I

The bedroom is dark. There’s a Red Dead Redemption poster in that darkness that he had hung up, some pictures of his family that his mom had hung up, too, and a picture of Amanda and him at last month’s Eighth Grade formal. He can’t see any of them from where he lies in his bed, he sees only his phone against whose bright screen the bedroom darkness is black. All that light and then nothing.

He’s messaging someone on Instagram. “You little loser,” she’s written. “You know you want to fuck me so bad but you can’t and you never will.” She sends a laughing face and “you little faggot.” He reads that and keeps reading. “So just give me $20 because even though you’ll never fuck me you need my attention. That’s how bad you want mommy’s attention, loser. So go ahead and pay me and jerk off thinking of me like the fucking pathetic loser that you are.”

He does. Through CashApp he pays her twenty dollars and starts stroking while he thinks of her breasts which she’s shown him only once, her tits that are bigger than Mandy’s ever could be. He tries not to think of her or of his parents, of the missing allowance money he’ll have to explain again. He’s running out of excuses. He tries to think of nothing save the stranger’s tits and how much of a loser he is, jerking off to her in the dark, paying her because she said he’s a loser and he knows he will still be a loser when he comes and puts the phone down and can see nothing, can think only of who he’ll pay next. When his parents will find out what he’s doing. What Amanda will think. Poor Mandy who’ll never fuck him because he’s a loser and she’s not.

The bedroom is dark. He can’t see his Redemption poster or his family or his girlfriend in that darkness. Only the white light of the phone he’d put down two hours ago and the words he’d read there. He can see nothing else. He doesn’t know if he wants to.

II

At two in the morning he is still awake and stiff with arousal so he starts stroking, slow and then faster, moaning low and then louder in the darkness. He isn’t sure that he wants to do this, because sixteen-year-old boys are men and men don’t masturbate, Fr. Goering had said to him in confession last Sunday, because they have self-control and self-control is what Saints are made from. Anthony wants to be a man because he wants to be a Saint. He’d told Fr. Goering so. The priest had said sure, Anthony could do it, he’d just need to control himself. “Remember that, Tony,” Fr. Goering had said, “whenever you’re tempted a certain way: self-control is what makes a man and a man is what makes a saint.”

Now Anthony is tempted in a certain way and though he keeps thinking about self-control and saints, he is thinking harder about a girl, girls, girls who are so delicious and whose tits and pussies so soft and their lips and tongues so talented that he is now very sure that he does want to do this and so he comes. He shoots off and then lays there sweating, panting animal-like in the sheets where his sperm, his manhood, dries and shrivels into a stain. He feels it shriveling on his skin too and instead of his sperm he tries to think of the girls again but they are already gone, they have slipped out the back door of his psyche. christ is there instead. christ says nothing. Anthony turns over in the sheets.

“Fuck,” he says, “fuck, I know, self-control.”

christ speaks. “You don’t know, or you wouldn’t have jerked off. Real men control themselves, Tony, and you do not.” christ sounds a lot like Fr. Goering. “And if you’re not a man, then you’ll never be a Saint.”

Anthony turns over again, grimaces, clenches his pillow. “Look, I know I don’t control myself, I don’t even know if I can, and I—look—don’t know if I’ll ever be a saint.” His stomach is a vacuum, he feels sick, he squeezes his eyes shut. “But I do know I’m a real man.” He breathes hard, slow and then faster, waits before with a tight fist striking himself on the temple. “Goddamn you,” he says to christ, “I don’t have to be perfect to be a man.”

But christ is already gone, he’s slipped out the back door too, and Anthony doesn’t know if christ heard him. He hits his temple again, plants his head deep into his pillow, tries to sleep but can’t. Through teeth clenched he says, “Goddamn you,” again but he’s alone in his psyche and his room. There’s only a brass figure of Christ hanging on a cross over his doorway. Anthony can’t see Him in the darkness and doesn’t even remember He’s there, hanging with His head bowed toward him.