Play Me Backwards

by Adam Selzer

  “You thought I was a ditzy cheerleader, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And I guess I thought you were some geeky comic book guy.”

  I nodded.

  “So the thing is, we’re not really as different as we thought,” she said. “And, anyway, those matchups always work in movies. Maybe they will in real life.”

  She was making some good points. I had had a pretty good time talking to her in the car the night before. And I wasn’t really in any position to go around turning girls down if they were actually willing to take a chance on me.

  And having heard from Anna again, I was heading straight for a fall. Maybe Paige could catch me before I landed on my ass.

  Besides, I was under orders.

  “So, what do you think?” she asked.

  I took a long look around the room and felt my knees shivering, but I remembered my Satantic master’s command.

  “Yes,” I said.

  She smiled and moved in closer to me.

  “Do you have much experience with girls?”

  I was going to give her some detailed response, but I decided I was safer sticking to one-word responses.

  “Yeah.”

  “Like, ones that are in the same country as you?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you know what I want you to do right now?” she asked.

  I frankly didn’t, but I said yes again.

  “So do it.”

  She smiled and leaned in just enough that I got the message. I moved in and kissed her once, then moved back. Her lips were still cold and my knees were still shaking.

  “You can do it more than once, you know,” she said. “Help me keep warm, okay?”

  I did. I pulled her up against me and let her kiss my neck, even though it was ticklish as hell, and I wrapped my arms around her. Her dress was cut low in the back, and her bare skin was still cold. She kissed my neck softly and did something with her finger, like tracing the alphabet or something, on my thigh, slowly moving farther up towards my waist. She pressed her left breast into my shoulder.

  I still felt weird about it, and like I maybe should have been saying no, but I can’t say I wasn’t enjoying it. It felt good. Really, really good.

  And after a couple of minutes I stopped thinking about anything. I stopped telling myself it would at least help me get over Anna again if I went out with Paige. I stopped telling myself that I was just going along with it because I knew she’d feel terrible about herself if a guy like me turned her down when she was dressed like this. I stopped thinking I should say yes just because of Stan’s orders. I just concentrated on kissing and got lost in the moment.

  But then, just as I was getting comfortable, Dustin Eddlebeck came flittering into the back.

  Literally. Flittering. That’s what he did. He flittered.

  Dustin was given to flittering. I almost expected him to sing out “tra la la” as he helped himself to some mix-ins from a tub.

  Paige pulled away from me and looked a bit embarrassed.

  “Hey, man,” I said as Paige and I stood up.

  The minute we were off the couch, Dustin took our place on it. He fell backwards, stared at the ceiling, and sighed, leaving Paige and me standing awkwardly above him.

  “Oh, shit,” I said. “Not again.”

  Dustin nodded. “I’m in love,” he said.

  I tried not to laugh. Dustin tended to fall in love more often that most people went to the grocery store. Every few weeks he’d be madly in love with some girl he met at a party or something, and he always went into this same “just got hit in the head with a mallet” mode when it happened.

  It should be understood that Dustin Eddlebeck is a very sick person. He knows more dead baby jokes than any other man alive. He is the kind of guy who always, always refers to toilets as “shitters,” even when he’s talking about urinals.

  But inside that greasy exterior beats the heart of a poet. He falls in love at the drop of a hat, and is the kind of guy who breaks into song and frolics about the break room when he falls in love. And he’s good at it. The sick motherfucker knows a thing or two about frolicking.

  “Who is it this time?” I asked.

  “Jacqueline Hart,” he said, the sound of the two names rolling down his tongue like balls on a Skee Ball ramp.

  “I know her,” said Paige. “She used to work at Casa Bravo with me. She’s pretty nice.”

  “She’s more than nice,” said Dustin. “I met her at a gas station last night.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “that’s where a lot of classic love stories start. Under the soft lights of the self-service pump.”

  Normally he would have made some joke about the masturbation reference that is built into any mention of a self-service pump, but in his reverie he didn’t even try it.

  “I’ve been driving around trying to find her again all day,” he said. “We talked for, like, five minutes, but then I just said I’d see her at school.”

  “You want me to text her for you?” asked Paige.

  Dustin looked up. “Would you?” he asked. “I didn’t get her number.”

  “I have it. A bunch of us are going to Hurricane’s tonight. I’ll see if she wants to come.”

  She pulled out her phone from her purse and went out to the front, leaving Dustin and me alone.

  “So, you and Paige Becwar, huh?” he asked.

  “I guess,” I said.

  “I thought I heard Anna was moving back.”

  “Nah,” I said. “She might come back to visit, but she’s not moving or anything.”

  Dustin turned on the stereo to add music to his reverie; KGGO was playing “I’m a Loser” by the Beatles, which made me think of myself and Anna. Myself for the title, and Anna because it was British. Five minutes of expert kissing had not yet cured me.

  Paige came back in with a smile on her face a minute later.

  “It’s all set,” she said. “Leon and I will pick you up, then we’ll go get her and we’ll meet everyone at Hurricane’s.”

  Dustin practically leaped off the couch.

  “Oh, fuck yeah!” he said. “What did she say about me?”

  “That you helped her check her oil,” she said. “And that you were kind of cute. She heard you were kind of a sicko, but I said you were nice. You are, aren’t you?”

  “Totally.”

  Dustin beamed and collapsed back on the couch in such a happy stupor, I sort of expected a squirrel and some birds to come sit on his shoulder. Or a rat, at least.

  “You don’t mind, do you?” Paige asked me. “I should have asked if you were free tonight.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s fine.”

  I wasn’t used to being signed up for things in absentia, but being in a group with at least one familiar face would probably make it easier for me to dip my toe in the waters of whatever this was going to be. Paige told me to pick her up at six forty-five, then kissed me just hard enough to make me want more, and left.

  She certainly knew how to make an exit.

  8. TWENTY-TWO MINUTES

  “I guarantee you I will find a way to screw this up,” I told Stan towards the end of my shift. The gnawing feeling in my guts was working its way to the surface yet again. It hadn’t been this noticeable since the day Stan showed me how to use a hair dryer and a toilet plunger to get dents out of my car before my dad could see them.

  “You’ll be fine,” he said. “You afraid she’s going to make you start acting like a prep or something?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Or that you’ll start liking her, but she won’t want her friends to know about you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You think this is one of those teen comedies where a popular girl dates a dork?”

  I considered this for a second while I spooned some vanilla ice cream into a cup of coffee.

  “I could picture that,” I said. “Our first date would be a trip to the mall, and there’d be a musical montage of scenes with me co
ming out of different dressing rooms wearing trendy outfits that Paige had picked out for me. One time I’d be in a dress.”

  “And you’d look like an idiot in all of them.”

  “Then we’d have a series of funny misadventures ducking behind bushes, covering our faces with newspapers, and wearing disguises so none of her friends saw us out together.”

  “Nice touch.”

  “And at first I’d be all offended that she didn’t want to be seen with me, and I’d see right through her explanation that she just doesn’t want anyone else to know her business. But then I’d learn something that highlights her own vulnerability and makes me understand, until she surprises me by kissing me in front of everyone.”

  “At the prom, probably.”

  “The movie would get an average rating of two stars, but it’ll be a staple on ABC Family for at least ten years.”

  “You must watch a lot of shitty movies, Harris,” Stan said. “But that sort of thing doesn’t happen in real life. Her friends have all been out with worse people than you, and this is a group date, anyway. She’s already showing you off.”

  “That’s even worse. I’m not going to have anything to talk about with the kind of people she probably hangs out with.”

  Stan poured some hot water into a glass, then added a bit of lemon, a tea bag, and a dash of something from a bottle in a paper bag that he kept under the register. Leaning against the milk shake machine, he looked about as classy as a guy in an apron drinking a hot toddy from a paper cup probably could.

  “Look,” he said, “if you get stuck, tell them the story about the time Danny Nelson tried to keep one of his pet snakes in the back and why we had to get rid of it.”

  I looked at him to see if he was serious. He wasn’t laughing.

  “That story’s kind of gross for mixed company.”

  “Trust your dark lord, Harris.”

  I don’t know why I put so much faith in Stan’s advice.

  But sometimes I really did think he might be privy to all the secrets of the universe.

  Back in the 1980s people honestly believed that bands were hiding secret Satanic messages in rock songs, and that you could hear them by playing the records in reverse. There are web pages where you can hear samples of them, and they all just sound like mumbling and jibberish to me. Most of the time, when the secret message is supposed to be something about Satan, it sounds to me like they’re saying “Stan.”

  “Because I live with Stan.” (Led Zeppelin)

  “There’s power in Stan.” (Led Zeppelin)

  “Stan is lord, he will give you 666.” (Led Zeppelin)

  “Stan, move through our voices.” (Styx)

  “Yeah, Stan, he organized his own religion.” (The Eagles)

  “Stan, Stan, Stan, he is God.” (Black Oak Arkansas)

  Sometimes I imagined all these bands having shadowy meetings with Stan at a lonely crossroads someplace, bartering their souls for rock ’n’ roll stardom and sealing the deal with a handful of Skittles from an accursed barrel of mix-ins.

  After work I cleaned myself up, finished cleaning out my car, and drove out to Paige’s house to pick her up, listening to a few more minutes of Moby-Dick while I went. No answers yet.

  When I knocked on her door, Paige stepped out. “Hurry,” she said. “Let’s not do the meet-the-parents thing.” I was only too happy to oblige there, and the two of us practically raced down the icy driveway to my car.

  “You cleaned up in here,” she said, as she looked around.

  “It’s only fair,” I said. “If you’re gonna be spending any time in here, I could at least get rid of the fast-food wrappers and stuff.”

  She smiled.

  As we got on the road to Dustin’s house, Paige told me she waited tables two nights a week at Casa Bravo, the Mexican place on Cedar, and from then on we swapped stories about terrible customers and moronic managers. Casa Bravo sounded like a real shit hole to me. Her stories about getting yelled at and coming home exhausted only made me more aware of how lucky I was to work at a place like the Ice Cave. No one ever yelled at you there. George, the owner, didn’t seem to care if we got bad online reviews, or even if he checked the browser history on the computer and saw that someone had been surfing for porn. Or if we ate our weight in mix-ins.

  We picked up Dustin, then drove a few neighborhoods over to pick up Jacqueline, whom I’d never met. She was heavyset, but not bad-looking, with dyed black hair and lipstick that appeared to be dark purple. It was hard to tell in the dim light.

  “Hi,” I said. “I’m Leon.”

  “I’ve seen you around,” she said.

  Dustin just stared at her. “You have really pretty eyes,” he told her.

  “Uh, thanks,” she said.

  “I mean it,” he said. “They look like glowing orbs above the sea.”

  She buckled her seat belt and thanked him again, but I could tell she was sort of weirded out.

  All the way to Cedar Avenue, Paige and I enjoyed the spectacle of watching poor Dustin try to talk to Jacqueline. His attempts to charm her were well-intentioned, but most of them just made him look like a creep. At one point he even asked if she wanted to hear a poem he’d written for her.

  “Uh, maybe later,” she said. “Look, Hurricane’s is right ahead. I don’t want to make us late.”

  Throughout the evening Dustin’s hopeless attempts to woo Jacqueline made my date with Paige seem better in contrast. We were the first of the group to arrive, and while Dustin kept trying to seem smooth, Paige and I chatted, just casually, for a few minutes about normal stuff, like that rumor about how chewing gum takes seven years to digest if you swallow it, and how nobody ever really went on “dates” anymore, it was mostly just big group outings that turned into hookups, and whether Coke was better than Pepsi. Stuff like that. There wasn’t a lot of sarcastic wordplay, and nothing about the King of Prussia. It didn’t feel at all like the nights I’d spent hanging out in coffee shops talking about jazz with Anna (who knew way more about it than I did—I just faked my way through it), but it wasn’t bad. It was comfortable. I had no trouble holding up my end of the conversation, at least until everyone else showed up.

  I recognized a girl named Monica from math class, and there was a guy named Keith who’d been in classes with me off and on since kindergarten, but most of the group were people I never would have dreamed of talking to before. No one made any cracks about Paige dating an idiot like me, but I started to feel more and more like I was in over my head as the evening went on. After a few minutes the conversation all became gossip about people I didn’t know, movies I hadn’t seen, and parties I hadn’t been to.

  Keith was polite enough to try to engage me in a talk about sports for a second, but that didn’t go anywhere. They were all nice enough to call me “bro” and “buddy” instead of “fag” or “retard,” which at least one of them had called me in the hall once or twice, but by the time we were finishing up the entrees, I was starting to feel like a piece of furniture.

  Then I hit the bathroom and noticed a poster for an appetizer called Rattlesnake Poppers, which reminded me what Stan had said about the snake.

  “Rattlesnake Poppers,” I said when I got back. “That doesn’t sound very appetizing.”

  “I think snakes are cool, actually,” said Monica.

  “Oh, they are,” I said. “But they can be pretty nasty.”

  Dustin stopped looking awkward and laughed. “Oh, man,” he said. “I had no idea those things were so gross until we got one at work.”

  Monica gave me a weird look. “Don’t you guys work at that ice cream place?”

  I nodded. “Ice Cave.”

  “You have a snake there?”

  “Used to,” said Dustin.

  “It wasn’t, like, running around loose,” I said. “It was in a cage. Danny Nelson’s dad said he couldn’t have it in the house, so he thought he’d keep it in the back room at the Ice Cave.”

  “That’s probably
a violation of the health code,” said Keith.

  “That wasn’t the biggest problem,” I said. “The problem is that when it took a dump, you could smell it all over the store.”

  “And hear it from the front,” said Dustin. “Snakes are the most incredible dump-takers in the animal kingdom.”

  Someone else pointed out elephants are pretty impressive defecators as well, and after that the conversation spiraled into a whimsical, somewhat disgusting, but mostly enlightened discussion about all turds, great and small.

  From then on the conversation was easy for me.

  It’s an established fact that in the back room of the Ice Cave, the conversation will turn to the subject of excrement every twenty-two minutes. You could set a watch by it. I never would have imagined that the same thing would happen with Paige and her friends, but it did. Stan was right. We losers may have our differences from Paige’s crowd, but that’s one thing that unites all living things, from the snottiest cheerleader to the most introverted geek: Everybody poops.

  At the end of the night we dropped Dustin off first, leaving Jacqueline with us. All night long Dustin had tried to be charming, and she’d looked as though she wished she could just disappear.

  Paige turned around to face her. “I’m really sorry,” she said.

  “I don’t know what to say,” said Jacqueline. “He’s a sweet guy. He’s just sort of trying too hard.”

  “He means well,” I said.

  “I know. But . . . you know.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  She shrugged. “Hey, he didn’t text me any pictures of his scrotum, and when I wouldn’t let him kiss me he took it well, so it wasn’t the worst first date ever.”

  “People do that?” I asked. “They send you pictures of their nards on the first date?”

  Both Paige and Jacqueline nodded. I thought this over, and out of instinct I tried to rationalize it.

  “Well, maybe they think they’re living the golden rule,” I said. “They’re doing unto you as they wish you would do unto them.”