Read Inside the Mind of Gideon Rayburn for Free Online

making fun of them, I may already be friends with them, and if I'm not, if they wanted to be friends with me, I don't think I could say no. Gid loves the way the smoky liquor softens his pot buzz. The room is so warm and foggy now that it feels almost tropical.
    Cullen removes the thong from his pocket and tosses it to Gid.
    Gideon sits down on his own bed and draws his legs up, Indian style. He holds the underwear. "My girlfriend back in Fairfax was named Danielle Rogal," he says. "She lived down the street from me."
    "God, this is great!" Cullen shouts.
    Gideon shifts uncomfortably.
    "I'm serious," Cullen says. "Don't leave anything out. What kind of body did she have?"
    Gideon squeezes the underwear, thinking of Danielle's bare olive skin and sincere hazel eyes, which became more sincere, often disturbingly, the more naked she became. "Thin, maybe three inches shorter than me, normal, uh...chest," he says. "Dark hair. Anyway...uh..." Telling this story can't possibly enhance his reputation. But he's already started.
    "I actually had no idea how long we'd been going out," Gid continues. "But when we were saying good-bye, she told me we had been going out for seven months, two weeks, and three days." This gets a snicker from the crowd, and from me too. Girls are supposed to be bad at math, but we're excellent at counting. "So, the night before I left...Well. I guess I should go back."
    Cullen rubs his hands together with coarse greed. "Only if it involves anything remotely dirty!" Nicholas is flat on his back again. With every outburst from Cullen, his eyes dart to the side in annoyance.
    "So once we'd been together for about two months, we basically started doing everything," says Gid. "But she always had her clothes on. Her pants had some weird thing about them...where I would have my hand in them, and they would kind of...expand?"
    Nicholas and Cullen don't know, either.
    Is he talking about Lycra? Oh my God. Guys are such retards!
    "But she never took her clothes off, and then..."
    Cullen leaps off the bed, screeching as if in pain. "For how long did she never take her clothes off?" he asks. He holds his head, bracing himself for the answer.
    What, Gid wonders, has Cullen so confused and upset? "The whole time. The whole time we were...until the night before." Gid looks helplessly at Nicholas.
    "No!!!" Cullen wails. "That's so horrible!"
    "Cullen, just let him fucking finish," Nicholas says. "I think that what Gid's saying is that they did a lot of shit for a few months, but she always had her clothes on. I think it's sort of a boarding-school thing to just get totally naked and go for it."
    Gid wants to know more about boarding school and nudity but doesn't know how to ask without sounding too eager.
    "So the night before. We're in her basement."
    "Don't leave out all the details," Nicholas advises. "I like a little atmosphere."
    "Ass-mosphere!" says Cullen. "You like that?"
    "The carpeting was green, shag. Her couch was like, tweed or something. And upstairs, I could hear her brother, Kevin, getting himself a bowl of ice cream. I knew something was different because her parents were out at a Kiwanis dance and her brother, he won't come downstairs because of his mold allergy..."
    "Okay," Nicholas says. "Details can overwhelm."
    Strangely, Gid is enjoying himself. Being the center of attention. "So sure enough, instead of just, like, unzipping her pants and, like, letting her bra just kind of hang off of her, she just jumps off and takes off all her clothes."
    "Fucking finally!" Cullen shouts.
    "Quiet!" Nicholas commands. His eyes take on that lightness, that sea-under-the-sun quality that indicates his rare excitement. "This is when it all happens."
    This is indeed when it all happens. Gid takes what he hopes is a courage-stealing sip from his mug of bourbon. Stalling, he reads it. Midvale: Class of 78 Twenty-fifth Reunion. Cullen's dad went to school here too? Gid continues through a pang of outsiderness. "She's naked.