Tang by Lucas Simone
Trigger warning for sexual assault
I loved everything about Charlie, from the tiny bald spot at the back of his head to the lemony smell his belly button had because he never learned to wash it properly. Now, watching his parents rise out of the lake like gods, wearing their wealth like athletes wear KT tape, I realized why: The people who raised him—who taught him to brush his teeth and clean his ears and how to bathe—each had hard, bulging outies.
I never brought the smell up to Charlie, of course. Not because I thought he’d be embarrassed—when I asked him to stop peeing in the shower he shrugged and kissed my cheek and never did it again. I didn’t bring it up because I liked it so much. Lemon wasn’t right, too sour. It was more an early March orange. Or an underripe kiwi. I loved trying to place it. Sometimes I went down on him just to linger on his stomach and breathe.
The bald spot was not so much a bald spot but a dime-sized launching pad for all his hair to spring from and curl around. I was watching it. It was naive and open-palmed to the rising sun as Charlie bent his head over a book. I grabbed a lawn chair and walked down the steps to the beach.
When Charlie first told me the lakehouse had a beach, I pictured fine white sand and long stretches of solitude where we could fuck. But when we arrived yesterday morning, plastic bags of sunscreen and sandwich fixings in hand, the beach was a tiny little thing with grass poking through. The sand that wasn’t grassy was brown and cold—the days weren’t long enough to soak out the water that lapped up during the night. When I put my chair down, right behind Charlie’s, the legs sank with a dull crunch.
“Hey you,” he said when he felt my hands on his shoulders. He nuzzled into me without looking up from his page, and I twisted my fingers through his hair along the whirlpool. I never dared touch the bald spot, didn’t want Charlie to know the sensation of naked skin existed back there. I wanted to keep it a secret, a part of Charlie that existed without his knowledge.
“Did you use the aloe after your shower last night?” I asked. The sun was just making it over the trees, and there was a strip of it lighting the tops of Charlie’s thighs. They were peeling.
“It wasn’t in the cabinet. I probably left it in the car.”
I gave his bangs a tug, “Bad boy.”
He shrugged.
“How about I give you another layer?”
He shrugged again and stood up.
Charlie had bought the cheapest bottle of sunscreen the store held. It kept me in bed for an hour this morning, staring at the bunk above me, confused. I’d met Charlie’s parents once before so I knew they were rich, but the lakehouse told me just how rich. Sure the beach and the pier and the cinder block driveway were shitty, but the house was something else. Motion sensor faucets, movie-theater level sound system, an Alexa on each floor, a kitchen of clean appliances, and a basement of guitars. I didn’t know shit about guitars but I could tell these were the kinds only rich people bought—not to play, but to hang in dark, glossy basements beside their wine racks. I’d never been to Michigan before, but it looked like most other Southsiders had. All the houses on the lake had White Sox lawn chairs, broken shillings, and kids floating in tire innertubes. Not Charlie’s. He was from the River District. Among the obvious differences, his was the only house with a Cubs flag.
So. Why the cheap sunscreen?
Charlie handed me the bottle. It was an ugly blue and already felt hollow. I farted a glob of it on my hand and went to smear it on him. He was standing at the ready, looking at the lake. There was one good thing about the sunscreen—it took rub after rub for the whiteness to fade. So I took my time on the soft, relaxed muscles of my boyfriend’s back, going in circles and feeling like a gay Mr. Miyagi. Down in the water, two jet-skis bobbed. Charlie’s parents must have taken them out of the shed this morning for him and me to use. They probably lock them up when they can so the neighbors don’t feel so bad about being poor.
“Okay.” I walked around to Charlie’s front and smacked a fresh handful of sunscreen on his chest. It burst against him and speckled his chin and the underside of his brow ridge with a bright, greasy white.
“Fuck, my eyes.” But he didn’t do anything to help his eyes except stand still and close them. I cleaned a finger with my mouth and scooped the speckles away.
“Don’t fuss, baby. It didn’t get in your eyes.” I started working through the sunscreen on Charlie’s chest, and realized quickly that I’d poured way too much. That was okay as long as he kept his eyes closed. I had a feeling he wouldn’t like it being wasted, which would surely mean another long morning for me in bed, confused.
“Done?”
“Not quite yet.”
The front of Charlie’s body was as white as car headlights. I scraped some of it off and bent down to rub it into his legs and the tops of his feet, which were peeling too. After a while, I became conscious of Charlie’s breaths, steady and thoughtful. These were the breaths he took when he wanted to be mindfully aware of the moment. He’d told me about this on our first date, and whenever I heard those breaths I knew Charlie wanted this memory to be crisp. I tried to breathe mindfully too now, even making peace with the cold caves my knees were making in the sand. Then I became aware of something else: that Charlie’s breaths were pushing his belly button out, and it was waxing and waning very close to my face. I took the smell in with gratitude, letting my eyes flutter briefly to the back of my head. It wasn’t kiwi after all. I decided it was the smell of Tang. I was sure this was true, but wished I’d been born in a generation that knew for sure what Tang smelled like.
Then, keeping my breaths in line with Charlie’s, I put my hand flat over his crotch. He started looking around the way he did whenever we did this at a party or a concert. I could always tell from down on my knees when his ears were burning. I curled my pointer fingers so the tips slid down Charlie’s tummy and burrowed beneath his waistband. I knew just how far to slide his trunks if I wanted to see that mountain of hair. He kept looking around but I persisted. Just the beak, baby, please? I could smell the skin beneath the sunscreen and I wanted to lick him until my tongue was greasy and white.
“Stop,” Charlie said. By now his parents were up on the porch, drying off and finishing the final cold sips from this morning’s coffee cups.
“Why?” I asked, and pulled a little more.
Charlie walked away so fast I heard the snap of his waistband slapping on his stomach.
That evening I made dips and salad with Charlie’s mom while he and a childhood buddy rough-housed on the grass below us. I thought his mom would say something about Charlie, like the first time she knew he was gay or what he looked like leaving for the prom, but instead she asked me what I did for work, and then if I liked it, and then if I had a five-year plan. She was like one of my aunts, in hair mousse and lipstick, keeping track of her nephew so she could poke out bits at the next Christmas—So have you applied to that community college program yet?—to prove I never really had any motivation to do it. But then Charlie’s mom asked about life at home, my favorite childhood books, any pets? She smiled and nodded at all sorts of things, and remembered things about me that Charlie must have told her. She was nice. Clean. No mousse and no lipstick. She had thin blonde hair with highlights spaced perfectly so when she ran her hand through it her fingernails dragged along them. She didn’t seem put off that I didn’t go to college, or that I worked at a Sweetgreen, or that I had the sense of humor of a drunk straight girl.
After dinner she suggested a game called Poppers, which she got from a family magazine when the kids were kids. He squeezed my hand in a way that told me we’d laugh about it the next time we went out. While his mom was explaining the rules, Charlie’s sister walked in with her suitcase.
“Marissa!” his mom called out. This was perfect, she explained, because Poppers worked best with more people. Marissa obliged and sat down, watching her mom smile and smiling because of it. Charlie was less liberal with his smiles, but I saw the way his family brought them out—in small bursts, often when he had his head down and shaking, as if scolding the person for making him laugh and daring them to continue. After the game, Marissa invited Charlie and I to join her the next day at her boyfriend’s pad a few lakes over. Marissa was nice too, and would be as clean as her mom if not for the clumps of mascara she kept fishing from her eyes.
* * *
That night while I was in bed switching between apps on my phone, Charlie climbed down from the top bunk and crawled in beside me. He had his reading glasses on, but had left his book in his own bed. He wordlessly tucked his body against mine and put his head in the groove of my shoulder. He closed his eyes and fumbled to drag his glasses off. They ended up on my chest.
“I got it baby,” I said.
Charlie was already asleep. Careful not to move my shoulder, I put the glasses on the bedside table.
The drive to the new lake was hot and jungly, and made me think of all the war movies I’d seen of Vietnam. I looked over at Charlie in the driver’s seat. He was wearing a green button down like a little soldier. I wanted him to slam the steering wheel to one side and drive us off-road, to fuck me in the backseat while wild grasses snaked in through the window. I reached over into the V of Charlie’s shirt, my fingers hungry for a dog tag. He laughed, fished my hand out and gave it back to me, but let me hold onto his fingers in compromise. I kissed them. They smelled like dust.
This lake had fewer trees so it felt twenty degrees hotter than his parents’ place. Marissa’s boyfriend, Grant, met us in the parking lot and led us to his condo, which was ice-cold and filled with bar games. Marissa came down the stairs. She was wearing a Budweiser t-shirt that was two sizes too big for her. I guessed it was Grant’s, and that he’d bought it so he could lend it to girlfriends and see their nipples poke the logo out. I ran my hand along the pool table’s turf.
“We really only come inside when we’re too drunk to stand the heat,” Grant said.
Marissa threw her Budweiser shirt onto the air-hockey table. Her bikini top was striped and stringy, “We could all use a little UV.”
We sat on innertubes on the beach, which was bigger and whiter but still pretty small. The innertubes were fancy, the kind that hook to the back of speedboats and fly. But there was an understanding that none of us were getting in the water today. Today was for sitting down, massaging our toes through the sand, and getting drunk. Charlie asked Marissa some question about how some sort of business was going, and she gave some sort of answer. Her innertube was the fanciest of them all: a big puffy couch, bright red with neon yellow arrows shooting away from her like piss fireworks. The pattern looked terrible with her bikini stripes. The colors clashed too.
“Me and Eloise will have to go back a week before everyone else to double check, but at least we caught it early,” Marissa said.
I had to stare at the sand. Marissa was a flamboyant eyesore.
“What about you, Lance?” she asked, “How is Sweetgreen?”
I answered to her face, though it was hard. The arrows were telling me, Hey bud, look anywhere but here. But I was being good, making eye contact.
“That sounds like a fun work environment!”
I answered again, being very good. But the eye contact became impossible—her mascara was too thick! Fat butterfly legs, clumpy and inking. What was this? A middle school dance?
“Ooh do you think you’ll go for it? You’ve been there a few years, right?”
I focused on her belly. Nothing to smear on incorrectly, and no clashing patterns.
“No,” I answered, “I don’t really have a management mindset.”
“That’s okay. Good for you for knowing your limits.”
Huh. She had an innie too. Did she get the bathing memo? Or did hers have the same tang?
“We should do body shots,” I said.
Grant and Marissa smiled to each other, remembering all the times they were straight people and did body shots.
“It’s too hot for shots,” Grant said. And then he monologued about how cool Marissa’s start-up is. I broke my eyes from the two of them entirely and watched the sun turn white on the water until my seltzer was warm and limp in my hand.
“We should do body shots,” I said.
Charlie was in the middle of some story, his hands in the air. He froze and looked over. I stared him down. His hands sputtered and fell to his pockets, “What, baby?”
“We should do body shots.”
“We’re not doing body shots,” Grant said.
“Homophobic.”
Grant sat forward in his innertube and it made a terrible plastic creak. “How?”
“You don’t want a gay guy to suck your girlfriend’s belly.”
“You’re my brother’s partner,” Marissa said. “I don’t want you to suck my anything.”
“Lance, you want a mixed drink?” Charlie asked.
“That’s so sweet,” I said. “Isn’t he sweet? He remembered I fucking hate seltzers.” I dug my unsipped can into the sand so I didn’t have to hold it anymore. It was so full I could see that all the carbonation had fizzled out.
Grant moved his hat’s bill from forward to backward. “If you want a different drink you can grab a different drink,” he said in his big boy voice.
Marissa leaned toward Grant. “All we have is seltzers,” she whispered.
I squeaked out of my innertube and plopped into Marissa’s. My sudden weight made my butt touch the ground and Marissa jump an inch.
“Fuck, my drink!” she said. Hers must have been pretty full too. No one likes seltzers!
Grant stood and went up the beach for a towel. I put my arms wide on the back of the air couch while Marissa caught running drops of lime seltzer with her fingers. It was on her chest, her legs, her stomach.
Her stomach.
I bent forward, the couch molding as I moved, and licked a drop off her belly.
A towel hit my head. “Lance, go cool down inside,” Grant said.
I balled up the towel and handed it to Marissa. She stood, so I spread my arms further across the arrows and claimed my territory. “The UV’s perfect,” I said to Grant.
“I think we should head out,” Charlie stood and hugged Marissa. “It was so nice to see you.” He shook Grant’s hand and slapped an arm around his back, masc for masc.
“I’ll see you back at the house tonight, Marissa,” I said.
“I’m gonna stay with Grant,” she said to Charlie.
Then Charlie walked me back to the car, my flip-flops quacking like ducks.
We stopped at a restaurant on the way back. It was a small, dark place made of wood, with sports jerseys on the walls. Charlie put me at the bar, then walked around the restaurant with his knees locked and his face bent toward the floor until he finished his beer. I knew he didn’t want me to join him, so I watched him pace and sipped my Mexican Candy and used the end of the straw to drag chunks of sugar crust to my lips.
Finally Charlie sat down next to me. I wanted to rub his back but my hands were busy with the sugar, so I just pouted for him. He couldn’t see it though, he was itching lines in the bar glaze with his fingernail.
Finally, he spoke.
“You tried to blow me in front of my parents.”
I rubbed the sugar on my pout. “They weren’t looking.”
“And then you sexually assaulted my sister.”
This bounced off my forehead like a bullet, and I sat there bobble-heading for a moment. Then I laughed. “Why would I want to have sex with your sister? I’m gay!”
Charlie took a deep breath in, but it didn’t come back out. Instead he closed his eyes and rubbed his face. He had dirt under his fingernails—that must be why they smelled so dusty. I sighed. I knew what I had to do. I had to give up one of my secrets.
“Okay, I can explain some things,” I said. Charlie stayed how he was. “When they learn how to take a bath, most kids learn to wash their belly buttons.”
Charlie dropped his hands and looked at me, finally. I awarded myself a small smile for this victory.
“Yours has a very distinct smell,” I continued. Charlie kept staring. “At first I thought it was lemon, and then I thought it must be orange because oranges are so much more sugary, and then I thought kiwi—”
“What are you saying, Lance?” Charlie was facing all the way toward me now, his eyebrows pulled together so folds formed between them. I had never seen these folds on him before, and they made my stomach spin. There could be a hundred specks of sunscreen between those folds and no one would ever know.
“But yesterday I realized,” I said, leaning in with my fingers to wrestle out the specks. “I realized it’s actually the smell of—”
He caught my hand by the wrist.
“Charlie—”
He flattened a bill down on the bar and stood. “Find your own way back.”
And then he walked out of the bar. I wished he’d have paused in the daylight of the door and been a perfect little silhouette for me, but he didn’t.
I looked at the bill. It was a fifty, and it was new and starchy. I pushed my drink along the bar so it would slide into Charlie’s leftover beer bottle, but it only made it about halfway before it stopped. I stood up and ran to the parking lot.
The car was just peeling out of its spot, and it passed me as it rolled its way to the main road—the only road with a double-yellow line in the whole town. It drove right past me, windows down. Maybe Charlie turned the music up so loud because he thought I would try to yell something, but I didn’t. Charlie would never know this, of course. He never even looked at my face, just paused at the stop sign I was next to, checked for oncoming traffic, then took off.
I wondered how the wind from the car windows didn't tip him off to that pale, hairless thing at the back of his head. I thought about this as the car grew small as a pin, as it folded in on itself and disappeared. Then, I raked my own head with my fingers to see if I too had a spot. I didn’t. But I wanted one. I wanted my blind groping to stumble upon something raw and sensitive, like the bottom of my foot, that I could stroke whenever I thought of it. Maybe ten years from now, when I’d long forgotten Charlie, I’d be in bed with a man who’d find it for me. Maybe that’s what it would take for me to really fall in love.
Yes, it was true. I knew me and Charlie would never last. Having a boyfriend was the same as having a child: an opportunity to love someone unconditionally, no matter who they turn out to be. The truth was, I would love any man who looked at me the way Charlie did when we first met, and I would make the effort to love everything about him. I was good at loving people, and I liked that about myself.
I closed an eye and put my thumb out to where the car had disappeared, then turned and began to walk in the opposite direction.
The street looked like charred bread. I imagined it being made, big pot-bellied men in trucks collecting slabs of black pumice from abandoned roads all over the country, then dragging them to Michigan to be thrown down and driven over by half-drunk boys who had the car radio too loud to feel the cracks. I kept walking. It felt like what I should do. I also knew that if I stopped walking I’d be bored, and that once I was bored and propped up against some tree or fence, there would be nothing stopping the heat from widening my pupils until my eyes were two black holes, blinking and shiny. Along both sides of the road was grass as bright as plastic easter hay. There were rocks that my flip-flops kicked up, and sometimes they found their way under the arches of my feet, but I wasn’t tempted to move over and walk in the grass. I kept passing Trump flags tacked under billboards and over the windows of sheds, and I felt if I walked in the grass I’d step into a needle.
I knew Charlie wanted me to find my way back to the lake house. He needed it, expected it. He wasn’t the type of guy to leave his boyfriend stranded in another state. No. He’d break up with me once we got back to Chicago, but he’d do it politely on the couch in my apartment. Not his apartment, no—he wouldn’t want his neighbors to hear if I started to yell. Charlie hated public conflict. I knew this about him because I knew everything about him. I began to settle into a walking pace, letting myself hold my chin so high I was almost pulled backward. Charlie had shown his hand. In previous relationships I hadn’t seen the breakups coming, but now I had a head start. Control. If he wanted a break up, he was going to get one. On my terms.
I pictured what he must be doing right now. Just pulling up the driveway, tires inching over the cinder blocks with a drunk creak. Walking through the fancy fucking glass door, waving at a neighbor taking the garbage out through their broken screen, black with dust, which would make him feel guilty. Then he’d hoist himself on a stool at the kitchen bar, tell his parents that I saw an old teacher from high school and stayed for another round. His mom would suggest Poppers, but there wouldn’t be enough people to play. That’s okay, there would be lots of time to play when Marissa and Lance were back. So his parents would settle down on the couch for a movie, and Charlie would watch frozen from his stool, drinking another couple beers. Yes, he would surely sit there all night, the AC blowing in fake moonlit breezes. And then he’d go to bed and stare at the bunk above him until the sun rose, trying to figure out what to say to his parents in the morning.
Image by Anntarazevich for Pexels
Lucas Simone (he/him) is a playwright from San Jose, California. He currently lives in Chicago.