We were so bored in high school in 1978 that we very nearly threw a kid in the bonfire at Homecoming. We had nothing in particular against him; he was just tall and gangly like the rest of us but unlike the rest of us, he hung out with girls: homely girls, girls from our neighborhood, ones we called dogs. This made him an easy target. I didn’t like pursuing him, didn’t like calling him pussy and sissy and such but it couldn’t be helped, I thought, because I certainly didn’t want the rest of the pack chasing after me.

The rest of the pack: a gang of virginal boys dreaming of becoming otherwise, dreaming of dates with magnificent girls who would quietly disrobe and ruin us. Given that we were all working-class boys, called poor white trash in some circles, the illusion that a girl from some higher echelon of high school society was going to deflower us was just that, an illusion, a lie.

But I held a secret from the pack: I didn’t want a girl from the higher echelons. I wanted one from our world. Her name was Lori and she was skinny as a rail and freckled and pimply and buck-toothed and dressed just as ragged as we did. Her hair was the color of straw, like she had just come in from a hayride and fallen asleep in one of the bales. She smoked cigarettes around back of the school and cursed like a sailor and we were somehow conditioned to believe that she was less than feminine for all of that, and that anything less than feminine in a girl was to be despised. Femininity in boys, of course, was to be tossed into the bonfire.

We never caught the kid to throw into the bonfire. He was much more passionate about not going into the bonfire than we were about catching him and putting him there, so he easily outran us. Which was fine. The night air was cool and the bonfire smelled sooty in it, the noise from the crowd watching the football game was loud and raucous. Everything seemed a stir to the senses and we were fully agitated on cigarettes and Coke and our hormones out of control, so we kept stomping around the school looking for something, anything, to occupy our agitation.

Soon we saw Lori with her cluster of friends, a group of girls on the outs from the main of girls in the school because they didn’t wear dresses or skirts or makeup, because they were not pretty or not even trying to be pretty, because they weren’t trying to get into college or join clubs or chase after upperclassmen, they were just sitting in the froth of their own adolescence which must have sucked for them as much as it did for us, yet to admit it and embrace them would have been considered a reduction in status for us and so we snubbed them, we mocked them, and ultimately we threw our worst epithet to them: dog.

Never mind that it was we who were running around in a rabid pack, never mind that we were just as homely, if indeed they ever were really homely, just as lost, just as considered dead-end and wastrels, we couldn’t, wouldn’t, shouldn’t admit that. So we didn’t. We just howled at them. Lori looked over at us with her saucer eyes and spat on the ground before she and hers wandered off again.

I whispered to our de facto leader, a black-haired kid named Randy who stood next to me a minute outside the port-a-potty that passed for a john. “What’s wrong with those girls?”

“What do you mean?” He asked. He wore jeans, a t-shirt and a black leather jacket like he wanted to be seen as a thug.

“I mean, they’re girls, right? Why don’t we go out with them?”

“Dogs,” he said with a suck of cigarette. “Can’t touch them. Otherwise, you turn into a dog yourself.”

“Yeah, but no other girl better than them wants to be near us.”

“Doesn’t matter,” he said, flicking his lit cigarette but into a puddle with a hiss. “You want to spend the rest of your life with that?”

It was a question. In my head, I thought, why not, but I couldn’t say it right then.

Randy and I took our respective leaks and then joined the rest as we moved out like a ragtag army of sorts, searching for its mission. We never found it. Instead, we ended up at the top of the bleachers next to the broadcast booth where we hooted and catcalled at the cheerleaders, booed the football team, drew condemnation and nasty looks from the parents nearby.

In time, that bored the crap out of us too, so we moved under the bleachers where furtive lovers made out in the scent of popcorn and cigarettes. We thought it fun to interrupt them, calling the ones we knew by name, intimating that they were going to score tonight, throwing buckets of verbal rainwater upon them to douse the flames of their passion.

Soon we grew bored with that too and returned to the grass behind the football field where we once again spied Lori and her friends. Lori, emboldened by something, though I decide whether it was her nature or a nip of liquor or what, walked up to us. “Want to party?” she asked.

“Hell no,” Randy said before I or anyone else could respond. “Go to the damn humane society and party with your sisters there, you dog.”

I winced when he said it, it seemed so unnecessarily pointed and cruel and unfair. She didn’t show any sign of flinching though. She simply shrugged and walked away, over to her little pack of friends, and they moved away from us.

Gradually the guys began to peel away, getting tired, bored, restless. They went home or hung at the liquor store in hopes of finding someone above-age to pity them and buy them beer or bourbon. Soon it was just Randy and I. “You shouldn’t have said what you did to Lori,” I said.

“Why not?” He said, striking a match in the palm of his hand. “You like her?”

“No, no,” I lied. “I just, I don’t know, I think it’s kind of mean.”

“Listen,” he said. “You start feeling sorry for a dog and the next thing you know you’re a dog. Then we start chasing you around and throwing your ass in the bonfire. Nothing personal about it. Just we have to maintain some kind of standards. You don’t want to fall to her level.”

“But aren’t we already pretty close?”

“Don’t even think like that,” he said. “A boy dog has dignity, you know? A boy is supposed to be a dog, running with the pack, howling at the moon, biting and pissing and raising a ruckus. Girl dogs go against nature. Girls should be gentle and kind and sweet and pretty themselves up for us, you know? The ones that don’t, well, they get shoved aside.”

The more he talked, the more I winced, at least inside. It didn’t seem fair at all. And if they were dried up, what were we, alone in our rooms at night jacking off to pictures in our heads of unattainable girls like homecoming queens and baton twirlers and such? 

Randy and I left school grounds at midnight. The moon hung like a golden pill in the sky. A car rattled up to us as we made to cross the street. A window rolled down. Lori poked her head out, followed by a cloud of marijuana smoke. “You guys done for the night?” She asked.

“So what if we are?” Randy said.

“Last call to party. Want to join us?” She asked.

“Get lost, dog,” he said.

I didn’t move a muscle. I didn’t want to go home to nothing, to masturbation and loneliness and my homely face in the mirror looking back at me.

“You coming or what?” Randy asked me as I hesitated there.

“Want to?” Lori repeated.

“Well?” Randy said.

I walked past him and over to the car door, opened it, climbing onto the open seat next to Lori.

“You really going with her?” Randy shouted. “What have you got to say for yourself?”

“Woof,” I said back.

He yelled something else at me but I couldn’t hear him, the music loud and head-banging in the car so as to drown him out. I sat hip-to-hip with Lori in the front seat, packed in tight as dogs in a kennel, who at least had that bond between them.

– Michael Fontana