Pleasureworld
by Jeremy Griffin

Bradley had ridden his bike the mile and a half to K-Mart check out the meager collection of anime magazines (you had to make the twenty-minute drive to the mall for a more extensive selection, and just try convincing your mom to haul you all that way so you could spend an hour staring at Annie Mays—that’s what she called them, for Christ’s sake), only to find himself drifting toward the pharmacy as soon as he walked in the door. Actually, it was more of a pull, he would later realize—yes, he’d been pulled toward the racks of mysterious and intimate inventory, the kinds of items that he could never bring himself to look at directly. The feminine products in their pink and purple packaging, their lettering curvy and leaflike. The creams and ointments, the powders and sprays. It all made him feel so indecent.
 
The worst was the display rack of condoms. Partially it was because they were right there at the pharmacy counter, where the aisles converged like rivers emptying into a single floodplain. Also, their sizes and variety of colors gave them the distant appearance of candy, until they were right in front of you and suddenly the silhouetted images of men and women on the verge of kissing were obvious and you felt like a complete idiot. No matter how many times Bradley saw the display his brain continued to process it this way; it was always just for an instant, but it was still enough to fill him with the absurd suspicion that, like so many other things in his life lately, the whole thing was just some unending prank directed exclusively at him.
 
Even more disturbing was how intimate those silhouettes seemed, more so in fact than if the couple in the image had been doing it outright. You don’t hear people swapping dirty jokes about kissing, do you? You don’t hear them yukyukking about it in the halls at school, clapping each other on the back like the punchline is some sort of accomplishment. Kissing was so unremarkable as to be off-limits. Sex, however, was public domain, or so it seemed to Bradley who, at 13, was still a virgin—a screamingly obvious one, too, if the incident in the locker room two days ago was any indication.
 
Now, at the condom rack he paused, trying to appear aloof, like buying condoms was something he did all the time. He plucked a pack of Durex Pleasureworlds© from one of the hooks and examined it closely. ALTERNATING STUDS AND RIBS FOR INCREASED SENSATION! it proclaimed in bold black letters at the bottom of the box. Of course, he had no occasion to use the condoms. For him, talking to girls was like trying to communicate with an exotic and potentially dangerous species. Plus, there was Emily Hilford’s revelation in bio last month that everybody presumed him to be a level 5 queermo. “I thought you knew that’s what people were saying,” she’d said as though this were the most obvious fact in all of human history. “I was just asking. It’s not like I’m psychic or whatever.  Sor-ry!”
 
No, the condoms were about something more, something he didn’t entirely understand yet but could feel turning in his mind like the tumblers of a lock falling into place.
 
Running his thumb over the image of the man and woman, Bradley thought about all the boys in gym class who had stood around the other day laughing at his Pokémon briefs, all of them including his best friend Jason Halvorson. They had been inseparable since kindergarten—“the Ambiguously Gay Duo” as Jason’s sister Maggie, a high school sophomore, often joked—although admittedly things had been a little strange ever since last year when Jason shot up a good six inches in a matter of months, leaving him with a slim, serious face and an air of antagonistic indifference. Everything was gay or lame or weaksauce now. Everything, that is, except the invitation he’d received a couple months back to a party at Desiree Yarborough’s house, where he’d reportedly had sex with Ashley Carr during a round of Seven Minutes in Heaven.
 
Upon hearing the story, Bradley couldn’t help feeling betrayed. For years they’d shared their outcast status like members of a support group; now here was Jason having suddenly graduated to this newer version of himself while he, Bradley, was stuck being who he was, a plump, chipmunk-cheeked kid who got tripped in the halls and whose mom slipped little notes of encouragement into his lunch like he was still in preschool. Believe in yourself! they’d say or maybe Today is yours!. Each one he would cram into his pocket and then later deposit in his locker, because as embarrassing as they were, he couldn’t yet bring himself to throw them in the trash.
 
Nor could he bring himself to confront Jason about his new personality. Doing so, Bradley feared, would only widen the chasm between them. And so he now wondered: is this what had drawn him here to the condom display, a need to prove that he could be a better version of himself too, someone who could willingly make the wrong choices because they were wrong? That he was capable of being just as reckless and dangerous and unpredictable as Jason?  
 
Whether there was an answer to the question, Bradley couldn’t say, but that didn’t matter. Casting a look down either end of the aisle to make sure no one was watching, he slipped the small box into the pocket of his hoodie.
 
When he’d left from home on his bike, he’d had no intention of stealing the condoms. In fact, other than the first edition Bulbasaur card he’d swiped from Ricky Bowles when they were eight (Ricky wasn’t actually a Pokémon collector; he’d gotten the cards as a birthday gift from an aunt, which as far as Bradley was concerned made him unfit to own it), he had never stolen anything in his life. But now, as he made his way to the automated doors with the box in his pocket and his heart fluttering wildly in his chest, he felt a sense of triumph that he’d never experienced before, as if everything in his life had been careening toward this single act.
 
Except, that was when the alarm blared out and the red lights of the theft detector panels started flashing; he’d been too lost in thought to even notice them. As he whirled around to the store’s interior, he met the eyes of a clerk restocking the five-dollar DVD rack. A pudgy slack-jawed fellow, the man had acne-scarred jowls and a sullen demeanor that made it clear he would just as soon put a bullet through his head as price-mark another copy of Pirates of the Caribbean.
 
Well, here it is, Bradley thought. He was busted, no question about it. Any second the man would come grab him by the arm and drag him into a little windowless room in the back of the store where he’d have to wait for the police and then his mother. Oh god, he could just see the humiliation on her face when she arrived to pick him up, the craggy crease of her brow, her lips pinched into a wrinkled, colorless nub. Her son the thief.
 
Then a strange thing happened.
 
Something shifted in the man’s eyes, a glint of recognition, and suddenly Bradley had an unaccountable feeling that this fellow, a complete stranger, could discern things about him, personal things that only someone like Jason would know. In a flash, the events from the other day flitted through Bradley’s mind: the locker room with its pea-colored walls and fusty stench; the scrum of shirtless boys guffawing over his underwear, which he had only picked that morning because all the others were in the laundry; Jason stepping forward and giving the waistband a snap, his face bent into an unfriendly smirk; Bradley locking himself in a bathroom stall later that period and sobbing so violently into the crook of his arm that he had to bite into muscle to stop.
 
Only later would he come to understand what it was that the man saw—the shared recognition of trauma, like witnesses to a grisly accident. This must have been why the fellow now turned back to the DVD rack like he hadn’t seen anything, his pricing gun once again click clacking on the plastic cases.
 
For a moment Bradley just continued staring at the back of the man’s head, waiting for something to happen. Waiting to surrender. Then, when it finally dawned on him that the clerk was letting him go, he fled outside.
 
Behind him the lights continued to flash and the theft alarm howled, and folks in the parking lot gaped at him as he flew past them, but he was barely aware of any of it. All he could sense as he mounted his bike and began pedaling furiously, his hand still gripping the box in his pocket, was the blood pumping in his ears and the afternoon heat on his face like a friendly welcome to an unfamiliar world and the phrase repeating over and over in his head Today is yours! Today is yours! Today is yours!