Make Something Up by Chuck Palahniuk Page A

up in church to talk dirty through their own little window.
    Because no matter how they called it, dirty talk made Cannibal drool. Those words picturing a whisker biscuit like those lunch meat curtains kids talk about when what they really mean is a camel toe soufflé.
    In middle school when they grade you on Community Spirit, they mean: Do you cheer at pep rallies and football games? And when kids joke about Cannibal, they’re talking about the one time when Marcia Sanders was a senior about to graduate. Because she’s got those kind-of big lips and caved-in cheeks that make it look like she’s always deep-throating a baloney pony, because of that Marcia Sanders was the most-popular. And because this was such a small school people considered her a real dish. Because she had nothing in fourth period she was the TA in American Civics where she approached Cannibal, because he was still only in seventh grade, and because she knew he’d never say no because he was so stoned on puberty.
    She’s all, “You like my hair, don’t you?” Her head rolls to swing her hair like a spaghetti cape, and she goes, “This is the longest my hair’s ever been.”
    The way she says this sounds dirty, because everything sounds dirty when it comes out of a sexy girl’s mouth. And because Cannibal doesn’t know any better, Cannibal agrees to reconnoiter with Marcia Sanders at her house because Mr. and Mrs. Sanders are gone to the lake that weekend. She only asks him because she says her boyfriend, the team captain of every sport, won’t put her on like a gas mask. This is her, here’s her, she says this, Marcia Sanders, she says, “You really want to do me, kid?” And because Cannibal has no idea what she means, he says, “Yeah.”
    Because then she says to come by her house after dark on Saturday and come to the kitchen door because she has a reputation to uphold. And because Marcia Sanders says he can be her secret boyfriend, Cannibal doesn’t think twice.
    Because at Jefferson Middle School when they grade you on Good Citizenship, they mean: Do you wash your hands after launching a corn canoe? Because half the time Cannibal doesn’t know what he’s thinking, he goes on Saturday night and Marcia Sanders folds the bedspread back on the king-sized waterbed in her parents’ bedroom. She spreads two layers of bath towels across the waterbed and says to make sure his head goes in the middle of them. She says not to take off his clothes, but Cannibal figures that comes later because she unzips her jeans and folds them over the back of a chair, and because he’s looking at her panties so hard she says to shut his eyes. Because Cannibal only pretends not to peek he sees her kneel on the padded rail at the edge of the waterbed, and he can see why it’s called a ham wallet. After that he can’t see jack because she slings one leg over his face and squats down until the room is nothing but fish taco blotting out everything except the underwater sound of Marcia Sanders’s voice telling him what to do next.
    Cannibal finds himself sunk, head-deep into waterbed with sloppy waterbed mattress squeezed up around his ears, hearing the lap of ocean waves. His body rocking from head to toe, hearing his heartbeat, hearing somebody’s heartbeat. Because Marcia Sanders, out of nowhere her voice tells him, “Suck, already, you stupid dummy,” Cannibal sucks.
    Because she says, “Let’s get this over with,” he sucks like giving her insides a big hickey. It doesn’t help that Cannibal is no ladies’ man, like the one time Mrs. Cannibal told him to pin a corsage on his homecoming date but didn’t specifically say to pin it
on her dress.
And it didn’t help that every night you could walk past their house and hear Mr. Cannibal yelling, “I can’t drink fast enough to stay married to you!”
    Cannibal can’t put up a fight against Marcia Sanders because when kids say his legs are thick as tree trunks, they’re talking about willow trees.