Big Mike is my boss.

“You juh way up?” he asks, his voice muddled by the ball of mashed donut in his mouth, a mist of powdered sugar covering his lips. He slaps a clipboard into my stomach and, sucking on his fingertips, walks back towards his office without waiting for an answer. His office is slightly smaller than the rest of the place, which is always kept around sixty-five degrees and bathed in the dull florescent lights that reflect off art deco white tile. If one didn’t know any better they’d think they were in Miami.

Sitting in the far corner at a cramped desk overflowing with stacks of paperwork and an outdated computer is Lee, Big Mike’s right-hand. Lee works the phones, and generally lurks behind the scenes unless a particular situation can’t be handled civilly. He sports a thick, graying fu manchu, a shaved head and a leather vest over a black t-shirt. Faded tattoos cover his thick, leathery arms, and one of his eyes is dormant, the result of a decades-old altercation outside of a bar he once worked security for. He often has the TV hanging in the corner tuned to Fox News, though he rarely pays attention to it. Tonight he leafs through a wrinkled skin mag from the 70′s, a disturbing grin creasing his face.

“You got Mari doing her usual at eight,” he says, not bothering to look up from his jizz-encrusted copy of Oui. “Bianca’s on with some out-of-towner at the Renaissance about ten…sounded like a business dude or somethin’. Kelly’s floatin’.”

I rifle off three signatures and give the clipboard back to Mike, who in turn hands over a nine millimeter, a clip, a few bill-sized manila envelopes, two Nextel radios and the keys to a 2006 Lexus IS 350. The gun goes into the center console, and the clip into the glove box, where they will most likely stay until it’s time to turn them in at shift’s end.

I was granted full arms privileges on a Thursday about two months ago when Mike, chomping on a take-out meatball, casually asked ‘You know how to handle a gun, right?’

“Yeah,” I lied, tacking on an extra fabrication about going shooting with my father as a kid.

“We’ll get you started on your concealed carry later,” he said, sliding a clip across his desk, his attention quickly shifting back to his pasta. That was the last I ever heard of acquiring a permit.

The car is one of our society’s greatest sanctuaries. And for the next eight hours, my sanctuary comes equipped with heated leather seats, a six-disc changer and excellent reception. The vehicle upgrade, a fresh CD selection and the mid-dusk tranquility before the night’s first pick-up is usually enough for me to shake the grim scene over at dispatch, although initially it took a good while before I could easily regroup from the reality of Lee surfing some bizarre fetish site while Bill O’Reilly ranted about Hollywood pinheads.

Maricel had left Quebec with the intention of making it to New York City as a high-end stripper, but, as so many plans go awry, she somehow found herself in Cleveland seven years later, working for Big Mike and legally married to a gay American in a transaction that cost her six grand. She lives in an old apartment building just outside of Coventry, is (legitimately) thirty, prefers 96.5 FM, and likes mango iced tea, a can of which I always remember to pick up at the gas station around the corner from her place.

“Hello, darling,” she says as she swings open the door, her back turned and walking away before I even enter. If it weren’t for several misguided tattoos and the wear and tear of lifestyle, she could easily be the most beautiful woman of any room she walked into. She has the full lips that women inject chicken fat into their face to achieve, coffee-with-cream skin and thick, teased out hair that reeks of exoticism.

“There’s some smoke in the box above the T.V. if you’d like,” she calls out from the bathroom, fixated on the last few crucial touches of make-up that the intended audience will never notice. Mari always keeps small quantities of high-grade grass around, in a little faux-Chinese box that sits on a shelf of her entertainment center, though she rarely ever partakes. As far as I can tell, most of the time I’m the only one who smokes it.

She only turns one trick a week, with the same john, a polite and well-off man in his sixties whose wife passed away that I only know as Mr. C. Every Saturday he takes her to dinner, sometimes a show, and then they retreat to a room at the Renaissance for two hours.

This is a unique case — most johns merely want a stranger to whip in and out of a hotel room, occasionally a drink or two at the hotel bar to set the mood. They don’t want a date, but rather to dominate. Standard procedure consists of me having a brief chat with the john where I give a perfunctory listing of terms before I return with the girl and collect the initial fee, never to be seen again unless things go awry.

The Mr. C gig requires me to be a chauffeur of sorts, a position I often find myself uncomfortable with, neither the situation nor myself possessing the class necessary to not feel like a complete schmuck wearing the only suit he owns. But the free buzz Mari provides while she does her make-up and the twenty Mr. C always slips me at date’s end combine to make it one of the routines I look forward to.

“You on all night, darling?” She calls everyone ‘darling’, unless we’re working the act. Somehow I get the feeling that Mr. C’s guts would drop like he were cresting a roller coaster if he ever realized that the moniker wasn’t reserved for only him.

“When am I ever not?” I ask with a wheeze as I hold in smoke, thumbing through the same coffeetable art book I’ve flipped through about a half dozen times.

She glides into the living room as she affixes an earring, reaching two shelves above the grass box to grab a tray containing a small octagon shaped mirror and a thin glass straw. Sitting over the table on her knees, she taps out a small pile and carves herself a line, looking towards me for my usual dismissive head shake.

“Whew,” she says, vacuuming her sinuses and blinking rapidly for a few seconds. Once again, I picture whatever warped fantasy Mr. C harbors being painfully destroyed if he were to ever get a look behind the scenes. I don’t know what’s sadder — this scenario or the fact that most relationships aren’t that much different. One revelation, one realization, one hidden secret away from collapsing the whole house of cards.

I do not look him in the eye. I do not speak unless spoken to. Once the rate has been set and the retainer has been paid, I am a ghost in the presence of the john. He does not know my name. I do not know his. I am entirely anonymous, aside from the fact that I am, in a way, the guardian of this girl and his secrets.

I try not to think so much during the down time. The Cavs game on the radio, late night call-in talk shows, crossword puzzles, hollow but needed conversation with strangers at the hotel bar — any and all distractions must be utilized to avoid the quicksand of thinking about what I’m doing or where I’ve been. Like so many others, I focus on and lead a life within a life, carrying on text and phone conversations with friends and lovers of a past life who are hundreds and thousands of miles away in geography and beyond. Technology has provided us with the opportunity to transform them from static memory to active distraction from present reality.

Though I try not to, I picture Mr. C’s contorted face in the heat of the moment, and in my mind it’s not much different than Lee’s back at dispatch. I see through Mari’s act to the bored face and dead eyes. A drop of Mr. C’s sweat falls on her collarbone and it chills her to the core. She tries to focus on the Saturday Night Live monologue coming from the unwatched T.V., but can’t block out the pathetic and passionate call of her name.

Then again, what do I know? Maybe it’s not all that bad.

Once boredom sets in, I find myself chastising him out loud, demanding that he hurry up and get on with it. I ponder how a man as old as he is can go this long. I rifle through the radio dial and light a cigarette and sometimes take an unnecessary spin around the block to watch the parade of the desolate stalk through the decaying streets of Cleveland. Perhaps she’s in the midst of receiving an awkward display of affection or confession. They’re fairly common from what I’ve been told. A lot of the girls have reported tricks that involved more rudimentary therapy than fucking.

Most roads of thought lead to the conclusion that the hollow transaction between the two aren’t much different than the vast majority of relationships I’ve survived and witnessed. I’d like to think that more often than not I let romanticism win out over cynical nihilism, but it’s not easy in the confines of a heated Lexus, protected from the schizophrenics that pound the pavement looking for marks, floors below Mari and Mr. C, listening to the news at the top and bottom of every hour that’s made up of reports of chaotic inhumanity and gross incompetence; talking idly with ghosts from the past who converse for the exact same reason – a lack of passion for what’s in front of us and a desire for a life that’s passed.

On the way back, he wraps his arms around her hips and kisses her neck. She puts on a fine act, but I can hear the patronization in her breaths and giggles, and I can feel her body squirm as it happens, and, every once in awhile, she darts a quick, frantic and hopeless glance directly at the rear view mirror.

Mari and I have a fairly professional relationship. Granted, we do our fair share of illegal narcotics in front of each other, and over time we’ve managed to pick up a few of each others idiosyncrasies, and occasionally we’ll knock off for a quick drink where we’ll toss out a few scraps about our personality and history. But for the most part I don’t know her and she doesn’t know me.

Although, lately, when I catch that glance, it’s the closest and most honest bond that I feel with anyone.

I loved arguing over useless trivia in bars
until the last straw was to bet shots
but now someone just grabs their phone
and says ‘Big came out in 1988.’

There was something to having to wait
until my father finished the Sports page
to find out how we lost.

I miss recording songs off of the radio
the tape catching the last few bits of DJ banter.

I wish I still got handwritten letters in the mail.

Chris Vincent had gotten some pot from his brother, but I passed on it. He couldn’t roll joints very well so they burned unevenly and little bits of pot always fell out into your mouth. Plus, it was brown and there were seven of us.

A half hour or so before kickoff we trudged our way out of the woods, the leaves crunching beneath our feet and our heads buzzing with the kind of raw intoxication that every alcoholic’s been trying to chase for years. Chris walked backwards in front of us, promising he would call his brother from a payphone and convince him to give us a ride. Bill claimed that if he saw Jared Dawson after the game he was going to fight him. He asked if we would back him up. I said yes, but I didn’t mean it.

Julianne was standing with a friend just behind the strip of yellow paint adorning the curb when we pulled up. As always, she’d looked slightly different than I had been picturing her – her eyes weren’t as blue as I’d remembered and it appeared that she’d caked on some make-up where a blemish had started to form on her forehead.

Chris’ brother drove an old Chevy Beretta, black except for where the paint had peeled back along the edges of the hood, exposing rusted steel. Its trunk housed an expensive stereo system that rattled the car when the bass notes hit. After the last of us had piled out, he shouted ‘Later, homos’, squealing the tires as he left the parking lot. A trail of smoke floated up from the black tracks left behind.

She was wearing a blue windbreaker and tattered designer jeans that flared out just above her sneakers. Her hands were tucked in her back pockets and she blew a couple strands of her bangs upward before noticing me and smiling. I smiled back and followed my friends towards the stadium.

We usually only watched a quarter or so of the game, sometimes a little more if any of our friends got playing time. Most of the games were spent underneath the bleachers, along the rows of concession stands and bathrooms, where everyone gathered to talk about how much they had drank and where they planned to drink afterwards. The general consensus this weekend was that Marty McCann’s parents were out of town, or so that’s what they had all heard. Everyone laughed and complained about whatever they could find to fill conversation – how cold it was, friends that ditched them, the perceived stereotypes of the school we were playing, etc.

We made our way through the various cliques for a while, saying hello and shaking hands like politicians, and ended up on the side of the brick wall behind one of the concession stands to smoke cigarettes. Nobody ever went back there except for Mrs. Larkin, the principal’s secretary, who was always smoking herself, and before she left always did the thing where she zipped her lips shut with her fingers and tossed an imaginary key into air.

Julianne didn’t smoke, but had filtered in with a friend or two who did. She bounced her legs up and down and rubbed her arms and made shivering noises. I tried to make casual transitions from acquaintance to acquaintance, using them as swinging vines to have a reason to be near her. I managed to make my way over to Mark Morris, who stood just to her left, and struck up a conversation about gym class, my stare catching hers every thirty seconds or so. We switched off a couple of times, her staring and me looking away, and vice versa.

‘Hey.’

‘Hey.’

‘So I hear Marty McCann’s having people over,’ I say, shoving my hands in my pockets. I can hear Bill behind me, the alcohol already warping his words, asking if anyone had seen Jared Dawson.

‘Yeah, I think Lisa and I are going.’

‘Cool, well maybe I’ll see you there.’

Eventually we all shuffled back into the stands and made our way up the bleachers, making a slow procession as we stopped every now and again to say hello to various classmates. We ran into Marty McCann, who reluctantly admitted his parents were out of town.

‘You guys can come…but just you guys,’ he warned. ‘I don’t want to the whole school showing up.’ I was sure he had remarked this at least a dozen or so more times, and was going to be in over his head in a few hours.

In the third quarter, our friend Keith returned an interception for a touchdown, and we stomped on the metal planks and high fived. Bill screamed and thumped his chest like he’d done it himself. Despite the score still being close, we left before the end of the game to fetch the beer Chris had stolen from his neighbor’s garage earlier that afternoon. Marty McCann lived about a fifteen minute walk from the stadium, in a subdivision called Seabury Pines. His father was on the school board and his house always smelled like it was new. Bill led the way, the cubed backpack slung over his shoulder, strutting like a prize fighter, and ranting like rappers do about how great he was, and how fucked up he was, and how badly he was going to fuck up Jared Dawson.

I ran into Julianne while standing in the hallway waiting to use the bathroom and studying the family portrait on the wall. In it, Marty McCann’s hair was slicked with a neat part, the hands of his balding and pudgy father resting firmly on his shoulders. His was wearing a thick, fuzzy sweater and his smile was rather apathetic.

‘So did we win or lose?’

‘You didn’t stay for the whole game?’

‘No, we dipped out to grab some beers we had stashed in the woods.’

‘You guys have beers?’

“Sure, you want one?’

‘Sure.’

I waited around while she was in the bathroom, telling the small group that formed behind me that I wasn’t in line, and once she emerged we migrated into the kitchen. A group of football players, their hair still slick from the shower, sat around a table playing drinking games with a deck of cards. Chris was flirting with Lisa Savola in front of the fridge, his arm rested on a Polaroid of Mr. McCann hoisting up a large fish. I squeezed between the two of them to grab the beers, making sure to talk him up as I passed. Lisa gave Julianne an eyebrow raise.

We found a seat on a couch in the living room – the same couch featured in the McCann family portrait – and drank our beers slowly, half-shouting to each other over the throngs of other conversations bouncing around the room.

‘So you’re friends with Bill Lando and them?’

‘Uh, yeah.’

‘That’s cool. I hang out with Lisa and Janessa and all of those girls. It’s…I don’t know, they’re cool.’

‘Yeah, I know what you mean.’

Two of her friends came over, demanding us to check out the basement, where a large group had gathered to dance, an activity I’m certain that Mr. McCann didn’t envision when he’d built his rec room complete with entertainment system and bar. Lined along the walls were framed scorecards and pictures of his friends on the golf course. A metal sign hung above the bar reading ‘A bad day on the course beats a good day at the office’. The room still smelled of fresh carpet.

We danced to a Prince song. I hung my hands limply around her waist, and she tossed hers around my neck. Her skin was sticky with sweat and her perfume smelled like something purple. I fumbled my hands around her body, not quite being able to figure out which areas were off-limits. I could feel an erection swelling.

We continued on like this for a few minutes until it got to the part of the song where Prince starts moaning like he’s having an orgasm, at which point we swayed our arms and legs a bit, just to show that we were in it to the end. Bill, wearing one of Mr. McCann’s novelty golf hats with a big foam ball and tee on the brim, turned off the song, telling everyone that Prince was gay.

The crowd moaned and dispersed a bit, and Julianne and I made our way upstairs to get another beer. I stuck out my hand behind me and she latched onto it. I looked back for a quick second to notice a band aid on knuckle of her index finger. We ran into Chris at the top of the steps, who told us that Jared Dawson had arrived and dashed downstairs to find Bill.

‘Get that fuck out of here’, Bill yelled with a shit-eating grin, slapping Chris’ outstretched palm. We had all piled out into the front lawn to witness the aftermath.

Jared Dawson looked like he might’ve cried if half of his algebra class hadn’t been standing around him. Blood had already begun to pool and blacken inside the pockets of flesh underneath his eye. The skin of his right temple had been scraped raw by the tile floor, a few stray strands of his hair matted to it. He looked like he might say something, gathering his thoughts as he panted, but he just spat some blood into the grass and walked off, having to push off my shoulder to get through the circle.

Bill had wasted no time. There was none of the posturing that normally took place during our high school’s fights. They didn’t spend time circling each other, asking what the other’s problem was or disputing statements made. Bill just bounded up the stairs, tore right past Julianne and I, and knocked him back through the kitchen and up against the fridge. A few magnets and post it notes went flying into the air. Marty McCann rushed in, pleading hysterically and tried to fight his way through the yelling crowd that swallowed them to break things up. I tried to jump up and down and get a glimpse, but all I could hear was Bill’s fist smacking into flesh.

I don’t really even remember why Bill had wanted to fight Jared Dawson. There probably wasn’t any real reason. There never really needed to be with Bill. He may have cited something about an errant comment heard in the hallway, but in all likelihood it was just Friday night and Bill had settled on Jared Dawson.

Jared was good looking and had a driver’s license and a spot on the baseball team; Bill lived in a trailer with an alcoholic mother, paid for his lunch with one of those little green punch cards and rode his bike around town. And he didn’t like that, so in frustration he cleaned his clock. That’s probably as good a guess as any.

‘Goddamnit! Fuck! I am so fucked! You guys have to leave now! Everybody! Out!’ An indignant Marty McCann had been pacing back and forth in the kitchen when the police arrived. He had been holding the jagged remains of his mother’s sugar bowl and ranting on like this for several minutes until his eyes caught the red and blues flashes through the window. His shoulders drooped and his eyes filled with a vacant, weary anguish.

Bill and Chris were the first out the back door, followed by me and Julianne, whom I dragged the first few steps by the arm. A few scattered others trailed behind, pushing at our backs and tripping over our heels as we dashed off into the woods in all different directions, trying to call out to each other in a half-yell, half-whisper for instructions on where to meet.

The four of us ended up crouched behind a pair of large trees, unable to see anything aside from the occasionally sweeping flashlight near the clearing. I breathed as slowly as possible, wondering if she could hear the pounding inside my chest as well as I could.

No one spoke for what seemed like an eternity, until Bill – the veteran in these types of situations – rose and announced that it was probably clear to exit the woods, promising knowledge of a back trail that led towards the interstate. A few others emerged from behind various trees and as a group we began high stepping through the trail over branches, our arms extended for balance, Bill Lando leading the way.

We ended up at the Motel 6 near the interstate. Chris had called his brother on a payphone and gotten him to rent us a couple of rooms with the money we all threw together. Bill had managed to get the tattooed clerk with the black and jagged teeth at the gas station to sell him a couple cases of beer.

It hadn’t taken more than three or four calls for the cavalcade of Honda Civics to come rolling in. Two more rooms across the parking lot were rented, and we picked up where we had left off, oblivious to the agony Marty McCann was probably going through at that moment.

‘I’m really sorry about tonight’ I said to Julianne as we sat next to each other on the itchy maroon and green bedspread, oblivious to the Letterman monologue coming from the television bolted to the wall. ‘Bill’s kind of crazy sometimes.’

‘It’s really not a big deal.’

‘Sometimes I wonder why I hang out with those guys.’ Chris mimicked porno music as Bill pretended to hump the other bed, grunting like a gorilla, everyone around them laughing.

‘I know what you mean.’ She squeezed my hand and smiled at me. ‘My friends are idiots, too.’

‘And yet here we are.’

‘I don’t think it ever stops,’ she said, sipping her beer. ‘You just go from hotel parties to frat parties to dinner parties to retirement parties, and you just have to shrug off the fact that they’re all idiots…we’re all idiots.’

‘I don’t think you’re an idiot.’

‘Thank you,’ she said with a laugh, glancing down at her lap. ‘I don’t think I am, either. But, I mean, I’m still going to mall with Lisa tomorrow, right? I’m going to stand around and nod while she talks shit about everyone and acts like she’s got herself together.’

We didn’t say anything for a while. Letterman threw his pencil at the camera while Paul Shaffer laughed and ran his hand down the piano. I thought about Jared Dawson, and Marty McCann, and all we give up to make it seem like we’re not vulnerable. Bill recounted the fight for the third time for those who just arrived, his bravado rivaling a pro wrestler with a microphone in his face.

‘You remember that poem from Mrs. Stanton’s class?’ she asked. ‘Laugh, and the world laughs with you, weep, and you weep alone?’ I think that goes both ways. Like, it’s not cool to be sad, but you can’t be too happy, either. If you’re like, bursting with joy until you can’t contain yourself, people think that’s weird, too.’ She picks at her fingernails. ‘Sometimes I don’t think I really tell my friends anything. By the time I filter it down…it’s a half-truth at best.’

‘I know exactly what you mean.’

‘Enough Breakfast Club over here,’ Bill said, my face flushing with warmth upon realizing he’d been listening. ‘Hit this.’ He thrust a plastic half-pint of bottom shelf whiskey towards us. His eyes were glassy and the cuts on his knuckles were still glistening.

‘Hit it, girl!’ her friend Lisa chirped from across the room, and everyone ooh’ed like a Three’s Company audience. We both took sips from the bottle, and I had to swallow down a little bit of bile.

‘Danny’s a good guy,’ Bill said as Julianne hands him back the bottle, slapping my back. ‘Fuckin’ smart.’ He stumbled off to the bathroom and we smiled at each other.

‘Do you want to get out of here?’

‘Very much so.’

I walked her home, which was about a half a mile down Route 84. We didn’t talk about much – The Barenaked Ladies, our biology teacher’s propensity for scratching at his chest hair, how cold out it was – but I still felt like we were learning things about each other. She kissed me under a streetlight and told me to call her some time. I stood outside until she shut off the bedroom light. On the way back, I tried to reach Chris or Bill from the payphone by the Dairy Mart, but no one picked up. I walked home amidst a disjointed symphony of crickets, the occasional whoosh of a car passing chiming in like a cymbal crash, wondering about the person that she hid from the world.

She meets me on the platform at Damen, standing next to a ‘No Smoking’ sign while taking a drag from her cigarette, headphones plugged into her ears. She doesn’t notice me, and when I touch her shoulder she’s startled a bit.

‘How was your night?’ she asks, yanking the buds from her ears.

‘It was OK. You?’

‘Eh. Went out with a few friends.’ She looks at the wooden planks beneath us and digs the ball of her foot into the ground like she’s grinding out a cigarette. ‘It was pretty lame.’

Those are the last we words we share before taking the train back to her place. We sit together in silence, the same familiar recorded voice droning about policies on solicitation and gambling, and I realize that I’m here because she provides distraction, but that I always manage to get lost in my own head, anyway.

Lying awake in her bed afterwards, all I can think about is The Tin Man. I still feel as lonely as he probably is. And at this moment, I still think I might switch places with him.

I’d rather be crazy than in love.

Where is it? I could’ve sworn I took it off in the living room. Goddamn it, you don’t need the top hat. The top hat doesn’t define you. You can go places without it. God forbid you lose it one day. Who do you need to impress, anyway? The 7-Eleven guy? The 30-year-old chubby guy with a brow ring who always has to say “Welcome to the jungle!” every time you walk in, as if it were funny the first time. I fucking hate that guy. Did I leave it in the car maybe?

I really need to quit smoking. I should at least cut back. No smoking after 11 p.m., while playing guitar, or during photo shoots. Starting now. After this next pack. It shouldn’t be all that hard. I can do that. Where the hell are my sunglasses?

It’s getting cold, I really should wear a shirt. Every year you say, “Oh, a leather jacket is enough,” and every year you end up sick for a week. He’s going to ask about a reunion again. No, I haven’t talked to Axl since you asked last Wednesday; I have no idea what Duff is up to; yes, “Mr. Brownstone” is about heroin. Now just ring up my cigarettes and let me get the hell out of here. I should just drive to Circle K so I don’t have to deal with that guy.

I should just buy cartons. It would be so much easier. And cheaper. I just can’t bring myself to do it. It’s like admitting that I can’t quit. Pack to pack, at least you can promise yourself … Who the hell am I kidding? I’ll never quit.

I wonder if Axl still has the number to that hypnotist that helped him. Maybe I should give him a call. It’s been long enough. Time heals all wounds, right? Just be an adult about it. Call him up, say, “Hey, I’m sorry I walked out of your wedding, I just didn’t really approve at the time, I should’ve kept it to myself, but I was young and all I could think to do was to rip a solo in a sandstorm.” He’d understand. They’re divorced now, anyway. But what if he’s with that guy with the bucket on his head? I’d look like a total loser calling him then.

It’s got to be around here somewhere. You would think I’d have picked up more than one top hat by now. Let’s see—I walked in, took off the scarf, checked my messages, went to the kitchen, poured some Jack. I can distinctly remember wearing it then. Or was I? Did I leave it at Cindy’s?

Get it together, Slash. Think. Maybe I left it in the—oh, man, the bathroom! I’m such an idiot. I spend 20 minutes walking all over the house and I don’t even look in the bathroom once! From now on, it goes on the hook first thing, as soon as I walk in the door. All right, top hat, nose ring, sunglasses … now, where are my keys?

It’s been awhile since I’ve found myself this far deep into this sort of gooey, seventh-grade infatuation, and to be honest it’s a bit scary. I think I might be getting a little too old to handle the next bit. Or at least I should be. It’s not going to be easy.

I will run into her at a party, and be on edge for every second I am in her presence (actually, even at the mere mention of her name). Every nerve in my body will be buzzing and throbbing. Every cool line I had saved up for the moment will go out the window, and I will stutter and stammer and later on play Monday morning quarterback regarding what I should have said. I will try to work clarifications and corrections into a later conversation, but it will fester inside until that time comes.

I will learn things about her in passing, things like the fact that she isn’t fond of dogs or that she is considering pursuing graduate school. I will nod and take them in without much alarm, but later on that night I will have to scramble to amend the plans I had mapped out for us in my head.

I will Google her name. It will list nothing but the results from a high school track meet she ran in five years ago (2:16.23 in the 800-meter). I will learn from the student directory that her middle name is Madison.

I will hear stories of her past sexual escapades, and will have to laugh passively as if to say ‘Oh, you crazy girl!’ while my guts coil into a queasy knot. I will have to spend at least a few nights lying awake in bed, thinking about her blowing Kenny Conway in a hotel bathroom (Kenny fucking Conway!).

There will be the nights I won’t see her – most nights, actually – which will drag on listlessly. I will sit at the bar and halfheartedly stare at a baseball game I don’t care about, tuning out a friend’s rambling as I ponder the infinite possibilities of what she could be doing. I will go home early because ‘I just don’t feel like drinking’.

I will eventually have to bite the bullet and ask her out. Not one of those things where we meet up amongst friends and talk at a party, but a bold offer for exclusive company, one that will unravel all of the indifferent-yet-intrigued mystique I had worked so hard to build up. I will dial six digits and hang up a few times. I might play a song or two to psyche myself up, maybe even jot down an outline of what I plan to say. If the call goes to voicemail, I will leave a clumsy, fumbling message that carries on far too long.

As I ask there will be an incredible suction pulling at my guts, the kind you feel at the top of the roller coaster or when the road takes an unexpected dip, except much more intense. If she declines that suction feeling will reside for a couple of weeks. Prince will be replaced by Bob Dylan and Ryan Adams and every other sad love song I own.

If she accepts, that will bring up the challenge of The Date. I will have to downplay it, and act cool, showing that I don’t really feel like its The Date, just a date. But it won’t be. I will be up early, making sure I have everything ready – razor, hair gel, cologne. My top caliber shirt – the one with the pointy collars – will have a mysterious stain on it and I will have to rush frantically to the dry cleaners, even though I have ten or so hours to go. I will meticulously scrub every orifice of my body in a half-hour shower that takes every last drop of hot water, and play the Rolling Stones as I get ready, combing my hair into a hundred different never-before-attempted styles before doing it the same way I always have. I will pull sixty dollars from the ATM that afternoon, even though I will probably only need twenty or so. I will arrive ten minutes after I had said I would, just to look careless.

I will backtrack like a politician whenever she disagrees with a stated preference or dislike. ‘Well, I don’t really hate it, but…’ Even the most insignificant shared common interest – a mutual appreciation of The Sopranos or my knowledge of a restaurant in her hometown– will lead me to believe that this girl and I really click. We are two of the same. We match. This is when I decide that we will have two boys, and hope she doesn’t mind Dylan and Lennon. I will try to think of names for girls, but nothing will sound as pretty as Emily.

If I get on the dance floor with her, which will most certainly happen at some point if things go well, I will make an ass out of myself. The cool moves in front of my mirror will suddenly not seem all that cool, and the music won’t be the Prince I had envisioned in my head, but rather something along the lines of ‘Shake Ya Ass’ or ‘Back That Ass Up’. I will have most likely had one too many and just sort of gyrate awkwardly and hang my hands limply around her waist. I will question every move frantically. Should I move closer to her? Rub my crotch against her ass? Is that going too far? What if she thinks I’m prude for not?

When I drop her off at home there will be The Good Night Kiss Debacle. I will say something stupid, like ‘I had fun tonight’, because I can’t think of anything better to say. She’ll repeat that and we’ll promise to call, and then I will have to act. I will offer up a handshake for a quick second before pulling it away and throwing my arms out for a hug. As we move close I will notice that she had moved her head in for a second, and I will question it. Was she going in? Did she want a kiss? Have I blown the chance? To make up for it, I will try to kiss her on the cheek but will be off and catch half her eye.

Completely disgusted with myself, I will try to come up with some banter long enough to warrant a second goodbye. I won’t have anything and will repeat my promise to call again and just stand around in silence. We will giggle nervously and I will move in for a kiss and she will too, faster than I will have calculated, resulting in our teeth clacking together.

The second date will be quite similar to the first, with slightly less pressure. I will realize in preparation that my second-best shirt is not all that impressive, and will have to fly out to the mall to pick up something new. Halfway through the date I will realize in the bathroom that I forgot to take off the sticky plastic strip lined with the repetitious first letter of the shirt size.

At the end of this date the kiss will be a little less gawky, but nonetheless troublesome. We will make-out in front of her door for far too long. I will run out of moves and have to repeat them, going back and forth from lips to her cheek, her neck, down to her collarbone and back up again until it becomes tedious. I will wonder if she’s going to ask me in. She won’t, and on the walk home I will feel like I have done something wrong – that maybe she was going to ask me in for a drink, but the whole lips-to-cheek-to-neck-to-collarbone-and-back thing changed her mind.

I will both anticipate and dread the first sexual encounter. I will want nothing more than for her to just rip her clothes off, but then again, what kind of girl hops right into bed on the third date? What if I can’t get it up? When have I ever not been able to not get it up? Will those boner pills they sell in the bowling alley bathroom help me fuck longer? What if she has weird moles? Do her breasts look like I picture them? What if she’s crazy and kinky and likes to be slapped? Would I be willing to wear some weird leather body suit and a ball gag? Is Kenny Conway’s dick bigger than mine?

It will happen on a night that I hadn’t planned for it to. I will run into her at a bar, wearing a thrift store t-shirt. I will not have shaved that morning, and my deodorant will have begun to wear off. When she asks if I would like to go somewhere else, I will abandon my friends without a second thought.

There will be some sounds and smells and mishandled groping that hadn’t been anticipated in my fantasies, but on the whole it will go rather seamlessly– no moles or whips. Afterwards I will not be able to sleep. I will lie there long after the initial glow has worn off and listen to the crickets outside, wondering if it would be alright to go downstairs and make a sandwich.

The next morning I will take her to Bob Evans for breakfast and realize how pretty she still looks without make-up. We will have eggs and coffee and talk about the papers we have to write that evening. On the way back home I will drum the steering wheel with authority and sing along with Steve Perry. When the guitar solo wails I will pump my fist and clench my teeth in jubilation. I will decide ‘Open Arms’ should be our wedding song.

We will begin calling each other at random times, even if we don’t really have anything to talk about. There will be times late at night where we won’t even say anything at all for long intervals – we will just sit in silence content to know that we’re on the line together. There will be all sorts of cutesy gifts – if she comes down with a mild cold I will bring over a Blockbuster rental and some soup – and I will have to choose a pet name for her.

I will get to know her roommates, and say hi to them on my way to class. Sometimes late at night I will run into them in the hallway as I’m trying to navigate my way to the bathroom, disheveled and in my boxers. After awhile the situation will become so comfortable that I might crack a joke.

I will realize one night, as I hold her hair while she vomits in some bushes after having a bit too much to drink at the bar, that I love her. I won’t tell her right then. It will come out during a mundane Tuesday evening phone conversation; I will have meant to have saved it for sometime special, but she’ll have said something cute and it will just pop out. She will say it back.

If I can find a way to get through all of this in one piece, things will become a bit more manageable, less chaotic. I can just enjoy being with her, without having to wrestle with all the hassles of Kenny Conway or boners or how I should comb my hair. I won’t have to try to remember what her eyes look like, or rush out to get a last-minute haircut before we get together.

All of this nauseous, panicky doubt will fade away, and I will settle back into being a relatively rational twenty-two year old. Unless, of course, we happen to break-up. But that’s a whole other scenario that I don’t have time to think about right now. I have to get ready for the party. Emily will be there.

This Erica girl’s profile is private, so she can’t find out about her or see what Sean has written to her. She looks intimidatingly pretty in her picture, but then again, everyone’s putting their best foot forward there, right? Ashley had sifted through hundreds of photos while putting off a paper before choosing her own, going with one from a summer cookout where her skirt was flowing and her hair was full of body and she looked engaged in the moment, barely aware of the camera’s existence but too caught up to give it any thought. This Erica is holding a beer in a clear plastic cup, sweaty and on a dance floor, laughing manically yet still looking fantastic. Like it was taken last week, and chosen on whim. She’s seen her dress in a store somewhere before, but can’t place where, envying not having the sense to pick it up, wherever it had been. Her post on Sean’s wall is innocuous enough, but there are too many LOL’s and exclamation points for it not to be a missile of flirtation, evidence of something that’s budding or sustaining. Clicking out of Facebook, her whole body twists in a sharp slither, a seemingly involuntary twitch brought on by a sudden pang of guilt and shame at her perversion. Snap out of it, Ash. It’s Friday.

She’d only taken Adderall a few times, and never without it serving as a precursor to heightened performance in long put off academic assignments. A lot of the girls in her hall had. They’d said it keeps you going longer, helps you stay a little bit more alert after the second Long Island. Curbs hunger, too. Without the frantic stress of looming deadlines, or the intent focus on a task at hand, she suddenly finds herself much more aware of its effects. She notices the terseness and tenseness of her breathing pattern, and attempts to corral it back to normal, which only results in a frantic yet calibrated in-and-out thrust from her nose, her teeth clenched as her body feels torn between jittery discomfort and fierce, needy desire.

She will fuck Sean tonight, for the same reasons that she popped the pill on a Friday night with no sign of a test or paper- a simultaneous desire to both fit in and be someone that she is not.

Unplugging her headphones and turning up her speakers, she dances towards her dresser with a goofiness and precision that she wouldn’t dare display in public. She fishes through the top drawer and pulls out the pair of aqua underwear with lace and a little frilly ring at the center she had purchased last weekend during the trip to the mall with a few girls from her floor. She had held them up and squealed, poking her tongue through her teeth while the others cooed and made vague references to a lucky boy. In her head, at the time, that boy was Sean, though she thought herself the lucky girl. Plucking the matching bra from the drawer, she tosses them onto the bed and begins sifting through the closet.

Flicking through hangers, she imagines flirting with Sean, dancing with Sean, having sex with Sean, Sean having sex with Erica, Sean sleeping with Erica, taking Erica to breakfast. Fuck, Ash, why did you take that pill?

She glances at herself in the thin bookstore mirror that hangs on the wall. She gives it her best pose, trying to imagine herself in something more elegant than soccer shorts and a t-shirt, but can’t see the beauty she strives to be assured of. Sure, her hair looks nice, and she knows she has a set of legs, but so do half the girls going out tonight. She’s smart (3.7 GPA) and listens to thoughtful music (Death Cab, Modest Mouse, etc.) and can hold her own in most conversations, but more often than not she seems lost — she doesn’t know a lot of the things that seem to be common knowledge around these parts. For one, she’s still not sure if she sucks dick well. They’ve seemed satisfied, of course, but it would take something catastrophic for them not to, right? She’s heard the bar gossip about who’s a firecracker and who’s a fish, she’s heard her friends cavalierly and knowingly recount blowjobs. Where does she measure up? How can she compete with that?

She looks in the mirror and all she can see is a scared kid.

Tonight will be different. A new beginning. A confident Ashley. She’s going to break out of her shell. She’s going to be somebody different. She’s going to take the bull by the horns. She’s going to prove her worth. Her dance moves get more sharp and flamboyant as she tells herself this. She slinks around like girls on television do, never for a second believing or feeling that’s she’s sexy, but working at formulating an act convincing enough to dupe others.

She’s not aware of the fact that she’s going to bed with someone tonight, whether or not it’s Sean. By breakfast, she will be a woman who has had sex with more than just one man.

Picking out a dress that she purchased with the woman she wants to be in mind, she heads off towards the bathroom to apply her warpaint before slipping into the chosen armor and heading into battle.

I never knew that Washington owned slaves until Doug, this guy that I work with, told me. He said that Washington treated them like shit and didn’t free them when he was supposed to. At first I didn’t really believe him, because I’d never heard any of that before, and he’s like thirty and still works in a restaurant. But then I asked Mr. Hanson, my History teacher, and he said that it was a different time and blah blah blah, but at the end of the day, he didn’t say that Doug was wrong. So this big hero who’s on money and carved into rocks and all that was a complete dick, and everyone knows it, but they go along with it, anyway.

Turns out Doug’s right about a lot of other things, too. He hates conservatives, but he doesn’t like Bill Clinton, either. He says Clinton bombed an aspirin factory and killed a bunch of innocent people, and cheated on his wife. When I told my dad about all of this, he said nobody was perfect, and that we voted Democrat, because the alternative was worse, and long story short, Doug was right and my dad votes for a guy who bombs factories and cheats on his wife.

We work at Wings & Things on Belmont Street, in a shopping plaza between a movie theater and a Starbucks. It’s a sports bar that’s as big as a warehouse and is always about ten degrees colder than it needs to be. I work after school on Tuesdays and Thursdays until ten, and on Saturdays from five until midnight. Doug works every night except Sunday, all the way up to closing time. I usually work the wing station or the fryers. Doug’s always on the grill. He has a long goatee and listens to music where the lead singers just scream. During breaks he sits on milk crates out back, smoking and reading science fiction books. He always smells like dishwater and cigarettes.

Tonight’s the last Saturday of the month, which means that the regular manager has the night off, and so Doug is in charge. I like these shifts because he lets me cut corners and usually lets me leave early, which means I get to see ‘Saturday Night Live’ from the beginning. Plus, it’s usually when he tells me about things like Washington’s slaves or how the war on drugs is an excuse to put poor people in jail. When the regular manager is around he laughs at what Doug says and calls him Carl Marks, so he doesn’t talk as much.

‘Minor, I’m ready for three fries and a shroom,’ he says, wiping his brow with his forearm, the burgers on the grill sounding like tires going through a puddle as he flips them. Doug calls me ‘Minor’, but I don’t really mind, because he treats me like more of an adult than anybody. He’ll buy me cigarettes, if I ask him, and tells me about all the things nobody else does. And one time, when I came into the back office, he tossed a condom at me and said ‘Keep your tool cool.’ I know it was just a joke, but he wouldn’t have made it if he thought I was just a kid.

‘Got it,’ I say, lifting up the breaded mushrooms that bobble around the crackling grease pool like misshapen lottery balls. We dart around to the hiss of fryers and the chirp of timers while Ozzy Osbourne sings about going insane. Everyone always talks about kitchen jobs like they’re for idiots, but they can be pretty hard sometimes. Each ticket has a bunch of different things on it, and they all need to be cooked and organized and go out in order, as fast as possible. Sometimes they don’t stop coming in for an hour or two. I bet if all of those people who talk about it like it’s so easy had to do it, they’d screw up every once in a while, too.

My favorite part about Doug being in charge is that he’ll let you make whatever food that you want. Once dinner rush has died down, I always make a Caesar salad with chicken and bring it over to Megan, who works at the movie theater, because I like her and that’s what she orders whenever she comes in. I try to make it perfect, just like it is on the menu photo, and Phil, one of the other cooks, always makes fun of me.

‘Is that for your girlfriend?’ he always says, but he’ll say it in a mean way, as if having a girlfriend or wanting one is supposed to be embarrassing.

‘She’s not my girlfriend,’ I always say, like I’m angry, even though I kind of want her to be.

‘Shut the fuck up, Phil,’ Doug always says. ‘When’s the last time you got any?’ Phil usually stops talking then, just like Doug does when the manager calls him Carl Marks.

I think about Megan all the time, but for some reason I can never quite remember what she looks like, and so it’s always a bit of a surprise when I first see her. At the movie theater, she has to wear this stupid puffy white shirt with a vest and a bowtie and put her hair up, but she still always looks so pretty it makes me feel like I’m going over the crest of a rollercoaster.

‘You have no idea how much I love you right now,’ she says when she sees me carrying the salad, the steam from the chicken frosting the lid. The movie theater is as drafty as Wings & Things, and there’s a big poster of Brad Pitt holding up a bar of soap and staring down at us. ‘If you didn’t bring this, my dinner would’ve been popcorn and gummy bears.’

I don’t say anything, my brain still stuck back in the first part. I know she didn’t really mean it, but she said it, and when a girl you like says those words, even if they’re kidding, it still feels nice. But then she added ‘right now’, which means that she doesn’t at other times, and I keep thinking stuff like that for a while and just smiling like an idiot until she snaps me out of it.

‘Busy tonight?’

‘A little bit’, I say, looking at the teardrop swirls in the maroon and green carpet. ‘But there’s no football or boxing, so I’ll probably get out early. You?’

‘I get out at eleven fifteen, right after the last movie starts.’

‘That’s cool,’ I say, shifting my weight from foot to foot. Whenever I’m around Megan, I suddenly become aware of things I never normally notice, like how I’m standing, or what I’m doing with my hands. ‘I’ll probably just go home and watch ‘Saturday Night Live’. The guy from ‘The X-Files’ is on.’

‘I’ve never seen that show.’

‘’Saturday Night Live’?’

‘No, ‘The X-Files’. Is it scary?’

‘Not really. It’s mostly about the FBI and aliens.’

‘Do you believe in aliens?’

‘I don’t know. Everybody lies about everything else, so probably.’

Just then her boss walks by, and she straightens her back and stops leaning on the counter. He looks at us for a second before walking off.

“Well, thanks for the salad,’ she says.

‘Sure, no problem.’

We’re not very busy for the rest of the night. Doug and Phil play a game where they try to fling onion slices onto a pair of tongs, and I get most of the dishes done. A little after ten, Doug has me clean all of the boxes out of the cooler and freezer, and together we take all of the trash out back.

‘You smoke weed yet, Minor?’ he asks with a cocked eyebrow, lighting the little white twig his lips are clamped around.

‘Yeah,’ I say, though I only did once with my friend Dan and his older sister, and I don’t think I did it right, because I didn’t feel anything. He takes a big puff and hands it to me.

‘Don’t tell anyone,’ he says with a wheeze, glancing around the back lot as he exhales. ‘How’d it go with Caesar Salad Girl?’

‘I dunno. We talked about ‘The X-Files’. She said she got off at eleven fifteen.’

‘Did you ask her out?’

‘No.’

‘You should ask her out.’

‘You think?’ I take too big of a puff and end up coughing and hacking until my eyes water.

‘Maybe not when you’re stoned,’ he says with a laugh, plucking the joint from my fingers. ‘But, yeah. Unless you’re content with just bringing her salads once a month. You just got your paycheck, right? What better way to spend your hard-earned money than on a girl you like?’ He takes a drag and stares off at the lights from the grocery store before starting to toss bags of trash into the dumpster. “Gotta have a reason for doing this shit, right, Minor?’

He lets me go home after we finish up trash. I’m feeling a bit loopy, and miss the first bus because I’m just sort of watching the trees swirl. I don’t get to see the first part of ‘Saturday Night Live’, but they do a ‘Celebrity Jeopardy’ and the guy from ‘The X-Files’ is so funny that I spit up soda through my nose. While the music guest is playing, I lay two week’s pay on my bed in a row, looking at all of the sad faces. My dad says that I should save my hard-earned money. Doug thinks I should spend it on Megan. I know people like my dad or Mr. Hanson probably think that Doug is an idiot, and maybe they’re right, but I think I’m going to go with him on this one.

I like Sarah because I don’t like Sarah. I mean, I like her, but I don’t think of her when I listen to Phil Collins records. I don’t daydream about her, or empty the ashtrays before she comes over, and I’ve never wondered if she’s having sex when she doesn’t answer my call. I don’t second guess myself around her, she doesn’t make me want to be a better person, and if she fell out of my life tomorrow, I don’t think it would bother me all that much in the long run. I’ve always assumed the feeling is mutual.

She doesn’t own a car, often adds ‘dude’ or ‘man’ to the end of sentences, and keeps a flask of Evan Williams in her purse. If karaoke presents itself, she will almost always sing a Go-Go’s song, and ‘Gates of Steel’ by Devo is usually her jukebox leadoff. She wears Doc Martens with sundresses, dances like a character in a John Hughes movie, and the bottoms of her feet are always caked with dirt. Her perfume smells like mothballs; the only other time I’ve come across it is on elderly women.

She clerked for a law firm downtown for a year or so after college – owning exactly five appropriate outfit combinations that hung on a clothes rack with wheels she’d found near a strip mall dumpster – but quit last summer after selling a few paintings. Now she bartends at Crane’s. Outside of trivial details, I’m not really sure I know all that much about her.

We have breakfast during lunchtime most days, at the diner up the hill from my apartment, but we usually only talk about the night before or the day ahead, sometimes about the other people around us. Every once in a while we’ll make plans to see a movie or a show, but more often than not we just run into each other at the bar, or I call her when I’m feeling lonely. Although lately I’m starting to find myself lonelier when I’m with her than when I’m alone.

‘You ever get the feeling that you’re never going to grow up?’ she asks, hugging her knees. ‘Like, you’ll grow older or wiser, but on some level you’ll always be a step behind?’

‘I think everyone feels that way sometimes.’

‘I feel that way all the time’ she says with a sigh, running a finger over the tips of her bangs and taking a pull from her drink. ‘I thought someday I’d get to some, I don’t know, place…not where I had everything figured out or anything. But that I’d have my shit together a bit.’

‘For what it’s worth, I think you’ve got your shit together.’

‘Thanks’ she says, laughing through her nose. I can’t tell if she’s bemused or flattered. She gets up slowly, like a waking cat, and lumbers across the room toward the record player. ‘So what’s going on with us?’ she asks, flicking through the stacks before fishing out Transformer. ‘Not that anything has to be going on with us. Or not be going on.’ She fumbles with the record a bit before sliding it on and dropping the needle. Nestling back into her chair, she finally faces me, and I’ve always known that her eyes were blue, but it feels like I’m noticing it for the first time.

‘I don’t know…I like spending time with you.’

‘But we’re not dating, right?’ Her head is down, but her eyes are peering up at me. ‘I mean, it’s OK if we don’t date. I’m not even saying that I want to. I just…’ She trails off, rolling her eyes at herself and fidgeting in her chair, where she now sits yoga style. ‘Sorry, man.’

‘No, it’s fine. I, uh…I don’t know. I mean, I like you. You’re a great girl. It’s just…it’s kind of hard to explain, but it has nothing to do-’

‘Don’t.’ Her lips are so close to her jar that her voice is a muffled echo. She takes a gulp, shaking her head with a slight grin. ‘I’d rather you tell me that I’m ugly or a drunk than hear ‘it’s not you, it’s me.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘It’s always a lie.’ She swipes a strand of hair behind her ear as she gets up again, grabbing my jar and setting it next to hers on the wooden cable spool table, halving the remnants of her flask between them. ‘Even when there’s some truth to it.’

‘Well, I certainly don’t think you’re ugly,’ I say as she hands me back my jar. ‘And I find your alcoholism endearing.’ She punches me in the arm, her tongue poking through a gritted grin. ‘But seriously…I didn’t know that’s something you wanted.’

‘Like I said, I don’t know that it is. I just…’ She stamps her foot a bit, and her shoulders slump like a losing fighter hearing the decision. ‘I’ve been in a bit of a crisis mode lately…trying to come up with some sort of plan and organize my life.’ She says ‘plan’ and ‘organize my life’ as if they were alien and disdainful concepts. ‘I signed up for OK Cupid and went on a terrible date.’

‘And so dating me is the fallback after strike one on OK Cupid?’ We both laugh a little and dart our eyes every which way but toward each other.

‘I didn’t mean it like that, dude.’

‘Nah, it’s OK…in a way, that’s kind of why we’re both here, right?’ She doesn’t answer, her eyes still fixed to the ground, and so I stand up and hug her, the type where you eventually realize how long you’ve been holding each other, but still don’t let go. We stand that way for a minute or so, Lou Reed’s stilted verses taking over for the lack of conversation, and for once I don’t think about what the person I’d rather be holding is up to.

‘I’m sorry, man,’ she says, her speech stunted a bit due to her chin resting on my shoulder.

‘Don’t be.’

‘You want to watch one?’ she asks, pulling back from the embrace, but still holding me by the elbows. We’ve been watching Cheers chronologically on Netflix.

‘Sure.’ She playfully scratches my elbows, kisses me, and gives me another lengthy hug before we saunter over to the couch. We’re up to the one where Christopher Lloyd shows up and wants to paint Diane, but Sarah falls asleep long before the melancholy clarinet and piano duet signals the episode’s end. I glance over at her dormant body slumped against my shoulder and kiss her forehead. I think we both wish that we were someone else, but it’s nice to have her around, and the fact that she wants to be here reassures me that it’s not so bad.

I was trying to look like Bruce Springsteen on the ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town’ album cover. He looks tough, and he’s sneering and he seemed like someone Jenny Parker might like. But it turns out she likes guys who wear Abercrombie clothes, like Rick, and he called me a faggot, and I didn’t really feel like Bruce Springsteen on the album cover, so I tossed the jacket back in the storage room and got a job to save up for some Abercrombie clothes.

I wash dishes on the weekends at Mazarra’s near the mall. Mr. Mazarra is a friend of my grandfather’s, and he pays me twenty dollars in cash at the end of every shift. The dish tank is like a hundred degrees, and it makes your skin wrinkled and spongy. There’s usually four of us back there – me, Ramon and Luis, who don’t speak much English, and Monte, who has Down syndrome and only works until seven. There’s another guy, Wayne, but we’re not allowed to work together because he went to prison for touching kids.

It can get kind of boring because there’s no one to talk to. Sometimes Ramon and Luis will teach me dirty words in Spanish, but most of the time I just sing songs in my head. There’s that one R.E.M. song, ‘Stand’ – I like to sing that but change the words to be about what I’m doing, so in my head I’ll go ‘Stand in the place where you work, now clean forks’, and stuff like that. It helps pass the time.

When I’m not in school or at work, I like to sit in the basement and listen to my dad’s records. There are loads of them in the storage room, packed away in wooden crates, all dog-eared and faded. At first I used to play them based on what the covers looked like – I listened to Pink Floyd for the first time because they had the man shaking hands with the other man who was on fire, and the Rolling Stones because they had the real zipper on the cover and Billy Joel because he always looks sad and lonely on all of his album covers, and I feel that way a lot.

I don’t ever remember meeting my dad. Mom says I did, but he left when I was little to live with some other lady in California. I’ve never been to California, but everyone’s always singing about it, so there’s got to be something to it. One day I want to go out there and find him and talk about records. Maybe he could help me sort some of this stuff out. Mom’s great and all, but she’s not really much help. She just sits on the couch after work watching T.V. and sometimes she cries, and if I tell her about any of my problems she tells me how great I am, which I don’t really believe, because no one else seems to think so.

I’m kind of like Simon. He sings a song about how he’s alone and he doesn’t need any friends, and he seems like he’s doing OK, so maybe it will work out. He has his poetry and books, and I’m kind of like that with my dad’s records. He’s also kind of short and puny looking and has a dumb haircut, so we have a lot in common. Except that Simon probably doesn’t get a million boners and zits and I bet his voice doesn’t crack all of the time. And he says he doesn’t have friends, but then what’s Garfunkel? If he ever got too lonely he could always just call up and say ‘Hey, it’s Simon, want to write a song?’ I don’t have anyone like Garfunkel.

Tonight is our school’s Spring Dance. I didn’t want to go, because I went to the winter one and the music was crap and I just stood by the punch bowl the whole time. No one wanted to dance with me, and after a while I just waited outside the gym until my mom came to pick me up. But she says she always had fun at school dances and made friends and that I should go. Plus, I got an Abercrombie shirt last week. It was $60, which adds up to three shifts in the dish tank. Mom said that was ridiculous, and that no one should pay that much for a shirt, but when I told her that the dance was coming up and everybody wore them, she paid for half of it. She told me to save the rest and maybe use some to buy a girl ice cream after the dance. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that girls don’t like me, so I just said that I might. She’s always sad, and it would probably make her sadder to find out that I’m not as handsome as she thinks I am.

After I get out of the shower, I put on my Abercrombie shirt and try to style my hair all sorts of different ways. I make it like Sting’s, all pointy and messy, but I figure that Rick Huntington would make fun of that, so I try Rod Stewart hair, but that ends up looking just like Sting, and so I try to comb it down like the Beatles, but it’s not long enough, and even if it was Rick would probably make fun of that, too. He’s been on my case all year, ever since I wore the leather jacket. Whenever we pass in the hallways he does this thing where he jerks forward like he’s going to lunge at me, but he doesn’t, and when I flinch he laughs and knocks my books on the floor. Sometimes I really wish I was a tough fighter like Elton John or Mick Jagger, so I could just pop him square in the nose and tell him to leave me alone.

I end up doing my hair like I always do, and my mom says that I look really handsome. On the way there she asks me if there’s any girls I was thinking of dancing with, and I say maybe Jenny Parker, because the idea of me dancing with a girl seems to make her happy. She says that if Jenny and I wanted to get ice cream after the dance she could take us and even wait out in the car until we were done. I know she’s just trying to be a good mom, but it makes me want to cry because the idea seems so nice, and it will never happen in a million years.

Little circles of light bounce around the dark gym, and there are a few green and white streamers taped up in the doorway. A few girls are out in front of the DJ booth that’s set up under the basketball hoop, but they’re just kind of swaying, not really dancing. Everyone else is leaning against the walls or standing near the refreshments table.

I don’t really know what to do or who to talk to, so I duck into the bathroom for a minute, even though I don’t need to go. After that, I sort of take a lap and wind up at the DJ booth. The guy has big hoop earrings and when I ask him to play Fleetwood Mac he laughs a little. He says junior high kids don’t want to dance to Fleetwood Mac, but I tell him that I’m a junior high kid, and I dance to them all the time. He laughs again and says he’ll see what he can do. I head over to get some punch, where I run into Jenny. She has on a blueberry dress and heels with straps and her hair is swooped up. She looks really pretty.

‘How are you?’ she asks with the same chirpy sing-song voice she uses when she cheers at the football games.

‘I’m fine. You?’

‘Glad not to be in science class,’ she says, emphasizing the word ‘science’ as if it were our little secret.

‘Yeah,’ I say, and then it gets quiet for a minute.

‘I really love Third Eye Blind,’ she says, pointing towards the ceiling.

‘They’re great,’ I say, though I don’t know who Third Eye Blind is. It gets quiet again, and I start to think about the idea of dancing and ice cream and how happy my mom would be. ‘Hey, um, I asked the DJ to play a song, and he said that he would if I got people to dance to it, so maybe you could help me get some people?’

‘Sure. What song?’

‘Yeah, what song?’ Rick says as he bumps his shoulder into mine from behind.

‘Rick,’ she says with gritted teeth, stamping her foot and narrowing her eyes.

‘What? I’m just playin’, he says with a smirk, putting his arm around her shoulder. I start to walk away but Jenny follows me and grabs my wrist.

‘We’ll dance to your song, OK? Just tell me when it comes on and we’ll get people out there.’

It takes about four or five more songs, but when I hear the first few piano bars, I signal to her, and she grabs two of her friends’ hands and a bunch of others follow. At first when the song kicks up, everyone is jumping around and hollering, but when it starts to settle in people just kind of sway a little and don’t seem so excited anymore.

‘What the fuck is this?’ Rick asks with a crinkled face.

‘Fleetwood Mac.’

‘Who?’

‘Fleetwood Mac,” I say again, this time looking at the floor, a film of heat covering my face.

‘More like Fagwood Mac,’ he says with a laugh. ‘You can’t dance to this shit.’

He walks off and most everyone follows him. Jenny stands around for a second, and it looks like she might say something, but her friend pulls her away. After a minute or so the DJ changes to a different song and looks at me with a shrug. I get another cup of punch, and Mr. Michaels, my English teacher, says that he likes Fleetwood Mac, so we talk for a minute. He tells me I should listen to them before they had Stevie Nicks. I tell him I will, though I don’t know which one Stevie Nicks is. I hope he’s not the singer, as I like him, and the girl, Lindsey. They sound nice together.

The next song is a slow dance one – Janet Jackson, I think – and when it starts the bouncing lights settle into a steady carousel around the room. Everyone partners up except for a few of us, but I’m the only one who doesn’t have friends around they can pretend to talk to. Jenny dances with Rick, and puts her head on his shoulder while I stand against the wall, wishing that I hadn’t spent so much on a stupid shirt.

I wait until the dance is over before leaving, wanting my mom to think that I had a good time. As I’m walking past the line of idling cars Jenny calls out to me from behind, wobbling in her heels as she tries to catch up to me.

‘I’m really sorry,’ she says with a frown. ‘Rick is a jerk, and that was mean. I should’ve danced with you.’

‘It’s OK.’

‘I like that song,’ she says, swiping a strand of hair behind her ear. ‘They played it when the president got elected. He played saxophone.’

‘Yeah, he did.’

‘Seriously, though, I’m really sorry. I promise to make it up to you some time.’

‘Well, um, if you want, we could go get ice cream? My mom can take us. She’ll wait in the car. I can pay for it.’

‘Oh,’ she says, her eyes falling to the sidewalk. ‘I, um, we’re actually going to hang out in Rick’s friend’s basement. He lives down the street.’

‘Oh, yeah, no, that’s OK.’

‘Maybe another time?’ she asks, returning to her cheerleader voice but still frowning.

‘Yeah, sure. I’d like that.’ She kisses me on the cheek and my guts stretch and twist like boiling silly putty. She smells like green soap and perfume. I feel a little like Bruce Springsteen.

‘Bye.’

‘Bye.’

‘Was that Jenny Parker?’ my mom asks when I get into the car. I can’t remember the last time I saw her smile so wide, her cheeks bunching against her eyelids.

‘Yeah.’

‘Does she want to go for ice cream?’

‘She can’t. Her mom says she has to go home. But we might go, another time.’ She puts a hand on my knee, shaking it a little. ‘Can we please just go home?’

I’m not dumb enough to think that the kiss meant anything. I know she’s into guys like Rick who play football, and she just felt bad for me. But it made me feel nice, and maybe she could end up like a Garfunkel, and that would be a good start.

When we get back my mom turns on the T.V., curling up on the couch, and I head down to the basement and listen to songs about California.