Surge by Katelin;katie LaMontagne Page B

chuckles as he flips me off.
    “I was nine, you asshole,” he points out. “At least I didn’t play doctor with my sister’s Barbies.”
    “You lying fuck!” I accuse. “It was your idea to let GI Joe have a little play time with her. You said Ken didn’t have the right equipment to get the job done, so she needed a real man.”
    We both burst out laughing at that memory. I think we traumatized my mother when she walked in to see two eleven year old boys reenacting the nasty with plastic toys. To round out the picture, this included some embarrassing, poorly made sound effects and voice-overs that would make a porno proud. I remember her face turning beet red when John, not having noticed her said, ‘Give it to me Joe,’ in a high pitched Barbie-like imitation. My mom immediately spun around, walking right back out with a slam of the door.
    But she got us back with the resulting sex talk, which included some traumatizingly realistic visuals of childbirth from the book she went to retrieve. All with Mr. and Mrs. Moure’s explicit permission of course, the pack of sickos. I wasn’t able to look at any person of the female persuasion for more than three seconds for an entire month without envisioning bloody placentas trailing after them like a gory dog on a leash. This unfortunately included the nuns at school and made learning near impossible for a while, as well as earning me numerous raps on the knuckles along with orders to pay attention.
    The memory of my mom still hurts, but I think forgetting her altogether would be a worse pain. I loved my dad, but he was a workaholic. Pulling long hours with John’s dad in the office, we mostly seen them at dinners and the occasional ball game that John’s dad took us to. But our moms worked only part time, so they were always there to pick us up after every scrape, support us at all our games and embarrass us as all moms occasionally do. I wouldn’t have traded her for anything in the world. John must have caught my mind wandering, because he sobers up showcasing a rare appearance of seriousness.
    “Do you remember when we first met each other?” John asks. “That fat fuck, what was his name? Ah, Herbert. Who the fuck names their kid Herbert?” He waves his hand. “Anyway, Herby kept shoving you around and you were letting him. I still don’t know why, I would have just gut punched his ass if I were you, but I’m glad you didn’t because you still owe me.” I nod because my four year old self’s shyness is the reason I got the douchebag talking for a best friend.
    “Here I am, doing the monkey bars like a fucking champ, when I hear some cocky bastard mouthing off and shoving a kid around that was half his height and weight. So, I go on over to put this bitch in line, one quick pop to the nose and he tumbles down like a stack of dominoes. Fucking pansy.” He pauses to take a breath.
    “And who gets in trouble? Me, that’s who, because Herbert’s privileged ass calls me the instigator and I get sent to the office. I puffed up my chest and was walking out with my head held high, since I got that douche to cry for his mommy, when I hear this little voice behind me say that it wasn’t my fault.” I remember that, it was probably the first time I spoke without raising my hand out of fear the nuns would rap my knuckles with a ruler. “The uppity bitch ignored you, so you got up and followed me out of the room. We go down to the office, take a seat outside, and wait for our moms to show up. That’s when I took it upon myself to make the introduction.”
    “Your version of an introduction was to say I better be your friend, or I was next,” I retort. “Some giraffe boy threatens me, what was I supposed to do? I feared for my life.”
    “Fuck you,” he says with a chuckle. “And it was only a few inches.” More like half a foot, but I caught up eventually. Now he only has two inches on me, lanky bastard. “When our moms showed up, they both go ape shit