Play Me Backwards

by Adam Selzer

  But when reality was done lining itself back up in my brain, at least enough that I could think a bit, the first thing that wasn’t baby-related to come to mind was the Satanic poem in the yearbook, and the text messages I’d sent.

  I still wanted to fight.

  If Christian kids had a right to pray privately in school (and they do—anyone who says prayer just plain isn’t allowed is full of shit), then we had a right to worship Satan, too. Fighting for the rights of Satanists to express themselves in a high school yearbook may not have been the worthiest cause in the world, but if I didn’t stand up for this, that would make me more of a bum than any amount of covering up stains in my car with duct tape ever did.

  If I was going to be a dad, I was going to have to grow a pair of nards. I was going to have to stop living like a bum and be a man.

  And a man stands up.

  We spent the rest of the night dancing and mingling, but not really saying anything to each other, let alone to anyone else. Just a lot of “Thank you,” “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” and “Have you seen the view from these windows? You can see half the state.” On the car ride home I told Paige she looked gorgeous, and how she’d taken my breath away when I first saw her in the gown, and she smiled a bit but didn’t really reply.

  And when she was in her house, and I was back in my car, I turned my phone back on and saw that I had about fifty messages about the Satanic poem.

  28. TESTS

  One nice thing about the SAT is that it’s all just multiple-choice. There were no essay questions, and no real opportunities for me to write in a sarcastic response. There was nothing I could really do but give it my best effort.

  I didn’t sleep for shit the night after the ball, but I showed up right on time for the test with two number two pencils, proper ID, and everything else I needed. I took every brochure about colleges and trade schools and stuff that they had set up on the table outside of the testing room except for the ones for the army. I felt like I did fine on the test; you never know for sure or anything, but there weren’t all that many questions where I just had to guess. I test well. It’s why they had put me in the Gifted Pool in the first place. It sure as hell wasn’t my grades. There’s a difference between being smart and getting good grades. Everyone with bad grades knows that.

  But I can’t say I was focused on the test, exactly. The idea of Paige being pregnant was on my mind the whole time, and in between sections, I was drawing pentagrams on the top corner of the desk and imagining what it would be like to have a whole bunch of Satanists marching through the halls of the school demanding a right to express their religion.

  After the test Stan met me at Earthways, where he used a credit card to buy up every pentagram necklace and button they had in the store. They sold them for pagans, not Satanists (pagans never get sick of telling people that it’s not the same thing), but they’d work just fine for our purposes.

  I hadn’t done anything more than send out a handful of texts when I first heard about the poem and the meeting, but while my phone was off, things had apparently snowballed. I’d never really imagined having more than a handful of people actually get involved, but from what Stan was saying, we could probably expect a small army on Monday morning. There were even a couple of local metal bands that offered to play a benefit show if we needed it—like, if the school should find out that Dustin wrote the thing and take action against him, and we needed to raise up a legal defense fund. I didn’t think it would go that far, but it was nice to know that the resources were there.

  Operation Satanic Youth Gone Wild was off the ground.

  It was about midway through my shift on Sunday afternoon that Jenny came in. She helped herself to a pentagram from the box of supplies we’d set up on a table by the ice cream cake freezer, then leaned over the counter.

  “I just talked to Anna on the phone,” she said.

  “Yeah?”

  She nodded.

  I could handle talking about Anna a bit. The whole idea of going out with her ever again just seemed absurd now. That sort of thing just wasn’t going to be a part of my life anymore.

  “What was she up to?” I asked.

  “She said she was in the process of breaking up with some idiot.”

  “Yeah?”

  A month or so before, hearing that Anna was dating someone else would have felt like someone twisting a knife around inside of my kidneys, and then I would have felt like an even bigger asshole than ever for feeling bad about her seeing other people when I was too. But now it just gave me a sort of numb sensation, like finding out a swing set you really liked at your old elementary school had been torn down. It was sad in a way, but didn’t affect me much, really.

  “Didn’t you say she was always actually trying really hard to impress me back in the day?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” said Jenny. “She wasn’t as . . . worldly . . . as she made herself out to be. Didn’t she tell you she sat in on nude figure-drawing classes at the college where her dad taught?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “She totally made that up.”

  “Huh.” I said. “See, I’ve imagined her as this artsy genius girl, and I guess that she really wasn’t. I always thought she was pretty awesome, but it was all probably just in my head this whole time.”

  “No, fucker,” said Jenny. “She wasn’t perfect, but you somehow saw her as the kind of person she wanted to be already. And she saw you kind of the same way. She saw stuff in you that most people didn’t.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Definitely. Can I have a free milk shake for my words of ancient Chinese wisdom?”

  “You’re Japanese.”

  She giggled. “But ‘Chinese wisdom’ sounds more like it’d get me a milk shake.”

  “And you’re, what, third generation Iowan?”

  “Just give me a milk shake.”

  I made her a one—the proper kind that required ice cream, milk, and a blender—and thought for a minute about what she’d said about Anna seeing me as the kind of person I could be, not as an eighth-grade dork, which is what I was.

  Paige saw what kind of person I could be too. She just saw a different possible version of me than Anna had, I guess. A more responsible version—the kind who had a job with a 401K and wore shirts with collars on them. And what she saw was the person I was going to have to be now. Becoming that person was going to be a much bigger test than the SAT. The SAT just seemed like a game in comparison. A formality. Nothing.

  I didn’t go into the back room once during my entire shift.

  But all through the day the groundwork for a Satanic rally was being laid around me. Edie and Jill, her girlfriend, came in with a boxload of  T-shirts they’d ironed Satanic phrases onto. PROUD AMERICAN SATANIST, RELIGION IS THE OPIATE OF THE MASSES, I SOLD MY SOUL FOR ROCKY ROAD, stuff like that. Stan put them in the back room with a sign saying they were free to anyone who promised to wear them to school Monday. I didn’t think we’d get many takers, but when I got off work and went to get my jacket from my locker, I saw that half the shirts were gone. The idea that we might actually get a pretty good rally going, maybe even a regular student riot, made me feel proud.

  The feeling I got from working on the rally was the one thing that made me think that I could handle the whole thing with the baby. That I could rise to the occasion if I had to.

  Mostly.

  On the other hand, I knew that raising a person, and paying for it, was a whole hell of a lot harder than talking kids into wearing funny T-shirts to school.

  After work I bought Paige a pregnancy test at Kum and Go (which, of course, I thought was a hilarious thing to do) before our scheduled outing to Hurricane’s. She saw it on my dashboard when she got in the car.

  “You better not have bought that anyplace where people might know who you are.”

  “It was at a Kum and Go.”

  “They have pregnancy tests there?”

  I shrugged. “Surely you can see how people w
ould mentally link pregnancy to a place with a name like that.”

  She socked me in the arm, but she smiled a bit as she looked at the box.

  “Those Kum and Go guys know us. Whoever sold it to you is going to know about it.”

  “I was almost sure it was going to be that one guy who looks like a pirate when I went in. It wasn’t anyone I recognized, though.”

  “They all probably know each other. If my parents find out because a gas station clerk congratulates them, I’ll never talk to you again.”

  It should have occurred to me that even if they knew us, they didn’t know who Paige’s parents were. But at that moment it felt like one more thing to get all paranoid about.

  We sat there in silence, staring at the blue box on the dashboard like it was a gun that one of us was going to have to fire at the other sooner or later.

  And it had to be Paige. She was the one who had to pee on the thing. That gnawing feeling in my guts was strong enough to dissolve a couple of my internal organs now; I could only imagine what she was feeling. And she wasn’t used to feeling like she was in huge trouble, like I was.

  “You want to take it now?” I asked.

  “Hell no. Not in my house.”

  “You want to take it at Hurricane’s?” I asked.

  She shook her head emphatically. “I am not going to be sitting around Hurricane’s holding something I peed on.”

  “Well, you throw it away, don’t you?”

  She shrugged. I had to admit it seemed like it would be weird to throw something that monumentally important away, but you don’t go around keeping stuff that’s got pee on it, do you? I wondered if my mom took a pregnancy test when I was first conceived, and if she still had it sitting in a scrapbook someplace. She would. I was lucky it wasn’t framed on the living room wall, knowing my parents.

  “Ice Cave?” I asked. “Then you could put it in a plastic bag or something, at least.”

  “Under no circumstances am I pulling my pants down in the Ice Cave.”

  “I meant in the bathroom. I wasn’t, like, thinking you’d pop a squat on the couch.”

  “Same answer applies.”

  “Where, then?” I asked. “Some bushes?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t really want to know yet. I want to hang on to the uncertainty for a bit longer.”

  “Fair enough. I don’t think I could bring myself to pee under this kind of pressure, if it was the guy who did it.”

  “Nope.”

  We drove along the rest of the way without really saying anything, then ended up just sitting in the Hurricane’s parking lot, staring at the box. I should have at least put it in the glove compartment.

  “My parents have extra rooms,” she said. “I guess the baby will live with them while I’m in school.”

  “It could stay with my parents too,” I said.

  Paige looked off into the distance for a minute, then said, “It’ll live at my house.”

  I didn’t fight with her.

  We went a few more seconds not talking, while I tried to get my head around all of this stuff. Every few minutes I’d think of something else that hadn’t occurred to me before, like that I was stuck with Paige’s family now, if her dad didn’t use a butcher’s knife to end my life prematurely. Neither of us was talking about getting married (though I wouldn’t be surprised if her parents were still the sort who thought that was the right thing to do in this situation), but no matter what happened with us, I’d be seeing her parents and Autumn at birthday parties, school events, and all sorts of shit like that for the rest of my life.

  I was going to get a decent job. I wasn’t just going to let Paige’s parents pay for everything. I wasn’t going to be beholden to them. Just taking a job at their country club was bad enough.

  And I was going to have to tell my parents too. I’d have to tell them everything. About how I hadn’t really made any plans for after graduation yet, and about just how far I’d let myself sink. I’d done a great job of keeping up a charade for the last few years, but that was going to have to end.

  I could just imagine my mom responding by saying, “Well, I hope you kept the pregnancy test, because we’re going to start scrapbooking right now.”

  After she killed me, of course.

  Even though, now that I thought about it, she was only four or five years older than I was now when she had me. She was out of college by then, though, so there’s that.

  “Maybe my mom can help me get a real estate license,” I said. “There’s good money in real estate.”

  “You’d be a great Realtor.”

  I don’t think I’d ever felt more grown-up in my life than I did in that moment. The moment when the idea of being a great Realtor seemed like my fondest hope.

  If realty didn’t work out, I could probably move to some other city and get a job in the insurance business. I didn’t know shit about insurance, but I imagined that in most towns I could just walk into an insurance office, tell them I was from Des Moines, the insurance capital of the world, and be put on payroll right away, no questions asked.

  And all through the time we talked about this my phone kept on buzzing with texts. I didn’t check them or anything, but Paige noticed.

  “You’re popular tonight,” she said.

  “Kind of a big night in the Ice Cave,” I said. “Word about that dumb poem in the yearbook got around, and a bunch of people are going to fight to keep it in. Edie and Jill even made T-shirts.”

  Paige looked over at me.

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “Sounds like there might be a miniature riot.”

  “Just tell me you’re not a part of it.”

  I didn’t say anything for a second, and she started to groan.

  “Call it off,” she said. “Get on your phone right now, and call it off.”

  “Look,” I said. “All I did was send a few text messages saying what was happening, and then things kind of snowballed. It mostly happened during the test and the dance, when my phone was off. It’s too late to stop it.”

  “But at least tell me you’re not going to be a part of it. You’re going to come to the meeting with me, and we’re going to say that the yearbook can’t go out as is.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m for the poem. And I’m going to help.”

  “Are you seriously telling me you’re planning to lead a riot to fight for the rights of devil worshippers?”

  “This isn’t about Satanism, it’s about freedom of religion,” I said. “Kids wear shirts with stuff about Jesus on them all the time. You can’t just be for freedom of your own religion.”

  “If this is really going to be a riot, it could end up on the news. I don’t want the baby to be, like, twelve and looking his parents up online and finding out that one of them was part of a rally of Satanists.”

  “Look,” I said. “When the baby comes, I’ll go to church with you every Sunday if you want. I’m going to be the best damned father that baby can have. But if I’m going to be a dad, that means I’ve got to be a man, and a man stands up.”

  I gave her a steely gaze for the first time in our relationship, and she gave me one back, then sighed.

  “Fine,” she said. “Do whatever you want. I don’t even care. But I’m going to be arguing to have the books recalled at the meeting.”

  “Great,” I said. “Do what you think is right. We don’t have to agree on everything.”

  “We should,” she said.

  “But we can’t,” I said. “No couple agrees on everything all the time.”

  She nodded a bit, then sighed, then looked back at the pregnancy test for a minute before putting it in the glove compartment, so if anyone who was going to Hurricane’s walked by and looked in the windshield, they wouldn’t see it. We just kind of stared out at Cedar Avenue for a few minutes before Paige said, “Teddy bears.”

  “I still have a bunch of them in the attic,” I said. “I solemnly swear, this kid will never want for teddy bears.�
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  “No,” she said. “I’m playing free-form Dead Celebrities. Teddy bears.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Log cabins.”

  “Raincoats.”

  “Candelabras.”

  “Cheese sticks.”

  “Souvenir-hunting Viennese undertakers.”

  She paused a bit after that one before saying, “Uh . . . Leslie’s pantsuits.”

  “The Woman Pissing by Picasso.”

  “Headlights.”

  “Un Chien Andalou.”

  “Wooden fences.”

  “Thomas Edison.”

  “Licorice.”

  “Wackford’s Coffee.”

  “That nasty body spray Keith wears too much of.”

  We never did go into Hurricane’s. Other people from Paige’s crowd walked right past the car and didn’t even see us, and Paige turned off her phone so she wouldn’t get texts asking where she was. The two of us just sat there in the front seat, playing free-form Dead Celebrities until neither of us could think of anything at all to say.

  29. BLOOD

  We were lucky this wasn’t caucus season, the time when all the presidential hopefuls swarm on Iowa and bombard us with ads about what’s wrong with America and how they’re going to fix it (usually the problem is “we’ve strayed from the course,” and the solution is to hug a cute kid on television and talk about “values”). We get so many political commercials for so many candidates that people go on vacation just to get away from them.

  If that was all going on now, having a “Satan Rules” poem in a yearbook could have turned into a regular nationwide political issue, if it was a slow news week otherwise. Every candidate would have to make a statement about it. And not even the most liberal guy in town was likely to come out in favor of the poem. No one’s going to get elected as the “pro-Satanism” candidate.