall door, his frame silhouetted against the backdrop of white tile and mirrors. "Jesus, you smell like shit."

Kevin flicked a lit cigarette at Ryan's head and it landed on the wet floor with a steaming hiss. He waved his compatriots out of the room and waited until the door closed before he leaned over the boy. "I'll get you, faggot. I'll get you if you ever touch me again." He dropped a foamy white runner of spit from his lips onto Ryan's head, then backed away adjusting his crotch. Kevin disappeared into the hallway and Ryan waited while for Jeff Tate's whoops to Doppler away before breathing.

 

Kevin once lived in the house next to mine before his parents got divorced. We would play in my backyard while our maid, Senora Vega read her sensationalized Spanish magazines full of gossip and bizarre photographs of aliens and car accidents. We'd sneak into his backyard when she wasn't looking and wrestle across the lawn, tumbling in each other's skinny arms. The loser would be forced to put the other's penis in his mouth, nothing more, and I always ended up on my back with Kevin hovering over me, unzipping his jeans and straddling my face. I would reach up with tentative lips and pull that undeveloped flesh into my mouth and wait the thirty seconds that were required. It would move and grow, but would always be yanked out before I could think of doing anything else.

On the day before he moved away, we snuck into his basement and paged through the stack of his father's dirty magazines. To an eleven year old, it was sexual heaven, but I found myself quietly searching for the pictures of naked men which were few and far between. The men were strong with flat stomachs and gigantic erections rising from forests of pubic hair, so different from the large breasted women exposing pink meats from hairy slits, as if they'd been wounded. The men were architectural, each element blending into the next as if preordained. The women were round in all the wrong places, their blown-out hair and over indulgent makeup making them look as cheap as the paper.

Kevin pulled out his penis as he read his magazine and I could see the difference that had taken place since the last time we'd wrestled. He had hair and it had grown almost twice as big, closer to the men in the magazines. I stared at it in disbelief, and it felt perfectly natural to get down on my knees and take it into my mouth. I tasted the coppery flavor of his glans and pre-cum before he slapped the side of my head and stood up. "Shit, Ryan," he muttered and then came on my face. His eyes narrowed and he pushed me down onto the concrete floor and ran up the stairs to his empty house. I could hear his feet pound up the stairs to his second floor bedroom. I waited for him to return, but I left when his mother returned with the movers. I took the magazine he'd been reading with the busty blonde woman on the cover and locked it in my closet. It's all I have of him.

 

yan chose not to move, only allowed the wet to drip off his face into his open pants. He imagined lying there until someone found him. A teacher would find him and contact the police department, the ambulance squad, and then it would be in the school paper. "Frankenstein, son of local mortician, was found covered in his own shit on the bathroom floor of the Kevin Crowley's private bathroom at 11 AM this morning. Full story on page 5."

Ryan pulled himself up onto the toilet seat and sat with his wretched head dangling between his splayed legs. Droplets ran off his shit spattered nose and exploded on the tiled floor, seeping into the cracks. He took some toilet paper and wiped his face off and dumped the dirty wads of paper onto the floor.

His anonymous promoter's message recaptured his attention, and Ryan stared at it for ten minutes before he saw what he'd missed the first time. That stiff, mechanical handwriting of architectural drawings could have come from only one person, Kevin Crowley. Ryan replayed the scene for clues to see if there was more than routine torture. He felt the other boy's body sear across him again, Kevin's hard crotch digging into his neck from behind. Ryan touched the drawing as a way of communicating with his secret admirer, stretched his fingers over Kevin's dick and his own face, and made a little prayer that he could bring it to life. He designed frame by frame the reconciliation scene where his arch nemesis returned to beg forgiveness, covered Ryan with passionate movie-quality kisses and then opened his jeans to reenact the scene he had spent so long developing.

Then Ryan smeared a line of shit through the picture.

He heaved himself up with the assistance of the toilet paper dispenser and wobbled to the sink where he scrubbed his face and hair with the dirt smelling pink soap. He washed four times, once for each flush, but came away feeling as unclean as before he started. "I deserved this," he thought out loud. "I knew better than to come in here and fuck with Kevin. I asked for it and now he's got it in for me."

The boy toweled off with the thick brown paper and stared at his reflection in the mirror, a pale face with large, dark eyes like a deer. He fingered a growing lump on his forehead and the world swam away and returned violently in whiplash. "Love me?" he asked his image. His eyes grew moist and hopeful, "Will he love me?"

 

<END>