by Pamela Ribon
The air out in front of the club was brisk against my skin, but it was nice to be away from all of the noise. I lit a cigarette and checked my watch. It was only one. I opened my purse and grabbed my cell phone.
Dale answered on the second ring.
“Yay! You’re not dead!” he cheered. “Stalker boy and stalker girl have yet to kill you!”
“Yes, I’m completely alive and still have all my limbs.”
“Good. Wait. Are you trapped inside of a washing machine? What’s that noise?”
“I’m at a club.”
I couldn’t hear anything because of the noise outside, but I knew Dale was laughing at me.
“Dale, I don’t need this right now.”
“It’s just…I think it’s cute you’re hanging out with the kids again. Watch your drink, you might get some Roofies.”
“I’m still not laughing.”
After I recapped the web conference, he asked, “Did Tess say anything about Ian writing to her yet?”
“No, not really,” I said as I blew out a puff of smoke. “She said something about him wanting to sleep with her, but then she said she was kidding. We need to check Fake Ian’s e-mail when I get home.”
“I don’t trust that girl.”
“You don’t trust anyone.”
“Hey, I haven’t told you my good news yet. I finished the screenplay.”
“That’s great! When do I get to read it?”
“Wait. More good news. I asked one of my friends who works with Austin Film Works to take a look at it. She liked it and she gave it to someone else to read who gave it to someone else and that person wants to pay for it and—blah, blah, blah, Hollywood, blah—they’re going to make my movie!”
“That’s fantastic! I’m so proud of you!”
“So why haven’t you met stalker boy yet?”
I took a breath. “He cancelled.”
“Because he’s actually a woman living in Arizona? I knew it. Jason totally owes me ten bucks.”
“Because he thinks he’s in love with me.”
“Dammit! I hate when I’m far away from the good gossip.”
I told him everything from the chat room to the phone call just a few hours ago.
“He’s going to kill you,” Dale concluded.
“He is not. He’s just confused.”
“Only crazy people tell you that they love you so much they can’t ever see you. It’s because they’re trying not to kill you.”
“He’s not a crazy person. What if he really loves me?”
“Yes, well, it’s too bad you’re already attached to the perfect man. He called, by the way. Finally. Said he’s sorry he treated you like shit and ignored you after you let him fuck you in your mom’s house. Oh, wait. No. That wasn’t him. That would have been sensible and would have been the right thing to do, but you’re non-dating an asshole who’s trying to get out of weddings just so he never has to—”
“I got it, Dale,” I said, cutting him off. “Okay,” I whispered.
“Tell your Internet boy the truth. What do you have to lose?”
I could lose everything. The potential to have it all. I could lose the first person in a long time who really thought I was something special.
The cold was starting to get to me, so I promised Dale I’d call him the next day to fill him in on everything.
I found Tess inside and told her that I wanted to go home. She was dancing with a boy who had a Glo-Stick in his mouth. She asked if I minded taking a cab. I wished her luck and was grateful to be on my way so easily.
I checked my e-mail when I got back to my room. For the first time in over four months, Kurt hadn’t written. I went to sleep feeling that missing letter, wondering what percentage of my daily conversations happened with machines.
000057.
ldobler23: Good morning, Anna.
annakannak: Oh! Kurt? Hi. This thing made a noise and it scared me. I was just checking my e-mail. I didn’t know that it automatically logged me onto this thing.
ldobler23: I’m glad it did.
annakannak: Hi.
ldobler23: Hi.
annakannak: Hi.
ldobler23: Do you hate me?
annakannak: Of course I don’t hate you.
ldobler23: I can’t believe I said all of that last night. Will you pretend I didn’t?
annakannak: No.
ldobler23: Oh.
annakannak: It would be hard to pretend that.
ldobler23: I guess so.
annakannak: So, are you picking me up soon?
ldobler23: Yes.
annakannak: No pussing out today?
ldobler23: No pussing out. I promise.
annakannak: What are we going to do?
ldobler23: Fun things.
annakannak: Pittsburgh fun things, huh? If you say so.
ldobler23: I’ll pick you up at ten. Don’t eat lunch.
annakannak: Okay, I’m starting to get scared now.
ldobler23: Really?
annakannak: Yeah. What if this ruins us forever?
ldobler23: I’m sure it won’t.
annakannak: You could hate me.
ldobler23: I won’t.
annakannak: Promise?
ldobler23: No.
annakannak: Fucker.
ldobler23: I’ll see you soon.
annakannak: How will I know which one is you?
ldobler23: You’ll know.
000058.
I met Tess in the lobby an hour later.
“Do you want to keep the rental car?” I asked her.
“No,” she said. She was wearing a Cure T-shirt and jean shorts with tights under them, a look I hadn’t seen since I was in the ninth grade. “I’m going to have the hotel shuttle take me to the airport.”
I had brought her a cup of coffee. She sipped it.
“You look nice,” she grunted.
“Oh. Well, I haven’t seen my friend in a while. You know how you always want to look like you’re doing better than the last time you saw a person.”
“Are you? Doing better?” She wasn’t looking at me.
“I don’t know.”
“I’m sorry. I’m cranky this morning. I was up with that guy very late.”
“Oh, yeah. How did it go?” I lit a morning cigarette and leaned in. “Did you do the nasty? Da butt?” I bumped into her hips and moaned, “Oh! Sexy! Sexy!”
“It’s very early, Anna. Please don’t dance before ten.”
“Sorry.” I giggled into my coffee.
“What gives you so much energy this morning?”
Only one more hour. One more hour. Just one more hour. Sixty minutes. Less than that by now. Even less by the time I realized that it was even less. The minutes, ticking by.
“Before you run off to have fun with your real friends, I brought you something.” Tess was handing me a box that was wrapped with silver paper. “Don’t freak out. I made them.”
They were superhero action figures. One was obviously Tess, with the hair and the giant “T” on the chest. The other one was either me or Hester Prynne.
“I thought you might like to have some more updated Barbies,” she said. “You know, with real sexpot superstars.”
“I can’t believe you made these.” They looked incredible. “Do their legs bend all the way back?”
“I just took some old dolls, changed their hair and painted some new makeup on them. I made the clothes. I was bored one night and on too many No-Doz. I had a French final I blew off. No big deal. You like them?”
I did.
“Thank you.”
We hugged. We wished each other safe trips home. We promised not to write anything incriminating about each other. When she went back to her room, I saw her wipe a tear away in haste. “I’ll miss you!” she shouted as she shut the door.
Fifty-two minutes later, I was standing outside the hotel. I couldn’t wait in the lobby anymore. I had already gone over my list of lies, had three cups of coffe
e, eaten two pieces of gum and six Altoids. I had brushed my hair and applied lip gloss and put on moisturizer. I had run out of preparatory things to do and I couldn’t sit still any longer.
I gave myself whiplash craning my head down the street as I waited for Kurt to pick me up. I didn’t even know what kind of car I was looking for. Since he could be just about anyone, each person walking toward me went through an evaluation process. If the person walking toward me wasn’t him, I’d choose traits in this person I hoped Kurt would have. I was trying to decide if Kurt should have a nose ring when I heard a voice from behind.
“Well, hello, Anna K.”
John Cusack has dark hair, a tiny mouth, and looks like a good kisser. Kurt was tall, blond, with glasses and no nose ring. Still looked like a good kisser.
“How did you know it was me?” I asked.
“I didn’t. Lucky guess.” He smiled and looked up to the sky. “Very lucky,” he said quietly. We both exhaled at the same time.
He took me to lunch at a little diner that he said was near his house. He ordered a club. I had a BLT. The table was blue, with this plastic lacquer type of thing over it. It had postcards decoupaged inside the lacquer. The postcards were of different shots of San Francisco. Alcatraz. Trolleys. Fisherman’s Wharf.
The chairs we sat in were wooden and worn. The seats were too hard and unforgiving. The room smelled like mop water. The coffee was watery. The food was fine. Not that I ate much.
“You don’t like tomatoes?” I asked him, noticing the food pushed to one side of his plate.
“No,” he said.
“Oh.”
“You want them?” He pushed his plate a bit toward me and a few fries tumbled off the side onto the table.
“No thanks,” I said. “I’ve got a lot to eat here.”
“Is it okay?”
“The food? Yes.”
I had an incredibly hard time staring Kurt in the face. I don’t know how I got so nervous. It was like I was waiting for him to ask me to dance. We gave each other the quickest answers to every question. Where were the jokes and the flirting we were so accustomed to? How did we end up scaring each other like this?
I grabbed the salt shaker and it fell out of my hand. As I lurched to pick it up, my elbow hit my water glass, sending it tumbling over.
I jumped up and cursed. Kurt was quick with the napkins, preventing the spill from pouring into our laps. Water dripped off the table to the floor. A busboy came up with a mop. People were staring. I could feel the tears beating in my entire face, waiting to make their move. He was right; we were ruining everything by meeting face to face.
Kurt looked up at me and made eye contact. “Let’s get out of here, okay? I’m not hungry anymore.”
We walked outside of the diner. I spoke first. “I’m sorry.”
“We’re nervous.”
“Do I make you nervous?” I asked.
“I make myself nervous, Anna,” he answered. He pulled off his glasses and started to clean them on the end of his shirt. He looked over my head, down the street. “I imagined our first afternoon together so many different ways, but I never thought it would be me saying stupid shit while you wished you were somewhere else.” He was much taller than I was, and I could see a small scab on his neck where he must have cut himself shaving.
“Hey,” I said suddenly. “Take me to your bar with those guys that tell you about your life.”
He smiled. “I can’t believe you remember that.”
Two beers each later, we were much more relaxed. We were able to look at each other. We made jokes and even touched each other a few times. Avoiding talk about anything uncomfortable, we refrained from discussions of Ian, my father, his message last night, or his ex, Heather. We stuck to movies, sports, and music. We ended up arguing over which song is better for trashing a hotel room: Prodigy’s “Firestarter” or L7’s “Shit List.”
“I can’t believe your friends aren’t here,” I pouted.
“Wait long enough and they’ll show up. There’s one now.”
An older man with a large, rounded stomach took his place on a stool at the end of the bar. He gave a small wave to Kurt. “Is that the girl?” he said loudly.
“Ah, jeez,” Kurt said, lowering his head toward the bar. “I knew this was a bad idea.” He looked back to the end of the bar. “Hey, Al.”
“You did good, Kurt!” Al shouted back, his thumbs and fore-fingers forming two “OK” symbols over his head.
“Thanks,” Kurt said as he led me by the elbow away from the bar. “Let’s get a booth,” he said.
“You aren’t as short as you make yourself sound,” he said to me after our next round. We were huddled together in the booth, the room quickly getting darker.
“Tall shoes,” I replied. “You aren’t as much of a loser as you make yourself sound.”
“You thought I’d be a loser?” A waitress brought by a lit candle inside a Mason jar.
“No, but you talked like you thought you were a loser,” I said.
“How does someone do that?” he asked as he sipped his beer.
“I don’t know. With more whining? I kind of thought you’d be fat.”
“Thanks. Because I’m a loser?”
“No. I just thought you might be fat. Your voice, I guess.”
“I have a fat voice?”
“You speak with a fat accent.”
He shook his head. He laughed.
His eyes were brown. His hair fell down in chunks around his face, but it wasn’t messy. His hair had a natural wave that framed his face nicely. His face was clean-shaven, and I could see a few scars on his chin and one under his right eye. I asked about it.
“My sister. We were fighting over an Easy Bake Oven packet and she jabbed me with a pickup stick.”
“That’s a puncture wound?”
“I’m not really sure how she did it. She’s strong. I couldn’t have been more than ten. It wasn’t even that bad of a cut—it just scarred for some reason. I like it because it’s in the shape of a letter C, and my sister’s name is Cassie. Cassandra, actually, but I like that she put her mark on me like she’s Inigo Montoya.”
I turned my hand over and showed him the inside of my right elbow. “Sisters always cause scars, don’t they?”
“Theresa?” he asked.
“Who?”
“Theresa. I thought that was your sister’s name. Shannon is the other one, right?”
As far as he knew. I tried to cover quickly, but I’m sure I looked caught. “We call her Meredith, mostly. Theresa is her middle name. I don’t know why I told you her name was Theresa.” Only the last sentence had any truth in it.
We shared an order of onion rings as we watched Al hit on the girl who sat next to him. She left seconds later, quickly cursing at him before bursting out the door.
“Hey, baby, you’ll miss me when I’m on the moon,” Al shouted at the closed door. The bar erupted in laughter.
“I’ll miss him, too,” Kurt said. “I never get to go to the moon.”
“That’s where all the really cool guys get to go.” I looked up to see that the place had gotten quite crowded while we talked.
“What’s the worst pickup line you ever heard?” Kurt asked, dipping an onion ring into a puddle of ketchup.
I thought for a moment. “He said to me, ‘Hey, you know you could be Julia Roberts’ stunt double?”’
Kurt laughed into his drink. “What does that mean?”
“I know! I look nothing like Julia Roberts, in the first place.”
“I wasn’t going to say that, but yeah, you look nothing like her.”
“Thanks.” I dug my straw into my Coke and rooted through the ice.
“Not that you’re not pretty, but you don’t look like Julia Roberts. You’ve got blond hair and she’s easily a foot taller.”
“If by a foot you mean five inches or so,” I said. “But I get your point. Thanks.”
“I’m not saying you’re unattractive.
You’re very pretty.” He was pleading for me to look back at him again.
I smiled. “But that’s not the strangest part of what he said. He said I could be her stunt double. Does that mean I’m the burly version of Julia Roberts?”
“What did you say to him?”
“I told him that he looked like a poor man’s Bruno Kirby.”
“Nice.”
“Thanks,” I said. “What’s your worst?”
“That a girl ever used on me?” he asked. “Well, once a girl handed me her phone number and told me to call her when I was ‘done with’ Heather. Because Heather is some kind of disposable item. She said it like she was asking me if I was done with these onion rings or something.”
“What did you say to her?”
“I didn’t get a chance. Heather slapped her in the face.”
“Heather was there?” The waitress brought over another round of Cokes.
“The girl had a lot of balls,” Kurt said. “Heather wasn’t the kind of girl you pulled that shit around.”
“What’s the worst line you ever used?” I asked him.
“What makes you think I use lines on women?”
“Just taking a wild guess.”
“Oh, I’m sure I once said something really stupid like, ‘Are you a thief? Because you just stole my breath away.”’
“You never said that.”
“Everyone’s in junior high at some point, Anna.”
“Lord.”
“What line did you use?” He leaned in toward me and the scent of him filled my head. Warm, like a fire burning and someone drinking hot chocolate. A little spicy and warm.
“I’m a girl. We don’t use pickup lines,” I said, leaning into his smell. My head felt lighter. I bit my lip, aware of how much I’d been grinning.
“You just use your computer to pick up guys.”
I leaned back. “I’m not picking you up.”
“Come on,” he said. “‘I’ll buy the onion rings?’ That’s the worst line I’ve ever heard.”
“I know the best line I’ve ever used.” I smiled.
“What’s that?”
“I’ll kick your ass in Street Fighter.”
“The video game?” he asked.
“Yep. Makes ’em melt every time.”