When We Were Vikings

Carol did not have a husband or a boyfriend, but she had a daughter that hated her guts. Carol did not want to talk about why her daughter hated her. She did like to talk about how good her daughter was doing in school.

Marxy started telling me everything about sex that he had learned, about spermicide and condoms, and all the different ways to do it.

“I wrote it all down,” he said, and took out a piece of paper that had been folded a lot. There were words by the pictures of naked people.

“Wow,” I said.

“This one is my favorite,” he said, and pointed to one where the woman and the man faced each other. “Because you can kiss while having sex.”

He was getting “riled up,” which is what AK47 said whenever Marxy got too excited. He took out his asthma puffer and inhaled.

Some of the people in the McDonald’s were looking over but I didn’t care. I thought it was very sexy how excited Marxy was getting about us having sex. I thought that this was my boyfriend, and he loved me so much that he couldn’t breathe.

Hendo held up the baby and said his name was Artem.

“My grandfather was this old-school Russian dude. Doesn’t Artem look old-school?”

I wasn’t sure what that meant.

I know that they broke up because Gert got her pregnant and she had an abortion without telling him. An abortion stops a baby from being born. Some people think that it is like killing a baby. AK47 says that it is more like stopping a cake from being baked by taking away the ingredients you need to make the cake.

Marxy is tall and when he walks he moves his head down, like he is afraid of his head hitting the clouds. He also talks slowly and does not like looking people in the eyes, except for the people he loves and trusts. Sometimes he picks up string he finds and rolls the string into tiny balls that he likes to chew on, which is gross but when you love someone you try not to be bothered by gross things they do when they can’t help it.