My face started smiling too. I did not ask it to start smiling. But I could feel it smiling and then I started smiling inside of my body when I understood what Dr. Laird was saying.
“In other words,” he said, “you are finally living your own legend.”
* * *
When I got home from Dr. Laird’s I took out my list and looked at it:
THINGS LEGENDS NEED
A hero who is skilled in hand-to-hand combat
A powerful weapon for the hero to use
The hero must win the love of a fair maiden in danger
Every hero needs a wise man
Pillaging rival villages for treasure
The hero must defeat a villain who threatens the tribe
Dr. Laird was right. I had accomplished almost everything on the list. I still did not have a villain to defeat, but maybe sometimes legends don’t have villains. Maybe mine would be the kind of legend where the hero is good and just, like Knud the Great, a Viking king who brought his people many years of peace, so that they could trade goods with other tribes. And I was the hero of my legend, where the next step was to have sex with Marxy.
* * *
However, I wanted to talk to Marxy in secret. The secret to secret meetings is to make sure that nobody finds out about them, so you need to make sure it is in a place that is secret, and also make it so that nobody asks questions. I did not want to lie, so AK47 said that the best way to do something secret and to not lie is to make sure nobody asks questions that make you need to lie.
I texted Marxy and told him to call me, but only when he was sure he was alone and his mother or father was not around.
He called that night.
“I am calling because I’m alone and nobody is around,” Marxy said, almost whispering.
“Why are you whispering if nobody is around?”
“Oh.” His voice got normal. “Okay. I am home alone, so I guess nobody can hear me.” He made a noise that was like a smaller sneeze. “Sorry,” he said.
“Did your mom talk to you about our secret meeting?”
“She did.”
He said that she had told him everything about sex, including how to use condoms. “I’ve been practicing,” he said.
That made me smile.
I told him I wanted to meet him in secret, before we had sex. “Without anyone knowing. Just us two.”
“Without AK47 or my mom?”
“Yes.”
He got quiet. It was not a good quiet.
“Hello?”
“I don’t like this,” he said. “I don’t like hiding things from her.”
I sighed. “But when we have sex, she won’t be there, in the room.”
“I know.”
“It will just be me and you.”
He got quiet again. “Yeah.”
I told him that having a secret meeting would be like practice, being alone without his mother or AK47 or Gert. I said that for Vikings, you are a man when you are able to ride horses and drink with other men, and when fifteen winters have passed.
“I don’t know how to ride a horse,” he said. “My dad lets me have beer sometimes.”
“You have passed fifteen winters,” I said. “And nobody rides horses anymore.”
We agreed to meet alone, without telling anyone where we were meeting, or what time. It was not a very special meeting spot, the way secret places are always special and dark and scary in movies. This meeting place was a McDonald’s by the Community Center.
I got there first and ordered fries for us to share.
We always spent time together with other people around, watching us. We had not been alone very much since we first met at the Community Center exactly eleven months and fourteen days ago. All of the things I read on the Internet say that boyfriends and girlfriends that do not spend a lot of time alone with each other often break up. And Marxy’s mother did not let him be free. I believed Marxy could do more than she thought he could. It was like when I started working at the library, after people thinking I was too retarded. I proved them wrong.
I ate the fries and made sure to have lots of ketchup in the little paper cups for Marxy. I put two of the paper cups in front of the chair for him, and a small packet of salt and pepper, which I knew he would like. Two old people, a man and a woman, were sitting across from me and the man ate his fries with his mouth open. The old woman wiped his face with a napkin. He kept his mouth open while she wiped around his lips.
I reached out to take the longest fry, and a hand reached for it first.
The hand was not Marxy’s. It had tattoos of eyeballs on the knuckles.
“These are my favorite,” Toucan said, dipping it into the ketchup.
“Mine too.”
“Oh. Shit, sorry.” He held out the half he had not put in his mouth. When I did not take it, he said, “What, you think I have germs?”
“You do have germs. Everyone has germs.”
He shrugged and put it into his mouth. Then he sat down. “Relax,” he said when I started to tell him he couldn’t sit there. “I’m just waiting for Jumbo over there to order the food.”
The Fat Man was waiting in line.
“How are things?” Toucan asked.
“Things are fine. Can you go?”
The door to McDonald’s opened and Marxy came in. A stranger was with him, and he patted Marxy on the shoulder and I waved to Marxy and Toucan turned around to see who I was waving at.
Toucan took another fry and watched Marxy come over. “What the fuck is this now?”
“Hey,” Marxy said, out of breath. His shirt came up just above his stomach, showing little black hairs, and he pulled it down.
“Who was that man you were with?” I said.
“Oh. I got lost and he helped me.” Marxy turned to Toucan and stuck out his hand. “Hi. I’m Marxy. Who are you?”
Toucan finished chewing and wiped his hand on a napkin. “Toucan. I’m a friend of Zelda’s.”
“Of Gert’s,” I said.
“Oh. I’m Zelda’s boyfriend.”
Toucan stared at him. “No kidding.”
“You can go now,” I said to Toucan, who kept staring at Marxy.
The Fat Man brought over the McDonald’s bags and Toucan got up. “Good seeing you,” he said, and as he left he patted Marxy on the shoulder, and Marxy flinched, because he does not like being touched.
“I didn’t like him,” Marxy said as Toucan left.
“Yeah,” I said. “He’s a real shit-heel.”
* * *
We ate our fries and then Marxy was still hungry, so we got hamburgers too. He told me about how his mother hadn’t told his father about us having sex, and I told him that Gert did not know either. He ate his hamburger very quickly and asked if I was going to eat the rest of mine.
Marxy started telling me everything about sex that he had learned, about spermicide and condoms, and all the different ways to do it.
“I wrote it all down,” he said, and took out a piece of paper that had been folded a lot. There were words by the pictures of naked people.
“Wow,” I said.
“This one is my favorite,” he said, and pointed to one where the woman and the man faced each other. “Because you can kiss while having sex.”