by Shawn Bartek
“Mom,” Ami said, “I have to get home to Dana right after school.”
“She’ll already be alone for two hours until you get home, what’s another hour?” Pam said, “Dana, you’ll be okay, right, hon?”
Dana was now as deceptively sweet as antifreeze, “Yes, momma.”
Ami strained her eyes from the rolling, “Yeah, Dana will be great Mom. She’ll finish what she didn’t finish last night of Dad’s brandy.”
Dana gasped.
“What happened?” Pam said, genuinely confused.
“Oh, Dana just had a taste,” Ami giddily blurted out, “Hey, pulling up to the school now, gotta go, Mom. Talk to you later.”
“Mom!” Dana matched Ami’s blurt, “Ami was out ‘til—”
Ami quickly swiped at the phone and cut her Mom off mid-goodbye. The heat from Dana’s anger was boring itself into the back of Ami’s head.
“Sorry, runt,” Ami said, “I got pissed. I had to relieve stress.”
“I hate you,” Dana said, and she meant it.
Ami cringed. The guilt immediately washed over her and she reversed course.
“Dana, I hate you too, but that’s no reason I can’t make you a kick-ass cheese sandwich tonight. Like, the kind with the thick toast—”
“Texas toast,” Dana mumbled.
“Right,” Ami chuckled, “And three layers of three different cheeses. We have the bacon-flavored cheese.”
“Okay,” Dana said.
“You’re home at two, right?”
“Yeah.”
“You have your bus pass?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re not going to talk to anybody, right? The bus-driver’s okay, but no one else.”
“I know.”
“When you get home, lock the doors, don’t answer the door, hit the couch and pop on those unboxing videos on YouTube that you love. I’ll try to get home by five. Cheese sandwiches will follow shortly thereafter.”
“Do you promise?”
“Yeah, I swear to the god of cheese sandwiches.”
“There’s no god of cheese sandwiches,” Dana said.
“See? Nothing gets by you. You’re so grown up.”
“You better tell Mom you were kidding about the drinking.”
“Let’s take this one day at a time, you souse,” Ami laughed at her.
Dana got out of the car and she disappeared into the school building. Ami recalculated the severity of her lateness and knew she’d be walking into school thirty minutes late. She thought of a few scenarios that would be too awkward for anyone to ask follow up questions, most of them related to bodily functions.
There was also the dead-dad card. It sat waiting for her to use it, but it was already reaching its expiration date with people. She never wanted to use it in the first place, but it was a card game that played itself.
Chapter II
Marc Nelson stared at the makeshift dust jacket encasing his latest Human Dignity reading assignment. It covered a (nonetheless frayed and worn) copy of the book Alive, the true story of the Chilean soccer team that survived a plane crash in the Andes; they stayed the titular alive by eating the bodies of the dead.
On the dust cover—formerly a paper grocery bag, a poorly doodled face stared back at him. It wore a sombrero; its mouth gaped open in mid-devour of a dismembered leg. To the upper left, a voice bubble emitted from the caricature, exclaiming in bold print, “LEG TASTE GOOD!”
As he began to finish the last gaucho ball on the sombrero, he heard Mr. Harris call out his name. He felt the familiar electricity run through his body.
“I…unh. The snow?” he blurted, hoping the class had still been ruminating over the thematic concepts of the book, specifically “Man versus Nature”.
“We’re on Man versus Technology now.”
“Oh, I…sorry, I meant that the snow was messing with the airplane’s radar,” he said, unsure if this was true. The stars began to twinkle in Marc’s peripheral, but he continued to ramble, “But that’s just nature, again, isn’t it? Not the technology. Sorry.”
There, he thought, I’ve put in my participation time for the day. Now don’t frickin’ call on me again.
Marc’s temples began to feel saturated and he naturally assumed his sweaty brow was screaming to everyone in the room. He nonchalantly pretended he had an itch there so he could gauge the level of the damage. His index finger came back dry.
Nonetheless, Mr. Harris picked up on Marc’s anxiety. He said, “I suppose so. No biggie. Nature is definitely the big bad villain in this one.”
Two rows up, that dude Mitchell came to his rescue.
“The high altitudes were also a factor,” Mitchell said.
“Certainly,” Mr. Harris, moving back to the chalkboard, “I guess we weren’t finished with Man versus Nature, after all.”
Marc would thank Mitchell if they ever spoke directly to each other. Human Dignity was a class sparse with friends. It was even sparse on casual acquaintances. It didn’t matter, Marc had a few friends at school and that was enough for him.
The dissection of the book began to sound like white noise again and it faded into the walls. It was a crazy story, but he found little interest in it today. As if he’d ever be in a position to decide whether or not to eat another person. He wondered when they would just go ahead and watch the movie already.
Marc stared back at the clock. His impending doom was about twenty-three minutes away. The hands of the clock moved as if it were running out of batteries, yet still keeping accurate time. His concentration on the clock was so deep that he could hear its gears scrape slightly while the second hand pulsed between the 9 and the 10.
It was D-Day. The day he’d finally ask Ami Gibb to prom.
He had been patient long enough about this whole thing. When his family moved to Montana his freshman year, he needed a supernatural excuse to give their move a more profound meaning. It was his first spotting of Ami that did it, her eyes arresting him and making a dubious concept like fate seem real.
And after four years of waiting for some good luck with class scheduling, they finally ended up in the same class. Fate was trying to prove its existence to him again. Ami had been going through bad shit. And Marc figured that he had dealt with bad shit before; he could be the one to bring her out of it. It was as if the stars aligned to bring them together at the time where she would need the help of a friend that could help her cope.
She was clearly doing better lately and Marc wanted to think their art-class shenanigans had something to do with it. They were less than two weeks away from the dance and he was sure that if she had been asked already, she’d have mentioned it to him.
It was going to be a hard sell. Marc was not a bro’s bro. He didn’t look anything like her last boyfriend. Scott made Marc look like an emaciated albino.
But Marc could make her laugh. And that’s where he thought he had his in. He had always made it a goal to snake one genuine laugh out of her per day and his daily average continually increased. He was still riding a small high from an incident that happened between them last Friday.
In art class, a self-portrait (medium: chalk) was revealed by Kevin Traynor. A future frat pledge with a square jaw, his braggadocio strongly asserted the quality of his work. He was unaware that the drawing of his chin-dimple looked exactly like an asshole; there was no other way for the eye to interpret it. Marc and Ami got infected by the giggles. They squeezed each other’s hands under the table, the pain providing just enough distraction to keep it together. It was the most genuine laugh he had seen out of her since you-know-what.
He built himself up. Why wouldn’t she want to go? At the very least, Marc felt confident they could officially be defined as buddies. That’s the angle he would take. Light and breezy would be the key. No money down, no obligation to buy.
Seriously, how hard is it? Just say it: ‘Let’s go to the prom together. It’ll be good for you. We’ll have fun.’ She won’t say no.
But he knew it wouldn’t happen like that. It would happen like one of these three possibilities:
“I like you, Marc, but not in that way,” she would say.
“Oh, okay, I didn’t really mean it to mean anything,” he would say.
Or:
“Marc, I’m just not ready yet for social events,” she would say.
“I get that. I really do. You need time,” he would say.
Or:
“You are the lamest guy in school and when I talk to you, I think about killing myself,” she would say.
“Right on, buddy. You are totally right,” he would say.
And through all of those brutal exchanges, he would also be fighting with an array of potential physical symptoms: the rush of heat to his face, the hand tremors, the stars in the corners of his eyes, the faintness and the sweating.
It was the misery that would arrive anytime he’d need confidence and instead his body would tell him to fuck off.
A pharmaceutical ad on T.V. convinced him that he might have something called generalized anxiety disorder. If he ever actually went to the doctor, he’d make sure to ask about it, just as the ad suggested.
His stomach turned as he continued to stare at the clock.
Chapter III
Ami peeked into the doorway of art class hoping not to be seen. This was the second tardiness today; this one due to her lunch obligation to pick up her aunt’s Xanax. She was ten minutes late this time and wasn’t sure if Ms. Ford had noticed. Her art teacher had buried herself in an art project of her own: a pen and ink drawing of the old Wilma Theater. Ami tried to flag Marc down to plan out an impromptu distraction, but he was also buried in his art project.
Then inspiration struck. A gambit presented itself to her.
“Ms. Ford, can I go to the bathroom?” Ami called out.
Ms. Ford looked up, “Hey, where were you?”
Ami looked perplexed, “What do you mean?”
Ms. Ford picked up a clipboard and examined it, “That’s what I was thinking. You weren’t here for roll.”
“I was here,” Ami said, “I heard you call my name and I answered.” Her face moved to pensive and she said, “I know what happened. I wasn’t very loud, so I don’t think you heard me when I answered.”
Ms. Ford gave her the skeptic’s eye, “I was pretty sure I didn’t see you because I remember specifically wondering how your project was coming along.”
The gambit was failing. “I don’t know what to tell you,” Ami began to say; her hair slightly damp at the temples.
“She was here,” Marc spoke up, “She was here the whole time with me. She found this picture for me.” He held up a picture of a red and white flip-flop.
Ami smiled at him and slunk down in her seat.
Ms. Ford looked around the class and didn’t see any students caring enough about tardiness to sell Ami out. It wasn’t a secret that she lost her dad four months ago and people generally were treating her with kids’ gloves. Ms. Ford wasn’t going to press the issue.
But she wasn’t going to play stupid, “Okay. Don’t you still need to go to the bathroom?”
“I don’t have to go anymore,” Ami said.
“Right,” their teacher said, “How convenient.”
“Just like magic,” Ami shrugged and dug into a box of scrap magazines.
Marc was biting his lip; pushing the laugh down into his chest. He was punching out holes in a magazine and pasting the matching colored dots to his picture of the sandal. It was his experiment in pointillism.
Once Ms. Ford was safely into her pen-and-ink trance again, he decided it safe to whisper to Ami, “Where were you?”
“My mother is an assface. Just a continuation of a shitty day.”
“I don’t really think Ms. Ford is giving a shit right now,” he said, “Brendon asked if we can have the T.V. on and she didn’t even flinch.”
“Sweet, I hope we see Days of Our Lives.”
“It’s not on until three,” Marc punched another hole in the magazine.
“How do you know that?” Ami said.
“Doesn’t everybody know that?”
“My aunt does,” Ami said, “How’s the masterpiece coming?”
“It’s the perfect amount of tedious mindless work and treasure hunting. I need a magazine with lots of white, though.”
“Here, I owe you,” Ami said, handing him a copy of the New Yorker, “This should be a gold mine. Lots of white in this magazine. White pages and white people. You’ll have the face of your flip-flop covered just with this one issue.”
“You’re a genius,” Marc said, and nodded at her, “Favor returned. We’re even.”
Marc was a rare occurrence in her life right now: a person in which Ami needed to make only a little effort to throw on the suit of armor. It was less necessary to wear the happy-dog face with him. She figured it was because he was the first friend she made after her dad died. They had met each other a few times before, but until a month ago she mostly considered him a background extra.
With Marc, there was no such thing as acting in a way that an Ami Lee Gibb, daughter of Pam & Martin Gibb of Harrison Street was historically known to act. Marc hadn’t grown up with her since she was a kid like the rest of her friends and he wouldn’t be comparing a pre-tragedy Ami to a post-tragedy Ami.
He would just treat her—normal; like nothing was different about her. He also didn’t seem to care if she was ready enough for jokes. She had nearly pissed herself last Friday during self-portrait presentations and it was mostly because of the mugging of her cohort. They held hands to stifle their rudeness and she had thought she would squeeze his hand off.
“So why’s your mom an assface?” Marc asked her.
“Ugh, I’m Replacement Mom now, don’t ‘cha know? Mom thought she deserved a vacation for herself to sort things out. In the meantime, I’ve had to take care of Dana all week, keep the house clean, and be an errand girl for my aunt.”
“She’ll be back in time for prom though, right?”
“I guess so,” Ami looked confused, “Why does that matter? You want to ask her to prom? You’re gross.”
“No,” Marc laughed, a little too nervously, “Maybe it would just be good for her to see her daughter all dressed up and having a good time.”
“I don’t even think I’m going,” Ami said.
Marc shifted in his chair and put down the hole-punch. “It might not be that bad,” he said.
“Who would I even go with at this point?” Ami said, “I just…I don’t know. I don’t think I’m-”
She cut herself off when she saw Scott and Leslie strolling by the classroom. It derailed her train. He looked good today.
“Sorry, I just saw, um…you know who,” Ami said.
“Oh, that sucks,” Marc said, “Is he still ugly?”
“Far from it,” she said.
At the kick-off of what was the shittiest day of her life thus far, Scott had cut ties with Ami, citing a problem of “priority”. He was on the fast track to a pre-law program at the U of M and told her as gently has he could that he didn’t want her to be a secondary concern in his life.
And yet, Ami had been seeing Scott with Leslie Knadler a lot lately. Leslie was a jealousy inducing, statistical anomaly: a young woman of poise; naturally attractive, inside and out, in a way reserved only for the most fortunate of human beings. Sweet and self-deprecating. Straight-A student. Star athlete. Hair straight out of a shampoo commercial. A smile rich in teeth that were impossibly white. Always generous with gratitude and flattery. She exuded charm and grace to everyone she came across.
The phenomenon that Ami could not explain was that with all the pain she had been through this school year, seeing them together had the capacity to hurt her. She had been through the ringer. Her father died. Her mother had fallen apart. Her family was a now a broken centrifuge, scattering fragments into the universe. These were things that had hurt her until she eventually turned numb inside, and yet Scott
and Leslie exchanging a knowing glance was like dagger into her eyes.
Scott should have been there for her. He’d made a few attempts to console her over the last few months. For instance, he’d made an appearance at her dad’s funeral and he’d sent her flowers. But he’d not been the same friend that he’d been before their breakup. Ami knew the side of Scott that was genuinely nurturing and it would have made a big difference for her. Maybe the pain would have been more manageable if she hadn’t felt so alone.
And maybe it was her that was pushing him away. When she spoke to him after December, there was a bitterness that would come out and it would conflict with her desire to have him back.
Ami returned from her fugue when she heard Marc speak again. She said, “What?”
“I said: is your mom coming home on Saturday?” he answered, slowly enunciating to her.
“Sunday, actually. It’ll be nice handing back control of their little mid-life surprise.”
“She’s been a real hassle for you?”
“I don’t know. I suppose not. She’s a brat and all, but she has her moments. She’s lucky I knew her when she was a sweet innocent little baby. I guess I just haven’t felt up for the obligation of it. I feel bad, I didn’t get home until almost two last night.”
“You left your sister alone until two in the morning?” he said.
Ami threw a copy of National Geographic at him. With its hard-edged binding, it left a dent on Marc’s arm.
“Ow,” Marc squinted at her.
“I’m sorry,” Ami smiled, “I can get you a wowi-pop if it makes you feel better, little guy.”
“You are a cold-blooded badass,” Marc said to her.
Ami laughed as she glued the last ear on her project; a collage of facial features combined to make a creepy whole. It took ten minutes to finish, which was the most important part for her.