100 Dollars

100 Dollars

         The day Thad first mentioned the hundred bucks, I had beaten them both to James Brown and sat in the sun thinking naked. Just the one word. Naked.
         "I need a hundred." Thad shambled up, all arms and big hands clutching a pop and black curls catching the heat and making it shiny.
         "A hundred what?" Adam was two steps ahead, already dusting the ass of his jeans (I never knew why he did that; none of his clothes were less than a thousand years old) before placing it between the pigeon shit on the concrete. "Pennies? Quarters? Condoms?"
         Naked, I thought, and for a second I saw my two boys without their t-shirts or denim or joke boxers. I closed my eyes for a long blink.
         "Dollars," Thad said. I heard a pop top peel open with a loud double snick. "I need a hundred dollars."
         "I don't have a hundred dollars," Adam said. He reached up to rap a knuckle on James Brown's metal cape, frozen mid-performance with the rest of our soul brother number one. "Why don't you ask Mr. Brown?"
         A small silence—Thad always had to think through the smartass that naturally surfaced.
         "What for?" I asked, and felt the slight defiance stir as they both looked over. She speaks! their faces seemed surprised to tell each other. It was in my own head—mostly—but it was there, and I hated it a little. Every time.
         "Yeah, what for?" Adam's face settled as his brain ticked through possibilities. His thought process was easy to follow since it leaked out his mouth like a real-time news feed. "Rent food clothes air conditioner medical procedure—Thad, are you dying?"
         That shook his head and stared into his Coke. "I'm fine."
         "Oh Jesus." The rims of Adam's nostrils went white through their sunburn. "Oh motherfuck. Oh Thad. You have to buy a chick an abortion, don't you—"
         Instinctively, I followed James Brown's tin gaze down the street to the nondescript door everybody knew housed Planned Parenthood.
         "I'm FINE."
         We looked at Thad, Adam and me and James Brown, and waited.
         "I'm fine, for fuckssake, I am fine, I am fine, I am FINE." He took a deep breath and a long swig of cola, an unfortunately timed move that made him hack brown fizz all over James's mike stand. When it was done, Thad took an extra second to collect his dignity. "I just need one hundred dollars."

         All of us needed a hundred dollars, for one thing or another. Rent-food-clothes-air-meds came as close as any of us did to reciting a rosary to protect our meager lives.
         "Is it for a new guitar? You could use commission." Adam and Thad worked at Rock Bottom, which did a pretty brisk trade as the only music store in town. "You'd have to sell a Les Paul or something, though. And lessee...ten percent...well, you could at least buy new. Maybe not nice. But new." Basic losers' economics.
         It was the next day, but the only way I could tell was Adam's tuna sandwich had become peanut butter and Thad's jeans were darker than I remembered. The sun still burned away like it hated us and I still smelled like tomatoes from the front half of my shift and James Brown still busted mid-move above us.
         "I can't, man." Thad sighed. Long and stringy and faded, he really put his back into it. "Chuck put me behind the register."
         "Haven't played anybody to their checkbook?"
         "No."
         "Really? Dude, it's been like a year now. And some months."
         "Yeah."
         "Nobody?"
         "He said nobody already so drop the fucking subject," I said sharper than I meant. Aw, hell, that's a lie.
         Adam faced me in what he thought of as his sympathetic mask. I though of it as Douche Bag Needs to Take an Epic Shit—but only to myself. He usually meant well. "Bad tip day?"
         Not really. Before the noon rush, I got the tips of the pasta grabber jammed in the toaster, the prints almost singed off the tips of three fingers while reheating a crust, and the tip of my ass poked while brushing past the busboy.
         But to Adam I just nodded.
         "It's not for a guitar, anyway. I know I can't play." Adam and I made obligatory protest gurgles in the back of our throats, but Thad held up a hand. The sad part was his fingers looked long and subtle enough to play anything they wanted. "I wrote this story."
         "You wrote a story?" Adam turned concerned again; I could always see his mental calculator tapping away its endless rent-food-clothes-air-meds, because mine did the same exact thing. "I thought printing's ten cents a page down at—damn, Thad, how long is this fucker?"
         I wrote this story. That phrase made me think naked again, not quite for no reason.
         "I want to enter this writing contest."
         "It costs a hundred bucks to send your story to somebody who'll tell you if it's any good or not?" I couldn't see Adam's eyebrows anymore. They had disappeared into his hair. "Dude, you're getting fleeced! Just say baaaah, I mean come ON—"
         "That's how they make their money!" Thad actually started to grin. "Listen—listen—if I win—whoever wins gets three thousand bucks and a trip to New York City to talk to an editor! Fucking three thousand bucks, dude! A fucking EDITOR!"
         Adam stopped and calmed down, inch by inch. Finally he relaxed enough to slouch against James Brown and squinted at the hope in Thad's eyes. "Dude, I didn't even know you wrote shit like that."
         "I just need a hundred dollars." Thad drained his drink (Sprite—another sign it was a Tuesday) and slammed the empty can against James's shoulder. The can only dented, and he still didn't have a hundred dollars, but That looked more cheerful than I'd seen in eleven or twelve months.

         I knew That wrote. I knew from the day last March when I put his hand up my skirt.
         It started with him padding into my dorm room during the endless stretch of day we both hated, the block of hours between our last two classes before the weekend. "I brought movies in case we get bored."
         "Cool." I unfolded out of my desk chair to help him with his backpack, the giant lump of canvas where he kept most of his life. It took both of us to ease it onto the floor without damaging our entertainment options. "What'd you bring?"
         His hands dug into his pockets and spread their findings across my homework, a gesture that always added a domestic touch to our farting around. "Random shit. I found Matilda—"
         "Really?"
         "Okay, we're watching that."
         "No. I mean, I love that movie, but what else?"
         "Did you see your face when I said Matilda?"
         "Um, no. Kind of working blind here." But I felt it, a nostalgia that hit pure and strong around my mouth like my cravings for crunchy M&Ms I hadn't tasted since fifth grade. "If you insist, though."
         "I do." He stood next to my bed and gestured. "Can I—"
         "Go nuts."
         I heard him fluffing comforter and stacking pillows beside me as I rooted around for my laptop, which sat patiently under a week's worth of paper crap. My fingers brushed away Thad's top layer, coins and keys and Chapstick and an empty pack of gum and a stale Triscuit and a smudged note card and—
         Another square, this one foil, made me look closer and pinch it out to hold in the air between us. It was a condom in its wrapper. "It's green."
         Thad noticed. After a few seconds he said quietly, "I was going to put it on and call myself the big green monster."
         I had no fucking idea if he was joking or not, but something in me that had been waiting for this took his hand and molded it around the curve of flesh under my blue plaid backside.
         He stood up, slid his free palm under my hair to grip my neck, pressed his lips on mine. I kept my eyes open and watched the world speed up around us as everything inside me seemed to melt.
         When he straightened in front of me with his wang jutting out wrapped in what looked like a rubber case of the gangrene, I couldn't help myself. I laughed.
         I kept laughing when he jumped me in the movie-viewing nest, the softest place my bare back ever felt; I kept laughing when he entered me, while we figured out how to move, when our sweat and muscles seemed to grow wings that tangled together as they flew higher. I laughed as he came, stiffening and then going limp across my torso, attempting a feeble lip brush near my hip on his way down. I slowly stopped laughing as we lay there stewing in our body fluids and waning strength.
         Later, he pulled some sheets of typing out of his bag and told me he'd been working on this story, sounding shy for the first time since we'd met. I read his progress when he fell asleep after declaring he never went to geology anyway and still had an A average in there.
         I had liked the story, I thought. I had liked the characters, the way they were normal people dealing with some weird shit. I had also still be naked, stealing glances at the evening sun painting Thad's still face gold through the window.
         So my judgment might've been a little skewed.

         That happened a week before I dropped out of college like a stepsister's foot bursting out of Cinderella's shoe (only I could never tell if I was the useless shards of glass or the bloody sliced-up tendons).

         Thad looked at the check I held out like he felt the same way I did holding the condom, a year and some months before. "Where'd you get the money?"
         "My grandma." I lied. Even the damn bank paper smelled like pepperoni. "She forgets when my birthday is."
         "So she sends you checks whenever she thinks she remembers."
         "Yeah." The tips had made a wrinkly green pile I attempted to neaten before handing over to a bank teller who wore a bow tie. "It's kind of cool."
         "I bet." A manila envelope gaped open on his couch (well, futon—none of us had anything as elegant as a couch) next to papers stapled together.
         We weren't naked; that part of us had eased past its expiration date like the milk sweating in the fridge.
         He took the check and tucked it into the envelope, then the stapled papers.
         "What's this one about?"
         His back, bent over a drawer, twitched. I liked to think it was at "this one," at a shared moment of naked, but I didn't ask. He straightened up and sealed his package with half a roll of Scotch tape.
         "How many times did Pete pinch your ass during the extra shifts?"
         "Grandma, I said." At least half a dozen. Whenever I swung through the kitchen carrying full trays on my arms and full orders in my head, after my feet went numb and stupid and forgot to go around the ovens instead of the sink. It was my own fault. "I didn't pick up any extra shifts this week. Sandra need them, anyway. Something about her boyfriend's tractor hitch."
         Thad hugged me abruptly enough to burst through platonic walls I had constructed around my heart. "Thanks. A lot," he said into my hair.
         "No problem," I said. "Grandma's just random like that."
         Then he let go.
         I scuffed into the hallway. "I guess I'll see you later?"
         "Yeah. James Brown," he said, and added, "Acute knee pain and the end of the world. That's what this one's—" He shook the package at me. "—about."
         "Interesting."
         When I got out of his sight line, I let myself sag until I could sleep off my double shifts before the next day began.

         Six weeks passed. That's it; that's all there was to them, six hot weeks when none of us thought about much.
         "So when do you hear from whatsit?"
         Thad moved his eyes from his root beer to Adam. "Can you get a bit vaguer than that, dude?"
         "You know I can't do Darth Vader. I tried that one time, remember, but the chick—"
         I pinched the nearest earlobe and, after the initial squeal, everything went quiet. "When do you hear from the writing contest people?"
         "Yeah." Adam rubbed his ear. "That's what I meant."
         "The thirty-first," Thad said. "Of August. If I win."
         "Dude, today's the thirty-first."
         Thad and I both looked over at that.
         "You sure?" he said, suddenly alert.
         "Yeah," said Adam, fishing out a bent paycheck. "At least that's what m'wages say."
         Without another word, we watched Thad lope away, cutting a Thad-shaped swatch in the heat down the street to his apartment mailbox, the little steel cubby he had to whack with a fist to unlock.

         He won.
         "I won!"
         "Holy fuck, dude! You won!"
         "I know! Holy fuck!"
         I managed to grab both the boys in a grip of writhing joy.
         "Can I borrow a pen?" Thad asked my shoulder. I gave him one and he started filling out acceptance forms leaning on James Brown's back, hopping a little in his Converse. "How do you spell your last name, dude?"
         "What?" Adam tried to read the fine print. "Why? I didn't do anything."
         "New York." Thad's pen quivered impatiently. "Come on. I want to put this in the box before the mail guy gets here."
         "The fuck you say!"
         "Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah—I get to take a guest—how the shit do you spell Markovsky?"
         "Dude, it's easy—"
         Whatever else they said I didn't hear. Whatever I was suppose to feel I didn't, except a fleeting urge to thrust my bare bruised ass in Thad's face and tell him where the money really came from.
         But that passed quickly enough.

         I am fine, I am fine, I am fine. I'm fine.
         I just need one hundred dollars.

THE END