by Adam Selzer
“I fucking hate girls like Becwar,” said Danny. “They get all pissed off and freak out if someone’s wearing white after Labor Day. Say what you will about us, man, at least we don’t judge people like that back here.”
“What?” I asked. “You wouldn’t pick on someone if he came back here in a polo shirt and a Nike hat?”
“I’d have to punch him,” said Danny. “But I wouldn’t mean anything by it. And we’d be cool afterwards.”
He had a point. There wasn’t a lot of judgment going on in the Ice Cave. We all met as equals. Then again, it wasn’t like we had anything to test our tolerance. People like Paige and Joey almost never came to the back.
All the while, Stan was sort of staring at me.
“Where did you run into Paige?” he asked.
“She came into Captain Jack’s while I was there,” I said.
“And what were you doing at Captain Jack’s?” he asked.
He’d caught me, and he knew it.
“Listening to Moby-Dick put me in the mood for seafood.”
He nodded, like he’d known all along that listening to that damned book would lead me to eat at Captain Jack’s, and that Paige would be there needing a ride home. And like he already knew what was going to happen for the next several months, too. It was times like this that I remembered why I tended to give him the benefit of the doubt on his stories about being the devil.
“All as I have forseen,” he said. “Soon, there will come a great plague. The halls of your school will flow with the blood of the unbeliever. How’s Moby-Dick so far?”
“It’s okay,” I said. “But what’s the point? That I should go get a job on a whaling vessel so Anna doesn’t find out I’m a loser now?”
Stan shook his head. “Commercial whaling has been globally outlawed since 1986,” he said. “So you’d be fucked. My plans work a little better than that.”
“She’d never think you were a loser, Leon,” said Jenny. “She loved you!”
“Yeah, I had her totally tricked into thinking I was cool,” I said. “But I’m not, and I don’t know if I can fake it anymore.”
Jenny laughed. “Do you know how much effort she put in to seeming all cool and intellectual and artsy for you? All that stuff you thought was spontaneous took weeks of planning.”
“Right,” I said.
“It’s true,” said Edie. “Like, how she used to wear that Kermit the Frog shirt that was long enough to cover her shorts, so it looked like she wasn’t wearing any if she didn’t move around too much? She practiced in front of the mirror.”
“We used to get sick of her talking about you,” said Jenny.
I had never heard that before, and I didn’t exactly believe it. The idea of Anna doing something to impress me just seemed absurd to me. Jenny couldn’t have actually known it if she did, anyway. She was barely allowed out of the house outside of school hours in those days.
Talking about Anna was just about the last thing I really wanted to do at the moment. I knew myself well enough to know that if I got started thinking about her, I’d get sucked back into the same misery I’d felt when she first left, so I took off for home shortly after that, quitting while I was ahead.
As I drove home I listened to another few minutes of Moby-Dick, and tried to think of whether I’d heard Ishmael say a single thing about women. I didn’t think he had. Then again he hadn’t said what put him into that “damp November” mood at the beginning in the first place. I would have bet a hundred bucks that it was a woman.
Or a guy, if that’s the way he rolled. I think there was a really good chance that Ishmael and Queequeg, the cannibal guy, were fucking. I could imagine whaling, a job where you get shut up in a ship for years at a time with big beefy harpoon-wielding guys, probably attracted its share of nineteenth-century gays.
But I didn’t really pay attention to what was happening in the book. I mostly just thought about Anna and felt like I was driving off of a cliff.
She was eighteen by now. That was the drinking age over there, so she was probably going to wine tastings and shit. She probably had a boyfriend, and he was probably the son of the Earl of Wigton or something. The two of them and her parents probably sat around talking about global politics while they ate gourmet food.
Meanwhile, my parents had probably spent their Valentine’s night eating some sort of casserole where the recipe called for ungodly amounts of lard, canned vegetables, and ketchup.
My parents call themselves “food disaster hobbyists,” which is a fancy way of saying that they get their jollies by buying up vintage cookbooks at flea markets, finding the most disgusting recipes in them, then cooking them and eating them so they can make fun of them. It’s sort of like watching bad movies just to riff on them, only half the time you get diarrhea. For years—like, up until my sophomore year in high school—I thought that this was a real activity, and there were food disaster hobbyists all over the world. Then I Googled it and found out that it was pretty much just them. I didn’t even like to think about where they were really going when they told me they were going away to conventions for the weekend.
I didn’t participate too much anymore. My habit was to stay at work or at Stan’s until I was pretty sure dinner would be over, then drive through Be-Bop’s or Burger Box on the way home. Eating alone in my room or my car not only saved me from the food disasters, it saved me from getting nagged about how I was doing. Mom and Dad knew that I wasn’t going to college right away, but they thought I was just planning to save some money first so I wouldn’t have to work too much once I started. They had no idea that I wasn’t sure how the hell I was even going to graduate in the first place. I was good enough at faking my way through classes that my grades hadn’t suffered much, but I still had all those detention hours to work off. The less I spoke to them, the less likely they were to find out.
When I got in, they were sitting on the couch, watching TV.
“Hey, hon,” said Mom. “How was work?”
“Same as any other night, really,” I said.
“Anna called.”
I grabbed the nearest sheet of paper I could find—a piece of junk mail from the table—and pretended to read it, so she wouldn’t know I was sort of freaking out, even though I was relieved, on one level, that they’d said “Anna called,” not “the school called.”
“Did she?” I asked.
“She just wanted to see if you were around,” said Mom.
“Did she leave a message?”
“She said she’d e-mail you her new number. She’s picked up a tiny bit of a British accent.”
Great. Something to make her even more out of my league.
I turned to head up to my room, but Mom caught me by the shoulder. “Not so fast,” she said. “What’s she up to these days?”
“Probably just studying all the time,” I said. “I don’t know.”
“You two made the cutest middle school couple,” said Dad, who hadn’t gotten up from his chair. “You reminded me of your mother and me.”
“Mom,” I said, “if you could move your hand a few inches up towards my neck and squeeze until I go limp, I’d be very grateful right about now.”
She pushed me away. “Not funny,” she said. “Go check your mail, kid.”
One thing my parents have not figured out is that you get to a certain age when teasing your kid just makes you both look stupid.
Sure enough, on my computer there was another brief e-mail from Anna. With a phone number. For a long time I just stared at it, and then at the dirt under my fingernails, and wondered what the hell I could say to her.
What if she’d, like, waited for me, and I’d repaid her by growing up to be a complete bum who screws around with really unpleasant girls at parties in Stan’s basement? She might want to kill me, and I wouldn’t blame her.
Or what if she hadn’t thought of me in a long time?
It rang three times before she picked up. Her voice—the first time I’d heard it in t
hree years—sounded groggy.
“Hello?”
“Anna!” I said. “It’s Leon.”
“Oh, wow,” she said slowly. “Your voice changed.”
I freaked out for a second, then realized she probably just meant that it was deeper now, not that she could tell I wasn’t the same person I used to be.
“Did it?” I asked. “I guess it changes so gradually that you don’t really notice it when it’s happening.”
She laughed. “You do realize that it’s four in the morning here, right?”
“Oh, shit,” I said. “I’m sorry! I didn’t even think about the time difference.”
“Don’t worry. I’m up now.”
She had, in fact, picked up a bit of an accent. Fuck. Even the kinds of British accents that people in England think make people sound stupid sound about 50 percent classier than any American accent. I couldn’t possibly imagine anyone with a British accent in the Ice Cave.
“So, you’re moving back to Iowa?” I asked.
“Well,” she said, “as of last night we were thinking about coming back for a few days, at least, but I can’t imagine we’ll actually move. Mom mentioned that we could get a mansion south of Grand Avenue back in Des Moines for what we pay for a flat here, but I think it’s about a thousand to one odds. And I love it here.”
“Oh,” I said. “Okay.”
I didn’t know whether to feel relieved or heartbroken. It was a bit of both.
“What have you been doing out there, anyway?” I asked.
“Working my ass off, mostly. I’m taking a lot of university classes this year. Any spare time I have I’m volunteering at the theater.”
Of course. Volunteering at a theater. I instantly imagined her sitting around backstage chatting about metaphysics and Shakespeare with a bunch of guys from Doctor Who, even though it was probably just the theater at whatever school her dad was teaching at. Still—that meant she was hanging out with a bunch of British college guys. Way out of my league.
“Sounds like a good life,” I said.
“It’s not bad. I never get in trouble anymore, though, so I miss you guys. How’s everybody been?”
“Getting by,” I said. “Not too much to report, I guess. Edie has a girlfriend. So that’s new.”
“She’s not with Brian anymore?”
“Nah, it was a pretty messy breakup. I haven’t seen him around much lately. Hey, you didn’t have fish-and-chips for dinner tonight, did you?”
She laughed. “I made chicken tikka masala,” she said. “Why?”
“I had fish-and-chips,” I said. “I thought it would be cool if maybe you did too.”
“Yeah, it would have been,” she said. But she said it awkwardly, like she was a bit creeped out, and I couldn’t help but notice that she specified that she missed “you guys,” not “you.” My attempts at flirting and seeming all romantic and profound were clearly going nowhere.
“Hey,” she said, “Sorry to cut this short, but like I said, it’s four a.m. here. Will you be online tomorrow?”
“I have to work,” I said, “but I’ll be on when I can.”
“Great,” she said. “Talk to you then.”
And we said “see ya” a few times, then hung up.
So that was it.
She wasn’t moving back. If anything she would stop by just long enough to put my heart back inside my sternum, then rip it back out all over again. That was worse than never seeing her again, really.
And the way she reacted to my question about fish-and-chips made me think she was a little turned off by the notion that there might still be something between us. Maybe I was just being paranoid, but if I had to guess, I’d say that she was seeing someone else now.
Some British college theater guy.
And why shouldn’t she? It wasn’t like I hadn’t been with anyone else.
I wandered over to my window to stare over the tree line. On winter days when the leaves were gone, I could see some of the lights of the signs for the restaurants on Cedar Avenue. Back in my more intellectual days I used to stare at the green light of the Wackford’s Coffee sign and pretend I was the Great Gatsby.
Now the green light looked like it was flickering as the tree branches swayed in front of it. As I stared on, I became acutely aware of just how horrific the smell in my room had gotten. I was standing in a pile of empty pizza boxes, crumpled up sacks from fast-food places, broken speakers, dirty dishes, and crusty laundry.
But I felt at home. Like I belonged here, among the detritus and debris.
After a while I looked away from the light and saw that there was an SUV in the driveway.
And Paige Becwar was sitting at the wheel.
5. VALENTINE’S DAY & GARBAGE NIGHT
My first thought was that maybe Paige was in one of those groups like Active Christian Teens or something, and her whole thing at Captain Jack’s had been part of some elaborate experiment. Maybe she and the other members had been going into one fast-food restaurant after another all night to see if anyone would offer to help a crying girl, and since I had, they were going to give me a prize. Like the SUV she was in. I could have used an SUV. To call my car a piece of shit would have been offensive to most turds.
But when I stepped outside, she got out of the driver’s side, walked up to me, and said, “Hey.”
“Hey,” I said.
She came really close, close enough that our toes were almost touching, and I could still smell the fries on her breath. She stood there for a second, like she was nervous, or maybe noticing that my breath smelled like hush puppies, then inched a little closer. She looked . . . relieved, I guess. Like she’d lost her keys and finally found them.
“Well,” she said, “I’ll bet neither of us saw this coming, huh?”
“What?” I asked.
Then she leaned in and kissed me hard on the mouth.
I was too surprised to pull back at first, but as she put her hand on my shoulder, I moved away from her and felt my knees shaking.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“You can’t tell me you didn’t feel it.”
“Feel what?”
“The spark!” she said. “When we had that amazing conversation in your car.”
“Which one?”
“About, like, literature, and stuff,” she said. “And about the school crotch-kicking team. You’re so funny!”
I took a step away from her, but she ran a hand down my arm and held on to the end of my sleeve. I thought she might have started crying again, which is about what I’d expect from someone who had just kissed me, but she was smiling, so maybe it was just the snowflakes melting when they hit her cheek.
There had obviously been signs in the car that I hadn’t picked up on. Maybe I’d be sending out a few of my own that I wasn’t even aware of. That wasn’t impossible.
“I’m kind of hung up on someone else right now.”
The look in her eyes changed, like, instantly. All of a sudden she went from looking like a puppy to looking like a fighter who could have taken Danny down in one punch at a low-down, no-good boxing club on an old TV show.
“Who?” she asked.
“Anna Brandenburg,” I said. “Sort of.”
“That girl who moved to England?”
“Yeah,” I said.
Paige’s face went back to normal. She laughed, took a step closer, put her arms around my waist and kissed my cheek, then just sort of hugged me casually, like we were already an established couple or something, and comfortable around each other. I tried to turn my head away. Logically I should have run or pushed her away or something, but that would have made me look like a complete asshole.
“Wasn’t she kind of a freak?” she whispered in my ear.
“In a good way, maybe.”
“And isn’t she gone now?”
“Yeah,” I said. “But we never officially broke up or anything.”
“But she’s gone. If she’s not with you on Valentine’s
Day, you’re not really together.”
She was still so close that her lips brushed my cheek some when she talked. Now she pulled her head back away from my face and seemed to get into position to kiss my lips again, but I took a step backward up the driveway and away from her.
“Listen,” I said. “You’re just upset because you got dumped. You don’t want to hook up with me.”
“I don’t just want to hook up,” she said. “I want to try something with you. Something more.”
“No, you don’t,” I said. “We have nothing in common.”
She took a step back. “Come on, Leon,” she said. “I felt a spark. I never felt one of those with Joey, or my last couple of boyfriends, for that matter. We’ll find things that we have in common.”
“Look, I couldn’t go out with you anyway,” I said. “I mean, your friends would go nuts if you dated a guy like me, wouldn’t they?”
“What, because you’re a geek?”
“Geeks don’t really just sit around dreaming of dating cheerleaders, you know. That’s just in movies.”
“I could be a geek,” she said. “I’m wearing superhero undies right now.” Then she gave me a smile that must have taken years of practice. “Can you honestly tell me you wouldn’t like to see them?”
Okay. I’m not going to lie. I was tempted. Really tempted. She wasn’t, like, a supermodel or anything—in fact, I could imagine her looking just like one of my mom’s friends in ten or twenty years. But she certainly looked better than most of the girls who went around showing their underwear in the back of the Ice Cave or in Stan’s basement. Seeing Paige’s panties would have been among the top five or six most erotic moments of my short, miserable life. But even though I can’t claim to mind seeing girls in their underwear, I always feel like an asshole for looking if I’m not actually making out with the girl at the time.
I continued my basic routine of saying the stupidest shit possible.