He was getting “riled up,” which is what AK47 said whenever Marxy got too excited. He took out his asthma puffer and inhaled.
Some of the people in the McDonald’s were looking over but I didn’t care. I thought it was very sexy how excited Marxy was getting about us having sex. I thought that this was my boyfriend, and he loved me so much that he couldn’t breathe.
chapter twenty-one
On the day of sex, AK47 didn’t pick me up in the school bus. She came in her car and told me to be ready to go before she got there.
“In and out,” she said on the phone, and I made sure before she came over I had my shower and shaved my armpits and legs. Even though Marxy didn’t care, I wanted to be smooth.
I did the perfume like AK47 told me, putting some on my neck and the insides of my wrists, not too much, since some people didn’t like loud smells. Especially spies. Being quiet and hidden about things is not a very Viking thing to do. You should be brave and stand up to your enemies face-to-face.
“Except there are no enemies here,” AK47 said. “Unless you count Gert.”
People are always telling women and girls what to do, AK47 said. And people were always telling me what to do too.
“I’ll be back in a few hours,” I told Gert. “AK47 and I are having girl time.”
He was lying on the couch, not listening. He put up his hand and gave me a thumbs-up.
“Sounds awful. Tell her I say hello.”
I said I would and he did not ask any more questions. He had been working on an e-mail he was going to send to Dean Horowitz, who said that he was allowed back to school, but would need to take summer school classes to make up for the ones he stopped going to.
When I got in the car AK47 looked at me and smiled and said, “You did good on the lipstick, Zee,” and then licked her finger and rubbed my face where some of the lipstick had gotten smudged.
* * *
We drove to the hotel. It was not very fancy, but it was also not like the hotel near our apartment, which AK47 said is where men bring women to have sex with them for money. The hotel was a Holiday Inn and when we were going in we walked by people holding briefcases and talking about banks.
Marxy and Pearl were waiting in the lobby of the hotel. Marxy was wearing a shirt and tie with Batman on it. He waved at me and I waved at him. Pearl was already talking to the woman at the front desk and AK47 went there to talk too.
“Are you all going to be staying in the room?” the woman at the front desk said.
AK47 handed over her credit card and said, “What’s it to you?”
The woman was looking at me and Marxy. I wondered if she knew what we were going to do. I went over to Marxy and gave him a kiss on the cheek. I got on tiptoes until I was off the ground, since he was taller than me. My lipstick left a picture of my mouth on his cheek.
“I love you, Zelda,” he said. “Go then dang.”
“I love you, Marxy,” I said, and held on to his hand.
“It’s extra for double occupancy,” the desk woman said.
AK47 gave her THE LOOK and the woman at the desk swiped the credit card in the machine. AK47 put her hands on her hips. The credit card machine beeped.
“Here are some keys,” the desk woman said, handing over plastic cards.
When AK47 got the keys, she gave the woman one last mean look before we all walked down the hallway.
The carpet was brown and orange and had shapes that were like arrows, with other shapes that were colored green and looked like cactuses. The arrows were a good omen because they looked like Tiwaz, the rune for Tyr, who is a god that lives in the sky.
“You look very beautiful,” Marxy said.
He put his big hand around my hand and we held them together like that, like they were praying together, just like the Bon Jovi song where he sang about living on a prayer. We held hands and lived on the prayer of our hands all the way up to the fourth floor. AK47 and Pearl had also gotten a room, across the hall.
They would stay there in case we needed them.
“Let’s take a look-see,” Pearl said, putting one of the plastic cards into the door. A green light beeped and we went inside.
There was one bed and curtains that were white and you could see through, and an alarm clock on a table next to the bed. Pearl took a bottle of water from her bag and put it on the table beside the bed. She also took out a few other things, containers and also a package of napkins that were wet, in case we needed to clean up “any messes.”
“What messes?” I said. The hotel room was very clean and we would not be eating in it.
AK47 and Pearl looked at each other and then Pearl said, “Just in case.”
“We’ll be right across the hall,” AK47 said. “Okay?”
“Okay,” I said.
“I am trusting you with my son, Zelda,” Pearl said, giving me a hug.
“You can trust me.”
“Do you know about safe sex?”
“Everything and then some,” AK47 said. “Condoms. The moves. Everything. Boom.”
Pearl nodded. “Marxy also knows everything there is to know. And you know things will have to go step by step?” Pearl asked me. “He has been going through the steps today.”
“I don’t even need the paper with them written down,” Marxy said, pulling on his Batman tie.
“I think we don’t need the paper either,” I said. “I think we will know what to do.”
“He might need to take his time, so don’t get frustrated. Things might not go as fast for him as you’d like.”
For other people it is not very romantic, having a list of things to do. People are supposed to have sex “naturally,” meaning without having to think. But because Marxy isn’t good at not-thinking, he needs to be really sure about what he is doing before he does it.
This was one of the deal-breakers for the sex: that Marxy would need to go slow and I wasn’t allowed to get mad if he needed to stop and go back to steps that made him comfortable. That was fine because I liked to use steps when I did new things too, and I had my own steps. For example, I wanted to kiss a lot before having sex, and before having sex he had to put on the condom.
AK47 hugged me. “Are you ready for this? You can always not do it. It’s no pressure.”
“I want to do this,” I said. “I want to have sex like an adult and be legendary.”
Marxy’s mother came over and held my face in her hand. Then she kissed the top of my head and told me I was a good egg.
I was going to achieve another part of my legend. We were finally going to have sex, like normal people who are in love do.
* * *
When the door closed we stood across from each other. We were each holding a condom. The condom in my hand was blue. His condom was red.
“Hi,” he said.
I said, “Are you ready to have sex?”
“I think we should kiss,” he said. “That always comes first.”
The hotel room smelled like the little cardboard tree that Gert hung from the mirror inside his car. The bed had a white sheet that was like a trampoline when I sat down on it.
“Do you want the lights off?” I asked.
In porno videos people are always having sex with the lights on, but one of the things that I knew from being home when Gert had sex with people was that he liked to have sex with the lights off.