Casualty (Excerpt Ch. 1)

“Casualty. …Casualty.”

My little brother Len was over there at the computer playing War For the World. Again.
Are all little brothers this boring?
I would wonder what goes through his mind all day while he gets C’s at Haywood Elementary, but I’m sure I couldn’t understand. It would probably consist of a lot of bleep blop blooping in between periods of blinking “booting up, please wait” images. Len isn’t the most social person.

I’m not either, but only because Haywood Middle keeps socializing out of my daily routine.

“Dang it!” Len shouted at our family computer screen. His general was wounded.

“Casualty.” The computer responded. Len would have to start a new game.
Every time he lost a soldier to things like enemy warfare, dysentery, or a wayward tank, the computer would calmly announce “Casualty.” This way, Len knew there was one less soldier out there warring for the world.

I sat on the living room sofa, next to where Len was playing at the computer desk Mom scored at some consignment shop.

For your information, this means that it took a can and a half of Febreeze before the thing smelled like furniture instead of an ashtray. But Mom says five dollars worth of air freshener on a used computer desk costs a lot less than buying a new one at Havershams. I like Havershams. I’ll buy all my furniture there when I grow up and get out of here. I’ve been in Havershams with Mom twice, and every time I go I dream about hiding under one of the bed displays until they turn the lights off and close the store. I think it would be fun to live there all quiet and secret like. I wouldn’t have to go to school if I ran away and lived in the Havershams. But Gran Rice says some day I’d probably get too big to hide under the bed and by that time I’d be too old to go to school and I’d be a dumb bunny forever.

Gran Rice is my grandmother. She doesn’t have a name like Meemaw or Peepaw or anything because she says she isn’t a bodily function. I like her as Gran Rice though. It sounds like I’m saying Grand Rice, and she is pretty grand. Gran Rice went to college in the twenties. She’s real short, and she’s got gray, old-lady hair now, but sometimes I think about what she must have been like when she was in college. I like to think of her as a flapper girl with feathers all over her like the picture on the F. Scott Fitgerald page in my literature book at Haywood.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote “The Great Gatsby.” I think it has lots of flapper girls in it, but I don’t know because I’ve never read it.

English is my favorite subject. It was the only part of my day at Haywood that made me a little less mad. Please note that I did not say “happy.” It seemed like nothing at Haywood ever made me happy. In fact, I’d gotten so sick of Haywood that I went through my days like Len goes through War for the World.

“Get out your History books and turn to page 157. We’ll be learning about the Holocaust for the next three weeks.”
As I scribbled little hate messages in my notebook, loony Mrs. Raines started raining on my parade.
“Oh, please put that away, dear, it isn’t school related.”
Oh, it’s school related all right, I thought. Mrs. Raines might enjoy a Holocaust of my creative mind.
Casualty.

“That test gave me the worst hand cramp!”
My best friend Amanda didn’t have any classes with me.
“I wouldn’t know,” I replied.
Casualty.

“Hey, nerd. Guess what? Your mom’s so fat she has to iron her pants on the driveway!”
At lunch I got to sit alphabetically with the other people in my small group. All were boys. All were lame. And gross.
Casualty.
And stupid.
Casualty, casualty.

Its like every day Haywood Middle found a new way to defeat me. Sure, there weren’t any tanks rolling over me, and I wasn't contracting dysentery by eating the caf’s two-day-old chicken tetrazzini, but I sure as anything was not winning the War for my World lately.

I’d like to say it was all Haywood’s fault, too. But it wasn't. It was a little bit my fault and a lot a bit Haywood’s fault. In the sixth grade, I was an imaginative kid, you know. Not like now. I’m a realist now. But in the sixth grade, when Mrs. Moran told us to take our time on the standardized state achievement test, I didn’t do it. I wanted to finish really fast so I could use the rest of the time to write imaginative love stories about Todd Crews while I stared at him across the classroom.

I guess you could blame things on Todd too.

But you couldn’t do that for too long, because he’s too beautiful to blame anything on for too long. That’s probably why he sucks. Because he can get away with anything. Plus, his mom named him Todd Crews which sounds like Tom Cruise, so when rumors started going around the school that some boy named Todd Crews was transferring in to Haywood Elementary, all the girls already thought he was cute subconsciously, you know.

So anyway, I stared at Todd Crews while everyone else was carefully finishing their state achievement tests, and I wrote a love story about us going to the sixth grade social together. It was a good story, and I had time to read it over to myself before the bell for the end of the test rang.

I guess I didn’t score so good on that test.

But I didn’t know that the test scores were going to determine where everybody got placed in the seventh grade! I mean, how was I supposed to know that! Teachers never tell kids the important stuff.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was a womanizer, which means that he slept around a lot and cheated on his wife. She went crazy and died in a mental institution. Nobody ever tells you that when you’re reading excerpts from The Great Gatsby.

So nobody told me that my story about Todd Crews would cost me my best friends the next year, and any hope I ever had of pretending I was cool, unique, exceptional, distinctive, incomparable, or any other synonym Haywood seemed to think I didn’t know.

No one told me that seventh grade at Haywood would change my life forever.

Brad Newsome #3291

They totally ignored me.
Maybe that was why I thought they were cool.
They each had their own little black hoodies with some distinguishing characteristic splashed across the back with mall-kiosk airbrush pen. This made them official. They were the Exclusivists because they were exclusively friends, exclusively elite, excluding all others.
Others like me.
“Lets all drink PBR and eat pizza.”
“Okay!”
They did stuff like this in their dorm rooms.
There were three girls and three guys. The “leaders” of this secluded six were a couple that had been together since high school. They were philosophy majors and were unfortunately under the impression that they were better than anything that moved and or breathed. This also included myself.
“Brad, do you have any more cloves?”
Brad was Charlotte’s boyfriend. They were the supreme team that led the secluded six, the Exclusivists.
“I think we should run and get some before the pizza comes.”
Charlotte, Brad, Darren, Elizabeth, Maryanne, and Nigel all filed out of the room. I squeezed Nigel’s little finger and followed them down the stairs. After all, he was my boyfriend.
Nigel was tall, bronze skinned, and had a face with angular features. His eye lashes were dark and unusually long. This gave him a youthful, boyish look. He also sported a faux hawk. It might have been the only thing that gave him edge. He was pouty, self-centered, and only slightly spoiled. His parents had divorced money and married into more money. They showered him modestly by their standards, which was of course extravagantly by my standards.
I had managed to land my position as his girlfriend after a 3$ matinee led to a make out session in his car under the guise of a deep discussion on the merit and fallacies of the band Blink 182. The cd looped 3 times.
“Here, you want one?”
I didn’t smoke. The awesome six-some had just gotten back from the “Yellow Roof” which was their code word for the Discount Tobacco Outlet down the street run by an eccentric Jordanian man.
“They’re not real cigarettes. You don’t inhale them.”
Oh. I took one. Nigel handed me his lighter. He had to help me light it. I couldn’t get the thing going without fearing the fiery death of my fingers.
“Thanks.” I didn’t even cough. I thought of Michael, and our quiet and not-so-quiet rebellions at Lavery. He used to smoke, too. Breathing in the smoke, I could almost taste the memories flickering away inside my head. I was still fresh from Lavery in some ways. The incident there had only occurred seven months before.
“You’re welcome.” Nigel slung his arm around my shoulders and I nestled perfectly into his side like a mold. It made me forget about Lavery.
We were all sitting on the steps around the backside of Charlotte and Elizabeth’s dorm. Charlotte and Elizabeth were roommates. Charlotte, Brad’s girlfriend, made a big show of the fact that she weighed only 95 pounds, while Elizabeth quietly kept to herself the fact that she might have made two and a quarter Charlottes. I reminded myself that I had weighed 95 pounds in the fifth grade, and was considered a midget. I should not be concerned about the thirty-pound difference in Charlotte and myself. Elizabeth, in fact, could have reasonably taken offense. Yet Elizabeth always agreed with Charlotte, and was a nurturer by nature.
Maryanne, a radiantly pale redhead, had only joined their group this year, when she streaked across the quad in her bra and underwear as an homage to Edna Pontillier from Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. She was a year younger. Her face was soft and pretty, unlike Charlotte’s, whose pinched nose and plain features were constantly viewed at an angle. In a way, she was always looking down and straight ahead simultaneously.
“I think I was chunkier when I met Brad,” she looked up at him from her position on the stair below him. He had a leg on either side of her. She was leaning back on her stair, and he was sitting forward on his. It crossed my mind that they probably had sex daily.
“How did you meet Brad?” I looked up at Nigel when I said it. I didn’t want him to think I was butting in.
“Yes, tell us a story!” Maryanne chirped. She danced over next to Charlotte and sat down on the stair, laying her head in Charlotte’s lap like a little girl.
“Please, mommy!?” Even Elizabeth was squishing herself onto the stair with the two of them. I nuzzled myself deeper into the hollow under Nigel’s right arm.
“Well,” Charlotte started. She patted the top of Maryanne’s head. “It was junior year. We were both at the same party. It was a costume party, around Halloween time.”
“What were you dressed as?”
“I was a black cat.”
“She had little ears, whiskers, a tail, the whole bit.” Brad was getting sentimental, too.
“Brad and I kept looking at each other across the room.”
“What was Brad?”
“I went as a zombie,” Brad said.
“He had eyeliner on,” Charlotte grinned up at him.
“It was part of the costume!”
“Anyway, Brad and I kept looking at each other, and then suddenly I couldn’t see him in the room any more. So I told my friends I to go to the bathroom, and wandered into an empty room.”
“Guess who was there?” Brad interjected.
“You were there, and what did I say?”
“You said, ‘I hate to break it to you, but you’ve got bad luck now.’” Charlotte giggled as she remembered this and then leaned back into Brad, with Maryanne’s head still in her lap. Brad continued. “And I said, I think its good luck if the black cat that crosses you is as beautiful as you are.”
“Awwwwwwww!” Maryanne and Elizabeth cooed and sat up straight to stare at the happy couple. Next to me, Nigel choked back a laugh.
“And then we made out,” Charlotte finished before planting a kiss on Brad’s chin.
“Way to go, Brad.” Nigel cheered. He was clearly not a romantic.
“Dude, I honestly thought she could have been thirteen or something. I’d never met a sixteen year old that tiny looking.”
“Oh come on, I was chunky then!”
“Char, you know you weren’t. You never were.”
“And I’m still your little girl!”
“Yes, my little girl.”
Ew.
So I was thoroughly grossed out by the fact that Charlotte, at 95 pounds, with her blonde hair and her elitist attitude, while making out with Brad, really did look like a small child. And I briefly thought to myself that maybe a Napoleon complex was to blame for all her arrogance.
“Now, my friends, story time is over! Let us go upstairs and partake of wetness on this dry campus!” Charlotte hopped to her feet, and began hopping—marching?—
up the stairs.


One month later, Nigel broke up with me outside of the on-campus Subway. He told me that he was bored by me, and that his parents didn’t really like me.
“Why? I knew your mom was kind of stiff, but I’m shy around new people! Geez, forgive me for being shy!”
“She thought you were kind of rude, actually.” Deadpan. Way to break things to me gently, there, Nigel.
“Rude? I’m not rude.” I’m about to be rude, I thought.
“That day when you she came to the football game with us? She told you to have a nice night, and you said, ‘I will.’”
“…huh?”
“You didn’t say, ‘Thanks,’ or ‘You too.’ You just said, ‘I will.’ My mom thought that was really rude.”
“…I –
“And you just didn’t mesh well when you came for dinner that one night.”
Yeah. I’m not rich, stuck up, snobby, or drop-dead new-money gorgeous, and I’m sure as hell not an “Exclusivist”. Also, I hate green bean casserole.
“I thought your Dad liked me! You said he liked me!”
“Actually my Dad was the only one who said he didn’t care for you one way or the other.”
He left me on the bench outside while a long line of hungry students snaked their way through the sandwich line into the door in front of me. They were so obviously trying not to stare, and I had no idea why I was crying.

Everybody wants to belong somewhere. Everybody wants to fit.
It turned out Nigel had been seeing Maryanne behind my back for almost two weeks and everybody in the “group” knew.
Believe it or not, they had a pregnancy scare not two months after he broke up with me. They started coming up with baby names, and laughing about it like it was just great! But when the whole thing was over, Nigel split with Maryanne citing undue stress. I was told he could be seen sending up a few silent hallelujahs. He moved back into his mom’s house and told everyone he was going to art school. I think his “fit” was right under his mom’s metaphorical wing, bound and gagged with her apron strings.
Elizabeth tried to date Darren, Brad’s best friend, to no avail. Darren was very nice about it, but Charlotte intoned that it was probably because Elizabeth was too emotional, clingy, and last but not least, significantly overweight. Elizabeth caught up with me in the Student Center one day and tearfully recounted a “meeting” of the Exclusivists in which everyone tried to tell her that leaving the group would be for her own good. She said Darren had sat silently while they told her they could no longer be her friends.
I wondered if perhaps Darren had really liked Elizabeth after all, but that Charlotte’s influence had been so strong that her opinion in the matter was law. Because of this, I wondered how Charlotte had ever been able to allow “rude” little ole me into the inner workings of this “Exclusive” circle.
For some reason, she must have enjoyed my company.

“Hey, so we’re having a housewarming party. Charlotte and I moved to a new apartment. I don’t think I ever told you that. So we’re asking some people from the old crew to get together and hang out.”
“…really?”
I couldn’t believe Brad still had my phone number. And the “old crew??” How was that going to work?
“Nigel won’t be there. He’s not really our friend anymore.”
And I am? I thought.
“Come on! There’ll be jello shots!”
It had been close to two years since I’d been in a room with the whole exclusive crew. Out of curiosity, I had to say I’d be there.

“Nigel was a total jerk, dear. It only sucks that he kept you from us.”
Charlotte was in full matriarch mode. She stretched herself out over the sofa lounge she and Brad had no doubt bought at the Goodwill. It was a hideous orange color. Yet strangely, being a lounge, it suited Charlotte’s goddess-of-everything tendency.
“Do you know he’s trying to date my sister now?” Brad had just poured himself a new drink, and sat down next to Charlotte on the lounge.
“Your sister? Isn’t she, like, in high school?” I was sipping a mixed drink Charlotte had made me. I hoped it wasn’t poisoned.
“She was in high school,” Brad said, “She’ll be a freshman in college this year, though. And Nigel is begging me to let him go out with her.”
“Well how does she feel about it?”
“She thinks he’s really hot, of course. Just like you two did.” He gestured at Maryanne and myself. Maryanne was in a chair adjacent me. She was still gorgeous. “What a douche,” Brad finished.
I stood up.
“Well, anyone want to come smoke?” I pulled out a scrunched pack from my back pocket.
“Oh, we don’t smoke any more. We quit,” Charlotte informed me.
I looked at the four others in the room. Brad, Maryanne, and Darren were all looking at different spots on the floor. Chase, whom I had met only a few times, looked not at the floor but at me, as he had all night.
“I’ll go with you,” he said.
“I will too.” Maryanne hopped up from her retro chair. “I’ve been drinking,” she said, as if this accounted for her lapse in smoking-related judgment.
We filed out the door and I didn’t look to see what sort of face Charlotte might be making.

“Brad and Charlotte are getting engaged.”
Maryanne, Chase, and I were all leaning up against the brick wall of the apartment building. It was much like the days we used to lean up against the brick wall of Charlotte’s dorm.
“They’ve been together forever, haven’t they?” Chase asked. He had known the couple because he had lived down the hall from Brad and Nigel in the boys dorm.
“Pretty much. But I think they’ll be engaged for a while. Charlotte’s not exactly the nesting type. You know, nurturing, motherly.”
“Right?” I laughed a little bit at the understatement, and Maryanne smirked at me.
“You know, Nigel was a real dumbass,” she blew out a puff of smoke, and looked at me again. “I’m not just saying that because he messed with my head, either. I’m saying that because I saw him mess with yours and somehow I thought I was different.”
Doesn’t that just mean you’re the dumbass? I thought
“Well, you know, I was outside you guys’ ‘circle’ or whatever. After a while I thought he probably would get on better with you.”
“Don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it’s not really a circle. It never really was. It’s just Brad trying to reach out to as many people as he can in his love/hate relationship with Charlotte.”
“But… Brad’s not the reason it’s a circle. It’s a circle-- I mean-- It’s called the Exclusivists because Charlotte made it that way. Isn’t she the reason you guys don’t hang out with Elizabeth anymore?”
“Woah. Elizabeth was a mopey, depressed mess when she stopped hanging out with us. We wanted her to get over Darren, that’s all. And as far as Charlotte’s concerned, she’s got Brad in a headlock. He’ll never get too far from her. He gets us all together all the time so he doesn’t have to be the only one she tries to control. And the term Exclusivists was exclusively a Charlotte thing. We only thought it was cool for a little while.”
“So you know she’s controlling?”
“Well, yeah, but she’s a real softie. I mean Brad and her are sewn up. It kinda makes me feel sorry for them. And… I a little liberated and free for myself. Nigel was a douche, yeah, but at least I’m free.”
Oh.
Man, I felt bad for Brad.
“And anyway, I think we sort of share something because of the whole Nigel thing.”
This was the most I had ever talked to Maryanne. She’d never really spoken to me seriously about anything. I had always lumped her with Charlotte as another pawn or minion. But this made me see her differently.
Besides, boy hate can seriously bond girls together.
“Yeah,” I said. I smiled at her.
“Yeah. Nigel was an elitist scumbag!” Chase announced. We both looked at him. “…I always thought so.”
He turned and punched me lightly on one arm. Lets go inside.
Somehow I felt like he was talking only to me.
When he walked inside ahead of us, I saw that the black sweatshirt he was wearing was one of the old Exclusivist jackets they’d had made. In faded print, I could read the words Poet Laureate on the back of it.
Could it be possible that I’d actually want to spend time with some of these people?

Notification of Impending Mutation

Please note.
Lesser Known Works has always been a great source of pride for me. I am aware that I am neither widely read nor greatly impacting the cosmic flow of ideas in the universe. What I am doing is what I have always wanted to do. I am writing not only for myself, but for others. This is a small stage, I know. But I prefer not to think of it as a tinker toy tower next to the great pyramids, or the empire state building. I prefer to think of this miniscule stage as a lonely star in the great dark universe shining constantly, if feebly, into the great beyond in the hopes that one day, maybe light years and light years later, on another distant lonely star, someone will hear my tiny voice and feel something important. Maybe they won’t feel so alone. And because of this, I myself, the feeble light shiner, feel less alone just thinking about it.
Which brings me to my next point.

The book, my friends, is bunk.
I cannot write it.
This new revelation comes to you in light of some news that many of you may find shocking, scandalous, outrageous, appalling, and perhaps even nauseatingly girly.
I want to get married.
Please stop feigning composure. I am aware that this statement should be accompanied by the loud boom of explosives, and dynamite, and screaming fireworks, the sudden incessant wailing of small children, and perhaps a few dying animals. Please also note that this is not happening right away, and you must save your best roman candles for a while yet.

Specifics are not important to me yet. But I realize that one day I will greatly expect the inevitable change, as things and people do continually change.

Says Shelley:
“Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;/ Naught may endure but Mutability.”

This mutation of my role in humanity does not change the necessity of this feeble light I call LesserKnownWorks. Yet the things that have been said here are not exactly conducive to married life, the future, and the possibility of one day creating Rafaelas (see immediate previous entry).
How can one change, but to throw off the chains of torrid memory, the phantoms that fetter you to your former self?

Says Wordsworth:
“Truth fails not; but her outward forms that bear/ the longest date do melt like frosty rime.”

These things need to melt. I can’t resurrect them any longer, and I can’t keep the parts of myself alive that time would like to bury. I need to let them die softly away into the recesses of memory. Publishing them would achieve the exact opposite of what I originally aspired to do.
You see, I thought that by going through my overloaded phone contact book, writing vignettes, conjuring my worst images and purging myself of them in front of everyone would prove that I am changing and am done with all the muck of erroneously finding myself. But the truth is that this constant conjuring prolongs the purging process.
When I taught at the alternative school we used to have a policy that new students would not be judged by why or how they had gotten there. They had a clean slate. And they were graded on how hard they pursued their potential best, at whatever level that may have been.
You see, despite your worst days God has given you many choices in this life. He will forget your past much quicker than you can, if you let him. Clean slate. New start.

The “Waiting By The Phone” project at Lesser Known Works will be no more, in response to the needs and true character of its author.
Future posts regarding a Young Adult fiction book will follow, as well as a few unfinished entries from the “Waiting By The Phone” series. However, all ancillary entries to this series shall cease, though they may still exist online for posterity.
If you were wondering, the multitudinous numbers will be deleted from my phone regardless of the existence of a vignette for each. I will lose them forever. But this new change is a much better forever.

LesserKnownWorks will remain alive. However, for the purposes of the death of this series, Sarah Teasdale once penned a good epitaph:

“Remember me as I was then;
Turn from me now, but always see
The laughing shadowy girl who stood
At midnight by the flowering tree,
With eyes that love had made as bright
As the trembling stars of the summer night.

Turn from me now, but always hear
The muted laughter in the dew
Of that one year of youth we had,
The only youth we ever knew
--Turn from me now, or you will see
What other years have done to me.”

A Note on Bad Breath, and Other Deterrence

“Boys are so disgusting. And they are all the same. In fact, people in general are all the same. They’re boring and they annoy me.”
Rafaela was starting another of her brooding rants. Aleighna knew it. Instead of stopping her, she focused on the road ahead and breathed a few silent breaths.
“Whether they’re mean or they’re nice, they are all the same. Boooring. And disgusting. Of course.” She flipped down the mirror in Aleighna’s passenger seat and checked her black eye liner for the second time.
“How are they boring? You sure are making a lot of assumptions for a person whose never had a boyfriend.” Aleighna was secretly proud of this fact for her daughter.
“Well. They all have bad breath sometimes.”
“I hate to break it to you, but you have bad breath sometimes too, Rafaela.”
“Mom! Geez, so do you.” She crossed her arms and cocked a perturbed eyebrow. She looked like a beautiful bronzed pouting statue. With black eye liner and jewelry. She continued on. “Anyway, they all say the same things. Come-ons, you know.” She looked at Aleighna out of the corner of her eye.
“I know you get hit on, Rafaela, you’re my beautiful girl.”
Rafaela sighed heavily at her mother’s utter dorkiness.
“Thanks.” She grinned cheesily.
“You’re welcome.” Aleighna smirked. “Be careful.”
“I knew that was coming...”
“I’m just saying.”
“I know!” With a grumble, she tightened her crossed arms. “They are just… all the same. That’s all. I don’t see how girls get married anyway. How can they want to dedicate their lives to something so disgusting? Boys disgust me. They’re stupid. They’re inferior. They don’t deserve me.”
“That’s right, dear.”
“…They can be hot.”
“You’re saying that to annoy me.”
“But they have bad breath.”
“That’s more like it.”
Aleighna looked over and smiled at her daughter. From the moment Rafaela could form any opinion at all, she had reminded Aleighna of herself. A little bit angsty, a little bit picky, a little bit scared whitewashed with grandiose statements and girl power. Aleighna was impressed by her own gorgeous spawn. She found she didn’t mind so much being the mom in the background.
Still, at the same time that Rafaela’s similarity to her delighted her, it also scared the crap out of Aleighna sometimes. She couldn’t tell Rafaela why she was so hard on her. She didn’t want her to understand. Aleighna had fought so hard to be the kind of person who could have a beautiful daughter like Rafaela with a beautiful husband like Ignacio. She had fought so hard for this version of herself. She did not want her daughter to ever fight like that.
“Rafaela one day you’ll understand. But to be honest, you’re not supposed to right now.”
“Understand what? I do too understand. Boys are not worth my time with their disgusting, stupid selves. I will never get married. I can’t be with one person forever. I will live alone my whole life because the only person I can stand is myself.”
A chuckle escaped Aleighna as she pulled up at the high school.
“Look, believe it or not, one day --not today, or tomorrow, or in the next five years… ten years, whatever-- you’ll meet somebody who doesn’t irritate you. Who doesn’t have bad breath even when he does have bad breath. You’ll meet this person who will be good to you, won’t make you cry, and will want to know everything about you. And he won’t care what it is that scares you about yourself. He’ll love every piece of you, even the gross small pieces like your bad morning breath.”
“Gross, mom. You’re really weird, you know that?”
She hopped out of the car and swung her bag up onto her shoulder before rolling her eyes a little bit.
“I love you too!” Rafaela shut the door halfway through this, to avoid anyone hearing the whole thing, Aleighna knew, before waving warmly, then turning around and stalking off toward the front door.
Chip off the old block, Aleighna thought. Then she checked her eyeliner in the rearview, and drove around the loop toward the school parking lot exit.

Brandon Cole #1141

I can remember nearly every single girl Brandon Cole dated.
I met him when I was 13 years old, and a few months away from my freshman year in high school.
“This is Brandon! He’s going to be a junior at Overbrook next year.”
“Hi. Brandon.”
We looked at each other across my parents’ living room. He was older than me, and at the time, that scared me.
And excited me.
Of course.
I remember wanting to rip the kitten off of the white fitted tee I was wearing with rigor. I wore white tees a lot back then. They all had something different on them, but I thought the white made my skin look darker. I was very pale.
“Nice to meet you.” Brandon stepped forward and shook my hand warmly. It was the first of many times I would see him do it. “So you’ve done pretty well at speech and debate, huh?”
Our parents went off into the dining room to discuss wood paneling and wall paper.
“I think so. I won first place at every meet I’ve been to.”
Brandon chuckled a little bit and crossed his arms.
“High school speech isn’t like that. They're tournaments, not meets. They last all day, and only one person at the whole contest wins first place over all. Middle school speech meets are totally different.”
“Oh.” Crush my dreams, why don’t ya.
“Yeah. And you have to watch out for Mrs. Barnes. She really knows what she’s talking about, but she’s not exactly the warmest person when you first meet her.”
“Thanks for the advice.”

Telling me I was out of my league might have been a dick move on his part, but I didn’t care. I was already into him. Albeit mildly, and from a distance. Never once did I consider he might actually like me.
I don’t think he ever did. Maybe I scared him.

I dated his best friend, who did like me. Russ went to Brickmore High. Brandon and my mutual like for Russ, along with our parents’ friendship, kept us in touch and a sibling-like understanding stood between us. I respected Brandon for qualifying for Nationals with top in the state debate ranks, and I liked being invited to sit with him and Russ, and other Nationally recognized debaters. I liked being near him. He exuded confidence that in some way, I knew he didn’t really have. Debaters are always good at lying.

Heather Almeda: Brandon dated her his junior year. She had an identical twin sister, and I never quite understood how he could tell them apart, or why he liked one over the other. They split up because Brandon was too eager to please. I made a face when I heard, because Heather wasn’t great looking anyway.

Sarah Starnes: He dated her for almost a year. She looked just like me. Long dark hair, big poofy bangs. She was more light and ditzy sounding than me, though. She was outgoing. I wondered if I just didn’t have the personality to keep up with Brandon. I wondered if he wanted a sunshine-smiling, Laura Bush-esque girl. After enjoying some success competing with two more mad-man type speech performances my freshman and sophomore years, I was not sunshine-smiling.

Brielle Heffinger: Also looked like me. She was short, with long thick dark hair. Her eyes were large and pretty. She had a distinct look to her nose and face shape that was shared by her entire family. They all looked like little European hand puppets, and they could perform like them, too. They loved theater, and they loved Brandon. Brielle and Brandon broke up some time after Brandon went to college. I was still dating Russ.

Brandon took up multiple clubs and organizations in college. He had a serious ambition to be President some day, and joined the Young Republicans. He created a new social club on campus. He became active in a Human Rights organization. All of this he did from his college campus at Lavery. Lavery College just happened to be the same private Christian establishment I went to straight from high school.
Our next few meetings went like this:
“Hey!”
“Hi.”
“It’s so good to see you!”
“Yeah.”
“I’m just so busy with everything, Young Republicans, you know, I never get to see you. And you’re here, aren’t you! Don’t you love it!?”
“Sure.”
“Well, I gotta go.” His phone would ring, and he would pick it up while walking away, never looking back at me.

Carly Lewis: She was the same age as me. She lived on the same hallway as me at Lavery. She was a die hard, conservative Republican. Her father was a local Republican politician. In the required class, “Matrimony and Christian Family Values” Carly had called anyone who voted for the Democratic presidential candidate a person who wanted babies to die. She was thinking of abortion. Carly had chunky legs and a round happy face that was usually smiling beneath her strawberry blonde hair. She even smiled while making the assertion about baby killers. She was always so cheery. Brandon had found his Laura Bush. And he married her.

I didn’t go to the wedding. I don’t know if I was still sore about Lavery, or whether I was somehow disappointed that Carly Lewis was getting married at 21 in a totally acceptable ceremony with parents and a church full of guests who were all happy for her.
Maybe it was because Russ didn’t come to the wedding either. He had moved out of state. Though we had dated for a near solid four years, we had grown apart. I had grown into myself, or whoever I was then. Russ had grown into himself too. And he had grown hundreds of miles away.

Sometimes when I think about Brandon Cole, I feel alone. Brandon grew into himself while loving Lavery, and he turned it into an identity for himself. I freaking hated it, and I’m still trying to make my own identity. In high school I felt like Brandon was so much like me we could have been siblings. In college though, he went the way I couldn’t go. My pride and my somewhat arrogant disgust for all things definitively conservative kept me from embracing some person I could have been.
But I’m not Carly Lewis.
I’m not a Republican.
I’m not a baby killer.
I’m not branded by that place and that persona I refused to try on.
I’m not married because I want to live my own life, not someone else’s. And I think that if I had ever dated Brandon Cole I would have found out that we did too have something in common. He was damn good at lying about being happy.
I guess I’m just not as eager to let someone tell me what happy feels like.
I want to really feel it.

Brad Billings #8555

“Are you sure you want to do this one?”
“I’m sure.”
“You really have to go for it, okay? I mean, this is dark. Really dark. You’re a crazy murderer.”
“Dr. Langley, I’m sure.”
I was holding a worn out packet of paper with the heading Tell-Tale Heart. I knew what I was doing.
“All right then. We’ll start in about twenty minutes, now go sit and read through it.”
Dr. Langley eyed me with skepticism from behind her reading glasses. She was my favorite teacher. She was a middle aged woman who reminded me of Jackie Chiles from Seinfeld. She wore slacks and dressy, silk shirts all the time that she accented with oversized gold jewelry. She wore a tie to school once. She was no nonsense, and for some reason she liked me a lot.
It might have been the time I wrote half of a poem on the back of my homework about how her student teacher sucked at classroom management. I didn’t mean to turn it in, but when the student teacher saw it, Dr. Langley called me out of my fourth period to tell me I needed to write an apology letter. I was mortified, but Dr. Langley couldn’t stifle a few spurts of laughter. At the time I couldn’t understand why she would laugh at me over something so horrible. As it turns out, I think Dr. Langley would probably have liked the adult me as well. With her sense of humor, we could have been great friends.

I sat down in a desk near the back corner and started reading the piece to myself. I had heard of it before, and I knew it was about a crazy guy who kills his roommate. I liked the idea of pretending to be someone evil. Dr. Langley didn’t know what she was unleashing when she put that piece in the box.

My best friend Brenna had come to the after school Forensic team tryouts, too. She was in a chair two seats down from me reading something soft and fluffy sounding.

“I don’t see any boy pieces in here, Dr. Langley.”
Brad Billings had been rifling through the basket full of papers for probably twenty minutes already.
“They’re in there, Brad. Just read something.”
“But, um…” He was holding three packets and looking helplessly at them, his snaggle teeth exposed by his open-mouthed confusion.
“Oh, here. Let me help you.”

Brad Billings was skinny, pasty white, and had a mom who was a substitute teacher. His sandy brown hair was always mussed up, and his clothes were always sub par by the then current clique rules. It looked like his mom not only embarrassed him by substituting in the same school her pre-teen son attended, but it often appeared that she might have been dressing him, too. Brad always wore either blue jeans that were a little too tight and too short, or the kind of pants that had an elastic band at the waist. In 1998, elastic was so last decade.
Really, though, his teeth were what made him who he was. They were a dentist’s nightmare. Several were actually growing on top of each other and pointing in odd directions. He looked like he had a mouth full of oversized chicklets when he talked, or laughed, or did anything that required the opening and shutting of his mouth in general.

Dr. Langley settled Brad down with a piece called “Dr. Loveletter.” He sat down next to me.
“How’s your mom?”
I looked up at him from my maniac piece and glared.
“Fine.”
“Jake doing any better in English yet?”
“I don’t know.”
I kept pretending to read. I didn’t want to talk to Brad. I wanted to pretend that I didn’t come to his house on Saturdays because my little brother was bad at Language Arts. I wanted to pretend our moms weren’t friends, and that our little brothers didn’t run around together in his back yard playing with Batman figurines. Brad had nothing to do with me. Brad’s single mom had nothing to do with me. His whole family and their buckteeth could just go away. Especially while my best friend was two seats away.
She looked at Brad sitting next to me, smiled politely and looked back at her own paper.
Being twelve and just a little bit nerdy was not cool. There were standards of decorum at that age that were never as important to me afterwards.
I huffed so Brenna would know I didn’t want to sit next to Brad.

Brad didn’t win awards as Dr. Loveletter, but I made a surprisingly convincing madman.
Brad’s mom ran away in his summer after 8th grade to be with her high school sweetheart whom she hadn’t seen in twenty years. She moved the whole lot of them out to North Carolina, and I never heard from him again until I was in college.

I wasn’t huffy at all. I called him from the number he had emailed me and spoke to not only him, but also his mother. They were really nice. I called partly because Brad didn’t look like a nerd anymore. From his pictures it looked like he had gotten braces somewhere along the lines and now looked, in just the right light, like an Abercrombie model. I wasn’t thinking about how he looked, though. So much had changed since 8th grade that I was also a different person. While Brad had gotten sweeter looking, I had begun to feel like I was rotting on the inside.

I can remember sitting in the car outside my dorm room smoking a cigarette out my window with one hand and my cell phone pressed to the ear with my other.
“I can’t believe you’re actually calling me after all these years!”
“I know! It’s been so long!” I gush back.
“I’m sorry about your parents,” he said, “That sucks.”
“Yeah.” So does getting kicked out of school. So does being ostracized. So does breaking up with your boyfriend of four years. So does being told you’re fat. I took another drag and exhaled.
“You know Carly Lewis? She used to be a good friend of mine from church.”
“Yeah. She’s married now.”
“Woah.”
“I don’t know what’s wrong with people these days. I guess that’s great, for her.”
He laughed at my cynicism.
“I wish we could hang out,” he said after a bit.
I wondered what it would be like hanging out with Brad Billings again. Would I go into autopilot and start flirting and forcing out innuendos? Or would I be like I was in eighth grade, all sweet and innocently going with the flow of things. I wished I could be like that again. Unassuming. However awkward it had been, however pretentious I might have seemed at times, my problems were so small then.
“I wish we could too,” I said.
“Too bad I’m in North Carolina.”
“Yeah.”
After I hung up, I considered calling someone else, but I couldn’t think of anything easy. Over the years I had painted myself into a social corner, and the only thing to do was to either pretend to be someone else, or to call someone who might like me. Pretending to be a madman from the Tell Tale Heart had been easy long ago. Pretending to be happy, on the other hand, was hard.
I scrolled through the contacts on my phone.
Brenna was in New York State.
Brad was in North Carolina.
Dr. Langley was teaching college classes up north.
I kept scrolling.

Brian Who Puked #4738

Kyle stared at us from his porch, and I felt terrible.
“Come on, how are we getting home?”
“We?” Brian’s forty was nearly empty now, and I guessed he was done for the evening. He took another swig.
“Yeah, come home with me.”
I glanced at Kyle, now smoking on the porch, pretending he wasn’t out there just to see who got in what car. Then I looked at Brian. He gazed back at me from behind his artsy glasses, looking all relaxed and sleepy.
“I can’t go home with you.”
Kyle had been glaring at me ever since I’d responded positively to Brian’s come-ons. I didn’t know why I was doing it, but I was. His glasses were nice. He looked trendy. He had a closely shaved beard-like thing. His upper lip was eclipsed by it, and I didn’t intend to kiss him, but I had. We had been behind the stairs next to Kyle’s back door. The rest of the party was inside, and Kyle hadn’t noticed us go out. But he’d seen us come back in.

I liked Kyle. I always had. Since the first day I walked into my first college class with him. I had just broken away from private school pseudo-bliss. Kyle was a great guy. He was quiet, southern, and sweet. His demeanor had mostly been defined by his awkward high school years as an overweight funny guy. Since then, he had nearly lost Nicole Ritchie’s entire body mass. He was different outside, but inside he was still shy, inexperienced, and a little bit paranoid.
I had been through an inexplicable crush on him in my first semester that I knew was bad news. Kyle liked me, would probably do anything for me, and I was using his affection like a never-ending gobstopper. I sucked it dry while I ran wild. Then, when a slutty looking freshman made out with him in his driveway on Cinco de Mayo, I flew into a jealous rage, much like the one he was pouting his way through now on the porch. Only “now” was almost three years later.

“Come on. I live close.” He drained the forty in his hand. Only disgusting alcoholics and white guys who think they’re funny drink forties of beer.
“You do probably need a ride, don’t you?”
“Kiss me.” He smelled thick and sweet. And as he leaned in I shot a look back at Kyle who was going back inside.
“Okay, okay. I’ll go.”
Now, I had only bought a six-pack of Blue Moon that night, and I didn’t even get to drink it all because the party got out of hand and people kept going in the refrigerator and stealing them. So I wasn’t toasted.
“That was a pretty great party Kyle had, huh?” We were in my car, driving away from the city. Apparently Brian lived in the upstairs of an old house near the historic district. I was jealous. What did he do?
“What do you do?”
“I work with Kyle.” Oh crap. “At the pizza place next to campus.”
“Really?”
“Yeah…” He leaned toward me and reached for my leg. “Kyle’s a really nice guy.”
“I know.”
“Hey,” he was looking right at me. Maybe he wasn’t drunk. “Are you going to come up?” His eyes were brown and shining. I didn’t know what I would do when I got there. Drive away?
“I plan not to come up.”
“Can I make you change your plans?” He spread his long fingers out over my leg and moved up and down. Something shifted inside me, but I reminded myself not to ignore the fact that there was a large empty beer bottle in the floor of my passenger seat.
“Turn here.”
We turned onto a narrow street lined with old Victorian style houses. They had beautiful lattice porches, but were otherwise sad looking. Such was the way with that college town, though. The real estate could look beautiful. It could be over one hundred years old. Yet it would be rented out to a bunch of partying, drug experimenting, co-eds who had no real ambition but to stay as wasted throughout college as possible. It would definitely explain the beer pong table set up on the wrap around porch of the yellow two-story we pass before turning into a driveway.
Brian is still massaging my thigh. We stop at the end of the driveway around back next to two other cars.
“You’re so beautiful.”
“Thanks.”
He unbuckles his seatbelt and leans over towards me.
I stare at him, still warm from his hand on my leg.
He is about to touch my neck. He’s just breathing on it, still.
“…Inside with me?” he says.
“Huh?”
Then he sits straight up. He looks a little—green?
“Come on, let’s go.”
He opens the car door, and says “Man, I think those two beers were a bad idea.”
When he stands up he bends over and pukes into the grass.

Ew.
I sit there for a minute, my hand still on the steering wheel. I’m frozen. In the third grade, this girl named Brandy Houston threw up in my lap and I never felt the same way about body fluids after. This weird fear rises up in me, and as he’s still retching, I say aloud, “Well, Brian, that’s my cue!”
I lurch over the console and grab enough of my passenger door to close it without disturbing Brian’s “situation.” Then I turn the key in the ignition and back out of the driveway. At the corner, I chuck his beer bottle out the window after I make sure no one’s looking.
It makes a satisfying shattering noise in the street.

I don’t talk to Kyle for three weeks after. I don’t want to remember this ever even happened. And when Brian asks Kyle for my number at the pizza place, Kyle gives it to him one digit off.

Good ole Kyle. He always protected me even when I should have known enough to protect myself.

The Office: 10 Reasons Your Workplace Deserves Its Own Episode

You know your workplace deserves its own episode of The Office when:

1) As part of a Can Drive, there is a karaoke competition complete with dj downstairs in the auditorium. It lasts three hours.

2) Your boss sends out an email detailing his involvement next week in a program called PMP Training.

3) Your co-worker one cubicle over has a last name that sounds like Toaster Streusel and works the expletive “Shit!” into nearly every phone conversation, good or bad.

4) Your superior in the sales department dances in her office at your mere mention of Salsa music, then loudly requires that everyone gather round to watch.

5) You participate in a skit for Charity that involves dancing provocatively to Flo Rida’s “Low” while waving phony money at people in the audience.

6) Shorts Friday turns into Butt Cheek Day as a few misguided youths wear butt shorts to work in September.

7) The names of customer companies provide a continual source of merriment as you file away “Taynt Co.,” “Diggin Durty Inc.,” and “Phat, Ho.”

8) The company picnic happens during work hours, with a free lunch, free ice cream straight from a truck parked at the curb, and the results of a contest meaning 5 executives will get pies in the face.

9) Someone has written “feces” in pencil on the bottom of the list of non-recyclable garbage above the green bin in the workroom.

10) One of your co-workers continually tries to hook you up with an associate who lives in Michigan and has no idea who you are. She postulates about your future with him and whether he would move to be with you.

Becky Wilson #5627

Becky Wilson was boy crazy.
“Don’t freak, but I think I like Adam.” She said it with a sympathy-inducing grin her eyebrows arched in mock-anguish before turning back to the road. I was riding in the passenger seat of her hand-me-down minivan on our way to a chick-flick movie.
“Adam?” Savannah Gregory was in the backseat.
“Yeah…” Becky sighed loudly, and made a right into the theater parking lot.
Savannah and I didn’t really have anything to say about Becky’s undying love for Adam. Everyone on the news team already knew. Becky had been gifted with the inability to conceal her true emotions. What you saw was what you got. Thus she was unable to work on-camera, and had been propelling herself toward becoming a producer.
“I mean, I thought I liked Jason, but I definitely know I like Adam. He’s just so cute!” The news team crew was predominately male. Savannah and Becky only knew each other so well because they were the only girls on crew.
“I mean, isn’t he!?” she gushed.
We shrugged. It was an uncomfortable topic. Adam was considered ambiguously gay.
I was not on crew. I was on-air talent. I read the news on Tuesday nights. Still, I was a non-major of the Mass Comm department, and I didn’t really fit in with the other on-air girls. They were usually blonde, always perky, and only sometimes very good at what they did. I was brunette, more often sarcastically morose, and always very good at doing the news. This is not to say that I could do their jobs today and really be a reporter or an anchor lady, but that in terms of editing and cold reading, I was somewhat exceptional. Okay, I might have been the bomb. I anchored in my first semester of college, having no idea what I was doing, and no experience besides speech and debate.
But it was people like Becky and Savannah that made me want to take another look at Mass Comm. They were close friends. And I hadn’t had close friends since, well, speech and debate.
“Do you really think he likes you back? He did hang out with you a lot.”
“Oh, yeah, Adam and I were like peas in a pod until I thought maybe I liked Jason.”
“Well isn’t it weird that you like Adam now after he knew you liked Jason?”
“He didn’t know I liked Jason.”
Savanah laughed.
“Beck, everyone knew you liked Jason. You still do.”
“I do not!”
They were so funny together.
“I think Jason’s kinda cute. In maybe a nerdy sort of way,” I chimed in.
The two girls looked at me from their seats in the car before squealing with girly glee.
“You like Jason!?”—
--“I know right?!”
I laughed half at their reactions, and half because I had never admitted this.
“He’s sort of shy and quiet, but really funny,” I said through my grin.
Jason had a “late night” show on the campus tv-news station. He was so quiet during the day, and then all of a sudden at 9pm on Thursdays he was Letterman, wearing artsy glasses and a blazer with elbow patches.
“I remember thinking that about Tim.” Savannah had a boyfriend who also worked crew. They had been together for over a year, and were very nearly attached at the hip.
“That he was nerdy, or shy and funny?” Becky snorted.
She was a collection of characteristics that could be both charming, and obnoxious.
“That he was shy and funny.”
“Is he still shy and funny?” I asked.
“Funny, yes. Shy, no. He pushed me off the bed yesterday. We were joking around and he pushed me so hard that I actually fell and busted my elbow a little bit.”
“Tim! What a jerk!” Becky said, smiling. “Did you hit him back?”
“I got him good.”
Unlike Savannah, Becky, bed, and boy, were not three words that had ever been said at the same time. She was just hopelessly awkward when she was trying to hide something, and the feeling could be exponentially multiplied if she was trying to suggest something. Instead of subtlety, Becky was blessed with candor. Her obvious nature made her a danger zone for most guys, and she seemed never able to gain the experience that could make her “cool.”

Savannah, Becky, and I walked toward the ticket line outside the theater. The two girls were not blonde or unusually perky. They were real, and I liked that. They were also very different from me. And as I checked my phone for the tenth time to see if anyone had called, I knew I could never really be close with them.
I didn’t want to talk about who Becky liked, or what Savannah’s boyfriend had done the other day. I wanted to hunt down Jason myself, if I had to. I’d much rather have been at the movies with him or whomever else I was waiting to hear from. It was almost less pressure to be with boys, because dates were easy. It was being with these girls that was hard. I had to fit in, say the right things. Girls didn’t give you brownie points for being pretty. You had to be the right kind of person.
I guess I just never felt like I was.

Becky is a producer now. Savannah married Tim. I still wonder if I could have been friends with them if I had only had the right things in common.
And I wonder if I wouldn’t be wishing this stupid copier in front of my cubicle a death threat if I had only been a Mass Comm major. Is there really only one version of yourself that can find true happiness? Did I miss that turn on my GPS or something?

Brian Who Flaked #0393

“Hey, everybody! Get with this girl, so she’ll like you!” He trudged across the yard to his car. “Whore.”
As soon as I heard it come out of his mouth, I had a moment. Like one second I was in idle, swimming in the shock of it all, and the next, I was shooting like a bolt of lightning toward him across the grass. Other kids at the party stopped what they were doing, if they hadn’t already. “Oh, snap.” I heard someone say. I didn’t stop. My heart was thudding away; I couldn’t control myself. My stomach contorted into a twisted knot of rage as I flew towards him.

*************************************************

Brian Gary was a boy with two first names who lived on campus where I went to college. He lived across the building from me, and we bumped into each other several times. I worked the front desk of our residence hall, which really meant I kept a watchful eye out for people sneaking in or out, and called a Resident Assistant if anyone happened to report large quantities of blood or feces anywhere.
“Hi.”
I looked up from my copy of Winesburg, Ohio to see Brian staring at me across the desk.
“Hi.” I looked back down. “Can I help you with anything?”
“What are you reading?”
“Winesburg, Ohio.”
“No, what are you reading?”
“Winesburg, Ohio.”
I could feel his confusion at my Who’s-On-First answer so I looked back up.
“It’s a collection of short stories by Sherwood Anderson. He taught Faulkner how to be Faulkner. He’s the inventor of Southern Gothic. He’s… It’s a good book.”
“Cool. Hey, what’s your name?”

Brian was twenty-five and an aerospace major. He didn’t look either of these things. He had thick-lensed prescription glasses that made his eyes look small and squinty. When he took them off, he looked like a timid little mole rat blinking at you, half blind. He had psoriasis around his hairline and terrible dandruff in his scalp. He had prescription creams on the bedside table in his dorm room, and I shuddered to think of what evil residues lurked in the fabrics of his pillow. His room was a single, meaning he had no roommate. It was furnished with staple dorm furniture intended for two, and a futon that his mom had bought him for the first apartment he had never procured. He liked Seinfeld, non-fiction, and ramen with shrimp.
We watched television for hours and I discovered too late that he was a terrible kisser. He took his glasses off to do so, and the whole mole rat thing was just too much. His hair was a course shock of black. Totally disappointing to the touch. He was one-sixteenth American Indian and I didn’t know the rest of his ethnic background, but in a first for me, I didn’t care. I didn’t want to know. All I wanted to do was get rid of the sick feeling I felt when I stared at the imperfections I couldn’t get past.
I was a bitch. Sure.

“Why are you being so weird?”
We sat outside the backdoor of our building, on the concrete steps, both of us staring at the mud.
“I don’t know. I’m not being weird. I’m just being me. Maybe I feel weird.” I felt like he kept edging toward me. I made no move to stop it, but the whole gesture just seemed so pathetic and clingy that I wanted to shake free of it, of all of him. I wanted to stand up and away out of his petty reach.
“I don’t think you’re acting like you used to. Is something wrong?”
I looked up at him, and the pleading look in his eyes behind those thick little glasses. Screw it. I’d just tell him the truth.
“I can feel myself doing it again.” I looked back down at the mud.
“Doing what?”
“It seems like, every time, I’ll start a relationship, and then something happens. I either become dominated or I dominate. Neither is healthy, of course, but its always one or the other! And-- I think I’m just going into bitch mode on you.” I laughed a little helpless laugh. I knew this would set him off a bit, but I really only anticipated his little hopes to be crushed. I didn’t expect anything more than a dejected look.
“Dominate? What, you’re dominating me?”
“No. I’m just... I’m being a bitch about it. Something in me is destroying this thing we have.”
“This thing we have?”
He looked at the ground between his knees. His face was all tense and rigid. Still. And yet I sensed a movement behind it all. He stood up.
“As far as I’m concerned, we don’t have anything.” He spat the words.
“Okay.” I looked up, masking my ripple of surprise. I wanted to smirk, and play innocent at the same time.
“All right!” And he walked off around the corner of the building with his head up high, like some kind of super hero. ‘Wounded Pride!’ I thought to myself. ‘Great Indian name for poor Brian.’

We didn’t see each other for the next two days unless I was working the front desk and he happened to walk through. He would nod at me, like I was some comrade Homeboy or something. Maybe it cracked me up a little too much.
I didn’t flinch when he declared that he would come with my friend and I to a party I made plans to go to while working the desk.
“What’s with him?” Josh asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I think I made him mad.”

************************************************

“Hey, everybody! Get with this girl, so she’ll like you!” He trudged across the yard to his car. “Whore.”
He had been giving me the evil eye all night, and it had finally come to this. His lecture to me from an adjacent folding chair on the smoking porch of some stranger’s house, filled with strange people, had been horrifying. It was something I couldn’t make stop. I couldn’t argue back. Public humiliation is always like this. Whether the one humiliating you is your family member, or some guy you thought you knew. You have to sit quiet and wait for it to be over.
But he’d pulled the right trigger.
As soon as I heard it come out of his mouth, I had a moment. Like one second I was in idle, swimming in the shock of it all, and the next, I was shooting like a bolt of lightning toward him across the grass. Other kids at the party stopped what they were doing, if they hadn’t already. “Oh, snap.” I heard someone say. I didn’t stop. My heart was thudding away; I couldn’t control myself. My stomach contorted into a twisted knot of rage as I flew towards him. I lunged at him for all the humiliation I’d ever felt and I’d ever tried to force myself through quietly.
“Just who the hell do you think you are? You’re damn right I didn’t give a shit about you. Who would? You don’t even know me. You wanna tell me who I am? I’ll tell you what you are. You’re just a drunk, twenty-five-year-old, college student loser. Your life doesn’t mean shit and it never will. And how DARE you call me that!”
I slapped him across the face as hard as I could.
For a single beat I stood shaking, not knowing what to do next. I thought maybe I wanted him to hit me back. I heard the witnesses behind me go quiet, but only for a split second.
“You are so lucky you’re a girl right now it’s not funny!” He got right up in my face. “I’d beat the shit out of you.”
He stepped back and opened the door to his car.
“You really think you’re something, huh?” He got into his car laughing this awful, mean laugh. It made my stomach turn.
Then he drove away while I stood shaking in the tall, wet grass watching his red taillights disappear down the road.
I think it ended like all humiliations end, too.I smiled a little bit, still shaking, and walked back to the party, pretending nothing had happened at all.

Agree-Monster, Mrs. Barnes #9893

Overbrook High was a good school when I went there. There were AP classes, and Honors classes, and a film class, and an Orchestra class, and we had a nationally competitive Speech and Debate team. I involved myself in all five of these things that I thought made Overbrook great.
The place was built to hold half the population it did when I went there. In fact, my mother had gone to the same school some thirty-five years before me with a much smaller student body. Her yearbooks looked like pamphlets compared to mine.

“And just what do you think you’re doing?”
Mrs. Barnes had also graduated from Overbrook High. Only her class had been the first to go all the way through the school when it was brand new, and a mint green wall color was called innovative instead of nauseating.
“Nothing.” I had frozen with my hand in front of the controls to the popcorn machine.
“That’s right. You’re not burning anything tonight, missy. Go be Nacho Nelly.”
Mrs. Barnes was not only a year-one graduate of Overbrook, she taught there, too. She was both a Geometry teacher, and the school’s Debate coach. It just so happened, that during basketball season, she was also the manager at the concessions stand where our Speech team got to keep half the proceeds. Which was why I found myself laboriously prying open a gallon tin of Nacho Cheese and scraping it out into a crock-pot that had probably never been clean.
“Kunal, you can be the Popcorn Prince tonight.”
“Yesssssss.” Popcorn Prince or Princess was the job that required the least amount of cleanup. Unfortunately, you also had to be good at knowing when to add what.
“Hellllooooo?!” Shayna was obviously perturbed. “I always get to be Popcorn Princess. It’s like, my job.”
“Exactly.” Mrs. Barnes turned from where she was leaning up against the counter. “We’re switching it up tonight. Kunal is Popcorn Prince. You get to be… cashier.”
Shayna frowned and moved over toward the cashbox.
“How come cashier doesn’t get a cool name?” She muttered.
Shayna and Kunal were on the Speech team with me. Kunal was a state championship debater, and Shayna and I were sophomores. We did interpretation events and practiced rote memorization while conjuring wildly ridiculous emotions. It was like competitive acting. We were good at it so far, and we liked it. But while we weren’t state champions yet, we found ourselves loving the part of Speech Team that meant we got to stare at older, talented guys like Kunal wearing three piece suits.
“Hey, watch it, Kunal, you’re going to get oil on me!” …or maybe not like Kunal.
Kunal was Bengali, which meant that he could grow a full beard and mustache at his seventeen years of age. He had made this unusual fashion statement his trademark, and it gave him an edge while he made Marxist comments in his AP government class. He looked like a forty-year-old man trapped in a seventeen-year-old boy’s body, and sometimes in the midst of a particularly heated rebuttal he sounded like one too.
Shayna and I were pretty close to being best friends. We had been competing in speech events since we were thirteen, and we had a lot in common. Shayna was trend sensitive and colorful. She liked shopping, sports, accessories, and winning speech trophies.
“Hey, are you going to Homecoming?” Shayna also liked boys.
“I don’t think so,” I twisted the knob on the crock-pot all the way to the right. “I went last year and it really wasn’t fun. The only interesting thing that happened was that Darius Palmer wore a dress.” Darius had slowly become more and more female since he’d first arrived in our seventh grade class. It had taken him three and a half years, but he was now considered a flamer, and was unmistakably gay.
“Yeah, but you could go with Russ. Talk about accessorizing!”
“I don’t know. We might find something better to do that night than freeze our butts off in the bleachers at homecoming.” Something better like lay around in the grass, I thought. Russ and I had been dating for a bit less than a year, but we were linked like an old married couple as far as Speech team was concerned. Russ was the captain of the Brickmore High School team. Brickmore was down the street from Overbrook, but several busy intersections separated it from Metro County, meaning it was securely rooted in the new money suburb of Brickmore itself. Russ’s family owned stock in soft drinks that dated back almost a hundred years. They were worth significantly more than my parents.
“It should be a crime to make us wear all these pretty dresses to go to some dance-type function and then hold it outside so we all cover up with coats.” Shayna dipped a chip into my now luke warm nacho cheese and popped it into her mouth before Mrs. Barnes could look.
Hm. It might be too cold to lie out in the grass.
Russ’s house in Brickmore had a creek running behind it. You could walk along the creek until there was an open space and a clearing containing some kind of large electrical box servicing his subdivision. We liked to go there and lay out in the grass staring at the sky and holding hands. We walked there those days because the last time we had taken Russ’s car, we’d found his father and a police car next to it when we got back. The owners of the house we parked it in front of had called the police to have it removed from their property. On the drive back, I distinctly heard his father refer to me under his breath as “jail bait,” and since then I was attempting to present a Brickmore-acceptable version of myself anytime I saw Russ.
It wouldn’t stop me from lying in the grass with him, though.
“You girls talking about Homecoming?”
We both turned around to see Mrs. Barnes leaning against the frame of the side door to the concessions stand. She always seemed to be leaning against something.
“Yeah.”
It might have had to do with the fact that age had not exactly been kind to her body. Though after all, she was the one of the flagship graduates of the smelly public school we were now standing in.
“You girls know something? I bet you’d never guess now, but when I was in school, I was on the homecoming court.”
“Really?” I could believe it. Mrs. Barnes had a face with soft features. At sixteen, this was the sole factor by which I determined whether someone had once been beautiful.
“Yes. And Mr. Barnes escorted me.”
“Oh! How cute!” Shayna clasped her hands in girly glee.
“Are you girls going?” I was surprised she was interested. Mrs. Barnes was the Dragon Lady. She wasn’t exactly the kind to buddy up with students. She was more likely to yell at you while making a facial expression akin to a screaming teapot than to ask you questions about a meaningless social function.
“She’s not going,” Shayna pointed at me before looking away and straightening two boxes of candy that weren’t centered on the back shelf.
“Yeah, I went last year. It was kinda boring.”
“If you did go,” Mrs. Barnes was interested in my social life? “You’d be going with Russ Walker?”
“Well, yes. We’ll probably do something else that night, though.” I wanted to keep my name linked with his. I didn’t want her to think I wasn’t with him at all. Russ was, after all, pretty dreamy. And talented. And perfect.
Mrs. Barnes looked absently over at Kunal filling bag after bag of yellow popcorn.
“I might go with Chase Miller,” Shayna had to be included. “He goes to my church.”
“Don’t get too wrapped up in that boy,” Mrs. Barnes said to me suddenly.
“…Oh, I’m not.” But I was, of course. I wanted to marry that boy. I thought about it all the time. I tacked Walker on the end of my name constantly just to see how it would look and how it would sound.
“She wants to marry him!” Ah, Shayna, ever the enthusiast. “You married Mr. Barnes, didn’t you? She’s going to marry Russ, and the circle will be complete! It’s a reincarnation of love!”
Mrs. Barnes looked away from Kunal and back at us. She actually looked a little bit sad.
“I did marry Mr. Barnes, but not right away.”
“Like after college?” Shayna asked.
“No.” She turned back to Kunal. “Don’t start more yet! Where would you put it? Think before you do something that’ll waste team money!” Kunal put down the container of popcorn kernels and sighed.
“So when did you marry him?” Shayna and I still wanted to know.
“I got married nearly out of high school. But it wasn’t to Mr. Barnes.”
“Oh,” we both said.
“That’s why some of my books, if you’re looking on maybe the top of that bookshelf, say Bethany Anders on the binding.”
“I thought Anders was your maiden name?” I asked.
“It was my married name. The first one.”
“What happened?” Shayna asked, and I elbowed her.
“Oh,” Mrs. Barnes turned and opened the cashbox, “I only did it to get away from home. I was very young. Back then a girl couldn’t move out on her own. I just got married.”
“Wow. You make it sound so easy!” Shayna handed her the roll of quarters she was reaching for on the bottom shelf below the counter. “Like… finding a husband is like grocery shopping.”
“Oh, it’s not hard at all,” she said, breaking the quarters open on the edge of the counter with a loud pop.
“Not hard?” I asked. “Isn’t it, though?” It was hard for my parents to stay married, I thought. They didn’t agree on anything lately. They were hardly around each other. I felt like they were hardly around me. As a unit, anyway.
“Girls, it’s not hard to be married. At all. It’s easy, actually, to agree, to get along, in a marriage.”
“It is?” It just didn’t make sense to me.
“Yes, it’s easy to be married. It’s hard to be happily married.”

And this was the one thing that I remember most of Mrs. Barnes.
She said that, and I thought, great! It’ll be easy for me to marry Russ and be happily ever after. Domestic bliss is only a few years away, I thought, and we’ll be together all the time, as adults in our adult lives!
What I didn’t bank on was the fact that in those few years I was marking off day by day, I would still be immature, wild, and overly imaginative. I wouldn’t understand the world the way I was so sure I did then. My parents would be divorced, and I’d be chasing guy after guy, so desperately trying to agree, to get along, just like Mrs. Barnes said, that in the end I’d forget who I was completely and agree so much and so often that I wouldn’t remember anything about what I wanted.
Maybe that was why Mrs. Barnes went back and found Mr. Barnes, her high school sweetheart. Maybe she didn’t get to become anything, since what she became was an agree-monster. Coming back into yourself is hard. I watched my mother try to do it five years after Mrs. Barnes told us her story at the concessions stand.

Mrs. Barnes doesn’t teach at Overbrook anymore. And I didn’t realize how much I would miss that school until I left. But that’s how all important things are missed. Nostalgia happens suddenly, and keenly, and without warning or premeditation.
The distinct smell of old library books mingled with the scent of a thousand musty cafeteria lunches made me want to cry the next time I visited Mrs. Barnes’ room after high school. It met me at the door like a permeable wall of memories. I felt like I was looking back at myself in some sort of Dickensian High School Christmas Carol.
Yeah, Zac Efron, try starring in that.

Zyan Hassan #9184

I met Zyan Hassan at a stoplight on Harding Place.
I didn’t tell anyone this when we started seeing each other.

“Peek Point.”
“Pea pod?”
“Peek Point!”
“Ping pong?”
“Peek Point!”
“…I guess I’ll just recognize it when I see it.”

He was Kurdish. He had a thick accent and had not been in the country for very long. Maybe two years.
His apartment at Peek Point, which I eventually located, smelled thickly of men’s aftershave. You could smell it before you knocked on the door outside on the landing. The permeating smell of this spicy cologne might have been the only thing that continually lingered in his apartment. The place was nearly devoid of furniture. He had a television, and several large woven blankets on which we sat and ate things like cucumber salad and something that looked yellow like eggs but was actually chicken. It was really good.
He explained to me about the different countries that had once been pieces of Kurdistan, and about how traditionally rigid Kurdish values kept one inside a box, maybe, but that the box was safe, happy, and commonly accepted.
I learned to say, “Hi, How are you?” “I’m fine, and how are you?” in Sorani Kurdish.
He continually called me something that meant “beautiful thing of my heart.”
I learned that he’d had a girlfriend who was now married and still called him sometimes begging to run away with him.
He told me my clothes were too tight, and he left me five voicemails one night when I left my phone in the car by accident.
He told me that there was a difference between traditional Kurds and acculturated Kurds. I quickly came to understand that the ones I’d had crushes on in high school were the acculturated kind. He told me they were shameful, insolent, and disrespectful of the religion and the culture from which they came.
One day he made a point to show me a commemorative coin I had never noticed resting on the mantle above his fireplace. It was unusually large. He told me that while he was in Iraq, General Wesley Clark had come to speak to American troops about the war. He handed out some coins, and somehow, the then-presidential hopeful ended up giving a coin to Zyan. He kept going on about how nice General Clark was, what a good man. He held the coin out for me to see grinning, his white teeth and wide eyes a glow with something akin to pride. An Iraqi boy with an American General’s coin.

“Help me with this?”
He sat crouched on the floor of his Peek Point apartment with a thick white form paper in front of him.
“What is it?” I put my bag down next to the door and came to sit beside him.
“It’s a form so that I become a military interpreter.” He held the paper up in the light and squinted at it. “What does this mean?”
He pointed to the words “Social Security Number”, and I knew I would be there a while.
Zyan wanted to go back to Iraq in a safe way. He wanted to stop cleaning office buildings after dark, stop working at his friend’s hamburger joint, stop driving a car that smelled like french fries. He didn’t have much that other people didn’t. He didn’t have education, a degree, any technical training. He didn’t even have an extended family here like most immigrants you see clumped together in certain parts of the city. He did have one thing though; he was tri-lingual. Aside from English and his native language, he spoke Arabic. And in 2005, knowing Arabic could make you a living.

Eventually I viewed his near-fail pass of the ASVAB as a quick out for me. If he went into the military, and back to Iraq, I wouldn’t have to sit there calling him every time I went somewhere. Before long it was clear that I was going to break up with him.
Clear to me, anyway.

“What… why?”
“Because.” I pressed the phone tighter against my ear and cupped my hand around the receiver. “We don’t have the same values. We’re not in the same place in our lives.”
“What is value?”
I sighed, and crossed the kitchen to stare out at my mother’s backyard.
“We’re not in the same place in our lives,” I repeated.
“But, I—I never tell you this, but—I love you.”
A little late for that one!
“Oh… I’m sorry. I have to go.”
I was annoyed by the whole thing. I hate break ups. I always tried to get them over with as quickly as possible and start thinking about what I was going to do the next day, the next hour, the next five minutes. It was much easier to decide to make grilled cheese than to figure out what I could do to make things easier for someone else.
If I always had something to do, I wouldn’t remember what their face looked like, or their voice sounded like, when I told them I’d rather make a sandwich than be with them.

Zyan came back from Iraq a year later. He was thirty pounds lighter, and I thought twice before telling him I was practically engaged to Miguel Morales. Zyan didn’t like the military. His English still wasn’t that great, and he never saw General Wesley Clark. I pictured him crouching in the sand like Geraldo, trying to explain something to US Military personnel. He wanted to date me again. Instead he went back to cleaning offices and working at a gas station.
I sincerely hope he kept his faith. People with principles, even ones that don’t make sense to me, are hard to come by these days. It’s 2009 and I’ve only met a few people since then that have matched the intensity of his beliefs. That’s admirable.

Sometimes, someone will walk by me wearing a certain scent of men’s cologne, and my brain will literally drop everything. Before I know it, I’m back on that landing outside his second floor apartment at Peek Point. Scent really is the strongest link to memory.

Benton, Adam #4563

“Hey, uh, we’re friends of Benton.”

That was all it took and we were in the door.
After a quick name check, we were let into PanFlash free of charge at the head of the line. Which wasn’t really that long or anything, it was just cool to be friends with the headliner.
Adam Benton had been DJ-ing for around five years after an earlier attempt at becoming the next white rap star had failed like Kirsty Alley’s career. He was no Eminem.

What he was was a kid from an affluent new-money suburb who fancied himself a music connoisseur. I couldn’t really debate that, though. He was pretty good at what he did. PanFlash had allowed him the promotion, booking, and use of their club every other week for months now, and Benton was great at packing it with guests. He was charismatic in a subtle sort of way. Part of this was due to the fact that he and three drug-addled high school friends had rented out a house in college. More than twice a week, a barrage of drunken, drug-loving, hippie wannabe co-eds could be seen blowing large clouds of smoke from the front porch and side deck.
One of my first memories of Benton actually involved him pulling a plate out of a dresser drawer in his bedroom full of people and sweet smoke before sifting through some floury substance that was not flour.

Since then, I had actually come to like him. That memory was three years past when I walked through the doors at PanFlash. Mordred was with me. He was one of the reasons I knew Benton in the first place, and I let him lead me through the dark, surprisingly open feeling PanFlash.

The ceiling was high, and the whole place had an abandoned warehouse atmosphere. It wasn’t classy, but it was urban which was fine for a DJ venue. It was dark, with sparsely placed hanging lights and a few colored spotlights near the dance floor, which took up a good third of the place. There was a bar area right in front of us with a few people waving money for the bartender, but after a bit of hesitation, Mordred steered me toward the round booth tables directly beside the dance floor.

“I don’t really have that much money on me,” Mordred said in my ear, because it was loud, and gestured toward the bar. He probably didn’t need a drink anyway; I figured he was probably already high.
So typical of Mordred to take me to a bar that he could get in for free, and then not have money for drinks. Somehow he always paid for pills, though.

The place wasn’t crowded yet, but there were plenty of people standing around or sitting and staring at the music videos playing on the big screen behind the stage. Nearly everyone looked like they were trying to be something they weren’t. This sort of style has always surprised me with its contrived authenticity. They looked like rich kids on Halloween. It occurred to me, as we moved toward a booth directly across from center stage, that the style might just be the kind that happens when you combine substance abuse and MTV.

We sat down for a second. I remember looking at Mordred and thinking that he was beautiful. The colored lights reflected off his eyes, and he smiled at me.
“You’re looking at me strangely.”
“Strangely.” And I laughed. The adverbial form of the word ‘strange’ was not something Mordred would have said if he weren’t high. And he smiled again because I was laughing. His eyes were relaxed in the thick of it, and he squeezed my hand.

I looked back out at all the youth and excess around me. One lone guy was now dancing on the dance floor, breaking the empty floor up with his break dancing, which included much more flailing of arms and intense facial expression than was necessary. He was sweating rather profusely when he stood up and made an exaggerated gesture to no one in particular that said “you just got owned.” He was serious. So it was pretty funny.
“I’m gonna go find Benton,” and Mordred got up and ran off in the direction of the bar.
I sat there, suddenly trying to sit up straight and not look fat, staring at the sweaty break dancing guy.

After a couple of songs, break dancing guy found someone to battle, which only made him flail more wildly, almost knocking himself into onlookers, which I thought was hysterical. I, on the other hand, found myself being pulled toward the back of the place by Mordred who had found Benton.

“Hey! It’s good to see you!” We had entered a small room at the back of the bar across from the restrooms. The room was for talent so they could get ready for shows. While one would think this to be really cool, it wasn’t. It was a room with white walls, one table, a couch, a tv, and a cooler full of some overpriced energy drinks. Benton stood up from a table where he had been sitting with his glowing ibook.
“Its good to see you too!” I came forward and we hugged. Benton was the kind of person who hugged you even if he didn’t know you that well. He had wide eyes and a boyish face that he tempered with a seemingly out of place goatee and mustache. They were both just thick enough to pass adolescent inspection. It kinda looked like baby hair.
“I’m just gearin’ up for the show!” He adjusted his flat-billed cap. “You’ve never been here before, right?”
“Nope.”
“It’s gonna be dope, man. Really cool.”
Mordred broke in before I could say anything else.
“Oh yeah, have you had a chance to look at any of the stuff I gave you?”
Mordred was constantly getting things off the Internet for free. New music, new movies, he was impatient and impractical in nearly every aspect of his life.
“Yeah, I looked at it.” Benton went back to fiddling with his laptop, and Mordred turned to me, I guess to recap why he was cool.
“I gave Benton some music so he could maybe put it into his set.”
I nodded.

Mordred looked down at me and batted away my hands from my stomach before making a quick face and turning back to Benton. He didn’t like it when I clasped them in front of me. I think he thought it made me look fat. In fact, I know he thought it made me look fat.
Then Janie came in. She had a drink in her hand.

“Hey, you want anything? I am so incredibly sober.” Janie was Benton’s girlfriend. She was a gorgeous girl with long black hair and pale, naturally flushed skin. They practically lived together. I gave Janie some credit, though. She had a real job, something about graphics and advertising, and she lived by herself when Benton wasn’t there. She walked around the table and sat down on a couch behind Benton. It was facing a television with the same music videos from the stage on it.

“We’re okay. We don’t need anything,” Mordred said, and I wondered if he always answered for me. He rubbed my back while he said it.


Benton’s show was pretty good. It was a little sad because when he finally went on stage, most people had already left. It was nearly one in the morning, and he played for around thirty people standing close to the stage.

Mordred was here and there during the show. I sat with Janie, and made obvious comments about the lights, and the cigarette smoke, and the musical transitions. Everytime Mordred came back he sat down next to me and squeezed my hand, or rubbed my back, or kissed my cheek. One time I saw him come out of that back room, and I knew why.

Just before we left, he ran outside, threw up, and came back in. When we walked out to get in the car and go home, he ran toward some trees near the edge of the parking lot so I wouldn’t see him get sick again, but I knew it. I pretended not to listen and kept my attention focused on two guys just outside the door to the place. They were arguing about whether they should go home, or beat someone up who had apparently threatened to shoot one of them. The one who wanted to beat up his would-be shooter was most definitely drunk. The other was yelling at him in a high pitched and exasperated voice. It was high drama.

I got in the car, hoping the guy who had “beef” wouldn’t show up for a show down, and waited for Mordred to get in. My head hurt just looking at him when he opened the door, his face all ashen, so I backed out pretty suddenly.

“Are you mad or something?”
“No.”
“You’re mad.”
“Why did you have to go and do that? You knew it would make you sick.”

He didn’t answer. It must have been because he didn’t feel well. Mordred always had an answer. In high school he had almost been a certifiable genius with a whopping IQ score. As a three-sport athlete and an Honors student, he was popular to boot.

But no matter how rich he and Benton had been in high school, or how smooth they looked or talked, it really felt, to me, like they were blowing up a balloon full of nails that had gone way past its bursting point. It was that time that always came to me in the night where I felt like I had to get out of there, or else I would end up being smacked in the face with all those little bursting shards. So I contemplated forcing Mordred out of the car, and then pulled around the corner.

Oh, Divine Air Duct

I think God is in the air duct above my desk.
Know how I know?
Every time I clasp my hands, like so,
Look up, and
"Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you,
for this boy!"
that's what I see.
The air duct.
Blowing back at me.

Avery McDaniel #1757

Was a technical virgin, a talented actor, a good liar, mildly self-absorbed, over emotional to a fault, and highly imaginative. These latter two combined to create a truly terrible combination and leading Avery to an unintentional yet complete fabrication of strong emotion.
He would obstinately refuse to confront any situation that threatened to disturb his meticulously organized or often meticulously disorganized universe. This was, of course, despite his ironic love of Roosevelt’s quotation, “Do something every day that scares you.” He could have easily been compared to a turtle.
Yet he was a total communication whore, a collector of friends and acquaintances. He seemed to look at most of his life from the midst of some hilarious inside joke. Behind the jokes he hid an ache that he masochistically enjoyed prodding.
He was unnecessarily sentimental regarding superfluous objects. A hanger-on.
He was totally and completely in love with his own creativity. He forced it to surround him, willed it to become his life. In this way, he made pleasing others his life goal. Which suited a boy whose mother had died when he was young.
He was a breaker of hearts, which also suited a boy with a dead mother. He blamed a lack of nurturing for his phantom emotions, which were the death of every sexual exploit, every tentative venture into the land of white picket fences and 2.5 children.
The walls were high.
Even when I used a pick axe, I really didn’t even dent his firm resolve.

Bottom line: Avery liked me because I promised to nurture him. I liked Avery because he was a labyrinth of a boy. And then I got lost in the labyrinth.
To tell you the truth, it was like he was trying to lose me. And when he said that I didn’t understand, he was right. I didn’t understand why he would try to lose someone in that labyrinth he had up there. But it was surprisingly refreshing to climb out and feel the cool simplicity of a person who knows exactly what they want.

I haven’t fallen into any labyrinths since. They’re pretty overrated.

Culturally Challenged #2059

I blew some smoke out the crack in my window and pressed the repeat button on my cd player so that Kanye would stay Heartbroken. I had stopped at a red light waiting to turn onto Harding. It was a long one. I had to stay in the right lane with everybody else or I wouldn’t be able to make another right one hundred feet later. Out of the corner of my eye, someone was staring at me in the next car. I glanced over to see a man wearing a suit and tie waving at me coyly like he was a prepubescent schoolboy.
Why do guys think it’s cute to wave at total strangers in other cars? It must be aesthetics because I could literally be hiding a peg leg behind the car door and Mr. Happy over there would never know.
Considering this idea of the peg leg, I looked forward with a smirk and blew some more smoke out of the window. Then I realized he had rolled his down. The light was still red.
“You are very gorgeous,” came his intro.
I looked over, much more directly this time, to notice that he was actually kind of attractive himself. It might have been the suit. Guys in suits don't usually try to pick up girls at traffic lights.
…All right. And I rolled down my window.
“Thank you.”
“I say correctly?” And I realized he was foreign. Something Latin. He had a nice cream color going for him and his eyes were dark and shining. He looked like he was on the older side of thirty. A wider grin escaped me.
“Yes. Gorgeous. You got it.” The light changed. We both looked up at it, and I shrugged at him and started to move.
“I give you my card!” He yelled over at me.
Card? He had a card. Oh, this I had to see.
Still smiling, I slowed on the turn enough to let him into my turning lane. Three cars behind us hit their brakes before we turned into the post office parking lot.
I stopped in a space with no intention of getting out of my car. He pulled up beside me, windows still down.
“You have a card.” I acted impressed, because I was.
“Yes. Here.” And he pulled one out of his wallet and handed it to me through the window. He had to lean over across his passenger seat. He had on cufflinks.
“Nice suit.” It was a nice suit.
“Thank you.”
“You work at the bank?” I read the card.
“Yes. I am the branch manager for them.”
“I’m sure being bi-lingual helps.”
His eyebrows raised, “How you know I’m bi-lingual?”
“You don’t know how to say gorgeous. You’re a Spanish speaker.”
“How you know that?”
I lifted the card, and eyed him, “Vasquez?”
I should have a BA in flirting.
“Where are you from?” he asked.
“Here.” Always here, I am so culturally challenged. “You?”
“Where you think?”
“…I don’t know. El Salvador.” Never assume Mexico, even if it’s your best guess.
“El Salvador?! Come on!”
“I don’t know!”
“Cuba.” He looked in the rear view mirror. “I have to go to work. But you call me sometime.”

I never called.

To tell you the truth this happens to me a lot.

There are an estimated 40 thousand foreign born residents in this city, and I cannot tell you how much I love that.

Culturally challenged, I am. Everyone always talks about diaspora and the return to the roots of your heritage. I took a class in college called Black Women as Writers and quickly realized that I couldn’t say much regarding my own heritage except, “I’m sorry.” White people have pretty much run the globe like a free lunch for centuries. Everything in history has been rewritten white. Flippin Jesus wasn’t even white. I feel that my "history" is all some big fable based on lies, exaggeration, and ego.

“I have no good English. You teach me?”
“Oh, you are teacher? I can learn with you.”
“How much you charge an hour?”
No, no, and no no no.

By the time I was student teaching at Murray Middle School I knew I wanted to teach ESL kids. That is, students who are learning English as a Second Language. Almost the whole school at Murray was made up of the foreign born population. Their biggest demographic was Hispanic, then Kurds, then blacks, then whites. I could count the white kids I taught on both hands. Having gone to school at Murray nine years before, I realized that the city’s changing demographic was not my imagination.

But the truth is I feel like I've been teaching English as a Second Language for a long time now.

“Ms. Robinson’s dating a Hondureno.” Somehow, my students discovered the fact, and I quite suddenly became infinitely more popular. "So you're trying to learn Spanish, Ms. Robinson?" Kids who weren't even in my class came up to me. I hadn't consciously sought Spanish speakers, or Gujarati speakers, or Sorani Kurdish speakers, but I think I found them because I was looking for culture. Attempting to improve their English was sort of a bonus.

It's not just that I'm culturally challenged. There's a lot of things that I think white culture keeps from me. We white Americans (maybe all Americans?) are all muddled and confused about the line between independence and selfishness. We don't know when to care for ourselves and when to care for others. We don't know respect. Being edgy and unique has replaced being respectful and honest.
Now this is not to say that other cultures are completely honest and respectful. This is not to say that they don't look down their noses occasionally.

What I'm saying is that there’s just something so base and pure about a lot of these people who come here to chase the ever-elusive "American" dream. The number one source of economic gain in Guatemala comes from wired money outside the country. The whole idea of the nuclear family, often lost on the divorce-ridden, emotionally isolated American populous drives these people in ways I find myself constantly in awe of. They are often moral and spiritual, and despite the fact that they might be able to drink like fish, their ingrained values of family, love, and mutual respect keep them afloat in the mad sea of America. How many college grads or dropouts do you know sitting on their butts waiting for someone to give them what they don’t have the courage or the ambition to take? These people I know have built their lives from the ground up, and they’re living day to day with the determination that they’re going to provide better lives for their children, and their children’s children.

I want those values. I want that determination. I want someone who is so dedicated to me that he would bend over backwards to provide for his children and I. And he wouldn’t forget that he’s doing it because he loves us. I want an extended family of best friends. I want an understanding that no matter what happens, nobody leaves each other high and dry. I want mutual respect. I want passion. I want to be surprised by the small things in life.

It’s all out there. It might not always be glamorous, but it’s so full of love.

Maybe someday I’ll be lucky enough to find it all, and culture too.

Still, I don't think it'll drive up next to me wearing a suit.