by Sean McGinty
She gave me a strange look. “And where is this going?”
“Nowhere. I mean, I’m just being honest. If you’re wondering where the compliments are coming from, they’re for real.” I patted my chest. “Straight from right here.”
“The esophagus,” said Katie.
I liked her. I really did. And even if I didn’t know her, it was like I already did, like we’d already met a long, long time ago—which doesn’t make sense, I know, but at the time it totally did. There was just this electricity. It’s like William Shakespeare may or may not once have said: Whosoever can explain the song that sings when two human hearts meet in the cold, cold night?
But now she was tossing the hoop in the back of her truck and opening the door.
“Wait. Don’t go yet! I’ve got the answers.”
Katie paused. “What answers?”
“Those three riddles you gave me—I figured out the answers.”
“There aren’t any answers. That’s the point.”
“No, but there are answers! Check it out….” I jammed my hand into my pocket and removed the first item. “Number one: a needle that needs no thread. See? It’s from a record player. No thread necessary. One hundred percent threadless.” I grabbed the second item. “OK, and here’s number two: a harp that sings without plucking….” I gave it a toot and handed it to Katie. “Harmonicas are commonly known as ‘harps.’”
“Commonly?”
But she was smiling now, just a little.
“What about number three?”
“You still trying to quit smoking?”
“Yes.”
“And how’s that going?”
“Same as always: terrible.”
“Got any smokes on you?”
She did. I bummed one, plus her lighter, and lit it up and took a puff. Then I blew it into the air.
“There. A cloud that makes no rain.”
“A cloud?” Katie eyed the darkness. “That’s hardly a cloud.”
“What? Clouds can be any size! What would you call it?”
“A puff.”
“Puff? That was more than a puff. Here. Watch.”
I put the cigarette to my lips, sucked in…sucked in more…sucked in some more…and then blew.
“There’s your cloud,” I said—or started to say, but I only got out the first two words before I started coughing. And coughing some more. I was really having a fit, but that wasn’t half as bad as the way the world was spinning and the pukey feeling in my esophagus like I was just gonna throw it all up on the concrete. I put my hands on my knees and waited for the feeling to pass.
“Arnold?” she said. “Are you OK?”
“Oh my God, you gotta stop smoking—those things can’t be good for you!”
“Thanks. I’m aware of that.”
“So I solved them, right? Does that mean I get your number?”
“I thought you were only here for a couple days.”
“Not anymore. I’ve got business to take care of in town. Want to get a drink or something? Or better yet, you could teach me how to Hula-Hoop. I never learned how.”
“You never learned to Hula-Hoop?” she said. “It’s easy.”
“So you say. The P.E. teacher thought I was goofing around, like making fun of it, but I was really just that bad.”
“Arnold—” Katie paused. It was like she was weighing some question. A couple dudes walked past in puffy jackets. She fiddled with her keys. “Look,” she said at last. “It’s freezing. I’m too tired to go out for a drink. So if I invite you over to my place right now, it just means as friends, OK?”
Her apartment was the top floor of an old building not far from the college, and its low ceiling sloped in strange places so that I could stand upright only in an area in the middle. But it wasn’t a bad place. In fact, it was pretty nice. The walls were blue and yellow, with twinkle lights strung around a built-in bookcase. The furnishings were kind of spare, though. A small puffy couch, a bookshelf, a floor lamp, a lime-green rug—and that was pretty much it.
“So tell me,” she said as she shrugged off her jacket and laid it over the back of the couch. “What’s Pennsylvania like?”
The question caught me off guard. “Oh, Pennsylvania. Well…there are a lot of trees.”
“Trees?”
“Yeah…and no sagebrush, of course. And everyone talks with, like, a Pennsylvania accent. And, I don’t know, it’s pretty much like anywhere else, only it’s there instead of here, if you know what I mean.”
“I’m not sure if I do.”
“Well—”
“Maybe I’m just envious,” she said. “I thought this was temporary.”
“Thought what was?”
“This. This apartment. This town. I should probably just give in and get more furniture. But of course the second I do, I’ll probably have to move out. That seems to be how my life works….Would you like something to drink?”
“Sure. What do you have?”
“Sparkl*Juice™ and gin.”
> yay! for sparkl*juice™?
“Yay.”
“What?”
“Sounds great.”
“Oh, OK.”
While Katie was in the kitchen, I checked out her bookshelf. There was a dusty word-of-the-day calendar on top, several months behind the actual date. I’ve always liked those calendars, with their unspoken promise to endow the user with the ability to cow rivals through obfuscation, which is a word I learned from a calendar, though not Katie’s. The word on her calendar was:
floccillation (fläk-suh-lay-shun) 1. aimless plucking at the bedclothes as a result of delirium or fever. 2. a sign that a person is approaching death.
Below this, the shelves were about evenly divided between children’s picture books and old pocket paperbacks, mostly what looked like science fiction, with yellowed pages and titles I didn’t recognize. Lunar Horizon. The Daughter Nebula. Omegathon. I was flipping through She Was a Space Amazon when Katie returned from the kitchen.
“Here you go.”
“Thanks.”
I gave it a taste. It was disgusting.
“Mm,” I said.
“You like it?”
“Oh yeah.”
God, she was beautiful. You know how some people are just beautiful right away and everyone can agree on it? Katie wasn’t like that. She was not absolutely stunning at first, but then, the more you looked at her, the more you saw how beautiful she was. Those pure blue eyes. Which, BTW, were aimed right at me, like, Why are you staring at me?
The problem is I was having a hard time finding anywhere else to put my eyes. There was this electricity between us, all in the eyes. I tried looking at the bookshelf, but it was so much less interesting than Katie. It was my turn to say something, but I could hardly get any words to come out.
“Those books are cool.”
“Really?” Katie brightened. “That one you have there—She Was a Space Amazon? I swear, it was a gift from the universe.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” she said. “It was the first day of spring and I had this incredible hangover. Around five in the afternoon I dragged myself out of the house, just so I wouldn’t miss the entire day, and as I was walking down the street I saw some people cleaning up after a yard sale. Something told me I should stop to see what was left, and that’s when I found the book.”
“Huh. What’s it about?”
“Inevitability.”
“But I mean, what’s the story?”
“Well, from the cover you’re led to believe it’s going to be all about kicking ass, but what it really turns out to be about is how incredibly harrowing this woman’s life is. Every time she comes upon a new, mist-covered planet you’re like, No! Don’t go down there! And yet, that’s what she does. That’s what she was born to do. She’s a Space Amazon.”
“What’s that she’s wearing on the cover?”
“I don’t know. A bikinotard?”
“I bet she gets co
ld in space.”
“It’s strange,” said Katie. “Reading that book made me think about my own life. I’m not a fatalist, but I have noticed certain patterns in my experiences. It’s like, wherever I go, there I am. I can’t seem to get away from myself. And no matter how careful I am, no matter how much I plan, I always seem to end up in these very, um, complicated situations.”
“Like what?”
Katie sipped her drink. “Like now.”
“What’s complicated about now?”
Two blue eyes watching me over the rim of her glass.
“Not just now-right-now,” she said. “I mean the bigger now. Which also includes the what-just-happened and what-might-happen-next. Sometimes the last what-just-happened ends up, you know, complicating the options of the now-right-now—because of what-might-happen-next.”
“You’re losing me a little.”
“There was a guy.”
“Oh. The bartender?”
“Yeah, him too,” she said. “And I didn’t even like him—but it’s complicated.”
I had no idea what she was talking about. But as our gazes lingered, a little bolt of electricity passed between us, and I could tell she felt it, too—I just could—because it was real. I mean real electricity. I hadn’t felt something like that since Shannon Boyster gave me a chocolate bar at recess in first grade. But as soon as Katie saw that I saw, she sort of jumped back and clapped her hands.
“Time for Hula-Hooping.”
“What?”
“I’m going to teach you to Hula-Hoop. Remember?”
We cleared a little stage in the middle of her living room, and she handed me the hoop.
“Let’s see what you got.”
“I got nothing.”
“So let’s see it.”
I twisted my arms and gave the hoop a swing, which completed 1.5 rotations before falling to the floor.
“Well, you have to at least try.”
“I am trying. Look.”
My body would not cooperate. My torso went one way, my ass another, while my hips struggled to maintain some equilibrium between the two. I dry-humped the air frantically. The hoop rattled to the floor.
“Clearly this thing is defective.”
“You see?” said Katie. “This is what happens when you spend too much time having FUN®. You forget how your body works. Use your core. Imagine you’re a salsa dancer.”
I tried again and failed again.
“Watch me. Maybe that will help.”
But no, that wasn’t going to help. Katie was too good. It was like trying to learn how to ride a bicycle by watching a motocross race. I mean this woman was a pro. She barely moved at all, just this slight swaying of the hips. Then, with a subtle motion that tingled my groin, she sent the hoop orbiting up over her breasts, to her neck, then slipped her arm up under it and caught it in her hand.
“Here. Try again.”
Pretty much I’ll try anything once, and probably twice, and probably a couple times after that—but inevitably there comes a point where it becomes pointless. When you have to admit that whatever it is might not be the thing for you. Katie was a good-enough teacher, but as a student I was hopelessly distracted by the method of instruction and general circumstances of the classroom, not to mention the glimpses of pale belly I was getting every time my instructor raised her arms. I mean I was absolutely floccillated.
I gave up on Hula-Hooping, and Katie gave up on trying to teach me. The heater was going now and her apartment was hot, and she set the hoop aside and took off her sweater, revealing a tight black T-shirt with the words Dirty deeds done with sheep.
“What’s that mean?” I asked.
“Well, Arnold,” she said in a teacherly voice, “it’s an appropriation of the stereotype of my people, the Basques. My sister gave it to me as a joke. I wear it for good luck.”
“Basques? Like from Spain? I thought you were Irish.”
“Half-Irish. My mom is Irish, my papa is Basque.”
“I heard a joke about Basques once.”
“Did it involve sex with a farm animal?”
“Yeah, pretty much.”
“When my papa was a teenager he actually did work with sheep,” said Katie. “Way out in a cabin in the mountains—but he was doing construction by the time I was born. Now he’s retired in Spain. He’s coming to America this summer to tell me to get a real job like my sister.”
“What’s your sister do?”
“Maite? She’s a real estate agent in Lake Tahoe. You should see the house she just moved into—it’s so obnoxious! But of course she was always the chosen one….” Katie ran her hands over her face. “God, I want a cigarette.”
We went out to the balcony and she lit one up, and I lit up a smókz™, too, and that calmed me down a little, but when she saw me smoking my invisible (to her) cigarette, she burst out laughing.
“What?”
“I don’t know. It’s just funny. Like you’re pretending.”
“I’m not.”
But I kind of was. But how could I tell her the truth? It seemed a little too late to do a name change.
I exhaled, and my smoke digitized into a hive of BeeWear® Bee Bonuses and Homie™ popped up.
> yay! to collect bonuses?
“Yay.”
“Why do you keep saying that?” she said.
“It’s just a thing I have to do for FUN®.”
“Ah.” Katie took another drag and tamped out her cigarette on the underside of the railing. “There. All done. See? I’m cutting back.”
I put out my smókz™, too, and followed her back inside, thinking about how to tell her the truth about everything, how I was actually Aaron O’Faolain, age almost 18, which if you think about it isn’t that far from 19—or 21 or 22, for that matter. And as I was working myself up, something funny happened. Back in the living room Katie suddenly spun around to face me, and it was like looking in a mirror—I mean, she was wearing this look on her face like she had something to tell me.
“Arnold—” she began.
“Yeah?”
And I knew in that moment that nothing mattered, because she was going to tell me her feelings now, how she liked me, too, how she’d been hiding it all along, and she was going to pull me close and smooch me. I envisioned locking lips like they do at the end of a movie, falling together onto the couch in a tangle of limbs and clothing. I envisioned what might happen after that, but then I pulled back on that vision because no need to get ahead of myself.
But I was already pretty far ahead.
I stumbled into a hug with her like Frankenstein with my arms all outstretched, and as I grew closer her eyes widened, and at the last second the message got through to my brain:
Abort mission! Subject is creeped out!
So what happened was, instead of her falling into my arms and locking lips, I sort of wrapped her in this awkward hug. And we just hugged for a moment, and she sort of patted my shoulder, and I patted hers, and smelled the flowery perfume of her hair, and then we drew back and looked at each other.
Words! Use your words, dude!
“Arnold,” she said at last. “It’s just…right now my life is…”
“Complicated,” I finished for her.
And the next thing I knew I was standing at her door, saying good-bye, and a voice in my head was like, Tell her, dude! Tell her who you are!
And another voice was like, No, you idiot! Don’t screw it up any more than you already have!
And a third voice was like,
> hi original boy_2!
u seem agitated
what’s on your mind?
So that was a failure, but my night wasn’t over yet. When I got home, Dad was in the living room, crouched in front of the record player, fiddling with something.
“I could’ve sworn this thing had a needle….” He twisted his head around to look at the space where the needle used to be. “You know anything about this, or am I just going crazy?”
“Who can say?”
Dad looked up at me. His eyes were all narrow. “I have another question.”
“Can we talk later? I’m in kind of a bad mood.”
“Nah,” he said. “I think we should talk now—don’t you think, Evie?”
I hadn’t noticed her. She’d been standing all statuelike by the kitchen. I noticed her now. Arms folded, glaring at me.
“Evie? What are you doing here?”
“What do you think?” she said.
“Look, if you guys are wondering why I didn’t go back to Sacramento, I just wanted to see the play and maybe—”
“That’s not what we’re wondering, Aaron. We’re wondering about this letter from your school.”
Dad put his face in front of mine. “What we’re wondering is what you’ve been doing for the last five months.”
And I was like, Oh. Shit.
And my dad and Evie were like, This is going to be fun.
The time had come. The show was over. The curtain had to fall.
What could I do but give them the truth?
I told them about San Francisco, and how I’d reappropriated the tuition payments (with all intentions of not spending any of it), how I’d lived in a hivehouse, and how I’d started having FUN®—and as I listened to myself talk I was actually kind of proud. But then I got to the part about all the money I’d spent on Tickle, Tickle Boom! (YAY!) and the part about FAIL, and I didn’t feel as good anymore, and Evie and Dad were right there with me. I mean, I figured they’d be pissed—and they were—but I hadn’t realized just how pissed.
Dad did that thing he does where he stomps around the room, working himself into an anger monkey, and Evie screeched at me like a hen, the two of them kept roundhousing me with the same basic point, which was what a deceitful ass I’d been—and it was true, I had been a deceitful ass, and I was angry they’d found out, and also feeling guilty as hell, like I was gonna start crying or something, so I excused myself out the front door and took a walk in the snow to calm down. I called my buddy Oso, but he didn’t answer. Once again, straight to voice mail. I left him a long message about my situation, and then I headed back home.
Dad and Evie were still there. They were still pissed, too.