She took me into the back room where the mouse-eating snakes were. In frail light the glass aquariums glowed radiation green. All I saw at first was tawny straw and clumps of fake rock.
“Isn’t that one something?” she asked.
“Where?”
She tapped the glass and I held my breath but nothing moved.
Her name was Roberta but I called her Bobby. Bobby wore boots and jeans like mine, boy’s styles. She knew curse words I’d never heard.
Bobby’s Dad owned the pet store but they had just sold it in order to move to California.
“When are you going?” I asked above a blanket of electrical hum. My hairless armpits were clammy and I hoped I didn’t stink.
“Next Tuesday.”
“You glad about it?”
“What do you think? It’s California.”
“Yeah,” I said, not knowing.
Bobby stared at me, her eyes pinched and sizzling with a mix of one thing true and another struggling. “You want to kiss me, don’t you?”
“I guess I do,” I said. “Yeah.”
“It’s gonna cost you then.”
“I ain’t got nothing.”
“That right?”
“It is. If I had anything, I’d give it to you kiss or no kiss, if you asked.”
She leaned across and stabbed me with her lips, then mashed them up against mine. My teeth hurt from the pressure but I didn’t dare say so. When she pulled away, Bobby wiped her mouth and said, “I don’t much like boys,” and I said I knew that.
“Early Prescott,” she said, using her nickname for my real one, Earl, “you are in love with me, aren’t you?”
She was moving on Tuesday and it was an honest fact she’d spoken, so I nodded as hard as when Mother sent us to confession.
Bobby clucked her tongue and said, “You’d better get some sense into your head before it’s too late.”
I had questions, but Bobby started to fumble with the gunny sack. Inside it, squirming commenced but no squealing, nothing audible. The bag kept leaping at me, and in response I jumped a few times, embarrassed. There was no way that the mouse could sense my fear or sympathy.
Bobby tipped the sack upside down over the aquarium and unknotted the brittle strand of rope that was in some ways like a snake itself.
I waited for the mouse to drop out and when it didn’t, Bobby held the bag up high and poked her face inside, same as a mechanic, and when the mouse fell it scampered first across her face, ripping licorice red lines in Bobby’s skin before skidding and slipping and thudding with a soft cloud of dust.
The snake crushed the mouse between its jaws.
I looked away.
Bobby punched me in the ribs. “Sissy Boy,” she said.
When I turned back Bobby wiped the last of the blood off her cheek as if it was no more than rain or spittle. Her eyes were riveted.
A potato-sized lump caught a few inches down the snake’s throat.
“Can you imagine being able to do that?” Bobby asked.
I shook my head. “Why would you want to?”
She snorted and I could tell from the defeated twinge of that sound it was time to go.
I watched their pickup and van pull away. Bobby never wrote back, but I guess that’s California for you.
In his first year, the new owner had a fire and many of the pets and animals went up in flames. People were sick about it for awhile, but then all sorts of jokes started around about barbequed this and smoked that.
I went to college in Oregon. My dorm was cold and smelly. The other day I heard a rat or mouse, something scratching inside the heat vent overhead. It struggled, seemed about to tumble. I folded my hands behind my neck, unable to sleep, listening. I kept my eyes open.
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