by Elle Wright
Of course, he was gracious and told EJ how wonderful his daughter was, yada, yada, yada, and then he gently handed her back to her father, and whisked Mrs. B out of the store so fast you’d think the place was on fire. EJ and I bust out laughing. There isn’t a person in town whose daughter, niece, granddaughter, cousin, or family friend hasn’t be trotted out in front of cop# 2 in some manner. The poor man has had more dinners with complete strangers at his parents’ table than a porcupine has quills. For a while there, Mrs. B was convinced cop #2 was gay, and then there were eligible bachelors coming over for dinner every time cop #2 was home for a visit. After the 3rd or 4th bachelor, cop #2 told his folks he wasn’t gay. He didn’t come home for a couple of months after the last guy had come to dinner.
You know what cracks me up the most? Cop #2 is on a terrorist task force and his mother is the most frightening person in his life.
Your turn.
Ace
Nine days later
Four weeks and three days until the end of the semester
Gio
Ace. Who’s Professor Kingsfield? What’s Peer Gynt, and who the fuck says poo-poo undies? Usually, I protect my man card and look up shit like that, and act all I knew that, but I’m so under water with studying, I’m taking the easy way out. I know you’ll lend a brother a hand and tell me what I don’t know.
This week E and I are spending hours every night quizzing each other on the chem stuff. My brain hurts. And you know what’s making me fuckin’ nuts? H isn’t studying AT ALL. The dude is taking walks in the sunshine, reading for pleasure under trees, and he’s taken to binge-watching British procedural cop dramas on Acorn. The thing that’s driving me the most crazy is that he’s going to breeze through every final and get an A in every class. Right now, I hate him.
Ready? Here comes who-needs-drama-while-we’re-studying-for-finals. Three girls who live on our floor – guy quads in opposite corners on girls’ floors, girl quads in opposite corners on guy floors, brilliant dorm arrangements, right? – come a-pounding on the quad door. How do I know? I’m out in the hall trying to get into my quad. They announce, wait for it, they’re offended by our objectification of women. O was the one who answered the door. Why it couldn’t have been anyone else, I swear, I have no fucking idea, but, in typical O fashion, he says, “You bitches high?” Which, of course, went beyond insult to injury and took us straight into women’s march territory. E shoved O into the quad, apologized for him, using the brain-dead-from-studying excuse, then asked the girls to clarify. One of them tells E, “That mannequin is placed where everyone can see her,” she points to the glass panel, “and there are as many times as not that she is draped with salacious items, is topless, or nude. We want you to do something about it or we’re filing a formal complaint.” At which point O, who had been hanging back in the quad but clearly hears the back-and-forth, goes into his room, takes out his nearly floor-length trench coat – don’t ask, he’s in a Sherlock Holmes society – and a fedora, pushes past E, and clothes Vanessa in the coat and hat. “There you go.” He brushes his hands together then says, “She’ll stay like that until the end of the semester. Have a nice evening.” He salutes, then heads back into the quad. The girls look at each other, shrug, and the appointed spokesperson says, “That’ll do for now.” As one, they turn and stomp by me. E shakes his head, and I have to stare at my feet to keep from laughing as I walk into the quad.
Your turn.
G
Eight days later
Three weeks and two days until the end of the semester
Mirabelle
G, G, G. I know you watch older movies ’cause you told me about the Dirty Harry flicks. I’m guessing you never saw The Paper Chase? It’s the seminal law school movie of all time set in Harvard. The professor who sits on the hero’s head (euphemistically, of course) through the whole picture is Professor Kingsfield, who thinks the Socratic method is inviolate.
Peer Gynt is a famous Ibsen play that has significance in the British movie Educating Rita. Fabulous story about a washed-up brilliant professor who becomes interested in life again while mentoring a vibrant uneducated hairdresser who took herself to uni to learn. It’s a wonderful movie. Lots of great lines and fabulous acting.
Puh-lease, puh-lease don’t tell me you don’t love Mel Brooks movies. This is a deal breaker, G. In Young Frankenstein, one of the funniest movies ever made, there’s a scene at the end, which if you haven’t seen it yet, I’m not going to do a spoiler, that references different hampers for washing clothes, and one of the hampers is for poo-poo undies.
You have a lot of filmography to catch up on, buddy.
I’m taking the no-comment route on the whole Vanessa biz. Less said sooner mended.
I’m guessing you didn’t get a summer internship on one of the treasure-hunting boats since you haven’t mentioned it. Pity. I had hoped you’d get a cut of some doubloons or something along those lines.
The latest on R: She’s about a week past the first trimester and she’s starting to show. But she’s not giving up her clothes for maternity duds quite yet. Yesterday, she came into the store wearing a sleeveless stretchy sundress in bright yellow. From the back you can’t tell she’s preggers. She’s got a great bod, and likes to share it with the general population. When you catch her sideways, she looks like she ate three too many burritos with a double side of arroz and frijoles. Yeah, look at me getting a jump on my Spanish class. She’d been ample in the chest region to begin with, now…let’s say I’m glad O can’t see her. His comments would, to quote you, take us into the women’s march territory.
R came in to tell EJ that she has her sonogram scheduled for five weeks from today. How long do you think it took to put up the town pool on the baby’s gender in the breakroom? Do Jeopardy music in your head for a moment. C’mon. Play along. Twenty-two minutes. No shit. The matrix was done and posted and people started coming in to place their bets within twenty-two minutes. And, yep, Mrs. B is in charge of the pool.
Everyone couldn’t wait to tell R how wonderful she looks, and there wasn’t a person who didn’t have some sort of advice ranging from what to eat, wear, rub on her belly to prevent stretch marks, to footwear, special sleeping pillows, and the best recliners to keep your feet above your heart. I don’t know if the last one has as much to do with being preggers as other health concerns, but people are trying to be helpful.
Hey, are you sleeping enough? Studying requires a lot of brainpower, and sleep is a great restorative. I try to get seven hours a night, and, for the most part, succeed. I drink chamomile tea about a half hour before I go to sleep. I think it helps. Don’t tell me your man card prevents you from drinking chamomile tea. Pretend you’re English and you grew up drinking tea. You can do civilized. I have faith.
Your turn.
Ace
Nine days later
Two weeks until the end of the semester
Gio
How could you miss someone you’ve never met? In ways he’d lost count of, Gio had spent more time getting to know M than any other girl. Ever. He wasn’t necessarily opposed to commitment, but up until now, he hadn’t met anyone who’d tugged on his heartstrings. Sure, a lot of girls were cute, or funny, or easy to be with, but he’d never done more than dated. Hung out. Fucked until he collapsed. But M—she’d become important to him in an air-that-he-breathed kind of way. With her he’d been having the relationship he’d never thought to try on with anyone else.
Although he’d never met her in person, he missed her physical presence. He wanted to hold her. He wanted to come back from the library, tell her about his day, hear all about hers, then get into bed with her and have her tucked up as close as two people could be.
Yeah, for months now, he’d been rubbing it out on the regular thinking about her. What was really weird, he didn’t want to sink his dick into anyone else. Not that M would know, and it wasn’t like they’d talked about it and were exclusive or shit like that, but he wanted her. And only
her.
Two weeks and a day before he would be standing in front of her, and he was jumping out of his skin as the hours crawled by.
He’d decided to fly and rent a car when he got to Portland, which was more than a five-hour drive to Fiddler’s Rest. He wanted to get to M right away, and figured he’d be wasting time driving across the US. Yeah, he’d like to see the country, hang in the Colorado mountains, stay up all night and get wasted in Vegas, but he thought maybe M would be up for little side adventures. He’d already begun looking for a summer job anywhere within an hour of Fiddler’s Rest. There wasn’t much doing in that part of the state, but the county was hiring people to work on road crews, and while it wasn’t what he’d call stimulating work, it was money, and he wanted to pull his weight when he was with her.
He couldn’t envision any other outcome than them spending their first few days together doing only four things: nonstop sex until they couldn’t breathe, eating, using the bathroom, and sleeping. God, the mere thought of smelling her hair, being able to touch her whenever he wanted, kissing her senseless…he got hard every time he conjured the possibilities.
While he didn’t care what she looked like, he pictured her as short and wiry, with spikey black hair, nails painted black, and lots of silver rings on her fingers. Since she was so into retro, he imagined her in clunky black Doc Martens, low loose jeans with a wide belt studded with silver, and a black hoodie. Okay, yeah, he’d fantasized about her more than was probably healthy, but she was his, and he was going to Fiddler’s Rest to claim her.
Ace. I knew it! You love to crack up as much as I do. Mel Brooks movies are right in there with Monty Python, Adam Sandler, Kevin Hart, anything Seinfeld, and Bill Murray. I’ve seen Young Frankenstein a couple of times, but I didn’t remember the poo-poo undies comment. Maybe because I was laughing so hard at the monster reading the Wall Street Journal. When finals are over, I’ll catch Educating Rita. I’ll hold off on The Paper Chase. I’m so done with school right now, my brain is disconnecting from the rest of my body.
Sleep. Yeah, I sleep, but it’s different now. I can define my life by two events that changed me forever. The first happened on my eighth birthday – family thing for another time – and the second was the school shooting. Up until the shooting, I was your typical teenager. I slept like the dead, sometimes for twelve-hour stretches. My mother, who worries like she gets paid for it, took me to the doctor, who told her I was normal. After that, she didn’t come in to check if I was dead, which was annoying.
After the shooting, I couldn’t sleep for weeks. I’d drift off from exhaustion, but I’d pop back up after a couple of hours. My mother took me back to the doctor, who told her this was typical of PTSD and that I’d get better over time. Which I did, but not all the way. So now I sleep hard, like gone baby gone, for about five hours and then I’m up. After a game, or long practices, I can go for six hours, sometimes. And every so often I nod off in the middle of the day for about an hour, but never more than that.
I’m not worried about my man card. I don’t like hot liquids. Sometimes, I’ll have soup, but only if my nonna makes it. Yeah, weird. I drink a lot of water and Gatorade, so I hydrate and keep my electrolytes in balance. Are you sure you’re not pre-med?
My first test is on Wednesday: Asian history. The prof is into little-known facts, so I’m expecting at least one question on some obscure moment from tenth-century Japan or some shit like that. This is fact stuffing, not really studying. The sad thing is, I’ll probably do a brain dump two minutes after the test is over.
Friday is my easy credits during the four-year ride. I have a good ear for languages, so I’m making the most of my natural abilities to help pad the grades. Anything to offset the math and science classes.
Next week is hell week. Monday: calculus. Wednesday: computer science. Friday: chem. I’m out by noon on Friday, and I’m going straight to my room where I plan to sleep the entire afternoon. Then we’re all going out to get shitfaced Friday night. Don’t nag. If we can’t walk it, we’ll take a Lyft.
Your turn.
G
Eight days later
Six days until the end of the semester
Mirabelle
The “don’t nag” comment was what did it. G never did lovey-dovey in his letters. He never talked about “them,” if or who they were dating, fucking, or whether they were falling in love with each other. Well, in her case, fell. As in flat on her face. And she hadn’t gotten up off the kitchen floor yet, and it didn’t seem likely that would happen anytime this century.
With those two words, though, G had communicated that she had rights when it came to him. Sure, they’d teased in their letters, and she’d known when he was keeping it light as opposed to keeping it real. When he’d said, “Don’t nag” prior to explaining what he was going to do and then shared the precautions he and his quad-mates would take, he’d told her she was part of the equation. That he factored her into his decision-making process.
G + don’t nag = a them.
Mirabelle was afraid lying in her bed wouldn’t provide enough stability, so, with his letter still grasped firmly in her hand, she moved to the floor. This way she was sure she couldn’t fall and break her skull as her brain tried to process what all this meant. And when the heartbreaking reality of what could never be reared its ugly head, she batted it away.
There were options. There were always options. She didn’t know what they were or could be, but she intended to lie on this floor and wait until her stomach stopped roiling, her heart slowed to its normal beat, and her hormones and serotonin calmed the fuck down.
She didn’t know if hours had passed or minutes. Deep in thought, she knew any option she’d worked out that had them seeing one another in person put G’s life in danger, and Mirabelle would never allow that. Which meant she had to eliminate the threat. And hoo-boy, that was an undertaking that was going to require some serious planning. She’d done a complicated two-step before and saw justice served along with securing her freedom. Now she had to find a way to take out the last piece on the chessboard without committing murder. Not that the sonofabitch didn’t deserve to die a slow and painful death, but she didn’t want the stain of his blood on her soul.
Her brain clicked into think, think, think mode as she started to consider the possibility she could go anywhere and do anything, out in the open, with abandon, doing all of it with the one person she wanted more than air in her lungs.
Oh yeah. She remembered what this felt like and she relished the sensation.
Hope.
That muthafucka better not be toying with her. She and hope had a rocky relationship, but, as she had one time before, she refused to back down, and she wouldn’t take no for an answer.
Not when G was waiting on the other side.
For her.
So G is a Lyft guy, not an Uber man. Good to know. Out here in the boonies we don’t have either. There’s one taxi service in town and they have four cars. That’s it. One guy works during the day and the other three drive at night. The rate of need grows exponentially in relation to incidents of overindulgence in alcohol consumption.
From what Mrs. B has told me, since I’ve never availed myself of the service, all the bartenders at the three bars in town have the cab company on speed dial, and when someone is too fucked up to drive, they take the keys and call a taxi. Which isn’t to say we don’t have DUIs, but hold that thought. I’ll come back to that.
During the day, the one taxi driver on duty is P. He’s been doing the job for about ten years. He used to drive a cab in Vegas, and he made great money, but he said it had gotten too insane and he needed a little peace and quiet. We’ve got plenty of that here. Most of P’s passengers are older people, mostly women, who can’t drive anymore, but they’re still mobile enough to get to the grocery store, drugstore, and our store. Usually, it’s a once-a-week outing, and he’s so great with them. Helping them to the sidewalk, getting their bags in the trunk and taking the groc
eries, etc., into the house. That kind of thing.
Some of the old folks are fighting the good fight and make it out of their houses a couple of times a week. A few of them like to sit outside the office of the older gas station and gossip. All of the chair-warmers are old guys who love to talk about back in the day. Sometimes, I stop by to say hello since the gas station is around the corner from the hardware store. A couple of the guys gossip in here for a little while, but there’s not really anywhere they can sit and not be in the way, so they head around the corner to jaw-jack.
P knocks off at 4 p.m., which is when T comes on duty. He works until midnight. J comes on at 6 p.m. and works ’til 2 a.m. and K comes on at 8 p.m. and works ’til 4 a.m. The bars close around 1:30 a.m., but there are always stragglers, some of whom J picks up, most K shuttles home. But K’s main early morning duty comes in the form of men who are locked out of their homes by wives who are fed up. K drives them to one of the two motels in town, helps them check in, and gets them settled in a room where they can sleep it off, so they can have the strength the to go crawling back to the misses to beg forgiveness.
As I mentioned, we have the occasional DUIs in town, and the same man always commits them. D is a mess. He’s the sweetest guy you’ll ever meet. Not a mean bone in his body, but he can’t get over his wife’s death. Apparently, they were high school sweethearts. She was the head cheerleader, he was the captain of the football team, and they were “dreamy” together. Mrs. B’s word for them. D was a couple of years ahead of cop #1, so Mrs. B saw D and his cheerleader when she went to see cop #1 play football. Remember, I told you he is a BIG guy. Anyway, D got a job working in the county’s vehicle pool. According to everyone, he could fix cars, trucks, and fire engines like magic. He and the cheerleader got married after high school and within a year she was dead from some rare disease Mrs. B can’t remember the name of. D was devastated and never recovered. Every couple of months or so he goes on a bender and drives up and down the streets closest to the football field crying his eyes out. The sheriff’s deputies never arrest him. They take him to jail, put him to sleep, and let him dry out. It’s so sad. Mrs. B still gets all weepy when D gets put in the “pokey.” Her word, as you surely know it’s not mine.