The Works

by Ali Sharpe

You agree to make the bomb because you’re afraid that if you don’t, Grace will stop kissing you and start kissing Alex Dobrowski. She’s never seemed interested in Alex, but she never seemed interested in you, either, until she was. 

All of the summer before high school, you and Grace have been the way you are now: in the Lugos’ pristine white living room, on the pristine white leather sectional, sharing her duvet and watching Academia de Amor Clandestino. The Spanish drama gets through Mr. Lugo’s satellite TV filter, somehow, even though it’s about a spy who goes undercover at a boarding school to infiltrate a teen terrorist ring. The spy becomes a guidance counselor and mostly infiltrates the fact that students are having three-ways in the tennis supply shed and doing lines in the middle of study hall. Most too-hot days in August have been like this since you’ve known Grace, since the day you moved to the neighborhood seven years ago, when your mom saw another girl your age playing across the street and practically dragged you up the Lugos’ driveway to say hello. 

The kissing, though. That part is new.

You scoot closer to Grace, and she traps your calf between her cold feet. Walking across the street to her house this morning was more of a swim, so humid at 11 a.m. that your bra was full of sweat by the time you got to her door. But Mrs. Lugo puts the air conditioning on sixty-nine and tapes the dial there. You get cold so fast it shocks you. “Get off,” you say, not meaning it. 

Grace slips a finger under the thick elastic lace strap of your tank top and moves it just enough to expose the hickey she gave you yesterday. (You tried to give her one back, and she wiggled away, laughing, leaving a ringing anxiety that lasted after you left, ate dinner, went to sleep.) “It looks cute,” she says into the spot between your neck and your shoulder.

“Perv.” You extract your arm from under the duvet, reach out and fiddle with a piece of Grace’s thick, dark-brown hair. She started straightening it a year ago, and you miss the curls, the way that on hot days, they’d get sweaty and stick to her neck (the neck where your hickey is not), amplifying the scent of her unspecified-fruit shampoo. 

“The shirt, idiot,” she says.  

On Clandestino, a girl from one of the three-ways is screaming at the spy/guidance counselor. “What did she say?” Grace asks you. “Pop quiz.”

She won’t turn on the subtitles, wants you to learn more Spanish before ninth grade starts in a month so the two of you can talk shit on people in front of them. Except Grace hardly understands the kids on Clandestino, either. She says that Spain-Spanish sounds like if Puerto Rican-Spanish got stung by a bunch of bees, so it’s taking you all summer to get through the first season.

“She said either that her baby will have two fathers or that the father will have two babies,” you say. Grace’s laugh vibrates through her lips on your neck and into your stomach. “You’re getting better,” she says. And someone rings the bell. 

You stay very still when Grace gets up, but the August heat leaks through the open door and into the spotless, frigid house, blending the heat left over from her lips back into your skin. Then Grace brings Alex into the living room, and he stands in front of the TV, an empty Gatorade bottle in one hand and a roll of aluminum foil in the other. 

“Hi,” you say, not sure if you should go through the embarrassing process of extracting yourself from the large blanket or continue to lie down in front of him, both of which feel like the wrong option. 

He does not say hi back.

Alex Dobrowski lives two streets down and is a year younger than you and Grace. During school, you are a lot older than him, but from the bus to home to back again, he’s the one who does the things with Grace you’re too afraid to do. Like jumping in neighbors’ pools at night or drinking half an open can of Bud Light he found in the woods behind Grace’s house even though it had a cigarette butt in it. You look at him and you think, I am smarter than him. I am older than him. I am taller than him. But this only makes it worse: that someone like Alex Dobrowski can make you, with a word or a look, feel so small.

He turns pointedly away from you, asks Grace, “You wanna make a bomb?”

Grace’s house is a dead zone, so you have to use the desktop, which is a million years old and lives in a rolltop desk in her parents’ office. There’s an index card taped next to the mouse pad, on which Mr. Lugo has written, NO chat rooms, NO inappropriate content, NO 4Chan, which of course means you and Grace have gone and looked for all three of those things at every sleepover you’ve had since the fifth grade. Mr. Lugo’s password is always Romans13:4@!

Grace keys it in and gets onto the administrator account, the one that doesn’t have Net Nanny, and looks up “The Works.” She finds a video of three guys making the bomb, two minutes and thirty seconds of them filling a Gatorade bottle with aluminum foil and drain cleaner, then waiting around for the bottle to explode. Which it eventually does, releasing the white smoke building up inside of it with a loud, apparently harmless bang. The bomb-makers cheer in the background while the cameraman zooms out to show the smoke cloud, drifting high over the trees.

“The one thing,” the guy in the video says, “is you gotta get that cap on real tight. Otherwise, you could get yourself a gusher, and—”

The video buffers, then freezes.

“Oh, come on,” you say to Grace. “Someone will hear us.” Your cul-de-sac seems more private than it really is; everyone has a yard and a garden, and there’s a strip of trees behind the houses on Grace’s side that looks like real woods until you walk half a mile and bump into the highway. It feels like your neighbors can’t see you, but, as Alex found out when he smoked one cigarette in front of his house on Peachtree, they really, really can.

Grace shrugs, like, what else are we going to do but make a bomb? To which you have a lot of answers, like maybe she could continue with the over-the-bra stuff that’s been happening as of late, but you can’t say that in front of Alex Dobrowski. Or maybe even in front of Grace.

“Plus, if your mom comes home– ” you start. 

“It’s not really a bomb,” Grace says. “It doesn’t even light on fire.” She drums her fingers on the desk. “What else did he say we need? Drano?”

“Yeah, Alex, where’s your Drano,” you say because you know his mom locks up all the household chemicals ever since his older brother Austin went to rehab for huffing PAM, and Alex started it, anyway, by simply being around Grace and hating you forever, hating you long before the one time you finally kicked him in the nuts. 

Mr. and Mrs. Lugo don’t know about huffing, so you find drain cleaner in the basement stockpile, which is, like everything else in the Lugo household, obsessively organized. Big gallon bottles of water, cans of soup, and detergent fill the matching metal shelves. You and Grace are always trying to figure out what her parents did to think they need a stockpile, since, Grace has pointed out, it implies they’re not going to get raptured with all the other members of God’s Grace Bible Church (LLC) when the end times finally come.

Maybe they are hedging their bets, you think, watching Grace kneel on the concrete and slide a bottle of off-brand drain cleaner from a bottom shelf. Betting against their daughter, and any girl-kissing she may get into. Grace’s shoulders bunch up around her ears as she spaces out the remaining bottles to account for the missing one. Maybe you should learn how to give a massage.

On the way up the basement stairs, Alex tells Grace a joke about some show you’ve never seen, that you know Grace has never seen, either, because of the family-filter situation, but she laughs and nods and pretends she knows, and every time you try to join in, Alex looks at you like he always does.

You don’t remember why you got on the bus last that day, or why Grace wasn’t there. The only seat left was the tiny single one in the very back. Alex’s brother had just gotten sent to rehab, so for weeks he’d been quiet, leaving the younger town house boys (whom he was even meaner to, whom he hit) and you alone. And anyway, he was only really nasty to you in front of Grace. “He’s marking his territory,” your mom would say. “Ignore him.”

You remember how he popped up over the seat in front of you like a gopher, and seeing the other boys try to do the same, look without looking, out of the corner of your eye. He started by asking if you wanted to go out with him. When you stared at the space over his right ear, eyes unfocused, he doubled down: don’t you know how hot you are, how a man could only take so much. The lesser-Alexes, the town house boys, were laughing, and he turned to them in fake outrage. What? he said. Ugly girls need love, too.

You did what you’d been learning to do for the last couple years, since they separated the middle schoolers into two different teams in two different hallways, put Grace in yellow and you in blue. You figured out how to be small. It was what you did with Alex, froze like a rabbit, eyes fixed out the warped bus window, until he got bored. The only thing you could rest on for comfort, protection: that people would, eventually, forget you.  

“It’s not dangerous.” Grace says it loud as you walk through the woods behind her house, even though you purposefully hang back and whisper this possibility. “Nothing happened to those dudes in the video.”

 “I don’t trust people who say yeehaw that much,” you respond, but it doesn’t come out like a joke. Your heart is hammering, and you are skin-crawlingly aware of your humidity-sheen of sweat, of your shorts, which are a little too small and keep riding up your thighs and into your crotch. It will never not be unfair, that your parents are atheists who believe in free-range child rearing, that Grace’s have been drawing lines on the liquor bottles since middle school, and still, when you do the things that make her eyes light up, those recently discovered things, she is calm and you are not. 

Ahead, you hear Alex crunching through the thick cover of dry leaves. It hasn’t rained since June, the day you and Grace got stuck inside for hours, the first time you kissed her excellent, stupid mouth. I guess boredom turns you gay, you said to her, and she laughed. 

“Don’t be a pussy,” Alex calls back.

Grace goes on. 

The three of you find a deer path and follow it, passing wisteria, mounds of litter where kids had dumped trash from parties, until it stops at a clearing. Worn-down dirt around an old firepit that’d been filled in with soil and crumpled cans of Yuengling. 

“Clear ground,” Alex says. He points at the fallen tree a yard away, then out at the evergreens, dense enough here that no one can see you from their backyards. “Cover.”

“It’s not Call of Duty,” you say.

“Oh, what the fuck,” Alex says. He points to your shoulder, where your tank top strap has slipped to the side, exposing the hickey on your shoulder. 

Why my shoulder? you asked her. Duh, Grace said, meaning, because nobody would see, which was when you tried to bite her back. 

“Did you give that to yourself, or something?” Alex asks.

“Burn,” you say, making it worse. There is something missing between the part of you that you’ve trained to shut up––in general but around Alex Dobrowski especially––and the part of you that has never shut up a day in your life. A busy thinker, your mother calls you; a fast talker, says your dad. Mostly, lately, you feel less like a person and more like a pair of eyeballs, floating above a body that doesn’t have much to do with you.

How you make The Works is you pour Drano into the Gatorade bottle, drop in balls of aluminum foil, shake the bottle up, and run. Grace is in charge of crumpling the foil, but she gets annoyed when Alex tells her the balls aren’t the right size. “You would know,” she says. She hands you the roll and goes to sit behind the fallen tree, and you try to think she’s huffy because she’s starting to hate Alex, too, as opposed to being mad because he mentioned the hickey.

Alex ignores it. “It says four the size of a golf ball,” he says, with less than the usual amount of sarcasm, so you roll the aluminum foil. “Yeah, that’s probably fine,” he says. He hands you the empty bottle. “You put them in. I’ll do the Drano. I can’t do it with you standing right here. Because it’ll go off before your fat ass gets behind the log, duh.”

“Asshole,” says Grace, but only when you sit down next to her, behind the fallen tree, where Alex can’t hear. Her fingers brush against your ankle, so light that a second later, you wonder if you imagined it.

You kissed Grace first in June. Sitting on the living room couch, across from the sliding glass door, you watched the rain steaming up off the still-warm grass in Grace’s backyard, fogging like crazy, encasing the house in plain, white nothing. The two of you had reached some kind of zen state, under Grace’s duvet with the blue nail polish stain birthmarking the lavender print cotton. Grace’s mom refused to buy her a new comforter, as some kind of punishment for having nail polish on the bed. Of course, the stain only bothered Mrs. Lugo. 

You’d just started watching Clandestino that week, and you were on the episode where Benjamin, the dorky British exchange student, realized he might be in love with both the headmaster’s illegitimate daughter and Dario, head of both the school’s teen terrorist ring and varsity basketball team, during the homecoming game. They kept cutting between the headmaster’s daughter’s cleavage, Dario’s slow-motion dick bouncing around in his basketball shorts, and Benjamin’s eyes darting between the two, before he faints due to, like, pure gay panic.

“Whatever,” Grace said. “Isn’t everyone bisexual now? You don’t have to go passing out about it.”

You were aware of everything, all of a sudden, every nerve ending, and how close Grace’s thigh was to yours, because lately you’d ended up on a lot of websites about “teen sexuality” that posed bisexual hypotheticals, using the sort of names a math teacher would for a word problem. Henry is dating Ann but has some confusing feelings about his neighbor, John. But Henry knows you can only like boys or girls, not both. TRUE or FALSE? You’d started to wonder if the reason you hated all the guys who liked Grace and all the guys Grace liked, the reason you wanted to look at her all the time and maybe touch her hair, was not just because you were a very, very good friend. 

“Girls are hotter than guys,” Grace said. “Like, objectively. Dicks are terrible.”

“Like you’ve seen anybody’s dick,” you said. 

“I’d kiss a girl.”

“You would not,” you told her, because you knew what you were doing, could hardly believe your luck, that you might be able to yes-huh her into this, but she just smirked, shrugged, turned up Clandestino. 

For the next two days, you were nervous. You went back to the web pages, their lesbian logic problems. If Tommy is gay at fifty miles an hour, heading south to point B, and Susie is traveling from point A thirty minutes later, how gay does she have to be to catch up? It rained, and you and Grace did what you’d done every shut-in summer day for the last seven years: TV broken up by naps and breaks to microwave Bagel Bites. But as Benjamin continued to ogle Dario on Clandestino, Grace’s thigh was touching yours. You pretended not to notice, and she pretended not to notice when you pressed into her, and she laid her head on your shoulder. The two of you sat like that for a couple episodes, like a dare, and later she will swear that you kissed her, and you will swear that she kissed you, and either way, finally, finally, you did.

“Is it supposed to take this long to go off?” Grace asks, after a few minutes without any explosion. Alex shrugs at her. “I think you put the cap on wrong.” She stands up and walks around the fallen tree to look at The Works. 

“Don’t,” you say.

“Please,” she snaps. “It’s not a, what’s it, an IED or something,” which is exactly what a nameless Clandestino student would say right before being mowed down by one of the teen terrorists. Except all that happens to Grace is that The Works goes off the second she gets around the tree. The bang isn’t as loud as in the video, the cloud of smoke not as big. It’s more of a splatter than a real explosion. You’ll get yourself a gusher!

Grace runs over to you, clutching her right hand; she shows it to you, wide-eyed and silent, like a little kid, the skin covered in aluminum foil–laced drain cleaner. “Wipe it off. Not on your clothes, on the ground,” you say.

She squats down and rubs the back of her hand across the dry leaves, flinches. “It hurts,” she says.

“Already?”

“Yes. Don’t touch it!”

She is looking at you like she needs you, which has never been unusual. This is the reason people like Grace are friends with people like you, first-aid-kit-in-your-backpack type people. Spotters. But you have no backpack and no solution and her needing you means something different now. You don’t know it’s happening until after you’ve taken her hand and kissed it on the red dots, already starting to rash and welt. Your lips start to burn only a moment before she wrenches her arm away. 

She holds her hand by the wrist, like she’s not sure she even wants to have it anymore after everything it’s been through, and snaps her head to Alex. But he’s not looking; he’s crunching across the leaves to The Works bomb, arms folded, muttering.

The funniest line from the show, the one you and Grace quote all the time: Such violence to my person and my heart! You think it automatically when you see the fear on her face, the new fear, of being found out. You want to laugh, and then you want to die, and Grace is over it already, going to Alex with her hand held out to him, asking if he was trying to kill her. And as bad as it would’ve been for him to see you, it seems just as bad knowing that Grace does not want him to.

You step out from behind the log and into the clearing, where Grace and Alex are standing over the failed Works. “That was almost fun,” Alex says, and you smile. He does not smile back but also doesn’t cross his eyes or loll his tongue out of his mouth or anything. “We should try it again. Bigger.”

“It’s too hot to haul our asses all the way back and out here again for another bottle,” Grace says. 

“We passed a lot of trash coming in,” you say. Alex nods. It is the first time he has ever agreed with you. “Bet there’s a two-liter in there.”

“I need to put something on my hand,” says Grace, in a quiet voice, a tone that you’ve only recently become familiar with—what could you call it? Asking? Wanting? Vulnerable, you think, and then you think of Grace flinching away.

You are almost never mean to Grace, not even the way she is sometimes mean to you as a joke. It turns out that it is easy. 

“Go back, then,” you say, eyes fixed on the raindrop pattern of welts spattering from her knuckles to her wrist. You refuse to worry, she’s always had sensitive skin. She says she’s the only Puerto Rican she knows who burns and peels and ends up covered in freckles like a white girl. 

(Once, you read a book where a guy talked about the main character’s freckles looking like cinnamon and probably tasting like it, too. Grace’s, it turns out, do not.)

You meet her eyes, two hard, polished black stones. Like after she spilled the nail polish on the duvet—you were there for that, and when Mrs. Lugo came in and saw it, she yelled, right in front of you, big forehead going red. Grace cares about yelling less than anyone you’ve ever met. She eats it, like how a plant eats sun, remaining impassive until her parents or teachers or anyone else run out of steam. You wonder what you look like to Grace. You think, Fight me.

Instead, she flips an escaping black curl away from her forehead. “Fine,” she says, but it doesn’t have the bite she’s trying for. She turns, holding her hand again, and leaves you with Alex Dobrowski. He smiles at you. You have always thought Alex hated you because you are not as cute as Grace, which is probably still true, but more than he hates you, he loves meanness.

You and Alex double back down the deer path, and it only takes a couple minutes before one of the caches of party debris yields an empty two-liter of some store-brand drink called Yow! He holds it out to you and, unbelievably, asks, “You think this is too big?”

Your lips itch and burn from where you kissed Grace’s hand, and you wonder if washing it will help her, or if this is one of those weird burns you don’t put water on. “Nah,” you say. “Let’s go back.”

You anticipate you’ll be silent on the way back, hot and awkward, but then Alex finds a mushroom and digs it out of the dirt with one of his enormous skateboard shoes. Nature dictates that he pick the cluster up by the roots and dangle it over his mouth, side-eyeing you. He’s done this kind of thing with Grace before. She either shrieks or eggs him on. 

You say, “Enjoy diarrhea.” 

He laughs, a real laugh, open-mouthed. You are more used to the snorting or the high-pitched cackle he does on the bus. The boys make fun of him for it, and then he says something mean about their moms. It bounces back and forth in the back three seats, where he sits with the other seventh graders. They’re all from the town houses, too far away for him to see them without a ride from his mom, who works.  

“I could eat these, though.” Alex takes the mushrooms away from his lips, looks at them. “It’s a blewit. They were in the Y garden.”

When you were in elementary school, your mom brought you to the garden to pull weeds whenever you did something bad. Alex and his mom were there a lot, and you remember Ms. Dobrowski loosening the soil in the carrot plots with her digging fork so that Alex could yank up on the leafy stems. “What technique!” Ms. Dobrowski always said. She was nice, but thin, tired-looking. Maybe it’s because she’s sad, with one son off at court-mandated Outward Bound, and the other, well, Alex. 

“Do you still go?” you ask him. “To the garden?” 

“No,” Alex says. “I don’t garden.” He takes a deep breath and yells, “Gay,” from the gut. It echoes off the highway barrier. 

“Why does everything have to be gay?” you ask, even though it was kind of funny, a “gay” without malice. “Is gardening gay, or vegetables? Or is it just some vegetables, the dick-shaped ones?”

He laughs again, the real laugh, and you laugh, too, and it puts this buzz right through you, a shock or a thrill. Then, out of nowhere. “Are you gay?” he asks. “Like, in real life?” And he doesn’t ask like Alex Dobrowski. For all the lesbian jokes before, it doesn’t sound like an insult, a threat. He asks with only a light coat of sarcasm, not like he’s making fun of you—like he’s curious, or maybe even nervous, and doesn’t want you to notice. 

“Nope,” you say, immediately. 

 For all the time you’ve spent in the shower, telling off made-up teenage homophobes who say some shit when you’re holding hands with Grace in the high school hallways, this no is the calmest, the easiest you’ve ever sounded around Alex Dobrowski. It is like a cue you never knew you were listening for, the most natural thing in the world. You recall, again, Grace pulling away.

“It’s not a big deal if you are,” he says. He says it like he means it. “My aunt is gay. Or she really likes her roommate.”

“I’m not.” You say it like you mean it, too.

“Huh,” says Alex.

You walk. Now, you find, you can be quiet.

In the clearing, the first Gatorade bottle is still feebly smoking. The two-liter has a smaller neck; it’s hard to squeeze the aluminum foil balls into it and even harder to pour the Drano. Alex splashes it all over the ground, and you jump back, trying not to get it all over your Keds. “Sorry,” he says.

“Just let me do it,” you snap, still hearing the calm, I’m not. Maybe he doesn’t love meanness, you think. Maybe someone infected him with meanness, and now, it’s infecting you.

When the bottle is full, you hand The Works to Alex and sit behind the log on your own. He puts the cap on the two-liter, shakes it up, and leaves The Works calmly on the ground. Strides over and takes a hard seat down on the dirt next to you, too close. 

“Did you fuck up the cap again?” you ask him, when once again, the bomb doesn’t go off.

“I don’t think so,” he says.

You wait, wait, pine needles itching the back of your bare thighs and tree bark digging into your back. You want to leave but can’t think of a way to stand that won’t look stupid, so you sit and listen to the highway sound and to the mosquito buzzing around your head. But when it lands on your neck and bites, you squirm away automatically, into Alex’s shoulder. You smack at your neck. You can feel his eyes on you. 

He gets closer; he smells like corn chips and the same deodorant your dad wears. You want to lean away so much, but your traitor body freezes up.

The first time, Grace’s couch on the last day it would rain, her mouth was hard and puckered and giggling, and your tongue hit her teeth, still all crowded at the front of her mouth from not wearing her retainers. You remembered to be glad she didn’t have braces anymore, although you sort of missed them after all those years of looking at them on the bus, sitting squished together on one seat. Then Grace stopped laughing and her lips got soft, and after what felt like the longest and the shortest time, she pulled back. “Should I . . .?” she asked, and you couldn’t have said what she was asking, except that it was for permission. Which is something you had never heard her ask for before.  

It was like you were her. No, it was like you were someone else. Your chest filled up, and you touched her collarbone, the place where, when you were little, when she was really skinny, you could sometimes actually watch her heart beating out of her chest.

“Yes,” you told her, “you should,” and she did.

It was like you were yourself.

Alex is close enough that you can see the wispy, blond hair coming in over his lip and a faded orange sauce stain on the collar of his shirt. You cannot imagine how you imagined Grace wanting to kiss him.

Instead, Alex is going to kiss you; Alex, who has called you ugly, who has called you anything and everything, does like you, and this is the proof. With that thought comes reeling adrenaline, the kind you felt the first time with Grace, but crazier, angrier. 

Reanimated, animal, all-body, you bite Alex hard on the cheek. 

“Fuck,” Alex Dobrowski yells. You let go and scoot back. Something thorny scrapes the back of your thigh. Alex is wide-eyed. The bite mark is already blooming red on his cheek, the imprints of your teeth smaller than they seem like they should be.

This was a stupid thing to do, you think, and you scramble to your feet and take off through the trees. You are not afraid. You are not ashamed. You are not crashing through the underbrush toward Grace’s backyard to go rescue her from her The Works–related injuries. You’re only laughing, only running, only feet on dirt, and behind you, something explodes.

Published October 2nd, 2022