The Real World Is For Suckers

Dreaming of Brooklyn
  Carrie left yesterday, right after the yelling.
  Last night, I dreamed about her arriving in Brooklyn, dragging her suitcase like it was a reluctant Great Dane, frazzled and wrinkled and tired and--scared?
  No, not scared. Carrie doesn’t get scared.
  I could hear the hitch of her key as it jiggled in the lock and the crack of the door when it opened. Vapors from someone’s tamale down the hall curled in my nose with intentions of staying awhile, and I got my first glimpse of freedom.
  I saw her new apartment as a giant blank canvas, white empty walls she could sprawl her life across. I saw her, ethereal in the neon Brooklyn moonlight, take a paintbrush in one hand and draw a tentative line, alone but firm in the middle of everything--a good start.

  The next morning comes hot and sticky, draining all the poetry out of what I remember.
  Mom and Dad sit reading the paper as if posing for a photographer, as if he has instructed them to act naturally and this is the best they can give him.
  “Hey,” I murmur on my way to the kitchen.
  Mom glances at the clock, so I do too and see that it’s slightly past noon.
  Does it matter? I wonder, staring at the open refrigerator, and decide that no, it doesn’t.
  All that matters is--use to be--Carrie, and she’s gone, packed up her guitar and typewriter to blaze a trail as the first ever white female Southern gothic poet-slash-playwright-slash-folksinger to hang her shingle in Brooklyn. And make a success of it.
  “Anybody can simply go to Brooklyn,” she tells me a week ago, before the first rumblings start but only just. Inspecting a pair of panties, she throws them aside and fits Leaves of Grass into the space instead. “It takes an artist to survive. More: to thrive.”
  I nod, as if nobody in the history of forever has said the same thing, and watch the live end of her cigarette bob dangerously close to the eschewed pile of nylon. “You should be fine, then.”
  “Yes.” Simple acknowledgment of the facts, no fear or gratitude or hidden self-sabotage. She really will be fine.
  Mom and Dad don’t believe that. Carrie is--use to be--the bright one, the rational one, the one with the most potential, the one destined for boring, everyday greatness.
  Not me. I just have a pretty face.
  They don’t know she writes poems in all capitals to signify her anger (at what? She hasn’t figured it out yet) or morbid plays starring a ghost and its lover. They don’t know she strums Bob Dylan tunes on an unplugged Stratocaster to signify her oppression (not many people realize, but oppression runs rampant through the family bloodline).
  I do--I know.
  They don’t know she drinks and smokes and swears (although I have been tried on all three charges) and will fit into the Brooklyn grit like a keg at a frat party.
  I do--I know. She’ll be fine.
  A can sits half open on the top shelf; I dig it out and take a swallow for her. It’s diet Coke, not booze, but, bitter and flat and jumping in my stomach, it’ll do.
  Wading back through the silence, I notice Mom and Dad haven’t breathed, seemingly, from their positions. All this celebrating is wearing me out, so I go back to my room to steal a nap.

  I saw her again, this time perched on a stool outside her new building, exposed to a glaring day.
  The heat shoed itself in little metal winks on her guitar’s pickups, tiny smudges on her typewriter’s keys, clear pearls of sweat on her fingers as she banged out a blues progression in time to her new verse. Clackity-clackity-DOO wah-clackity-clackity-DOO wah-
  A man wearing headphones walked by, bobbing to the wrong rhythm. As he passed her open case, his hand slipped out of his pocket and spilled a few quarters just deliberately enough to show his generosity. She stopped, mid-sentence and mid-turnaround, to squat and count her earnings.
  Viewing her from behind, I wished she had packed slightly differently, because Walt Whitman wasn’t doing a damn thing to cover her ass.
 
  Knuckles, sprinkled on glass, wake me an unknown amount of time later.
  “Roy?” I say sleepily to the window.
  A head appears; I recognize the curls. And besides, who else is it ever? “Hey.”
  Stumbling slightly, I go to the window, expose a foot of mosquito screen, and lean on the sash in the way that he’s told me brings out my eyes. “What’s up?”
  “Can’t sleep.”
  “Yeah?” Only dimly do I notice night draped around him like a velvet veil. “So, do you want to come in?”
  “Um.” He glances around with an uncertainty that makes me wonder. I like the fact that I have no idea what he’s thinking most of the time. “Actually, I was wondering if you maybe want to go down to the Dairy Queen, or something.”
  “At…” Holy shit, my alarm clock has been running sprints again. “--midnight? Doesn’t it close at like nine?”
  “Nine-thirty, on Fridays.” A ring of keys orbits his index finger. “But I know this guy.”
  I smile, really smile, for the first time in a couple days. “Let me change before we go.”
  “Does your offer still stand?”
  Through the dark, hope shines through the thick layer of manufactured lust on his face, and I lift the screen.
  He scrambles through and hit’s the floor just as I peel off my pajama top. “Wow. Nice view.”
  “Oh!” I giggle and throw my shirt at him, thinking of a genetically connected bare ass sparkling in the Brooklyn noon.
  A cool finger traces the dimple on my knee. “You’re so pretty, Dahlia.”
  Something inside of me blooms a little every time he says that. For lack of words (“Right back at ya, kid”?), I lean down and touch his lips with mine; they taste like cherry Chapstick.
  We’ve never done anything serious, and my modest underwear covers more than my swimsuits can aspire to, but sex crackles in the air between us tonight.
  Unsure, I shimmy into a pair of jeans and the first shirt I grab from the closet and listen--it’s not gone, just…muted. Packed away. “Okay.”
  He ushers me, then himself, through the window I leave open. “Are your parents…?”
  I shrug and take his hand. “They’re usually asleep by like ten. Usually.”
  Fingers flow through and around mine in an extra-tight grip. “Do they--would they--care?”
  “They would definitely--” I stop and reassess. “Well. Actually. Since yesterday they probably thing I’m the sensible one.” Damn. That’s no good.
  As he laughs appreciatively, we stroll across the grass thickets to the sidewalk outlining the one main road in town, and I take a breath of air that doesn’t reek of soured expectations. It’s refreshing.
  “So Carrie really hauled ass to Brooklyn, huh?” Only he is allowed to break such a silence.
  “Yup.” Our feet move in unison. I try to break the pattern, succeeding in jostling our shoulders, but after a few seconds we naturally fall back into sync. I decide I like it. “Did you hear the yelling?”
  “No, but Josh did.”
  “It was bad.”
  “That’s what he told me.”
  We walk along without words for a bit.
  “Was it really just--spur of the moment, kind of thing?”
  “Mom and Dad though so.” I see their faces, so angry and astonished as to seem like chiseled masks, and a tiny tremor skates up my spine. “She always talked about it, though, talked about going up there to break into print after graduation.” And to fund the self-publishing of her first book of poetry, she plans on hustling her musical talent. Can’t say the girl isn’t prepared. “I guess they thought it was a phase.”
  “She’ll make it, I bet.”
  I appreciate his optimism so much that I won’t let him in on the odds against that. “Yeah. She’ll be fine.”
  “Look,” he says abruptly, fishing into a pocket and tugging me to a halt. “I know this is probably a weird time and I was going to do something hokey at the Dairy Queen like put it in your milkshake or whatever but then what if you swallowed it and I can’t wait because what if you decide to run off to Brooklyn too so Dahlia will you accept this promise ring from me?”
  The thin gold band is almost lost in his palm. I can make out two shining white pinheads, which might very well be artificial pearls. Quarters flashing in the sun--the image streaks across my consciousness and is gone. Roy is still babbling.
  “--and you’ll only have to wear this one for a year, maybe even nine months because Josh got me a job at the Dairy Queen as the third shift scoop boy so I can save up for a real engagement ring by the time we finish school--”
  The smells of tamales and aftershave and hot concrete and cool grass swirl around and around, around and around…
  “--Dahlia?” Tears? Do I hear tears in his voice? “Dahlia, could you say something? Please?”
  Snatches of Brooklyn dreams fade away until all that is left is him, standing nervously in front of me, offering a future.
  I take the ring, slide it on, and pull him closer than we’ve ever been.

  The last time, she noticed me.
  We sat in a waiting room, in mismatched spindly chairs shoved between artificial plants in pots and bookcases groaning ostentatiously under literature. It intimidated her, that claustrophobically large, bookish space; I had the feeling it was suppose to.
  She was dressed in the best gathered change could buy while still paying the rent, and in her lap rested a clump of typewritten pages. I watched her fingers drum, and drop the occasional spot of blood, on the top words.
  Her name was called. She stood and looked utterly unsurprised when I caught her eye. With her manuscript, she made a small beckoning gesture. I returned it by waving my hand so the ring winked.
  No regret, except perhaps of not seeing each other for awhile, passed between us as we nodded and I watched her walk through an inner door.

  In the morning, I wake up to Roy’s ring glittering dully and a total sense of peace.
  I do--I know. She’ll be fine.
THE END

Someone Else
  “There’s someone else.”
  I wait, silent and expectant at the breakfast table, for the bottom (of what? The whole world? Yes, this seems serious enough) of the whole world to drop open and tug me into its depths with a hugely dramatic clatter of dishes. I wait, fretting a napkin out of the holder, for tears and lies and snot and the truth.
  I wait, but none of it comes.
  Morning sunlight filters through the windows and hits the purple juice glass at an angle that always makes me pause. Such a cheap thing to sparkle so beautifully.
  “Don’t you want to know who?”
  Looking at Lisa and back down at the toast, I notice they’re both ragged around the edges. “Do I know her?”
  “Maybe. Probably.”
  “Then no. I don’t want to.”
  She sighs, a tangible thing I can pluck out of the air and wind around my finger. “Okay, then.” One shoulder hitches, surely meant for me to notice the strap sliding down.
  “You’re leaving?”
  “Yeah,” she says. Duh, she thinks.
  “I mean, right now?”
  “There’s a room open.”
  It hits me low and hard in the gut--she’s done her research. The juice cup blurs into Impressionistic brush strokes. “You’ve already found another place?”
  “Yeah.”
  “At least have something to eat.” The toast and I avoid her eyes so maybe she won’t notice we’ve become a bit soggy.
  “No.” Impatient this time, as if my offer is embarrassingly domestic, a mother spit-cleaning her teenager’s cheek in the middle of a crowded restaurant.
  “Alright.” I don’t move, scared of driving the sharp edges deeper into me. She crosses to the door and steps halfway through before I mutter, “Who?”
  A pause, long enough to convince me she’s gone, then, “Maeve Cartel.” Footsteps fade on the tiles.
  The toast cries an empathetic tear of butter. It tastes lukewarm, an extension of the room. I swallow the remainder of us with difficulty.

  Scarlet hair.
  Not a polite, almost-could-be-natural auburn or an unruly carrot accompanied by freckles or strawberry highlights drawn in the sun, but red as a sweating glass of Kool-Aide. Scarlet as the letter we read about in Thursdays’ literature lectures.
  I remember Maeve Cartel.
  Does she remember me? I wonder obscurely as the emptiness she left shakes me awake. It won’t let me go back to sleep, plucking at my sheets every time I settle into them.
  “Shut up,” I tell the silence, but it screams and screams and screams.
 
  We met online, Lisa and I. In retrospect, maybe that wasn’t--
  Oh, hell. Both of us loved it, the idea of being a perfect match for a perfect stranger. On paper, we answered something like 9.6 out of 10 questions the same. Just enough variety to keep things interesting. On paper, we should’ve been married like five years ago.
  Communism works, too, though. On paper.
  So three or four dozen e-mails and two and three-quarters of a month later, we moved in together.
  As we tentatively smeared our personalities around the room, careful not to step on each others’ toes or anything else, I noticed the C.Ds competing for breathing space on her shelf. I hadn’t unpacked mine yet. “Those all yours?”
  “I told you I like music,” she said, half grinning.
  “Yeah.” I had to force my mouth up at the corners because I suddenly realized we had been acquainted eighty-three days without exchanging one word about musical tastes. How the hell did we miss that?
  It struck me then how terrifyingly unprepared we were for it all.

  The open window makes me feel guilty; I see the building I should be in, five yards from my side of the curb, and the flood of responsible people drying up.
  My fingers reach behind me and idly wade through our music library, which by now has merged and mated and mutated into one untidy pile almost big enough to pull the whole wall down. Grabbing something flat, I try to pluck it out with the care of an archaeologist, not wanting to disturb any of the preserved life around it. But it doesn’t come and I get impatient and a good solid tug sends a flurry of coaster-sized hail into the atmosphere and onto my head.
  “Ow! Dammit.”
  I examine the case--it’s Aretha, staring at me demanding respect, but that doesn’t mean anything--our CDs  find shelter wherever they can.
  Opening it, I lean to the other side, lace the red dot in the middle of the stereo, and press the skip button. A clean, bright guitar riff paints optimistic splotches in the air, and I smile. This is our favorite; Lisa got me hooked.
  Wait--
  I stand up and whirl around to confirm my suspicions.
  --Lisa left all of her CDs.
  Her closet is bare, nothing but skeletons of hangers left, the tape above her desk clings to plaster instead of her Star Wars poster, the floor itself seems to have doubled in the past few days, but her CDs are still there and it could only mean one thing.
  She’s not really gone.
  Relief takes over and pushes me out the door, down the stairs, and onto the sidewalk for my first venture into the real world since Tuesday. It feels--dare I say--nice. Really nice and fresh and clean like the trees stripped bare of the leaves, waiting until their blooms come back prettier than ever.
  I spot a smudge of scarlet bobbing in my direction and decide that I love what Maeve Cartel has done to her hair. Wonder if I could pull it off--
  “Beverly?”
  “Maeve, how are you?” Now aware of the truth, I’m able to inject my words with the proper amount of cordiality.
  “I’m fine. How are you doing?” She looks me directly in the face, serious.
  “Oh, good, good.”
  “Really?”
  “Yeah. Well, except for that Hawthorne essay--five pages, is Plotnik serious?” I laugh to show that I’m not.
  “It’s a bitch,” she says shortly. “Lisa tells me you two had a big falling-out Monday night.”
  “That.” Although no self-respecting mosquito would be outside freezing his ass off, I wave my hand around anyway. “Everybody--uh, argues, I guess. It wasn’t a big deal…” Was it?
  “I know. But.” Her hair flutters when she turns to watch Lisa walk towards us balancing two Styrofoam cups.
  “Here you go, kid.” Lisa presses one into Maeve’s outstretched hand before noticing me. “Oh. Hey.”
  It’s not how I pictured it, but okay. I can work with this. “Hey, Lisa. What’s up?”
  “…Nothing.” She glances at Maeve, who neither attacks nor retreats, eyes following the conversation like the two wheels in a blank tape turning in the recorder.
  I shift my weight. “Look, I just want to apologize for Monday. Whatever I might’ve said--well, I’m sorry.”
  Lisa blinks. “Okay.”
  We stand there awkwardly, my optimism draining onto the slushy ground, until they both nod (so much alike it makes me want to cry), and start in the opposite direction.
  “Wait, Lisa!”
  She turns, expectant but not coming back. “What?”
  “I--you--your CDs. You left all of your CDs at our place.”
  “So…?”
  I have no idea what to say. “But--but--your CDs.”
  Her shrug hurts more than any words. “It’s not important.”
  After they leave, I collapse against concrete and snow, finally unable to keep up illusions.
  God, this sucks.

  Monday night.
  What the fuck happened on Monday night? All I remember is typing a paper, settled in comfortably by eleven. Lisa stood up from her bed and paced a bit before deciding, “I’m going to the vending machines.”
  “Get me a diet Coke, would you?” Staring at the computer screen, I figured at least another two hours. And that’d be without checking the word count every other sentence.
  “Yeah yeah.” Quarters jingled in her pocket as she left, automatically shoving the door sideways so it closed all the way.
  I didn’t see her again until I emerged from my coma, paper typed and stapled and numbered and finally out of my head, to find an empty soda bottle leaning against the trash can.
  “Did I already drink that?” My kidneys remained quiet.
  “No, I did,” Lisa said. She was bent over the stereo, fiddling. “On accident.”
  “When’d you get back?”
  “Like ten minutes ago.”
  I glanced at the clock. “It’s almost two in the morning.”
  “I ran into Maeve Cartel.”
  “Oh yeah?” Stretching my legs, I stuffed my assignment into the nearest binder, to be sorted after hours of lovely sleep. “What’s she think of Plotnik?”
  “I don’t know. We didn’t talk English.” A bra, powder blue and polka dotted, landed neatly on my shoulder. “Hey, keep your nasties on your side, would you?”
  “Yeah, sorry.” I lobbed the bra in the general direction of our laundry baskets. It hit the desk and skid, which reminded me. “Don’t forget to sign the roommate contract thing.”
  “Mmm hmph.”
  “You still want to bunk together next semester, right?”
  “Mmph.” Her eyes closed and legs curled, arms hugging her pillow like a lover, indicated that I wouldn’t get a better answer.
  “Night.” Collapsing into my own bed, I shut off the light and drifted away.

  There it is, laid out and exposed like a crawdad on the dissection table.
  While I brood, wondering why Monday counted as a big falling-out or even a minor tremor, a Friday morning tidal wave washes through the coffee shop. Breakfast at the college separates naturally into cafeteria eaters and coffee shop diner, which means I don’t recognize a single laptop. But I like that. Bagels taste better than toast, anyway.
  “Strawberry jam, please,” a voice says close enough to graze my interest.
  The girl is small, with loads of dark hair enveloping her face. She’s also alone, and I have an idea.
  “Uh, excuse me.”
  Her eyes meet mine. “Yes?”
  “I was just wondering…” I notice her fingernails reflect shine from the metal coffee pot. “My roommate decided to--my roommate and I decided not to bunk together this next semester, so…I was wondering if you’d like to live with me, possibly?”
  A pause spreads out and makes itself comfortable.
  “Sure,” she says, and smiles. “I’m Ann.”
THE END

Pier Pressure
  Timothy hates opening his wallet. Every time he peels apart the Velcro, he sees failure.
  It’s unavoidable, cringing in the front sleeve meant to house his driver’s license for the past year, eleven months, and twenty-nine days. Instead, the plastic exposes a wide blue stripe--the mark of shame.
  A learner’s permit. Almost eighteen years old, and he still can’t drive alone.
  “Fuck,” he mutters, fingering the card and its round corners.
  He’s tempted to flick it away like a fly; one twitch of two fingers and the water will swallow his misery without bothering to chew. The ocean licks its dirty lips as if in confirmation.
  “Not yet.” Waves shrug--it will come, and soon. “Not just yet.”
  Standing up, he brushed the sand off his ass and shoves the card into a pocket. But not before catching his own eyes and remembering last summer, just after his last birthday.

  (“Why don’t you take off your glasses, Timmy?” Why hadn’t he convinced his mother to stay in the car during this humiliating chore?
  This is hell, he thought, grimacing in the direction of the camera. It’s got to be. “I can’t.”
  “What do you mean, you cant?”
  The kid behind the counter--she had to be at least six months and a grade younger than he--smirked.
  Surrounded by fake wood paneling papered with traffic notices, he began to feel nauseous. “I mean I can’t. I have to wear them to drive so I have to wear them in the picture.”
  “Well, that’s stupid.”
  “It’s the law.”
  “Any changes to the descriptions?” The counter girl grinned, showing too many teeth to be friendly.
  “No.” Under different circumstances, he would’ve asked her out--well, that was a lie. He would’ve thought about asking her out, possibly falling deeply and briefly in love, but he wouldn’t’ve grown a pair and done anything about it.
  Now he only wanted to get home.
  “Would you like to become an organ donor?” She was enjoying herself.
  I’m glad one of us is. It drew a scowl across his eyebrows. “No.” Just renew the damn thing and LET…ME…OUT!
  “Okay, then.” More teeth. “That’ll be $2.75.”
  “Two seventy-five?” His mother dragged the price out of her mouth. “It’s gone up again--well, just like everything else, I suppose--here, dear, use all these quarters. I’ll be in the car.” She strolled out, not even leaving the keys, a single fig leaf to cover his dignity.
  “Here you go, sir.” The counter girl’s tongue tripped on the last word, and he imagined the laugh she would pass around like Tic Tacs during her next break.
  “Thanks,” he mumbled, and left.)

  Sunlight dances over everything, lighting the pier from behind and peeking through the cross hatches. He breathes in the salt and peace that ride the air, and he feels balanced, content. At home. He knows what he plans is right and will go well, but--
  “Not yet.”
  No, not just yet.

  Timothy sits on the couch, staring at the TV and waiting for the clock to drag itself towards midnight. On his left, his mother frowns at a novel over her reading glasses--vintage Kmart. To his right, his father pretends to be absorbed in the History Channel. The voices of half a dozen scholars blend and whirl around the subject until Timothy has forgotten it entirely; this is a good sign.
  His eyes tiptoe over to his father. Chin down, mouth slightly open, eyelids at almost fifty percent coverage--yes, it won’t be long--
  “So, Timmy.” Closing her book, his mother looks as if she expects a conversation. “Where’d you go this afternoon?”
  “Oh, nowhere,” he says, dying a little inside. “The pier.”
  “The pier, eh?” His father doesn’t move, but his interest shifts from the TV to his son. Shit a brick and save the mortar. “The pier right up the beach?”
  “Yeah.” No, the one three gas stations past the moon, Timothy thinks in a sudden clot of anger.
  “That seems like a nice little stroll,” his mother offers.
  “Yeah.” A whole quarter mile.
  “I remember that pier,” his father says. “By damn, do I remember being seventeen, eighteen, and hanging out at that pier…”
  When her Look of Disapproval (she’s got to have a patent on that by now, Timothy figures) fails to attract any notice, Timothy’s mother folds her glasses. “He doesn’t need to hear any of that, Charlie.”
  “Estelle, he’s almost a man.”
  In twenty-six minutes and five, four, three seconds. “I’ve heard worse, Mom, I’m sure.”
  “But your dad was so much--older at his age than you are now.”
  Thanks, Mom. “Could I just hear the damn story, please?”
  From both barrels this time: “Don’t cuss!”
  No way he’s apologizing for “damn.”
  He watches his mother stand up and head towards the condo’s only bedroom. “I’m going to sleep…we need to get an early start back tomorrow.”
  “No problem,” his father says comfortably. “It’s all packed except the birthday cake.”
  “All right.” Pausing, she smiles. “Good night.”
  “’Night.”
  “’Night,” Timothy echoes.
  The curtain of Hawaiian shirts glides across the doorway; the molded fish table lamp goes quiet.
  “Well,” his father sighs, leaning back in his chair until the foot rest cranks twice, “It’s been a hell of a week, Tim. Hell of a week.”
  “Yeah, really fun.” And Timothy has had fun, most of it wading through the ocean without both parents alternating warnings about sunscreen and sharks. He’s seen a few females to lust after, uncovered a few shells and profound thoughts, spent hours reading in his swim trunks.
  “Good vacation.”
  “Yeah, good vacation.”
  “I tell you Tim--thirty years ago, all of this was brush…Native, from the pier to the state line. We’d come on road trips all the time, just drive right to the edge of the dunes and camp a couple days…”
  Timothy wonders if he’ll hear the pier pressure story.
  “…so one year--I think this was for our senior trip…”
  Like the one I didn’t get invited to this year? Timothy thinks it must have been very much like that.
  “…and everybody else’s already in the water, see, chanting, ‘Do it! Do it!’ So of course I do it, making an ass of myself so nobody’ll notice I almost pissed my pants…”
  Timothy can’t tell if the clock is broken or just lazy.
  “…so the officer comes up to me and hands me a ticket--apparently it’s illegal to jump off the pier…and climb on it in the first place…anyway, my hair was the only thing the beach patrol or whoever picked up with their flashlights.” Chuckling, Timothy’s father fingers the red-orange mop that rests atop his head. “Just goes to show why you should never give in to peer pressure.”
  His own laugh, Timothy fears, is not up to its challenge. “Ha, ha…I’ll, uh, keep that in mind.”
  “Good times.” His father’s eyes are still glazed. “Good times…”
  Lasting an entire minute, Timothy decides he can’t wait any longer. “Hey, Dad, I want to go ahead and get some rest, too, especially if we’re hitting the road by eight.”
  “Eight, eight-thirty.” Stretching, his father shakes off nostalgia. “Need some help with the couch?”
  “No, I got it.”
  “Okay, then.” Sweet relief approaches fast as his father moves towards the curtain. “’Night.”
  “’Night.”
  His father glances at the clock. “Oh, happy birthday, Tim.”
  12:0. “Thanks.”
  When he is left alone, Timothy piles the couch cushions onto the chair and tugs at the exposed pull-out extension. Nothing. After six nights, he still hasn’t learned how to make this easy.
  He grunts and cusses--curses, cuss is his parents’ word--until the box spring pops out and the mattress flops like a landed fish. Immediately, the whole thing rebounds and leaves him nothing but a possibly dislocated shoulder.
  “Shit.” But he says it without much frustration, or surprise, because it doesn’t matter. The couch cushions have much less imaginative stains, anyway.
  Turning off all the lights leaves him a clouded gray pierced by the fluorescent bar over the oven in the tiny short connective hallway/kitchen. In this vapor, he peels off his clothes and glasses, stopping to grab a handful of his stomach. It’s really more of a belly by now. His permit is ten pounds off--just like his father’s license had been until middle age--only Timothy’s is rounded down.
  Pajamas, pajamas, wherefore art thou…forget it. He grabs a couple throw pillows, curls up in his boxers, and dreams about the last time.

  (“I will not trick or deliberately confuse you in any way, per state laws of transportation.” The DMV worker sounded bored. Timothy wondered exactly how many drugs he needed to take before going a whole day without kissing the concrete after every return. “Do you understand?”
  He nodded--didn’t he? He must have. Surely he did.
  “For the first portion of the road test, pull around the building to the back lot and demonstrate a parallel park between the barriers.”
  Shivering and goosepimpled in the July heat, nostrils filled with his own deodorant, which didn’t smell like it was doing its job, Timothy eased the car forward at a tenth of its normal speed.
  Line up the back wheels right next to that first sawhorse thing--not too close, not too close! Turn the wheel…more…let off the brake--put it in reverse, dumbass--back…annnd…what was that? WHAT WAS THAT? The back end, oh Jesus--maybe she didn’t feel it--it wasn’t anything--an air kiss--a love bump--
  “Please pull around to the front of the building and park in a public space.” Suddenly animated, the worker checked and scribbled on his clipboard.
  So soon? That was never a good sign. “…Have I failed already?”
  “Please pull around and park.”
  He did so.
  “You did not pass. You are eligible to attempt again in one week.” She propped up his permit in the middle console’s cup holder, the closest thing to neutral ground, and got out.
  Timothy slumped over the wheel, not bothering to watch her discussion with his father in the rearview mirror. It was the same, all three--four--times. Tears leaked down the slope of his nose.
  Eventually, hearing the passenger’s door open, he wiped the failure off his face, yanked the car into gear, and drove onto the highway.
  “Well, Tim,” his father said a safe distance away.
  They rode in silence for awhile.
  “Well, hey,” his father tried, “at least you’ll have a funny story to tell your kids when you’re teaching them how to drive.”
  “How many times did it take you?” Timothy asked, drained of emotion.
  “Oh, I flew right through everything except the parallel parking--got two points deducted because my front wheels were eighteen and a half instead of…just…eight--it’s not important.”
  Another five miles down the road, under his father’s insistence, Timothy pulled into a gas station for gobs of chocolate ice cream dripping in waffle cones.
  He let his father take the keys and drive the rest of the way home.)

  On the dawn of his eighteenth birthday, Timothy watches the sun rise--an electric tangerine balanced on a purple table in a kitchen with pink and yellow wallpaper--and knows that he is ready to disappear into the scheme of things.
  He doesn’t think of it as killing himself, except in moments of dark weakness.
  In his hand once again rests his permit. He stares at it, seeing the abstract the facts represent, confirming what he has suspected for years: too fat, too pale, too nerdy, too short, too old, too stupid. Too easily discouraged, about everything, too tired to try anymore.
  Rocks bulge from every pocket in his cargo shorts. They’re buttoned and zipped and bungee corded; he doesn’t want this to fail.
  Yawning, he shuffles out under the pier until water laps at his knees. Up at five to beat his parents and check the high tide time--no note. That would’ve been too messy.
  Briefly, after snapping his permit in two and considering the vicious new edges, he thinks about slitting his wrists with the root of all his problems; he’s into metaphors. But he’s also incurably squeamish.
  And so he tosses it away and waits for the whitecaps to rush down through the gracefully angular battalion of pier supports all at attention, waits to be carried into the sheen of shifting shale, waits calmly and patiently.
  Waits.
THE END

Fingers
First I feel the pinky.
  It has been fluttering around its own little circle of cafeteria table for twenty minutes, straining to the end of its leash, occasionally lapsing into sullen stillness. But always it starts moving again.
  I have been watching this for the past twenty minutes. Not the book in front of me, or the dusty afternoon slanting through slits in the walls, or the other bowed heads and glassy eyes and silent lips pretending exactly as I am. I have exhausted those subjects; all except the pinky.
  When it brushes against my own, I am startled to find myself startled. It is, after all, a very crowded study hall. Only so much room for a pinky to roam. And it’s only for a fraction of a fraction of a second--
  But it comes back.
  More definite this time, but no less airy; a bee’s feet on a petal.
  I don’t look up until a line of pain so fine it turns ticklish traces itself the length of my pinky, down the side of my palm toward the freckles on my wrist.
  Troy. It’s Troy, isn’t it? Troy Doughtry, possessor of the seat next to me in every study hall chained to an alphabetical seating chart since the first day of middle school. Six years, and all I know about him is what I’ve heard going around.
  His eyes are bits of celery pinned to white dinner plates by spots of ink. They watch me as I search them for a question I can answer. I’m no good if there isn’t a question to answer.
  Metal groans against plastic, asserting authority from the seated woman placed in charge of us. I lower my gaze and draw my hand inward to the book.
  My mind is slow to follow, slow enough to see Troy’s fingers land lightly on top of mine. Slow enough to breathe in aftershave that doesn’t mask the musky haze of Boy, and slow enough to savor the blush curling up the corners of my mouth.
  This time, I note certain things and file them away (t-shirt a greeny blue, Adam’s apple carving deep hollows of shadows down his neck, chin smooth of fuzz) before encountering brows hoisted like horizontal question marks. He jerks his head, pointing to the bathroom door just outside in the corridor.
  I hesitate. He waits.
  I wait. I nod.
  He smiles--not at me. A loud bang echoes from the opposite corner of the room. Distraction.
  The teacher turns; we slip through the emergency exit door that has never worked.

  Troy’s fingers, long slender things endowed with individual life, snuggle between mine and guide me to the middle of the hallway. They light on my arms, keep me still as I listen to the busy silence of classes continuing around us.
  He stares at me, I stare back, and our lips meet in the middle. So gentle it leaves me hungrier than before we tasted each other.
  “That’s it?” I ask.
  “It?” His look of innocent confusion is so skillful, I almost believe him. Instead, I remember what Pam Legbone told me in the PE locker room last year, furtively whispering unspeakable things she had heard while passing the boy’s bathroom during study hall one time. It was much more helpful than the sex ed chapter of Health. I laugh.
  Charade unmasked, and honor in tatters, he laughs back.
  I am led into a cinderblock rectangle housing a hole in the ground where the toilet use to be. Yellow tiles sprinkle the floor but the walls are bare and the lock still works and Troy’s fingers are playing my spine like a saxophone as he pulls me near and I like it, this flower of lust bursting open with sudden violent color. 
  My hands flit under his shirt, race up his sides, squeeze his shoulders, relishing sinew and bone and finally soft caramel hair growing straight out of his head.
  When his fingers outline my breasts in detail, I let out a whooshing shuddery gasp that makes him pause to kiss me, more this time, long and hard.
  Wandering south, my touch admires his hips--he has none, and his jeans drop on command. The bump pressed against me through a layer of boxer shorts excites frightening joy. I can’t turn it off.
  The last part we slow down as much as we dare, easing cotton and denim and rayon from skin in a careful dance of patience before welding ourselves together, sparking a fire that licks higher and higher and explodes in a dazzling burst and nothing is left except ashes, piss-hued tiles, vague ghosts of past farts, and romance bleeding to death on the floor.

  We stay there, propped against each other, past the next bell. I am reluctant to move; Troy’s collarbone seems like the safest place in the world. Like the Titanic, before it sank. Safe as houses…

  Dressed, standing outside squinting at each other cloaked in golden gauze of sunlight, we are quiet. I wet two fingers at my lips and offer them. With a grave touch of his own, he is gone, and I realize I’m late for English.
THE END

Thirsty

        Her toes feel the train approaching before anything else.
        "Is this us?" she asks the concrete; it swallows her question. Concrete is everywhere—lining walls and pillars and running in every direction across the floor. She imagines concrete sneaking up her heels, building up her legs, shoving through her nose to paint inside the same bruise-grey as its shell, bridging her feet into the sidewalk forever.
        Beside her, he nods and watches the dot of light grow.
        It's the first time in the twenty-three minutes and four seconds of waiting that either one of them has said anything.
        Not that she has been counting, or tasting the silence wring moisture out of her tongue until the newspaper vender's Snapple display turns her on. All those smooth round bottles glistening in a row...
        She licks her lips but doesn't have enough spit for even that to work, so she steps away (breaking loose from concrete with surprising ease) and plunges a hand into her coat pocket.
        His finger taps on her shoulder an urgent warning made redundant by the train's thundering approach peppered with lightening shrieks of brakes. It's time to go.
        I know, I know, her left hand waves. This'll take two seconds.
        We have to catch this, his finger insists.
        The quarters already rest cool and ready in position; she has picked out the bottle; the newspaper vender reaches out expectantly.
        Suddenly a ping echoes between her eyeballs, and his finger has joined forces with the rest of his hand to yank her through closing doors that deny but give her full view of her desire edging away into a blur.

        But they are going home, she consoles herself a few stops away. That counts for something.
        Her ring winks at her from its perch on the overhead rail, clicking on inferior metal designed to insure her future. She remembers when he offered the thin gold band to her
        (the box was buried in her junk mail bowl so she would've tossed it through the shredder if he hadn't thrown a fit about that old electric bill—he never does get the big gestures quite right)
        and it's like watching a 3-D movie without the special glasses. Nothing lines up. It nestles a headache under her temples.
        When she looks at him, she tries a smile. He smiles back, the lips-only distraction she recognizes as—deludes herself into recognizing as, she sometimes believes—his thinking smile. "Penny for your thoughts."
        He shrugs; a mound atop his brown leather jacket rises and falls. (She likes his shoulders, loves them bare and rounded and soft in early morning light—but that only makes her imagine brushing them with her lips and kissing only makes her mouth drier so she focuses on the cold sore clinging to his face.) "Don't know if they're worth that much."
        "I'll be the judge of that," she says, lightly as a fresh-spun cobweb but still feels oppressive weight of concrete pressing all around her. Three years riding the subway like a native and she's never gotten claustrophobic until this very second, waiting for his answer.
        "Well," he says, pauses. "I was thinking about maybe getting Mazie's for dinner."
        Six-fifteen, she knows automatically. Every day the same thought at the same time. Why, oh tell her why, did she hope (dream and pray) it'd be different today? Her voice deflates. "Yeah. Sounds good."
        The train glides and rocks through layers of darkness and light, hypnotizing her eyelids until they droop, jerk up, then give in completely to gravity.

        In her dreams, she drinks until liquid flows through her body in a ceaseless cycle, until she is both the source and destination of countless rivers. She tastes water, drowns in Snapple and the hot honey tea he brews her whenever she gets a cold
        ("Will you be mine?" he had asked when her nose whistled and stuttered with mucus. Great timing, they posses—but she said yes, of course she did. He knew exactly how to ask, and she's a sucker for eloquence)
        and has to stay home.
        In her dreams, she never questions, and she feels nothing. It's wonderful.

        When she wakes up, her neck cricks to the left, an arrow stabbing at the delicate veins. Cornflakes seem to line her sinuses, and she is convinced that she has swallowed cotton; it has unraveled all the way down her throat and left thick, dry—God, oh God so fucking DRY—layers to soak up any sort of moisture left in her entire body.
        "Thirsty," she says, syllables cracking against each other, batting through the cotton to fight their way out amongst the rest of the air pollution. "Can—"
        An unearthly shriek (is the whistle really this loud all the time, or does his silence magnify everything else surrounding it?), an invisible long pull followed by—wait for it—there it is, the group abrupt yank of counterbalance. She wonders how many ass cheeks knock together on an average rush hour.
        Past the same PSA (the one about safe sex, the one with the color scheme disturbing because it looks as if a grade schooler has markered it) she has been staring at for the past thirty-five minutes and five, six, seven seconds, she sees something promising.
        Glass glints amongst wallpaper of news; labels leer at her; doors fold open and she bolts.
        He grunts in surprised before heaving himself out of the seat. "Wait—"
        Her fingers reach to hold the lips open just another second longer—
        "Wait, hon—come sit back down—this isn't our stop." He grabs her shoulder and pulls her back.
        "But I want..." The subway seals her back inside, taking a generous nibble of her ring. "Shit! Give it back!" She swats at it with her free palm and gets nothing but stings for her pains.
        Holding her back in consolation or self-defense (she can't tell), he extracts her finger and examines the ring. Its diamond still winks, and he shows her. "See? It just scratched the surface. Won't leave a scar."
        But...She watches escape flow by into concrete oblivion.
        "But I was thirsty," she says, mortified to feel tears pricking her eyelashes. "I wanted—I wanted—" A glance into his face and a start under her feet jostles everything until she's forgotten what she wants at all.
        "We'll get you something when we get home, okay?" His touch is comforting; his voice, patronizing.
        She hates it. She hates it so violently that she wants to puke it out of her system and run away, but she can't. Or won't—the distinction doesn't matter any more because both mean the same damning thing. Her ring grins up at her from her finger laced between his.
        An inquiring nuzzle against her neck, and she gags. Her knees buckle, and he drapes her into the nearest molded lump of plastic, dropping back into the silence beside her. What have I chosen, she wonders dimly, settling against the train's sway.           
        She is terribly disappointed, and she is still thirsty as hell.
THE END

Eugene the Miracle Fish

        Eugene is staring at me. I can feel it.
        This damn sunlight isn't helping anything. It stabs through the blinds in slatted spears that poke my eyelids. Poke, poke. My hand emerges from under the quilt and swats at my nose.
        "Ouch." Fingers continue their wandering, brushing through oil that has settled on my face in a thin overnight layer like dew. I reach to scratch my head.
        Halfway there, my hand runs into a smooth soft field of texture, a blend both foreign and familiar enough to jolt me awake.
        ...If Eugene is here, then where the fuck am I?
        The thought rips through me, stiffening my spine and yanking it upward until forehead meets metal and I find myself viewing a room that isn't mine through bars I don't recognize an inch from a strange pointy ceiling in which my hair gets immediately tangled. It feels like springs digging their teeth into my scalp.
        Hair caught in springs-this sensation nags at me. "Loft!"
        Springs in my hair means the big hulking cage around my head is supporting another bed above. Another bed that does not house my roommate, because Jeni says it'd take a lethal dose of tranquilizers to make her sleep ten feet off an uncarpeted, unevenly tiled floor, which means that unless I accidentally took her daily dose of prescriptions (she lines them up on her dresser and eats them like Skittles for breakfast)-
        This isn't my bed.
        "No," I say, scraggily around the edges, scrambling to push away heavy mounds of cotton and place my feet on the ground, to keep at bay the rapidly gathering heaps of panic pressing on my consciousness. "No no no no no, please God no oh God please please no-"
        I try to launch myself out of not-my bed several times, discovering by trial and error the proper angle to fold into myself enough to finally pop out.
        Standing on legs thinking a second behind the rest of my equilibrium, I study my surroundings like a stack of photographs, thumbing past images one at a time. That's the only way I can keep a hold of myself.
        Laundry puddles around me, threatens to engulf my bare toes in licking waves of underwear and socks. Books lean against each other on shelves too low and asymmetric for Jeni to allow. Wires coil together in piles, copulating into extension cords that snake into paths going nowhere. My nerve endings itch.
        "Mmmmhpt." A ball of black stripes, each curved by gravity, stirs on the pillow I have just vacated. Puffy eyes underlined by sharp lashes, thin lips bunched up against one cheek, nose crooked at the top where it blends into furrowed brows-the face stays still and quiet above the body-shaped lump swaddled in bed sheets.
        Eugene mouths something that I catch in the corner of my vision. As I turn to him, drag my eyes across the set to his glass bubble resting on top of the desk, everything comes together, all the photos merge into a backdrop. Everything makes complete, horribly messy sense.
        I've woken up in Bear's room.
        "Oh, no..." My body remembers; it's known the whole time and has just been twiddling its thumbs waiting for my brain to throw off its prudish, high-collared Victorian robes and GET with it, baby, come on like you did last night, COME ON like you did last night, oh YEAH-
        All of me remembers. All of me crumples onto the carpet and buries its head between its legs, remembering. All of me writhes in conflicting convulsions as my body remembers long-held thirsts finally quenched, and my brain remembers Eugene watching our every move, reporting by trans-Atlantic telepathy to Bear's girlfriend-
        "He's just a fish," I whisper to the freckle on my inner thigh. "Eugene's just a stupid fish."
        He's a miracle fish.
        "Just a fish, a stupid fish!"
        Why's he a miracle fish?
        "No!" I stumbled out of my fetal position, reach blindly for support. My fingers brush something solid and seize wood. "No, he can't tell her! There's no way she can know-"
        Another moan tears across my words, frightening my mouth into silence. Bear doesn't wake up, thank God and sonny boy Jesus. Relief buckles the backs of my knees so I dip and sway a little when I cross myself.
        Just a stupid fish. Just a stupid fish, approximately the same size and color as a lemon with fins, floating in a glass sphere of water. Nothing more.
        "I'm not scared of you," I say. My voice dances the tango with a whisper. "You're just a stupid fish."
        Eugene releases a bubble. It floats to the top of the water and rides the surface. He doesn't believe me. I don't believe me, either.
        "Okay." Patting my ass in a gesture cultivated for checking my wallet, my preparation ritual flies out the window. I find that my pants have gone missing. "Shit! Okay-"
        Digging into the nearest laundry pile is akin to digging through fossil layers, a compact portrait of the culture occupying the area. My jeans (my favorites, my denim babies I wore four months ago the first time I came to this place, my worn stretchy dark-washed darlings, I am so sorry for making you witness this) bunch between polo shirts, each marked in blue and white stripes. Every single one.
        I resist the urge to plunge further into my findings, briefly morn the death of an interesting chance at anthropology extra credit, and wiggle into decency. "Okay."
        What now?
        Time. Clock. What clock is it? I need a time.
        Red numbers blink at me from just past Bear's head. I glance at them and cringe away, like I'm trying to study the sun.
        It's eleven in the morning. The first day of November. A Tuesday-at least, it should be a Tuesday. Yesterday was Monday, because yesterday was movie night, and...well. Yesterday was Monday.
        "Twelve-thirty," I say. "An hour and a half." My classes don't start until half past noon on Tuesdays. I can still get this day right.
        Hunting for my shoes, I stumble over them and brace myself against the bookshelf. It sways-nothing in this place is bolted down, because nothing's worth a shit to steal-and Eugene rocks in his bowl. He keeps moving after everything else stops, and suddenly I noticed how bored he must get, alone without even a scale-model castle or neon gravel or a treasure chest that goes glub. He has to rely entirely on the outside world for his entertainment. Poor little guy.
        "Poor Eugene." I light a finger on his wall. He eyes it warily. "Poor stupid little fish."
        His mouth seems to form some objection, but I am distracted by the roar and thumpSQUEAK coming from the mattress to my left.
        I freeze completely, unable to move or speak until a few seconds after I'm positive Bear won't get up.
        There isn't much-oh, damn it all to a snowball-infested hell, why do I insist on remaining optimistic? I have already stretched my luck to the point of sheerness-I can stare right through it and see exactly what will happen if I remain any longer-it will involve conversation stilted with guilt and fried in morning breath. It will involve accusations and admissions and secrets sealed by blackmail pinches. It will involve my strong urge to vomit.
        It will also involve the stupid fish, so I grasp Eugene in his home, my fingers clinging to nonexistent purchase on the glass. I slip out of the room, let the door click itself shut.
        We run down the hall together, Eugene and I, spilling some of his house on the carpet runner (it needs cleaning anyway), speckling the stairs, baptizing the lobby as my feet and my legs pound and pump the dorm out of our systems into the glaring deceitful sunlight of a bright autumn day.     
***
        The name displayed makes me want to throw the phone into the nearest toilet and flush, hard. "Hello?"
        "Hey."
        "Hey."
        After a silence, short and stout, he says, "It's Bear."
        "Yeah." There's a lot to say-there has to be, I've seen the script lying flat and lifeless on the page-but I am tired. So very, very tired. "What's-what's up?"
        "Not much." The words are smooth, sure of themselves. "You?"
        Around me, people flow through the Technicolor outside world. It pounds against my skull. "Nothing."
        More quiet. Eugene flicks his tail.
        "Do you think-"
        "Do you know-oh. What?"
        "No," I say. "You go ahead."
        "I was just going to ask if you've seen Eugene."
        "Eugene?" I look down and nudge his bowl with a toe so I can't watch him float above the ground. "No. Haven't seen him."
        "Damn." A quick musing exhale of breath that blows static in my ear.
        I laugh, surprising myself at the ease and normality. "What, did he, like, run away or something?"
        "Yeah, that's exactly what he did." Bear's sarcasm is either extremely acute or so broad it misses the point. I can't decide. "He's not here."
        "Weird."
        "I asked Jon but he was over at Angie's last night."
        Fingers and lips and patches of bare flesh white with secrecy flash in and out of my memory. I was in the room. "So he didn't see Eugene, or anything."
        "No."
        "...Did you?"
        "No," he says. "I didn't see anything at all."
        "Weird." I swallow. I scratch a bump on my arm. I stare at Eugene. "Well, if you're asking if I saw anybody come in and fishnap Eugene during-during the night, no, I didn't. But I, ah, probably wouldn't've anyway, so."
        "Fuck." Another soft explosion of static makes me think overly intimate things. "Maggie gave him to me. She'll kill me."
        "Yeah." Bells echo from a tower I have never actually seen, bouncing peals off buildings. I keep still and mouth twelve beats. Eugene moves his lips with me.
        We stand in the middle of a dead field, my arms embracing him and each other. A thick hem of bushes keeps campus and reality at bay around the edges, but here in the center there is nothing except grass straggling away to dirt, and me-us.
        I only like it here when things are changing, when the plants are tucking the blanket of winter in around the corners or starting to air out the spring linens, when the weather is indecisive. I shiver a little now, in sleeves that expose my elbows. It won't last, though.
        "She calls him a miracle fish."
        "Yeah."
        "Why?" He says it as if I've asked, molds it like a televangelist going through the motions. "He survived a sixteen hour..."
        ...flight in the cargo hold, wedged between a rat terrier and a full drum set that covered his breathing holes, from New Zealand to the United States. I know.
        "...all the way from New Zealand."
        "Cool."
        "She sent it over for our two-month anniversary thinger. Or maybe it was our third."
        "Really."
        "She'd kill me if she knew."
        "Yeah." It's the most neutral word I can find.
        "Just keep an eye out, okay?"
        "Will do." Debating to myself the proper tone for good-bye, I hear a click and the call dies in my hands. 
***
        Bear carries a misnomer on his thin shoulders, five and a half feet (plus three-quarters of an inch, he is careful to add every time the subject comes up) above the soles of his Converse. I am able, not willing, to meet his straight gaze when he opens his door.
        "The hell-?" The stripes of his hair are painted upward (I never realized so many variations of black existed); his face is still scrambled, still shifting back into place from sleep. "Oh, hey."
        "Eugene," I say. I present the glass bowl and the lemon twitching inside for his inspection, joy, approval. "I-found him."
        Bear lets all the air whoosh out of his frame. "Thank God."
        "He was-" I bite my lip to keep the lies from flowing. They'll be so copious and elaborate I'll never remember a word. "He was-out in the hall. I mean, that's where I found him. I mean, when I...this morning."
        "Shit." None of this seems to surprise Eugene or his owner. They blink at each other. "Again?"
        "Again?" I ask. The glass slips a little and I bend up a knee to steady it. "This...happens a lot?"
        "Once or twice." Bear grins, fluffing crescent-shaped pillows under his eyes. "Someone always gets him back home, though, so."
        "Ah." It's horrible, this cloying tension that I strongly suspect is one-sided and maybe even a product of my imagination, so I thrust the bowl at Bear and attempt to unhook my attachment to Eugene in one clumsy arc.
        Bear doesn't catch it. Eugene's house hits the tile and explodes sunlight into sharp wet slivers that leap onto our fabric.
        "Fuck!"
        We all flop helplessly for a second before I step over Eugene, shove past Bear, and slop water into the first container-like object my fingers pinch. I pressed the plastic sieve into Bear's stomach, where it rains on his bare toes.
        "Holes-get something without holes!" But he beats me to it. I flutter in place as Bear plops Eugene (who has developed an alarming shiver) into a stoppered sink filled and garnished by a razor dripping shaving cream.
        "I'm sorry," I say. I've no idea what else there is to say. "I-I'm sorry."
        Bear sighs, shrugs, gulps pellets of breath. "Nah. It'll be okay."
        "Yeah..."
        "Just don't tell Maggie, okay?"
        I have no plans of ever meeting Maggie, but this point feels strangely irrelevant at the moment. "Okay."
        "Thanks." A nod sends his hair pointing down the hall. "For bringing him back, and everything."
        "No problem." I nod back, a short awkward jerk, and leave Eugene to work his miracles.
THE END

132

        132.
        Sunny looked at the number and puffed out a breath of relief. Not bad. Not great, not ideal, not perfect—but better than expected. A good starting place.
        The mirror reflected her one hundred and thirty-two sideways, silently showed where it resided in clumps of flesh smoothly molded together so the whole effect almost worked. Her fingers watched themselves tug and press at her skin; they let go hopefully but sagged with the rest of gravity a millisecond later.
        "Almost," she said to her mirror self, which blinked at her from its mirror bathroom prison. "Almost."
        Almost was an old friend of hers, one she never really liked but one she put up with because it never went away. All her life, it had made her almost pretty, almost smart, almost funny, almost worth more.
        Almost skinny.
        "You're a fuckin' twig, kid," Manda said at least once a week, usually over plates of Student Union ravioli, reddish orange brown slop that looked and smelled and felt like vomit on her fork.
        "Tiny," Rob said every time he hugged her, every time his freckled arms wrapped around her waist and lifted her soles a few inches off the ground, laughingly protesting. "My tiny girl."
        They pleased her, these assesments from her friends—she pulled close the delicate whispers in which they wrapped her—but she was pleased as an actor praised for a believable performance. For a minute, she would become what they expected to see.
        But then the curtain came down; Manda would rattle the empty ice left in her glass, Rob would place her on the floor carefully and step back, and she would be her almost self again.
        The numbers, though, were real. Digital red lighting up dark dusty plastic, cramped peeling bathroom with soft pink rug and cold green toliet, naked in fluorecent truth. She took flinching comfort in that sort of honesty.
        She pulled her clothes onto her almost frame, absently flicking hair out of the way. (Her hair, thick and long and golden, was why everyone use to call her Sunny—she thought the curtains that hung down on either side of her part looked more like undulating waves of wheat, although she had never seen wheat, but she liked Sunny and anyway nobody at college called her that, which made homesickness hitch a little more every time Mama or Dad said it.)
        Opening the door, Sunny let the real world filter in by wedges before she went to work.
***
        132.
        "Okay," she said, letting her eyebrow quirk down but yanking it right back up. "It's okay."
        No big deal—no big deal, because it had only been five days and muscle weighed more than fat and she ate like a starved colt rescued from the glue factory line and these things took time and blah blah blah—
        She still had it all; it just shifted until it got more comfortable.
        Sitting naked on the closed toliet, toliet top rug tickling her bare ass, Sunny listened to her thighs stretch and her knees bend and her calves bunch up in cautious collaboration. They hated the gym.
        "Damn, I'm out of shape," Manda said whenever they scurried late to their early classes. She drew in breaths like a ragged cloth between her teeth.
        Beside her, Sunny would wince in rhythm to her back pack's slaps and vow to throw their alarm's snooze button out their third floor window. She hated to run, hated how it squeezed a cramped thin layer of sweat over the day.
        Now, at home and alone with her one hundred and thrity-two, she ran anyway.
        Jogging machine number four, the middle in a line banished to the gym's basement, had a hitch somewhere up in its works so her right foot always clicked on the off beat, something to count and latch on to as she watched her progress blip down through green time and pull the knit stitches of her muscles together into something tighter, more streamline, more connected and flowing with itself. She thought about Howard Hughes running his hands across rivets on a plane wing and demanding them smoothed down flush, to cut down on wind resistence.
        To make it lighter.
        Okay—she wasn't there yet, okay. Her back side jerked up and down in abrupt tight arcs and her face flapped around the edges when she moved at a brisk clip, but it was a start, right?
        The numbers didn't blink at her.
        She didn't want to care. She wanted to bash in the smug numbers until they shut up, wanted to bask in the pure holy sweat that drenched her in bodily righteousness after a burst of healthy pain and be done with it.
        But she couldn't.
        Closing her eyes, Sunny matched her feet to the scale's top and eased all of her upright again.
        Persistance proved futile as she discovered she hadn't lost a pound in three minutes.
        "Shit," she aid, and felt like it for the rest of the day.
***
        132.
        An inarticulate surge ripped through her throat, bounced off her tonsils and lips and teeth and the bathroom tiles, chipped mosaics she watched explode as her rage focussed enough to pick up the scale and dash it against the floor again and again and again until it was completely dead.
        Almost wasn't good enough, had never been enough; almost was too kind a fate for the stupid, ugly, useless thing—
        Sunny blinked the red out of her eyes and saw the truth lying wholly intact around her. She read it displayed on the scale she hadn't really shattered, felt it close around her in the bathroom she hadn't really destroyed, saw it on the reflected body that still hadn't lost a pound.
        Damn.
        Seventy-two hours. She hadn't let anything in any shape of solid caress her tongue and slide down her throat for seventy-two hours.
        "The first twenny-four are the worst," Rob said. "We did this weekend fast thing for—church—and the first day I'd've klled for a peanut but after that you just don't care anymore."
        These days Rob only mentioned church when it had given him a rare bit of secular wisedom, so Sunny and Manda gave his cheasnuts their proper respect, filing them away for appropriate times that almost always came.
        Her first twenty-four hours passed in a plodding blur of empty stomach searching its corners for forgotten crumbs, growling louder with each disappointment. Sunny was so busy not eating she did nothing except drink and piss diet soda, which jittered along her nerve endings until four in the morning.
        Clattering through empty cans towards the shower the next day, Sunny put a hand to her stomach and, amazed, felt peace. It had pulled shut like a drawstring bag, empty but quiet about the whole thing.
        A welcome charge of determination shot through her, and she had almost skipped to the scale.
        But nothing had changed. Nothing had gone away.
        In her white skivvies, Sunny burst from the bathroom and streaked through the silence hanging like gauze through the rest of the empty house. Everyone was away—Mama at the hospital and Dad at the bank, Manda and Rob tucked away in seperate states for the summer—and all Sunny knew in that moment was the refridgerator, glowing pale yellow in the morning heat.
        "Fuck this!" she screamed to the scale, which didn't seem to care. "Fuck you!"
        Her eyes and hands and mouth worked independently of each other, spotting and organizing and consuming with the efficieny of a calibrated factory. It didn't shut down until it had been fully compensated and Sunny felt miserable throughout her core.
        Staggering backwards into a counter, her hand brushed a blue plastic beacon of Oreos, pristinely sealed and waiting.
        She licked her lips and tasted dusty black chocolate pasted together with cream—or peanut butter—the last time it had been peanut butter, because that was Manda's favorite, and it had been the two of them, the TV, and Oreos consumed in blind fistfulls, chased with queso dip, an entire bag of tortilla chips, and the last scrapes of salsa—
        Remembering cloying thick sweetness draped in liquid cheese and dotted in guacamole, her stomach gave a heaving lurch towards her upstairs exit. Sunny barely made it to the toliet to watch her entire self hurdle down the drain.
        Spent, Sunny draped limply across the floor. She had almost made it.
        The scaled looked at her in disgusted expectancy, waiting to make her surrender official. Too sick to argue, Sunny propped herself up on the flat black judgement box. "Happy now?"
        131.
        She looked again—two, three, four more times, and allowed a small smile to tug up her lips.
        Hope—it was almost there.

THE END

Cowpunk in the Nighttime

        It started when Skeeter Muckenfuss stumbled out of the radio station closet cradling a pile of albums and the laws of physics in his arms.
        "Eyes, nose, throat and groin—throat and groin—"
        Humming along with the public service announcement that chirped through patched speakers, he set his pile down. For a second, he let his eyes frolic amongst shelves crammed by heartache, misery, rejection, joy, irony, frustration—the entire human spectrum set to guitars, pianos, horns, strings, bass lines, the occasional kazoo—
        "Eyes, nose, throat and groin—throat and groin—"
        It made a hidden pocket of space behind his navel shiver in delicious pleasure.
        His waist bent and his fingers sorted deftly in time with his brain, which whirled up to a Doppler whine.
        Okay. So—The Dreary Toads went with POP/ROCK 1990s, except for their recent experiment in ELECTRONICA, and did Ms. Pedicure go in HIP HOP 2001 or '02? /Moisture Rich/ had been released midnight on December 31, really just a marketing ploy—but he could just file her at the very end of '01 since the years ran next to each other...
        "Hey, Skeet, I'm 'bout to get out of here." The station manager slumped in the library's doorway, peering from above two shadows brushed across a good-natured face. His keys—THE keys—rustled against each other, dangling from a finger.
        Skeeter looked up, still seeing track numbers. He blinked, and they arranged themselves around the wall clock.
        "You staying?"
        "Thought I'd finish organizing these, yeah." Frowning, Skeeter stared at his pile, at a shelf, at his pile, until something snagged his eye and his face smoothed. "That's where I put it."
        "Ah-ight, man." The keys jumped and flashed in the short arc to Skeeter's rubber soles. "Do me a favor before you lock up?"
        "Yeah, sure." He unfolded his knees, slowing ascending into the real world. "Sure."
        "C'mere." The station manager shuffled a few steps down the short hall. Following, Skeeter caught glimpses of wires crossing like veins underneath wallpaper layers of posters and stickers yelling band names as loud as possible.
        Everything led through the scarred door, one that needed a different sort of coaxing every time movement was required of it. The station manager kicked the frame and waved Skeeter inside; they were greeted by a bulky black switchboard, sleepily winking at them. A microphone stood in the center of the room like a sliver of a dancer waiting for a partner, facing a desk groaning under stereo equipment gathered from the finest yard sales around and made to play nice with duct tape on the connections. ON AIR pulsed red in rhythm with the broadcast.
        Skeeter felt the navel tingling slide slightly south. His prick didn't know the difference between bedroom and church.
        "And ears and wrists and mouth and shins—"
        The station manager pointed to two buttons snuggled up next to each other, one square and one round. "Looks like Westerberg won't be doing Cowpunk tonight, so if he ain't here in time, push the circle to automate the system."
        "How long's he got?" Skeeter read the label over the square. MIC 1, it said.
        "Eyes, nose, throat and groin—"
        "Until the PSA's done," said the station manager over his shoulder and halfway home. "About ten seconds."
        "—throat and groin!"
        A deep silence froze Skeeter. He aimed his hand—paused.
        The microphone. Oh, the microphone looked so very inviting, grabbing the harsh red ON AIR, which now glared at him steadily, and turned it mellow, easy. Around it, cords and plugs and dials copulated into electronic mutations that Skeeter knew how to tame—they all did, they all had to take the same training, even music librarians who never came out of the back room unless the all-clear was nodded.
        It was too much for Skeeter. Punching the circle and punching out would be too much like wadding up destiny and throwing it away to rot for a billion years with all the Styrofoam cups and plastic sporks.
        Shoving headphones over his curls, Skeeter grabbed the mike in a grip he imagined as aggressively smooth and pulled it near his lips.
        He punched the square button.
***
        She couldn't sleep. Again.
        Her bladder had yanked her eyes open a few minutes ago and shoved her across the hall into the bathroom, from the dark womb of her room into fluorescent determined to erase all shadows. The light stabbed at her as she sat defenseless and bare-assed on the can until she was wide awake.
        Now she stood, back on her side of the door, feeling exhaustion carved under her eyes, and listening to her boyfriend's snores catch in the air above her bed. He was so cute when he slept, a great heedless sprawl of limbs and head surrounded by a cornea of dark waves, but now she couldn't see anything except a vague lump.
        And the clock radio's bright red numbers, of course. 2:58 am.
        She hated that damn clock, hated how it counted and measured and segmented and seemed to save up so it could run its absolute slowest at the most inconvenient times—
        Abruptly, she scuffed through the carpet (the sudden deep-pile forest of her roommate's section rug always surprised her bare toes) and reached over to turn the clock's smug face into the wall.
        Her finger brushed a control and, "GOOD NIGHT—I MEAN, MORNING, UNION STATE COLLEGE—" leapt out of the speakers.
        Quickly, she turned down the volume and glanced at her boyfriend.
        Didn't even blink, her guilt sighed in relief, and she let it relax. It wanted to listen to another human, possibly the only other human on campus awake at 3:01 on a Wednesday morning, so she brought the radio to her ear like an awkward phone and settled the rest of her on her boyfriend's wide, open chest, where she could feel a heartbeat.
        "This is Skee—I mean Cowpunk—well, my name's Skeeter Muckenfuss but I'm filling in for Cowpunk in the Nighttime so technically at the moment this is Cowpunk in the Nighttime—although this is morning—technically—"
***
        "Yo, Skeet."
        Oh, God. "Yeah?"
        "C'mere." The station manager crooked a knuckle in Skeeter's direction.
        All shift, Skeeter had managed to avoid this anticipation drenched in dread. All shift, he had buried himself up to his elbows in the oldest box of music he could find, a nightmare of faded ink and half-peeled labels and blankets of dust that no one else cared about.
        All shift, it had worked enough to keep hope alive, but suddenly hope sprouted bullet holes and fainted dead away with its mouth still open.
        Skeeter made his slow way to the station manager's side and tried to keep his heart from fluttering out of its proper cavity. "What's—what's up?"
        "I need y'to stay for Cowpunk again."
        "You need me?" It vaulted out of his mouth and did a happy little shimmy around his pride.
        "Yeah. Cowpunk got mono at the staff party, so it'll be temporarily permanent."
        Bless Cowpunk and keep him sweating in bed forever and ever amen, prayed Skeeter. "I was okay?"
        "What?" The station manager glanced up from a clipboard hovering under his nose. "Oh. Yeah. It was fine."
        Skeeter allowed himself an internal moment of pure glee. He was fine! He—Skeeter Muckenfuss, graveyard shift music alphabetizer—was fine! "Really?"
        "Don't worry, nobody listens past like midnight anyway, not on a Tue-" Something on the clipboard caught the station manager's attention and held it fast. "Damn, did we go over filing budget /again/? Trudy! C'mere!"
*** 
        "So you multiply this variable—"
        "—in the Nighttime. Morning. Whichever—"
        "—and then you—"
        "—the next hour forty-five minutes and seven, eight, nine seconds—"
        "—and then you—"
        "—dedicated to Polka Covers Week." Dubious pause. "So." Accordions burst forth, flailing dense wings of notes that flapped manically through farting tubas and burping clarinets.
        A hand shot out and choked the music.
        "No!"
        Her boyfriend cocked an eyebrow at her, his finger still mashed against the button. "What's the matter?"
        She felt panic rise to fill her throat. "Why'd you turn it off?"
        "I have a test in like four hours." Wearing a smile that was suppose to tease the anxiety out of her, he leaned and brushed a kiss against her cheek. "And you're distracting enough, missy."
        She barely noticed her flesh nodding back at him. "Yeah."
        "It's late. Early." The clock turned softer in his examining grip. "Want to go to bed?"
        A challenge; can she endure? "No, no."
        "Okay." A great intake of breath, puffed out of solid nostrils onto paper covered in sharp pencil scratches curled around structured lines of type. Gathering the troops, he bent his head and squinted. "So you multiply this variable and then you..."
        She settled back in her chair and let her mind off its leash to wander the world wrapped in 3:35am haze.
***
        "So call to tell me what to play, what to burn, that I suck, that I rule, or that your very favorite radio station in the whole world is WUSC. That number again is..." Skeeter ran out of handwriting on the index card he held up to his face. The standard station announcement ended in the standard station phone number, which was—
        Ahem. The standard station phone number /was/—
        He said it before he thought. "Shit."
        The obscenity landed in his headphones, curving back into his ears and laughing fatly. Skeeter gaped at the red ON AIR, still pulsing, counting the beats. "Oh shit! I said—"
        He clapped a hand across his mouth before it could do anything else to get him fired. In the silence, Skeeter realized his futility. Nobody ever called.
        Music. Music would make it all better.
        He jammed in the nearest album—a mixed tape cassette that had last seen airplay about 1992 if he wanted to judge from its hand-annotated cross-references to Hall Meeting and the Floofy Feathers. Filaments whirled as the Beast ground away at them—to Skeeter it sounded like blood rushing through veins.
        Finally—
        "Nobody makes me feel that way and gets away with it!" Dodo dooodo, WAAAAAAAH wanka wah!
        Instantly calmer, Skeeter slumped and closed his eyes, wanted to drown. (Bip. Bip. Bip.) But they wouldn't let him. (Bip. Bip. Bip.) Dammit. What was it? (Bip. Bip. Bip.) Was the Beast finally dying? (Bip. Bip. Bip.) How much would it take (Bip. Bip. Bip.) to replace him? Would they take it out of his (Bip. Bip. Bip.) nonexistent paycheck? Would they banish Skeeter for life because the stupid (Bip. Bip. Bip.) thing—
        His eyes peeled open and saw a dot of light winking at him from the switchboard.
        A call.
        He stared stupidly for a second, gathering the procedure from a dusty corner of his brain, then flipped the switch right under the beacon. "He-hello?"
        "Yeah, I wanna order two large pepperonis, a couple sausage—hey, Mike, like how hungry are you?—Mushrooms and black olives? No way, dude, buy that shit on your own plastic—"
        "Thanks for calling WUSC. You have Union Station College on the dial, this is Cowpunk in the Nighttime." It came out as smooth and modulated as a woman's nightie. Skeeter almost wept.
        "Oh...this isn't Pizza Mia?"
        And it all came crashing down. "...No."
        "Oh, sorry dude. My bad."
        "Well, wait—" Skeeter clung to hope, refused to let it go, tied it up with ropes and handcuffs and duct taped its mouth shut so he could keep it. "D'you want to request anything?"
        "We want some pizza."
        "Yeah—uh, how about a song?" He dug through the catalogue. "Timetastic Trip O'Doom's cover of 'Hello, I Must Be Going'? Preston's 'Graduate and Work For the Man'? Um—oh! You'll love this one—Flying Saucer's 'Lump of Dough,' their best experimental thrash pop with sprinkles of grunge—"
        "Nah, that's cool. Thanks, man." Click.
        Skeeter looked at the switchboard, still (Bip. Bip. Bip.) blinking at him, without seeing. His finger, drained of illusion, flicked at the light, then trailed down to the automation button.
        He punched the circle and walked out.
***
        "Thank you for calling WUSC, Union State College on the dial. All lines are currently automated. Your call is important to us so please contact us on the web at—"
        She hung up in disbelief and mild disgust. It was only ten minutes past three on a Tuesday morning.

THE END 

Idols
        On her doorstep, I dodged the giant hunk of wood as it scraped open across concrete.
        “Petey boy!” A pile of dark hair grinned at me, white teeth bared through amber. Her lips closed and smushed against my cheek for a second before retreating again.
        I grinned back and wished I’d shaved better. “Janis baby.”
        “How you holden up, darlin’? No, don’t tell me yet. Come in, come on in, sit down somewhere. You want somethen to drink?”
        Her room was a calm sort of low yellow-orange from a couple lamps draped over with scarves. Everything squished together on brown shag carpet, everything touching overstuffed dusty arms and knit back-covers, dangling beads that clacked together when we breathed close to them. Sinking into the armchair under her Woodstock poster was like getting a hug from my mum but I never told Janis that.
        She swept back in from the kitchen carrying two cans of beer and trailing smoke. “So sorry, Petey boy ole chap, but I’m fresh out of tea and crumpets.” Her attempt at my accent cracked into giggles that creased around her eyes and bracketed her mouth; the Texas came back pretty quickly. “Grain Train okay?”
        “Marvelous, baby.” I took both cans and pried them open with my left fingers. Guitar calluses are useful. “Cheers.”
        We clicked aluminum. Janis tucked her feet between her jeans and the corduroy couch, curling her knees into the cushion. She must have noticed me looking at her cigarette because she said, “I been told a hundred thousand times to quit these things but that was before I started singen.”
        “Don’t ever quit,” I said. The beer coated my throat and made my thoughts go a little muzzy but if Janis ever stepped away from a mike for the last time, a piece of my heart would fade with her. That was a given. “You’re too good.”
        “Don’t tease me, Petey boy!” Her fluttering hand, knuckled in rings of dark-colored glass, scattered ashes until it found a saucer to leave them in. “I just gotta get it out.”
        I nodded—it was the same for all of us.
        “Here--“ She reached to her left and hefted a guitar my way by its neck. “Bobby got a new Strat. Play that line you were worken on the other day.”
        Smooth rosewood molded my palm, reared into a curly triangle head and melted into a sleek black body that rested on my knee. (You can tell a good guitar body like you can tell a good woman’s, by how many curves she can get away with.) White overlay pick guard, silver pickups that winked in the lamp light—single coil snugged near the neck, humbucker a couple inches down—I lowered my nose and smelled the strings. Sometimes I pretended that thin metal was the notes and if I played hard enough I could ground them into my own fingerprints.
        “Nice,” I said.
        “Bobby always gets the best.”
        My eyes roamed the cluttered space. “Where is he, anyway?”
        “I think he and Sue are fucken upstairs.” She shrugged and let what I called her Mournful Janis smile creep across the edge of her face. “But they’re so quiet I never can tell for sure.”
        “Oh.” My fingers wandered up and down the frets. I didn’t know what line Janis meant from what other day, but it didn’t matter because only the good ones seemed to stick.
        “Yeah…” Her eyes closed and her voice came into the room, as much a person as either of us. Maybe more. She sounded like—what was that old broad’s name, the one Elvis stole from—
        “Big Mama Thorton!” I remembered out loud, and that reminded me.
        “Don’t stop, Petey boy, please don’t stop, baby—“
        Balancing Bobby’s Strat in my lap, I handed her the big flat square I had brought with me. “I got you a present.”
        When she looked down, she squealed. “Big Mama Thorton!”
        “Yeah, you remind me of her. Only not, you know, as…tan.”
        I could listen to Janis’s great big whooping laugh almost as long as I could listen to her howl the blues. “Petey boy, you draw me aces! How the hell’d you know my Mama was shot to shit?”
        Across the room (three steps for me, four and a half for her), a glass cabinet reared up to her nipple height. It was topped with a turntable and needle, and buried in stacks of albums, speakers, wires, sometimes a mike stand or two if she’d been really practicing. She yanked off an LP scratched deep and wide through the grooves and settled her present under the needle.
        “Now I even got a playlist.” Her face peered at the album sleeve while her arse twitched to Mama’s opening moan. Suddenly I felt them both squeeze me tight. “Thankya so much, Petey boy.”
        “No problem, Janis baby.” I didn’t know how new the album was since I got it at a used record closet down the Hait, but I had figured she’d like it.
        “Aw, shake it but don’t break it!” she bawled with Mama, her moon face turned up to the ceiling.
**
        “Come on, Keith, get it the fuck together!” Robert scowled at the front of the stage. His fringes stirred.
        I wanted to tell him his fringes looked ridiculous, clinging to white leather pants and matching jacket and dusting his boots and his bare chest, wanted to tell him Keith was fine, Keith was a metronome, Keith was a fucking rock for fuck’s sake so just sing the fucking song. Robert.
        But I didn’t say anything, just bent over Melinda to make sure she was still tuned.
        We were all nervous. ‘Course we were. First gig where the seats wrapped all the way round us and none of us could duck behind curtains if we started to dry heave.
        “T-t-talkin’ ‘bout my ge-ner-ation!” Robert’s tongue tripped into the melody, his legs jiggling and his curls jumping from the sweat on his forehead, and we fell around him, layering chords and beats and lines until the music swallowed me whole. It was the closest I ever came to God; odd how much it felt like jerking off.
        Diggita-da-diggita-da-diggita-BOOM!
        Invisible hot fingers slapped me out of the music. I opened my eyes. “What the fuck?”
        “Keith!” Robert screamed. His veins throbbed, and I had to look away. “What the FUCK!”
        Keith sat behind his drum set, still for once. Black powder smudged around the edges of his startled look and dusted his hair into shaggy points. “It worked! Fuckin’ wicked!”
        “Oh Jesus. You pyromaniac cunt.”
        Through the stage lights, I could see the sound guy’s outline cross itself.
        “From.” Robert grabbed the mike that had been blown off kilter. “The. Top.”
        “I can’t,” Keith said. “Gotta get a new bass. Be right back.”
**
        Jimmi was always good for a smoke or two on the peace pipe once the sun was nothing but a purple haze over the hill we lived on.
        “Peace and love, man. All you need. All any of us need.” His fingers never left his strings. “Maybe music. But that’s just icing. Icing, man.”
        “Yeah, man. Icing.” I took another inhale and watched his thoughts slide upside down, backwards. “Sweet icing on the big shit cake of life.”
        “Looks like it’s headed that way, yeah.” His fingernails stood out as perfect white ovals on chocolate brown skin. “Looks like it, ain’t going to lie.”
        “What’re we suppose to do?” If anybody’d know, it’d be Jimmi.
        He shook his afro. “I don’t know, man. Don’t know anything about nothing but playing.” My vague disappointment melted and ran downhill when he plugged in with a feedback whine and we worked out our plan to save the world without saying a word.
**
        Next morning I woke up to Keith so close I thought for a second he wanted to kiss me. He bought into all that free love jazz.
        “Pete.” Eggs and kips for breakfast, I noticed. “Pete. Mate.”
        “Up,” I muttered. “ ‘m up.” Immediately I regretted my word choice and braced for Keith’s patented Wanker Yanker. It was always twice as bad when he heard encouragement.
        But it didn’t come. “Janis. It’s Janis, mate. She kicked it.”
        “What?” I hauled myself up until I was sitting and dug the heels of my palms into my eyes.
        “Janis! Dead!”
        “Dead.” Hating him a little for playing such a joke, I frowned. “No fucking way, mate. Nice try.”
        “No!” A newspaper floated into my vision; the column print had tried to escape a coffee stain and failed but the headline stood bold. JOPLIN DEAD, OVERDOSE above Janis onstage in her funky red glasses, the ones that looked like she saw the world through Mars. Under that, a photo of a needle next to a pale arm drowning in dark hair.
        OVERDOSE, I thought, and broke down. She always could make me cry.
**
        Few months later, Keith blew his fucking head open with his bass drum trick.
        It took him a couple dozen performances, maybe sixty rehearsals, to get bored and then inventive. Which only meant more dynamite.
        “Wait like three more beats before you light the fuse, mate,” Robert said the last time. “You know, da DAH da da DAH—two, three, four—BOOM! Dig, mate?”
        Keith nodded. “Yeah mate, yeah—lemme stuff it a little m—“
        KUMPFF. A flash of light drew a bright red line on his forehead. Blood and something grey that made me want to chuck started dripping onto his cymbals. Ping…ping…ping…
        “Holy fuck.” With the color drained out of his face, Robert looked like he did when we got matching beatings in primary school. “Fuck!—Keith? Shit!”
        “Doctor,” I said. My stomach lurched around. “Meds. Ring the meds—phone, where’s the fucking phone? For God’s sake--!”
**         
        You know about Jimmi. Everybody knows about Jimmi.
        OVERDOSE.
Nobody knows when I heard the news, I pushed Melinda under my bed for almost the entire day. I didn’t want to hear anything that reminded me of anything for a long, long time.
**
My life is full of dead people who won’t die.
Nobody’ll let them. Janis and Keith and Jimmi still talk to me all the time, still tell me the same things they want but’ll never have, still sing the same broken-down blues, never gonna get better. Nobody’ll let them put down their voices or sticks or picks. Must be exhausted by now—I know I am.
They may be your fucking idols but they were my fucking friends. My fucking friends.

THE END

He Said, She Said

You're fantastic, you know that?
Yeah, actually. You're the third person to tell me this week.
I'm being completely serious.
So am I.
No, you're not.
You doubt me, kid. It's distressing.
No, I don't. I mean—I don't doubt you at all. But you don't believe me.
No, I don't. I won't believe you at all.
But it's true.
Evidence, kid, evidence! I won't believe anything without evidence presented in a believable manner.
Oh, is that all.
Is that all! Yes, that's all.
Well, that's easy.
Are you calling me easy?
No! Not at all! I mean—
You're calling me easy.
I just meant that you're easy to—to—oh, fuck.
And here I thought the four layers of clothing muffled my vagina siren song enough for me to pass it off as gas.
...That didn't come out right at all. I do apologize most sincerely, and I hope I didn't waste too much of your time. Good night—
Oh, don't leave, kid. Come back and play.
I—I really should be going.
You know I was just yanking your chain, right?
...I know, but...
And you haven't told me why I'm fantastic yet. I want to hear you tell me why I'm fantastic.
You won't believe me.
Probably not. But you tell me why I'm fantastic, and then I'll tell you why you're fantastic.
You think I'm fantastic?
It's how these things work.
Really?
In my best assessment, yes.
How much assessing have you done?
You. Evidence, kid. My ass is freezing.
We can go inside somewhere if you need to.
No, the view's too epic up here.
It is quite beautiful.
Like you.
...You think I'm beautiful?
Are you deaf?
I think I might be.
It's your face—the way your face is all still and solemn.
Yeah?
Yeah, but it's more.
More?
Yeah. Like—when it's still, your face looks so fucking serious. Like you could be carved from a tree or something. But then—but when something cracks you up and makes you grin all of a sudden, like—
Ahahahahaha—hey, no fair—
When you spread your lips and show your teeth and squint your eyes and pull your head a little into your shoulders like that, you just look so—just so fucking young.
Young?
You're so young, kid. You're so fucking young.
You're beautiful, and smart, and funny, and—
I don't really give a tin shit.
But you are.
Thank you.
I mean it.
Holy fried chicken eating Christ, kid, I mean it, too, okay? Let's stop masturbating with each other's egos.
I'm sorry.
Good, because I hate it when other people give me extravagant compliments.
I won't bring it up again.
Ah, don't worry about it, kid. It just makes for boring conversation.
You're absolutely right.
Let's move on, then.
Let's.
***
Can I touch your face?
...Can you touch my face?
Yeah. Can I touch your face?
Why?
I want to know what it feels like.
Uh. Okay.
Don't tell me I was the only little kid in the entire store who got yelled at all the time because I picked everything up to see if the touch matched the look.
I said, okay. You can if you really want.
I do. It looks soft. Is it soft?
...Is it?
Yeah, actually. Like a soft-bristle hairbrush.
Really? I—I've been meaning to shave.
It's soft and rough until it blends back into your neck...here...here it gets all blank and smooth.
Wow.
You okay there, kid?
Yeah.
Sure?
Yeah, you just—caught some nerve endings, or something. Made me shiver.
Oh. I'm sorry.
No, no. You're—you're really good at this face-touching...thing.
I don't mean to be.
...Can I ask you a potentially embarrassing question?
Only if you answer it too.
Sounds fair.
Okay then. Go on.
Does this feel—sexual at all to you?
I. I. I...don't know. Does it—to you?
I...could definitely...maybe...see it possibly going down that path eventually.
Yeah. I could definitely maybe see it possibly going down that path eventually, too, also, as well. Like...soon?
What's soon, exactly?
I've no idea.
I don't know, either.
Your hair—can I—
Oh God. I'm terribly sorry—I didn't mean to—
No, kid, I—I liked it. A lot.
Yeah?
Yeah.
Well, then, um, may I be so presumptuous as to—?
Ooooh...
What? Are you okay?
More than okay—nerve endings, kid, nerve endings—like—this...
Aaaah—where did you learn—
Don't insult me while I'm pl-plea-pleasuring! you, kid. Mr. Distraction.
You feel so good.
You have belly fur.
Oh, sorry...yeah.
I like belly fur.
Really? Uh, why?
It's so soft—mmm, oh...and look, it's a little furry trail...
Sssst! /Oh/—
Did I hurt you?
No, just...unexpected, is all.
Surely it can't be THAT unexpected.
I was cautiously optimistic.
"Cautiously optimistic"! Listen to the cocky little bastard.
I really don't mean to presume—
Look at me, kid—see this smile? It means I'm yanking your chain. This...this...and—
MMMmmmmahhh!
—means I want you.
I want you, too—
Yeah?
Oh, yes.
Then take me.
***
So that's how that works.
It is indeed.
Wow. Just...wow.
Yeah. Wow.
***
Let me start by being honest—I still think about him.
Him?
A lot. The only time I don't is when I'm with you.
But what does that...mean?
And even you can't distract me all the time anymore.
Are you saying that—
You're killing me, kid. I made a mistake. Yeah.
...So I'm the mistake?
And he turns the knife on himself. If you want to hate me for the rest of whenever, then—yeah, I guess you are.
...But I'm so much better-looking than he is!
You're better than that, at least.
You said you hated his—
I know what I said. I know what I said, I know what I told you, I know what I told him, but—
You've changed your mind.
I have every right to change my mind, without you or anyone else giving me shit about it.
Forgive me for sounding harsh.
No. You have every right to sound harsh, with me or anyone else who pulls a bitch move on you. Just—I just wish being honest actually worked.
Worked?
Made everyone feel better.
It doesn't, though.
I know. God, I know.
...I should be going, then. Unless...
No, I've kept you too long already.
I came because I wanted to. I stayed because I l—like you.
Were you going to say you love me?
I—I don't know.
Don't. Even if you do, don't. Let's just leave it at this, okay?
...Okay.
Bye, kid.
...Good-bye.

THE END