by Don Zolidis
Kaitlyn loved everything about Stephen. She loved the low growling sound he made whenever I came near him. She loved the way he’d let you pet him for three or four seconds before biting the crap out of your hand and trying to claw you apart.
She was also extremely protective of him—especially with me, as she blamed me for the slaughter of every animal she had ever loved, even the ones I didn’t sit on or suffocate. (Although, to be fair, sea monkeys are not animals. They’re shrimp, and they are also the lamest “pet” ever.)
Anyway, all of this is to set the scene for our ninth birthday party, which was fated to be the last birthday party we’ d have together.
In previous years, our mom had managed to get us to agree to gender-neutral themes like “Muppets” or “balloon fun,” but this year we were irreconcilable. I had chosen The Hobbit as my theme, which drove my mom into a worrying stress spiral, not least for the fact that I had demanded giant spider decorations. Kaitlyn, for her part, had chosen the exact opposite: Barbie.
As you can imagine, there was no universe in which Barbie and hobbits coexisted. (Either Barbie would be put on the front lines to be eaten by the giant spiders, or the hobbits would get new, snazzy outfits—either way it made no sense.) My parents had tried—well, actually, my mom had tried. My dad had thrown up his hands and offered “lions” as a possible solution, which was to say, he was going to take us to the zoo and feed us to lions if we couldn’t compromise. His plan failed because we were at least half-sure he was joking. So there was a dividing line in our backyard—on one side, the denizens of Middle-earth, and the other side, totally unrealistic plastic women.
“They can’t even stand,” I said to her.
“Shut up,” said Kaitlyn. “Go play with your dwarves.”
“Hobbits. Dwarves are a different race.”
“There is something wrong with you. Really wrong.”
We had each invited the same number of people, but I had three acquaintances show up, and she had about thirty-seven girls there. From orbit, you could tell the difference between our parties. What’s worse is that my friends, sensing that something like the plague was affecting my side of the yard, had gravitated over to the Barbie side because they were traitors.
“Let’s put the parties together,” offered my mom. “I feel like there’s room for magic in the Barbie universe.”
We both rolled our eyes at that.
Kaitlyn offered no concessions to my side of the yard, and went out of her way to show just how much more fun she was having than me. Equally horrible was the fact that each person at the party brought a present for one of us, all of which were now located on a “present table” that was 90 percent pink. It was all going horribly wrong.
This is where Stephen comes in.
All my life I have been afflicted by a lack of common sense, and it was particularly noticeable on this day. Here was my thought process:
I need to get girls to come over here. What do girls like? Cats. We have a cat. I’ll bring him outside and carry him around. Then all will be well and we can play pin the scale on the dragon.
I found Stephen in his usual place, sitting under my parents’ bed, pissed off and hating the world. I crawled on my stomach, fended off his claws, and managed to grab his back. He emitted the low, mournful growl that was his way of saying Hello—please get the hell away from me.
But I was undeterred, and managed to scramble out from under the bed and scoop Stephen into my arms like a white, puffy ball of evil.
Stephen was an indoor cat; my dad had long argued that he was an animal and needed to hunt, but he had been overruled by the fact that Stephen showed no inclination to ever go outside or do anything to acquire food for himself. He was pretty useless as a cat.
I brought him outside, feeling his furry body tremble in rage and panic.
“Look what I’ve got over here,” I said in a singsong voice from my abandoned hobbit side of the yard.
Bringing something cute and fluffy into a group of thirty third-grade girls is a recipe for a stampede. Just as I imagined, they dropped their Barbie activities and rushed me.
Stephen’s evil cat eyes went wide when he spotted the flood of girls. He braced his back claws against my sternum, tore through my shirt, and sprang away from me like he had been fired from one of my dad’s guns. He shot to the ground and raced through the gaggle of girls like a thunderbolt. I had never seen him move that fast in his life.
He shot around the house and headed for the street.
I know what you’re thinking. A car ran him over, didn’t it?
Nope.
There was no car, but there was a giant German shepherd puppy that spotted a lightning-fast ball of white fur and thought it looked like a super-fun chew toy. By the time we reached the front yard, there was blood and fur and an adorable German shepherd being restrained by its horrified owner.
Death had come to our ninth birthday party. J. R. R. Tolkien would have been proud.
In my mind, I think of Stephen like the eternal pessimist. Every day I bet he thought, I’m going to die today. I hate these people. And at last, he was right.
Anyway, that was me in a nutshell. Trying to impress people the wrong way, only to have it end in horrible tragedy.
As I got older, I slowly conquered the entire basement of our house. At some point, it had been imagined as a family rec room, but the creeping tide of my nerdishness forced the rest of the family out due to sheer embarrassment. The fact that Kaitlyn and I had been largely at war for the past eight years had something to do with it as well. The faux-wood paneling my dad had installed in the late ’70s was perfect for tacking up posters of dragons and aliens. I had transformed one of the old coffee tables into a diorama, which was complete with metal miniatures of wizards and dwarves. I had even found a couple of crappy old bookshelves and had filled them with an endless supply of fantasy novels. In short, it was a space designed to repulse females.
And yet I had brought Amy into it, and, miraculously, she hadn’t run for the hills. She didn’t mind sitting on the couch; she didn’t mind the faint smell of death that still hung in the air from Son of Bo-Dag’s immolation. She was cool with all of it.
We had set up an old television down there and spent much of the last month watching movies while buried beneath blankets. It was an exercise in escapism, of course, as both of our lives were in the process of falling apart. Hers was collapsing, while mine was merely deteriorating, and like good Wisconsin people we had both made the unspoken pledge not to talk about any of it and watch horror films instead.
Should we talk about our feelings regarding the ongoing tragedies in our lives? Oh look, Critters 3 is on. I sure hope that will answer all the unresolved questions from both Critters 1 and 2.
It wasn’t a perfect system, and where there had once been long, deeply philosophical talks that lasted all night, there was now a sinister cloud of silence. It wasn’t the best way to run a relationship, but it was a model that seemed to work for everyone’s parents, so we were giving it a shot.
Anyway, we had just finished Hellraiser II, which was a lot worse than the original Hellraiser, so it was a lot more fun to watch. I had mastered the art of making funny voices during the entire movie (or at least, I thought I had mastered it; I probably annoyed the hell out of her, which might have been one of the reasons for the breakup, but who knows?), and I was on a particular roll that evening.
If you’re not familiar with the Hellraiser series of movies, congratulations. Basically it’s about a weird guy who wears black leather and has pins in his face. Like, three hundred pins in his face. He’s named, surprisingly enough, Pinhead. Pinhead is summoned by demons every once in a while and sends people to hell, where they don’t have a good time. Every once in a while he says, We have such sights to show you.
I had a great time imagining alternate employment options for Pinhead.
“What if he was, like, a tour guide?” and
“Wouldn’t it be awes
ome if Disney bought the rights to this and put him in Disney World?” and
“Wouldn’t it be great if he used the pins for storage? Like, hooked hot dogs to himself?”
So we were sitting there having a great time, and I had her hand in mine. She had fingers like a bird; they were pale and white and a little bony, but I loved them.
I suppose I haven’t really described Amy. This is usually the point where the hero says that the heroine was beautiful and perfect and had eyes like moonbeams or whatever. And, yes, all that was true about her. She was way more attractive than me. I had no business being with this girl.
She also walked a little bit like a duck. Not in a stupid way. But she just ever so slightly shuffled a bit when she walked. She had a weird thing where her hips were double-jointed, which sounds totally awesome but kind of had no effect other than to make her capable of standing straight up and twisting her feet around to face about forty-five degrees behind her. Weird, right?
All that is to say she wasn’t very athletic, and when she ran it was a bit awkward, which was just perfect for me, since I sucked at all things related to sports except for watching other people play them.
So, at this point in time, once Hellraiser II had finished, she let go of my hand and shuffled over to the backpack she had dropped at the foot of the stairs. She took a deep breath, like she was mentally preparing for something.
After having been dumped four times, I was especially sensitive to Amy’s body language. If she sneezed, I felt my heart twinge. If she took too long to respond to a question like How are you doing? a feeling of cold, tingly terror would race up my spine. When she opened the backpack and took out a letter, I felt my stomach drop.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Um…” She looked down at her hands.
Shit.
“So I wrote you a letter.”
“Great.”
No response.
“Is it a nice letter?”
Silence. It is not a nice letter. It is a letter of doom.
“I’ve been thinking about things,” she said finally.
“Nice things?”
Silence.
Then she started to pace. This was new. I hadn’t been dumped with pacing before. She had the letter in her hands, was looking down at it, and was shuffling a bit back and forth. “I wrote down some things that I want to tell you…but every time we talk I can’t seem to make them come out, so…” she said finally.
“What do you want to tell me?”
“That’s why I wrote you the letter. To avoid actually having to say the things….”
“What’s the gist of it?”
She looked down at her hands and made a little noise like “Hurm.” Oh, that behavior I recognize. That’s the universal sign for I must crush you now.
I got up from the couch and started following her pacing. “You can talk to me,” I said. “I know that I have been stupid in the past, and I am working on my own idiocy, and—”
“It’s not about what you’re doing,” she said. “It’s about what I’m doing.”
“Are you breaking up with me again? Is that what you’re doing?”
She looked down and made the terrifying “Hurm” noise again.
“You can’t break up with me in a letter,” I protested. “Letters are for good things. We’ve established this. We have a pattern!”
She tried a new tactic. “You’re going to find somebody so much better than me.”
“What? No, I’m not! Look at me! Are you insane?”
“You’re a great guy; there are probably a lot of other girls you could be going out with, so I feel like I’m preventing you from finding them right now.” Of all the lies Amy ever told me, this one was probably the most ridiculous.
“I don’t like anybody else! I’m finding you! I found you! We found each other!”
“But I can’t be found right now, Craig. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”
“Why not?”
“I wrote it in the letter!” she said, her voice rising just a bit. She shook it back and forth in her hand.
“Tell me. Talk to me. What did I do wrong?”
“Ugh!” She looked at the ceiling. “You didn’t do anything wrong! We do things wrong together.”
Kaitlyn emerged from the stairwell with a bowl of potato chips. She crunched one into her mouth and stood there, watching us.
“Do you mind?” I yelled.
“You want one?” she asked, popping another potato chip in her mouth.
“We’re in the middle of something here.”
She turned to look at us, as if she hadn’t heard the telltale sounds of Amy stomping my heart into dust yet again. “Oh crap,” she gasped. “Are you dumping him again?”
“Can you leave, please?” I said.
“What is it this time?” she said. “Is it the commentary during movies, ’cause that’s annoying as hell, right?”
“Would you get out of here?”
She put her hands up, starting to back her way up the stairs. “Don’t blame me. I tried to adjust your personality and you didn’t listen.” She got about two steps up before she turned. “Hey, Amy, we should hang out sometime.”
Amy twitched. “Uh…”
I picked up the nearest foam sword and threw it at her. Foam swords are not especially aerodynamic, so it glided harmlessly through the air and dropped to the ground about ten feet away from her.
“All right, whatever. I’ll be upstairs if you need me.”
Amy and I stood there for a moment, a few feet apart. I could hear my parents talking upstairs, as if everything was normal and I wasn’t getting crushed once again. The air turned cold.
“Please read the letter, Craig.” She shoved it into my hands, which were losing all feeling.
I tried a joke. “Does it say ‘Just kidding’?”
But it didn’t. She had put it in an envelope, and from the weight of it, it felt like half a novel.
“I think I preferred it when you dumped me in the middle of the woods.”
Amy gave a halfhearted smile, like she appreciated my attempt at humor and was duly sorry that I was not terribly funny.
I tried to keep going, even though it felt like I was swimming through mud. “Actually, I prefer it when you don’t dump me at all. Those are the best days. You know this isn’t going to stick, right? You’ve already dumped me four times—”
“Three times.”
“I think it’s four.”
“Three.”
“I’m counting the thing two and a half weeks ago. Fine, three, whatever. You’ve dumped me three times and it hasn’t stuck yet. So that’s…that’s just…you obviously are addicted to me like some kind of heroin addict…whatever it is I got”—I spread my arms out in a feeble show of bravado; I was highly conscious of the fact that I was in a dingy basement. With a crappy TV, faux-wood paneling, and an embarrassing collection of little monster figurines—“you can’t get enough.”
I paused. One eyelid stopped working. This is a stroke. I think I’m having a stroke. Maybe if I die she’ll change her mind. That’s stupid, Craig. Why would she change her mind if you’re dead? Then she can’t go out with you at all.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“What?”
“You seem a little messed up.”
“I’m getting dumped! And I’m probably having an aneurysm or something.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I would appreciate it in the future if you would stop breaking up with me.” The words spilled out of my mouth like an avalanche of stupid. What did I think she was going to say to that?
Then she hugged me. The hug of death. The hug that meant you’re-such-a-great-guy-but-I’m-afraid-this-battle-station-will-be-fully-operational-by-the-time-your-friends-arrive.
I held on. She patted my back like she was settling down an animal. I kept holding on.
“Craig.”
“This sucks,” I said.
“I know.”
She let me go to arm’s length and looked into my eyes. Her eyes were mostly blue, but not entirely blue; they faded to a kind of amber color near the edges. I used to think I would be looking into those eyes forever.
The world rocked a bit and went fuzzy at the edges. “Please read the letter,” she said, and kissed me on the forehead.
Hours later, after she left, I took it out of the envelope. It was four pages long, on some kind of artisan paper that still contained tree bark and could only be found in specialty stationery shops in rural Maine. Her blue writing filled up the spaces like a long, spidery trail of doom. Amy was pretty seriously dyslexic, so misspellings abounded, but each one just reminded me how much I loved her. I read about two lines and then set it down as my world fell apart for the fifth time.
At this point, you’re probably wondering what I saw in her, as she seems like a demon beast from hell. But most of the time she wasn’t anything like a demon beast from hell, not even a little.
During our relationships, those periods of calm and joy between the inevitable periods of disaster and doom that followed, things were awesome. At least in the beginning.
My parents had a strict “no phone calls after nine p.m.” policy, which was enforced as if the mere ringing of a phone after nine would bring about the apocalypse. Kaitlyn and I didn’t really have curfews; we weren’t really expected to do a lot of chores around the house; basically nothing was expected of us as human beings except for one thing: no damn calls after nine o’ clock. At precisely nine, my parents would retreat to their parental safe zone not to be seen again until morning, unless it so happened that my dad would emerge, clad solely in horrifying bikini-style 1970s briefs, hunting for a beer.
It was tough on all of us.
The first time one of my friends called after nine was in sixth grade.
“Craig is not available,” said my dad.
“Why not?” said my friend, unaware that he was poking the lion.
“He is not available,” repeated my dad, his voice sounding low like the gears of a doomsday device.