How You Ruined My Life

by Jeff Strand

  “Yeah. If I’m worried about a credit card transaction being traced, I’ll know it’s gone too far.”

  “Fair enough.”

  I fill up the tank and give Blake back his credit card. I can’t deny that I’m quite a bit less devoted to the idea of driving him all the way to California now. It sounded okay while in the midst of a nervous breakdown, but I feel like there will be a lot of reasons to say, “Oops.”

  We go into the gas station, and I generously allow him to use the restroom. I suppose he could leave a message for the next person, but as with the credit card tracing, if I hit the point where I’m doing a sweep of a restroom to make sure that Blake hasn’t left any messages, our road trip has gone too far.

  We get back in my car, and I still haven’t decided if I’m going to turn around and head for home or if I’m going to pretend that the California trip is still on.

  What would you do? Be honest.

  Not kidnap Blake in the first place? Thanks. That’s real helpful. I bet you would’ve given a real answer if Katniss Everdeen asked for advice.

  I decide to continue toward California. Let Blake sweat it out for a while longer and hope that he’ll learn his lesson. If I’m lucky, he’ll start sobbing and pleading for mercy and promising to help me put my life back to normal before it’s time to fill up the tank again.

  And then my car breaks down.

  27.

  I'm able to get my sputtering car off to the side of the road before it stops working. Black smoke billows from underneath the front hood.

  “Do you think it’s going to explode?” Blake asks.

  “No, but we should get out.”

  We hurriedly exit the vehicle and move far enough away that we won’t be struck by flaming debris if it blows up.

  “I take back all the things I’ve said about your car,” says Blake. “It’s a fine, reliable automobile.” He coughs, even though we’re not in range of the smoke anymore. “I’d call a tow truck, but some very intelligent person threw away my phone.”

  I pull out my own phone. This would be a wonderfully ironic moment to discover that my battery is dead, but I’ve still got seventy-one percent left, so it’s cool.

  “You’re bad at everything, aren’t you?” asks Blake.

  I punch him in the face.

  Unlike my previous laughable efforts, this is a pretty darn good punch. It gets him right in the jaw. He lets out a grunt of pain, and his knees wobble.

  Having done this, I suddenly suffer the emotional anguish of knowing that I’ve resorted to violence as well as the physical pain of how much the punch hurt my hand.

  Blake looks like he’s going to topple over, but he doesn’t. Should I give him a gentle shove?

  He looks really mad. Scary mad. Like if this were a very different type of book, I’d expect his skin to split open and reveal the demonic creature inside.

  I almost feel like I should offer him one free punch to even things out.

  He leaps at me. I throw another punch. I was not on the receiving end of this punch and thus cannot say this from personal experience, but I’m pretty sure that getting punched in the face hurts a lot more when you were in the middle of leaping at somebody.

  He stumbles backward, trips, and falls to the ground.

  Then he gets back up, growls (I always assumed that I’d have a good laugh if somebody actually growled at me, but nope.), and charges at me.

  I don’t know any fancy martial arts moves, so I settle for letting him tackle me. We both crash to the ground.

  I’m surprised that nobody has pulled over to offer us a ride, but it could have something to do with the fact that we’re currently beating each other up.

  He punches me in the face. It hurts worse than my hand did when I punched him in the face.

  I try to punch him in the face, but my fist brushes across his earlobe. If he wore an earring, it might have caught on my hand, doing major damage, but he doesn’t, so this punch has little effect on the outcome of our fight.

  He punches me in the index finger, probably by accident. He doesn’t break it or anything. But my finger bends backward a bit more than it’s supposed to, and it does not feel good at all. I cry out in pain.

  Though multiple parts of my body hurt, at least I’m not embarrassing myself the way I did last time we wrestled. It’s important to always improve.

  We punch each other in the face at the exact same time.

  Our faces hurt. Our hands hurt. And I feel like we’re both wishing this fight was over. I’m in the mood to cry some more.

  “Why did you do it?” I wail.

  “Do what?”

  “Ruin my life!”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about!” he cries.

  “Yes, you do! Why did you do it? That’s all I want to know! Is it because you’re jealous of me?”

  “No!”

  “Are you sure?”

  “How could I be jealous of you? You’re poor!”

  “I had a girlfriend and a band!”

  “I have a girlfriend!”

  “No, you don’t!”

  “She lives in Canada!”

  “You are lying! You don’t text or call anyone from home!”

  “She visits on weekends!”

  I punch the ground. Obviously, I meant to punch Blake instead. But the ground is softer than his body, and it’s actually a nice change of pace.

  “Why did you do it?” I demand.

  “I didn’t!”

  “Is it because you’re evil?”

  “I don’t believe in the concept of evil!”

  “A different question then! How much did it cost to bribe everybody to attend our show at the Lane?”

  “I didn’t bribe them!”

  “Yes, you did!”

  I punch the ground again. This time it is on purpose.

  “Ten bucks,” Blake admits.

  “Each?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. Ten bucks isn’t that big of a bribe.”

  “It was like five hundred bucks to get all those people to go.”

  “Right, but the individual bribes weren’t that big. For ten bucks, they’d still have to kind of want to see the show, right?”

  “I guess.”

  “It was an incentive, but it can’t have been the whole reason they went.”

  “How much did you think I spent?”

  “I don’t know. Fifty bucks?”

  “That would’ve been twenty-five hundred dollars.”

  “If I can imagine you spending one thousand dollars to bribe people, I can imagine twenty-five hundred. How rich are you anyway?”

  “I shouldn’t have spent that money. My mom is gonna kill me.”

  “Can we stop fighting now?” I ask.

  Blake punches me in the arm.

  “You can’t punch me after I call for a truce!”

  “I didn’t accept the truce. That was a fair punch.”

  “Please tell me it cost more than ten bucks each to turn the kids in school against me.”

  Blake nods. “My mom is going to be furious.”

  “Then why did you do it!”

  “I don’t know!”

  “Yes, you do! You have to know!”

  “I don’t!”

  “Were you going to start dressing like me and take over my life?”

  “No!”

  “Are you sure? You weren’t trying to date Audrey and be the lead singer of Fanged Grapefruit?”

  “I can’t sing!”

  “I know that, but maybe you don’t!”

  “I wasn’t trying to assume your identity!”

  “Were you doing research for a novel?”

  “No!”

  “Are you sure?”

 
“Quit asking if I’m sure! I think I’d know if I was doing research for a novel or not! I don’t like to read!”

  “That doesn’t mean you don’t want to inflict your torture on people who like to read! This was research! Admit it!”

  “Are you saying that I’m trying to ruin your life to research a book about another kid who’s trying to ruin his cousin’s life?” Blake asks, bewildered.

  “Well, it wouldn’t necessarily have to be his cousin,” I admit.

  “Listen to yourself, Rod.”

  “I am! I’ve been listening to myself this whole time! But I’m out of ideas! I need to know why you did this! Was it a bet?” I prompt.

  Blake doesn’t say anything.

  “A bet?” I ask. “This was a bet?”

  Blake shrugs.

  “You ruined my life for a bet? You wiener!”

  “Are you going to hit me again if I say yes?”

  “I’ll stop hitting you if you tell the truth.”

  “Okay.”

  “Will you stop hitting me if I stop hitting you for telling the truth?” I ask.

  “Yes,” says Blake.

  “Deal. Was this really a bet?”

  “Yes.”

  “With who?”

  “Myself.”

  “What?” Even for Blake that makes no sense.

  “I made a bet with myself.”

  I want to hit him again, but that would be a violation of the terms of our agreement. “What do you mean you made a bet with yourself?”

  “I was jealous, okay? When my parents told me I’d be staying with you, I was really mad about uprooting my life for them to take a trip without me. And I expected you to have a miserable life. And when you weren’t miserable, it made me feel bad about my own life and how miserable I felt being away from home. So I figured I could salvage the situation by making you feel worse so that I’d feel better.”

  A car pulls off to the side of the road next to us. An old man in a cowboy hat gets out.

  “Are you two fellows okay?” he asks.

  “Yeah, we’re good,” I assure him.

  “Not really a safe place to be arguin’.”

  “We know. We know,” I say. “We’ve stopped. We were just about to get up.”

  “Want me to call you a tow truck? Your car is lookin’ a little combustible.”

  “Nah, we’re fine. We were going to finish up our discussion, and then I was going to call somebody. Thanks for stopping to help though. We appreciate it.”

  The man tips his hat to us. “You two have a good day then. Make sure you put some ice on those bruises. They’re pretty ghastly.” He gets back in his car and drives off.

  Blake and I stand up.

  “Okay, so you were saying?” I ask.

  “Right. I figured you’d be wallowing in self-pity. That’s what I’d be doing in your place. But then I discovered that you were happy. Genuinely happy. You had a girlfriend. Not as hot as mine, but still. And even though your band was clearly awful—”

  “We’re not awful.”

  “Yeah, you are.”

  “I’m going to disagree with that.”

  “Maybe it’s your genre. Nobody actually likes punk rock music. They might say they do, but they’re faking it.”

  “Don’t make me break our truce.”

  “Anyway, what I saw is that you were playing music in front of people and loving it. I couldn’t believe it. You were happy. You had this sad excuse for a life and absolutely no reason to enjoy it, and yet you were happy.”

  “Yeah, I was,” I say, thinking wistfully back to my life before Blake arrived.

  “And so I bet myself that I could ruin it for you.”

  If I’m not going to hit him, I feel like the only proper reaction to this is to stare at him, slack-jawed, for about three hours.

  Instead I ask, “What were the stakes?”

  “No ice cream for a year.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Starting when I got back home, of course. I’d need ice cream to make it through those three months at your place.”

  “What did you get if you won?”

  “Nothing,” says Blake. “I wouldn’t reward myself for ruining somebody’s life. That would be wrong.”

  I punch him.

  Yes, it’s a low move to punch somebody in the middle of a truce, but there were extenuating circumstances. Dude ruined my life, and he didn’t even do it for extra ice cream.

  It’s the best punch of the fight so far. Perfect placement to the jaw, superb follow-through with my fist, and it doesn’t even hurt my hand all that much, although that could be the result of my sheer blinding rage.

  As the guy in the cowboy hat pointed out, the side of the highway is not an ideal place to be fighting. Much can go wrong. Let’s look at the following example, in which a sixteen-year-old kid punches his cousin in the face. The cousin, rather than falling to the ground in a heap, stumbles backward in a daze.

  Under normal circumstances, the act of stumbling backward in a daze immediately after receiving a punch to the face is not such a big deal. Sure, the subject could trip and injure his or her tailbone or accidentally bump into a table and knock over somebody’s cup of coffee, but it’s not typically life-threatening.

  The problem with the stumbling occurring in this particular location is that there’s a road right there. And this isn’t some tiny dirt road where horse-drawn carriages are on their way to purchase supplies for the long winter. This is a road with lots of fast cars.

  So when I punched Blake and he stumbled, a car was headed right for him. I won’t deny that I felt a strong sense of regret about throwing that particular punch, which will stay with me for the rest of my ruined life.

  28.

  No, I don't just stand there and let Blake get run over by a car! I don’t even consider doing that! Jeez! What kind of person do you think I am?

  It’s not like a semi is barreling down upon him. It is, in fact, a very tiny, economically priced, two-door sedan that I’m sure gets excellent gas mileage. Still, it’s going seventy miles per hour, and there’s little question that it will splatter Blake on impact.

  There’s no time to grab him by the arm and pull him back to safety. If I miss his arm, he’s doomed. My only choice is to dive at him and knock him out of the way. I might die. If I do, I apologize for the abrupt ending of—

  29.

  Sorry. Didn't mean to end that last chapter so soon. I was distracted by the car.

  I dive at Blake and push him out of harm’s way. We both fall onto the shoulder of the road.

  The driver of the tiny car blares his horn as he zips past us.

  I stand and help Blake to his feet.

  His eyes are wide. “You…you saved my life.”

  “You would have done the same thing,” I say.

  Blake shakes his head. “Nope.”

  Another horn honks. I glance to my right in time to see a semitruck barreling down the highway.

  Blake dives at me, pushing us out of harm’s way. We both tumble onto the grass by the side of the highway.

  “Okay, maybe I would have,” says Blake. “That’s surprising.”

  We both lie there for a minute, catching our breath and trying to recover from the shock.

  “You saved my life,” says Blake. “You endangered it, and then you saved it. How can we be enemies when we’re willing to sacrifice ourselves for each other?”

  “I don’t know,” I admit. “It seems stupid.”

  “This is a bond we can’t break. We’ll always have this moment.”

  “I’m sorry I kidnapped you,” I say.

  “I’m sorry I ruined your life.”

  “I appreciate your apology.”

  “What if I try to repair the damage I’ve done?”
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  “That would be cool.”

  “I’ve been a terrible cousin. But I think we should start from scratch. I understand why you were happy. And I’d like to be happy like that too.”

  “Really?”

  Could this be the start of an actual friendship? I’m going to say no, probably not, but maybe it’s the beginning of an era when Blake and I can cohabitate. I’m certainly willing to try to make things better.

  We get to our feet again.

  “Your car’s on fire,” says Blake.

  “I see that.” I sigh. “You know, it really was a terrible car.”

  “It was all right. It got us this far.”

  “Are you trying to write song lyrics?” I ask with a smile.

  “What?”

  “Song lyrics.”

  “Huh?”

  “What you said rhymed with what I said. Car and far rhyme.”

  “Oh. No, I wasn’t trying to write song lyrics.”

  “I didn’t actually think you were. I was making a joke.”

  “Hmm.”

  I give him a playful punch on the shoulder. He gives me a playful punch back. I think the punches hurt both of us, but we don’t want to say anything.

  It may sound weird, but I truly believe that Blake and I are going to be fine from now on. Am I glad he came into my life? Not particularly. Have we gained a new respect for each other? I dunno. Maybe if you really stretch the definition of respect. But when we were about to get splattered on the highway, we both risked our lives for each other, and that means something.

  The next two and a half months aren’t going to be so bad.

  I take out my cell phone. I missed a call from Mom while we were fighting, so I call her back.

  “Where are you?” she asks.

  “Um, on our way to Mel’s. What’s up?”

  “Aunt Mary and Uncle Clark canceled their cruise. Everybody on the ship got food poisoning. Blake needs to come home and pack his stuff because they booked him a flight home tonight.”

  Yes, I truly believe that Blake and I would have gotten along for the next several weeks, but let’s be honest. This is better.

  30.

  Hey, it's almost over! I want to thank you for sharing this experience with me. I’d like to apologize again for that part where I got mad at you and switched to another book. It was inappropriate, and I’m glad you stuck with me even when I wasn’t being a good host. I’ll make it up to you if there’s a sequel.