by Don Zolidis
Elizabeth returned with a skate punk named Reggie and dropped in next to Brian, unsettling him further. Reggie had six earrings and an infectious sense of joy.
“You want to hear my poetry?” he said, slapping a leathery journal on the table and flipping it open to reveal page after page of poetry written in a thick Sharpie.
Oh shit.
“This one is called ‘Pain.’”
“Sweet,” said Groash, twitching.
Reggie sucked on his teeth and flattened out his book. “‘The pain is everything I feel.’” He grinned. “‘It is the only thing that’s real.’”
This must be what I seem like to my friends. I am a horrible human being.
Reggie beamed and plowed onward, savoring every word.
I tried to look for an escape route, and that’s when I saw Amy and Chelsea sitting down in the non-smoking section.
The world shrank instantly to a circle surrounding their table. What are they doing? They’re laughing a bit. They seem to be enjoying themselves. Amy’s picking up the menu. Maybe she’s hungry. Yes, that’s why people normally order food, dumbass. I wonder what she’ll get.
“‘My tears fall like rain,’” continued Reggie enthusiastically. “‘And remind me…’”—he paused—“‘of the pain.’”
Amy was tying her hair back into the clam thing and was totally unconscious of the fact that she was moving in slow motion.
“This one is called ‘Exit wounds,’” said Reggie, grinning, and turning to a page that had cheerful drawings of skulls.
“Dude,” said Groash, following my eyes. Brian and Elizabeth turned to look. Reggie, oblivious, kept going.
“Don’t even look, Craig,” said Brian. “Just pretend she’s not there.”
But it was too late. Amy had turned in my direction. She waved.
She waved.
“I’m going over there,” I said, before Groash could reach out to restrain me.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hey,” said Chelsea.
My stomach, which churned with the unholy acid of four cups of Perkins coffee, started performing a gymnastics floor routine.
“So what’s up?” I said, trying to stay cool.
“Just hanging out,” she said.
“Yup,” said Chelsea.
“Um…there’s a really painful poetry reading going on at my table. Mind if I join you?”
So I did. And we talked, and it was kind of normal. It was better than normal. It was easy and it was fun, like we had never broken up. Most of the talk was about Chelsea’s secret hookup with Jacob Hammer back in December that absolutely no one knew about.
“You were gone from the room for like four hours,” she said to Amy. “What else was I going to do?”
“I woulda done him,” I said. “He was like a living god. Then again, I guess I have a thing for authority figures.”
Amy laughed. “Oh, so that’s what it’s about. I still have the gavel, you know.”
“Say the word,” I said in that I’m-not-serious-but-yes-I-am-totally-serious-please-take-me-back sort of way. Amy smiled. I smiled. The roiling coffee-like substance in my stomach lurched in anticipation.
Chelsea looked at both of us. “I’m gonna go see what that poetry’s about,” she said.
I looked into Amy’s eyes.
She looked into my eyes.
The smell of cigarette smoke wafted over from the smoking section. The clink of coffee cups sounded like an orchestra of manic toddlers. In the background I could hear Sheryl’s musical voice say, “Fuck this.”
I thought about the previous times we had gotten back together: the bridge, the capitol. I needed something romantic. I needed something amazing to look at.
“You want to go for a walk?” I said.
“It’s cold,” she said.
“Nevertheless, I am going for a walk.”
She smiled.
About a block from Perkins was a Janesville institution known as the Big Cow. The Big Cow was, as you might have guessed, a very large cow. It looked like it was concrete but was made out of fiberglass and loomed majestically over a parking lot near a gas station. On some nights, after sports victories, enthusiastic teenagers would throw toilet paper on it to celebrate greatness.
We stared up at it, hunched in our coats to protect against the cold. Nearby, we could smell the exhaust from diesel engines and hear the high-pitched beeping of a tanker truck backing up.
It was slightly less than romantic.
Damn it.
“What do you think went through the person’s head that ordered that?” I said. “Do you think he was like, ‘Get me the best fiberglass cow artist in America, damn it! I want it big!’ And the artist was like, ‘How big?’ And he was like, ‘Use your imagination, son.’ ‘Like a hundred feet tall?’ ‘Not that big.’ ‘How about slightly larger than life-size?’ ‘Done.’”
Amy laughed. “Probably they were thinking of a way to distinguish this gas station from the other gas stations and a giant fiberglass cow seemed like the way to go.”
“You’re taking the mystery out of it.”
“Are you hoping for mystery? Is that why you brought me here?”
“Maybe just inspiration,” I said, and then she was right next to me and I could feel our coats connect with each other.
“For what?”
“For this.”
I kissed her.
Two weeks later she dumped me in the park, mafia-style. (See chapter one.)
And one week after that, she stopped coming to school.
Unlike our two previous breakups, this one seemed to affect Amy the most. You could tell when you saw her—there was a hollowed-out look to her; sometimes she hadn’t even showered. The first two breakups had wrecked me, the third one seemed to have wrecked her.
After her second straight absence, I sought out Chelsea after school. When she wasn’t doing YIG, she was on the gymnastics team, which was banished to the auxiliary gym, because the basketball team ruled the regular gym with an iron fist. It took me about ten minutes to find her, but then I spotted her practicing the vault. Her brown fluffy hair was tied into a huge bun and bounced on top of her head like an attached balloon when she ran. She hit the vault, flipped over once, and stuck a landing on a blue crash mat. It was impressive as hell. I thought about my friends. None of them could do flips. They mostly didn’t even try.
“Do you know what’s going on with Amy?” I asked, when she was taking a break.
Chelsea looked to the side and sighed. “When was the last time you talked to her?”
“Last Saturday. She was breaking up with me again.”
“Huh.”
“Is that what she’s upset about? She’s normally not that upset after she dumps me.”
“She feels bad when she dumps you. Trust me.”
“Oh. Well, that’s good to know, I guess.”
She took a swig from her water bottle. “Maybe you should go talk to her. She might…appreciate that.”
“Do you think I should? I mean, like, when we broke up last time, it seemed like she didn’t really want to talk about things. So maybe I was thinking I could write her a letter.” Chelsea groaned. “Should I not write her a letter? Should I just drop by, then? Would that be okay?”
“How the hell should I know? Am I inside your relationship?”
“Do you think we still have a relationship?”
“Ugh. Dude. Whatever you want to do, okay? I think that a visit from you might be a good idea. But if you’re going to be bizarre about it, then probably not. So if you can contain yourself, you should go. If you are incurably strange, then don’t go.”
Shit. That’s a tough choice.
After her third absence, I drove to her house after school. Her teachers had let me collect the homework she had missed, so I had a small folder with her assignments. I had thought about slipping a heartfelt letter into the stack, but decided against it, because that seemed
to be in violation of Chelsea’s requirements. My mom had let me borrow her car after I promised that I would stop by the grocery store on the way home to retrieve more fish product.
The lights were on when I got there. Her car was in the driveway. My heart did that thing where it stopped working, and I started sweating unreasonably. My typical reaction.
Glenn let me in after Bear leaped on me and drove me backward with his massive paws. I tried to pet him, which was hard, since he was a brown-and-black blur of motion and teeth.
“She’s in her room.”
Amy was in her butterfly chair, listening to Miles Davis and reading.
“I brought you your homework,” I said, setting the folder on her desk.
“Thanks,” she said weakly, looking pale in the light of the floor lamp. Her nose was red and there were deep shadows under her eyes. She hadn’t been sleeping.
“Whatcha reading?”
“Invisible Man. For AP English.”
I nodded. “You know, I bought the wrong version of that. I was so stoked—yes, finally some science fiction in school. So I read the whole H. G. Wells Time Machine collection.”
She smiled.
“Then people started talking in class about race relations and I was, like…Shit, I did not get this book at all.”
“But now when you read the real version you’ll have a lot more to say. About the connections.”
“You’ve got a theory about those?”
“I’ve always got a theory.”
I put my hands in my pockets.
“So, um…are you doing okay?”
“…Yeah.”
“Good. ’Cause I was a little worried about you. I figured you might have the plague or something.”
“So you decided to come over to my house? Even if I had the plague? You could catch it, you know.”
“That’s a price I’m willing to pay.”
My smile died. I was too far away. I had managed to take two steps into her room, but couldn’t go any farther—I was still wearing my heavy coat. The hat she had given me was on my head. It felt like we had migrated to two entirely separate worlds. She was ensconced in a place I couldn’t reach.
“I can go if you want me to go,” I said.
Amy looked down.
“No.” She started chewing on the end of her finger. Her eyes flicked back and forth.
“You can tell me,” I said.
She took a deep breath. “My mom’s cancer came back,” she said, finally, wiping her nose. “It’s, um…it’s not good—it’s in her pancreas this time.” Her eyes fell to the side like she couldn’t look at me.
My feet felt like they were locked in concrete, but I took a step toward her. “I’m so sorry,” I said, realizing that the words felt hopelessly small and stupid. I was sorry? What did that actually mean?
She got up from her chair and grabbed hold of me.
“That’s why…”
“It’s okay,” I said.
“I found out two weeks ago and I…That’s why I had to break up with you. I didn’t want to…It’s not fair to you to make you go through this with me—”
“No, it’s okay,” I said, tightening my grip on her.
“I didn’t want to do it. But I really thought—I thought I needed to do this myself, but I can’t….” She was crying now, pressing into me. “It’s so fucking awful, Craig. Every time I pause for a second I feel like the whole world is going to fall apart…. I wanted to just wall you off from it.”
“You don’t need to do that,” I said, holding her.
“So if you need to bail, this is the time….”
I grabbed her and held her tightly against me. “I said I was going to take care of you last time I was in here. And I meant that.”
Amy’s nose was running now, and she was burrowing into me. I could barely move, but I managed to pluck the box of Kleenex from her futon.
“You want a Kleenex?” I said.
“…Yes.”
So that’s how we got back together the third time, clinging to each other like we were in a storm-tossed lifeboat.
Up and down we went, circling each other.
Two months later we were together again, after the fifth breakup, delivered by the letter of doom, didn’t stick.
Amy’s mom took the diagnosis with aplomb. “I beat it before, I’ll beat it again,” she said, but there were good days and there were bad days. I tried to support Amy the best I could. She continued to deteriorate.
It started with her classes. Class rankings were frozen after the first semester, but Amy had received a pretty serious scholarship to UCLA and it depended on keeping her grades sky high. UCLA cost something like fourteen billion dollars a year, her parents didn’t have a ton of money, and with her mom’s sickness, there was no way they could pay for her to go without the scholarship.
So she had to keep working. With her dyslexia, everything took twice as long. Spell-check caught a lot of her mistakes, but she’d often substitute the wrong word for things, so the only way to make sure it was right was to double- and triple-check everything.
That’s not even mentioning the fact that she was student body president, in charge of Youth in Government, and organized two or three other lower-profile clubs. As president she was also in charge of prom, which was a logistical nightmare of Lovecraftian proportions—just imagine an evil octopus-headed giant sleeping in the ocean and ready to wake up and devour humanity. Amy had to rent the space, get the money, approve the theme, and come up with a decorating plan. It was too much. It was too much for any two or three human beings, and it was definitely too much for a girl whose mother had cancer.
“Quit,” I said on the phone late one night after a particularly brutal conversation.
“I can’t do that.”
“Amy. Quit. Other people can do the work. You don’t have to do everything.”
She was quiet for a moment. “…I know.”
“You can do it. You can quit. Please.”
We had an all-school assembly a few days later. Amy sat up front, just like in the state capitol. The teachers announced a few things, and then she stood up. I had tried to be next to her, playing the role of the crying spouse during the public resignation, but they wouldn’t let me. She was alone in the gym.
“I just wanted to let you know,” she said, trying to keep it together. “That I’ve really enjoyed being student body president, and I have tried to do the best I could.” The crowd murmured. Amy was holding on to the podium, and I could see her hands trembling just a bit. “I’ve really enjoyed this…but, um…I need to…resign.” She stopped. “My vice president, Tricia Minor, is going to take over as president.”
And then she just deflated a little bit, and some assholes in the back started clapping, not for Amy, but for Tricia taking over. And you could hear other people mocking her, saying “Aw, poor baby” or conjecturing about the sex scandal that was bringing her down.
I couldn’t do anything. I tried to make eye contact with her, but she sat back down on one of the stupid folding chairs and the curtain of blond hair fell again, and I couldn’t help thinking about when she had broken my heart for the first time.
Now her heart was breaking, and there was nothing I could do.
I hoped that going to prom would cheer her up, or at least provide her a break from the tragedy at home. I’d been dreaming about it since the first time she kissed me—I could see us, under the balloons and the lights, forgetting about our lives and celebrating being in love. There was a whole musical number in my head to “In Your Eyes” by Peter Gabriel. We’ d hold each other on the dance floor, swaying slightly, since even in my imagination I couldn’t dance for shit.
I know it’s shocking, but I had never been to prom. I had never been to any dance, ever. It had always seemed like that was something for other, cooler, more attractive people who had decent hair-care products and rhythm. But this time—this time I was going to go. This was my only chance.
; There was only one problem.
I had no money.
Renting a tux cost at least a hundred bucks, and that wasn’t even counting dinner at a semi-fancy restaurant, which was going to be at least fifty. My dad was entering his fifth month of unemployment; the five hundred bucks and magic beans we’ d gotten for the minivan were long gone. There was no way I could ask Mom and Dad for the money. They had already told Kaitlyn she wasn’t going to be able to get a new dress this year, at which point she said everyone was ruining her life, and then apologized, and then decided that she could go ahead and use the dress from last year.
But I needed cash, and there was only one way to get it, since I couldn’t sell my blood plasma until I was eighteen. Stupid laws.
Rick’s Collectibles was located downtown near the Y, next to a movie theater that had closed when I was ten. It had opened to great fanfare my sophomore year, which had sent my friends into an extended paroxysm of joy until Groash was banned six weeks later. (He would skateboard there after school, take a Dungeons & Dragons book off the shelf, and read it for two or three hours before leaving. He ’d repeat the process the next day, slowly working his way through the entire collection and buying exactly nothing. We all understood why he was banned. “I would totally ban you from my store,” Brian had said at the time. “I wouldn’t even let you on the same block as my store.”)
Besides the D&D stuff, Rick also sold comic books, which formed the crux of my plan. I packed the best ones from my collection (the ones whose covers weren’t crucified on my walls) and biked downtown.
Rick was a young black guy with a beard, maybe twenty-five, who spent all the time when he wasn’t selling things to nerds working out. Apparently he was in training for the moment in time when secret agents would burst into his geek store and try to rob him with ninja skills, at which point he would rip off his shirt, flex his impressive pectorals, and open up a can of whoop-ass.
“I would so open up a can of whoop-ass,” he said, staring longingly at the door. He kept a pair of nunchucks behind the counter because he was that guy.
“They’re called nunchakus,” he would say.
Great.