Marsha Benson.
Hair like sunlight seen through a full Coke bottle, sparkling blues and browns and ambers. Dark eyes and a flat, Persian cat's nose. Full breasts and hips that were only now being rounded by adolescence.
An early spring tan showed through her torn jeans. She drew her tongue across her lips, left a diamond sheen.
Matt bit down on his own lip. His hand began to ache, and he switched smoothly from right to left.
Perspiration trickled down his naked chest, pooled in his navel. His shoulders and sternum were mottled red, his face flushed.
She reached out.
Her hand, so soft, warm.
Touched him.
His back arched violently.
The dusty gravel received his rain, soaked it in by the time the slick arc of his body had curved back to the earth.
The sun pulsed orange-red through his closed eyelids.
He rubbed absently at the dried, flaky splotches that dotted his forearm, his flat belly.
The sharp edges of the gravel poked him. He took a deep breath, rose to his feet. The wind whistled through holes in the massive, fallen screen of the abandoned Comet Drive-In, jostled its grove of metal poles, many of which still bore their speakers.
Enjoying the wind as it curled between his thighs, he dressed slowly, listening to the buzz of the grasshoppers, then ate the lunch his mother had packed for him.
Through gaps in the ruined screen, Matt saw that the sun had begun to set behind the hills.
Suddenly, an explosion of white light hit him with the impact of a physical object.
Startled, he fell against one of the metal speaker poles.
The speaker, swinging from its cord, began to crackle.
Music, filled with static.
The light came from a spot on the ground behind him. He followed the beam through the darkening sky.
Dancing candy and tubs of popcorn marched across the ragged screen, led by a wide-eyed wax cup of soda with the words "Ice Cold Drink" swirled down its sides.
This was replaced by a kaleidoscopic background with the single word "Intermission."
The sound was everywhere now, coming not just from the speaker near him, but from all of them, even those that were disconnected or that lay smashed on the ground.
"Our Feature Presentation" appeared across the same swirling, kaleidoscopic background. There was a brief flash of white light, a bass hiccup on the soundtrack, and the swirling background faded to a black and white picture of the front of his high school.
A bell rang and kids poured out onto the lawn. The camera moved in slowly on this crowd. There were 100 kids in the frame, now 40, now ten.
Now one.
Him.
Matt carried his school bag, walked to the spot where he always ate lunch. After one bite of his sandwich, a shadow fell over him.
Marsha Benson.
Her short skirt retreated as she curtsied down to sit close to him.
The camera focused intently on her sparkling lips, his darting eyes, the smooth expanse of her thighs.
A dizzying sweep, and they were together. He cupped her face between his hands, drew his fingers down her cheeks to her lips and kissed her.
With an unexpected electrical Pop!, the picture flickered, died.
He stood there a moment stunned, a pleasurable tightness in his groin. Taking a deep breath, he turned to where the light had come from.
In the stand of weeds, just behind where he'd lain earlier, he found the projector. He knelt near it, careful not to get into the mud.
As the light within it faded, he noticed a small blotch on the lens. The lens had cooled a bit, and he rubbed the white drop, which flaked beneath his finger. He turned slowly to look at where he'd been lying.
Suddenly, these white flakes looked very familiar.
Dried semen. Jizz. Go-go juice. A hundred locker room names went through his mind.
Wiping his finger in the grass, he grabbed his bag, fled the clearing.
Matt searched the chaos of the lunchroom, wanting to see her, half not wanting to.
Lunch was a dry bologna sandwich, a bag of Doritos and a handful of Oreos eaten outside on the grass. As he bit into the sandwich, a shadow crossed over him. His heart lurched, and the wad of bologna and bread rolled toward the back of his throat.
Marsha Benson bent to him, and he was looking down a long, long vista, interrupted only by her lace-enclosed breasts, and farther, the gentle slope of her belly as it slipped beneath the waist of her skirt.
"Can I eat lunch with you?"
Though he was flushed, a chill shook through him.
"How-how are you?" he stuttered, his wide eyes watering in the sunlight.
"Great!" she answered, taking a small bite of salad from a plastic bowl. "You looked lonely, so I thought I'd join you. Your name's Matt, right?"
Taking a self-conscious bite of his sandwich, he looked across the lawn, noticed the attention they were attracting. Marsha Benson was not so much a student as a commodity, a cultural landmark at William Henry Harrison High School, every bit as much as MTV or Coke or Reebok.
And he was the face in the yearbook that no one quite recalls ten or fifteen years later.
She leaned into him, and her body was a thick, warm liquid conforming to his shape. Amazingly, his first reaction was to run. But, when he looked down, her eyes caught him.
He fell into them.
They were darker the deeper he fell, but he noticed a flicker of light at their core.
The sensation of descending toward this light became so profound that he reached out to catch himself. His hand found a breast, though, which swelled into his cupped palm.
Then, she was pulling away, picking up her lunch, standing.
"Not now," she laughed. "Call me tonight."
"Do you love me?" she whispered in his ear later that evening, her breath hot and moist.
"Yes," he moaned, his hand slipping under her bra as deftly as a seasoned traveler through customs.
It was only the evening of their first lunch together, but they were already in the backseat of his father's car, and things were moving so fast that he'd disengaged his brain earlier in the evening.
There were, he'd decided, only so many times and so many ways you could tell yourself that this wasn't happening. Better, easier to just go with it.
"Really?" she whispered, her tongue twirling on the folds of his ear.
"Yes," he grunted as she helped him unclasp her bra to reveal her breasts, small and firm, with coffee-colored nipples that yearned upward from them.
"Yes," as he removed her jeans, her panties, his hand shakily exploring the softly haired rise of her sex.
Matt's mind swam in a sticky morass, whose undertow kept him just below thought as he climbed atop her, her legs spreading to enfold him. He entered her smoothly, collapsing into her, his body as taut as a wire.
As her moans became urgent, he felt something gelatinous twitch inside him.
It spread, flowing into his limbs, filling voids.
"What will you do for me?" she asked.
"Anything."
Feeling the heaviness within him build, Matt closed his eyes.
Not before he saw, for just a second, her two dark eyes, each with a bleached, gray center.
A light exploding within him swept it all away.
Matt awoke in her arms, feeling the vinyl seat sticking uncomfortably to his sweaty, naked butt. There was a new smell in the car, and it mixed with her flowery perfume, intoxicating him with every breath.
Marsha stroked his hair absently, his head resting in the valley between her cool breasts.
"What will you do for me now?" she asked again, her voice insistent.
"What do you want?" he asked, his mind reeling with the erotic possibilities.
"I want you to protect me from someone who's hurt me."
"Who?"
"Will you help me?"
"Yes."
A smirk played on her lips as she bent to kiss him.
Billy Jaskowicz saw the future in 1978, and it was playing on six small, indoor screens, not on the large, expensive drive-in he owned.
So, he put the Comet up for sale and plunked his money down on a building right on the main drag in town.
But while his new Jubilee Cinema thrived, the Comet never sold.
Disgusted and in debt up to his new marquee, Jaskowicz simply allowed the Comet to decay over the years. Weeds grew unchecked amidst the gravel; birds built nests in the projection booth.
The city made him tear down the structures on the property in 1986. He'd been so mad at his failure to extract any money from the Comet that he left everything in the ramshackle building when the bulldozers showed--from Coke machines to popcorn poppers, even the ancient projector he couldn't sell.
The screen took care of itself by partially collapsing in 1988, narrowly beating Jaskowicz's insurance company and, again, the city from having it torn down as well.
Billy Jaskowicz, apart from this imagined but deeply held failure, was a pillar of the community in the small town; revered by his fellow merchants for revitalizing the town's heart, popular with the teenagers because he was generous with special movie nights and discounts.
His money helped him attract other things, as well. He squired one of the town's most beautiful young women, Debbie Moorman, around in his Corvette. Debbie was a girl half his age who was once an employee at the old Comet.
In fact, there was a rumble of discontent that he was still sleeping with some of his young female ushers. But such was his popularity that, if he was sleeping with his employees, so the townsfolk's reasoning went, at least it was the female ones.
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