Paradise (pt 3)

The boy, the father, and the girlfriend walk past Maui promenade storefronts, every third one made up like a straw hut and every other one selling snow globes, shot glasses, and carved driftwood in versions both tiki god and hula girl. The girlfriend tries again to send a coconut to her sister from a pile of them owned by a grinning old man with a pile of stamps on a little table, and the father tells her to knock it off, don’t she know the post office is just gonna throw that shit away? And she says he’s right and puts it back.

They eat lunch at a place where the palms and the bamboo are made out of plastic, and the wavering hula music is blaring and scratchy, and when the boy says he wants a cheeseburger his father tells him he’d better get some seafood, because why the hell would anybody get a burger when they were in Hawaii?

You two are crazy, he says, leaning back in his chair. This isn’t someplace normal people ever get to go, don’t you know that?

The boy later goes to the bathroom and spits out a mouthful of pineapple shrimp into the trash, washing his mouth out in the sink. He looks at himself in the mirror and sees the tan streaks creased under his eyes and around his mouth, and the chlorine streaks in his hair from swimming every day at the community pool in his father’s subdivision, because why would you sit inside all day when there’s a perfectly good god damned pool – no, fuck that, a GREAT god damned pool that cost fifty bucks a month for a swim pass thank you very much – two blocks away?

He reaches for the mirror, his fingers approaching his fingers; he hasn’t tried to pass through a mirror yet and wonders if it will be something new and awful, if the reversed version of himself will reach back and maybe touch him, and maybe he wants that and maybe he doesn’t.

Before he can complete this experiment a guy comes in, taking a stand at the urinal, pissing, glancing over his shoulder twice. He’s tall, good-looking; as the boy washes his hands, he sees that the guy is just standing there, not pissing anymore. Waiting.

The boy swallows. And takes place at the next urinal, and opens his shorts.

He can’t move; skin’s on fire.

The guy looks around to make sure they’re alone, and then reaches over.

*