Maybe Joel had always had plans to infiltrate our relation. Joel sensed the sex stench, the bubble of me and Barbra together.
By Grade 10, Joel was doing ghb every single weekend because his tennis-club assholes had gotten him hooked. He had permanent pimples in a kind of star shape on his forehead. ghb made Joel even more intense about sex.
‘Chicks like to just lie there and feel it,’ he told me. ‘They love to feel the fucking power of cock.’
Miriam still cooked and cleaned the house for his family, even though Joel’s sisters had both basically moved out.
‘You want the girls who receive the cock to think it’s, like, fucking saving them or something.’
Miriam was still there every day when he was sixteen, making Joel’s lunches and polishing the glasses.
‘Dude, I gotta feel an ass twerk on my cock,’ Joel said. ‘One day, I swear, I’m gonna pay for it, fuck. Girls at our school, they don’t know how to twerk.’
I’d only ever seen Joel’s father a few times, the entire time that we were friends. He had this bushy brown moustache and was weirdly physically fit. I’d never seen a father who looked like him – dress pants, ballet-style pumas, and skintight white T-shirts without collars. He was a lawyer but he went to the office like that. Joel said that his father was a former world tennis champion.
‘I want the ass at eye level. Twerk, bitch. Work it out.’
It made me really queasy the way Joel talked half the time. Like, since Barbra was here, he was watching porn with only Black girls. He didn’t know shit about Black girls. He was just chasing after me.
It occurred to me that Barbra was our final movement as friends.
By the middle of August, she was coming up to my room every night. Jew-boy and Suicide Girl, intertwined. My father went to work. We tried every bed in the house. She said, ‘Bruh, tape my mouth.’ I taped Barbra’s mouth. I bound her hands with silver duct tape. She told me that I was the best Jew-boy abductor. The best Jew-boy wine buyer. The best Jew-boy with the best access to drugs.
‘Do you believe in a punishing God?’ Barbra had asked me.
‘I believe in Joel,’ I’d told her stupidly.
What I believed by the end of the summer was that I got punishment for the act of dehumanizing.
When we arrived at Joel’s house, at first it seemed like Barbra just took it all in – Miriam singing in the kitchen, Miriam working at the sink, the spotlessness, the pot lights, the rows of wine bottles behind glass doors, five bathrooms for five people, everything. I had been stressed about Barbra meeting Miriam, but when it happened it didn’t seem like a big deal at all. Miriam and Barbra just said hi to each other.
Then, later, in the basement, when we were all stoned, Barbra said out of nowhere: ‘Middle-class folks: the fucking worst.’
Joel started laughing. ‘Yeah, total hypocrites, man.’
‘Middle-class folks gawk at the rich as if they think they’re somehow different from them.’
I didn’t understand what Barbra meant and the ways in which Joel had just seemingly agreed.
Joel packed another bowl up while Barbra turned to me.
‘See, you’re jealous of him. Your family’s jealous of this. Class stratification’s everything.’
Was this the same gruff Israeli way of seeing things?
Joel’s basement was renovated, the exact opposite of ours where she slept. Class stratification? I was not jealous. I felt bad for Joel that his mother was never around. I thought his mother’s absence maybe explained his alleged need for sexual conquest.
I realized that Joel was guffawing as I was thinking.
‘What the fuck are you laughing at, man?’
‘Because you looked fucked-up, bro! You look totally fucking shocked.’
‘See, bruh, this family is at least upfront about its wealth,’ Barbra said, as if I were a tool. ‘They are not pretending to be middle-class, deceiving everyone.’
Deceiving everyone about what?
Now Joel was laughing so hard he almost could not speak. ‘Yeah, but you should see it, though. His mom’s into class war!’