The Seven Torments of Amy and Craig

by Don Zolidis

  But it wasn’t any of those things. Instead, the meet-cute began with the announcements.

  “Youth in Government is looking for people to sign up,” said the monotonous voice of our vice principal, who managed to turn every announcement into a death march of troubled grammar and awkward pauses.

  Ha, I scoffed. Those people sound like dorks. I went back to sketching a picture of Rothgar, my thirteenth-level dwarven paladin.

  “So if you’re…interested in government, I guess…or are a youth, Youth in Government might be the club for you. Here to talk about it more is Youth in Government president, Amy Carlson.”

  “Hi, everyone! We meet every Wednesday night at the YMCA; and it’s way cool, and we get to go on a field trip to Madison after Thanksgiving. I’m serious; it’s really fun. We’ve also got a pool table. So…um…if you’re interested, just swing by the Y at seven this Wednesday.”

  My ears perked up. A superhot girl had announced that she just happened to be president of a highly nerdy activity. A nerdy activity that required no skill or experience or ability whatsoever—you could just show up and hang out with her. At the YMCA. Which was probably the scene of any number of ill-advised romantic hookups.

  Did I have a chance?

  Normally, the answer would be no. Amy Carlson was no ordinary hot chick. She was president of everything. She wasn’t just senior class president and in charge of Youth in Government; people actually started clubs to get her to be in charge of them. It was stunning. She was almost certainly going to be our valedictorian, and despite the fact that she walked just a bit like a duck, if aliens descended on our school and demanded a specimen of human perfection, she’d be the first one sucked up by the tractor beam. Of course I knew about Amy. We had gone to different middle schools, but in high school it was impossible to miss her. The principal probably called her up at night and asked her for advice.

  People like me did not hook up with people like her.

  And yet, maybe this was it. Maybe she was different than I thought. Maybe she was just the kind of amazing, high-functioning nerd who would appreciate a guy in a trench coat with a dwarven paladin. Perhaps she would be impressed that my character had a lot of hit points and a really low armor class. Perhaps I shouldn’t mention that.

  My first accomplice was Groash. I cornered him in the hallway after first period.

  “Dude,” he said. “Youth in Government?” He shouldered the ugly blue duffel bag that contained half of his worldly possessions and adjusted the new safety pin in his left ear. “Do I look like I’d go to Youth in Government?”

  “I need somebody to go with me.”

  “Take Brian; he’s smart.”

  The thought of bringing Brian with his dungeon-mastering snorts filled me with dread. “I need someone kind of normal.” I paused for a second and thought about Groash’s safety-pin earring and Slimeballs shirt. “Like, passable as a human being.”

  “It sounds like school after school, dude. Why the hell would we do more school at night? That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “They have a pool table.” I could count on the fact that this would be news to Groash despite the fact that it was on the announcements.

  “They have a pool table?” he asked, suspecting a trick.

  “Yes. It’s free pool. You don’t even have to do anything. You just get free pool.”

  “Do they have food there?”

  “How would I know that?”

  “I thought you knew about this shit.”

  “I need you come to Youth in Government.”

  “It sounds awful. Youth? Who uses the word youth?”

  “Please?”

  “Ten bucks.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll try it one time for ten bucks.”

  “I’m your friend!”

  “If you were my friend you wouldn’t try to get me to do things.”

  I eventually got him to go after negotiating him down to $7.50, which was ridiculous since I was the one picking his ass up and driving him downtown to the Y anyway. When I say “downtown,” I am referring to downtown Janesville. If you’ve never heard of Janesville, you are not alone.

  Janesville had the benefit of not being a suburb and not being a city, so it did have an actual downtown, with buildings that were actually three or four stories tall. One of these was the YMCA, which had mutated over the years. It used to be a home for indigent young men tramping about the country on trains and sleeping on cots. Now it was basically a gym.

  The lounge where we met had been a smoking lounge for about seventy-five years, so it smelled like failure. The carpet was mostly stains; the floor creaked; and there were probably mutant rats hiding in the walls, plotting our doom. It also had a pool table.

  “Sweet,” said Groash, whose nose didn’t register smells like a normal human nose would. This was because of his living situation. His house smelled like dead raccoons. Because there were dead raccoons under it.

  But there was Amy—and some other people, whom I’m not going to bother to describe because they are not important to this story. Also present was the college representative, a girl named Amanda, who was a little chubby and had her hair spiked up, like she used to be a rock star or something. Amanda wore a leather jacket and didn’t give a shit.

  “All right, listen up,” said Amanda when we got there. “My name’s Amanda, and I don’t give a shit.”

  Groash clapped once and stopped when I elbowed him in the ribs.

  “I don’t really know what you guys do here, but the Y’s paying me minimum wage to hang out and make sure you don’t burn the place down. Whatever. I don’t really care. I’m going to go play pool.”

  Then she did that.

  Amy took over. “Great. Thank you, Amanda.” Amanda gave a thumbs-up as she racked the billiard balls. “Um…hi!” Amy gave a little wave and rocked forward on her toes a bit. She was wearing light blue sneakers, faded blue jeans, and a magical white sweater that seemed like it was formed from an adorable sheep that had sacrificed itself just to be near her. Her blond hair fell in a majestic wave over her shoulders.

  “I’m Amy and this is our VP, Chelsea.” She gestured to a petite girl in a debate letter jacket with five pounds of fluffy brown hair.

  “Hee-eyyy.” She waved. “I’m Amy’s right-hand woman, so…” She looked over at Groash and shook her head slightly. “So yeah.”

  Amy smiled. “So, um…this is Youth in Government. Yay! You’re probably not into the yay-ing yet, but it’s really fun. Like if you have interest in government, this is a great way to learn about civic institutions.”

  I nodded. Yes. I am here to learn about civic institutions.

  “Basically we’re going to assume roles as state representatives and senators and participate in a mock legislature. So, um…that is a lot more fun than it sounds.”

  “Yes,” I said audibly.

  “What?” she said.

  “I’m sorry?” I said.

  “You said something?”

  “I was agreeing with you. I’m just—you know—the mock legislature sounds really fun.” A little voice inside me, the one that had steered me wrong for seventeen years, whispered…Now is your chance. Be funny. Be funny now. “Can we mock the mock legislature? Like, heyyy, you’re not a real legislature?”

  Silence in the room. Very quietly, Groash made the low whistle of a bomb dropping.

  Then Amy smiled. “That’s funny.”

  “I’ve got more material if you’re interested.”

  “Please no,” said Chelsea.

  Later, we split up to think about legislation. The aim was for us to write bills and then try to shepherd them through the congress just like the real Congress would do, although we would probably do it with a lot less political grandstanding and backroom deals.

  Writing legislation is the most sensual of all the legislative arts. This is why so many people in the Senate fall in love with each other. Well, at least in the high school senate they do.
I figured it would be easy to come up with a mock law. Imagine something I didn’t like and then outlaw it. But I didn’t exactly want to be the jackass in the group (I was hoping Groash would fill that role naturally), because I sensed that was not the way into Amy’s heart. So I had to come up with something good.

  I drew a blank. Nothing came to mind. I normally considered myself to be a pretty smart guy, when it came to things that didn’t involve human interaction. I took the fact that I never had to try in any of my classes as clear evidence that I was an undiscovered genius and was just biding my time. I prided myself on not starting any research papers until the night before they were due and writing them as fast as possible and still getting a B plus. (Brian had taken this to a new level and wrote most of his term papers during lunch, which was both infuriating and inspiring.)

  So, anyway, I had nothing. I stared at the wood table in the Y’s rec room. Someone had carved the word dick an inch deep with a knife. Whoever carved that had more ideas than I did.

  “Hey, guys,” said Chelsea, after she’d seen a few proposed bills. “How about no more laws legalizing marijuana?”

  Groash groaned from where he was playing pool with Amanda. “I thought this was supposed to be fun!”

  Amy spotted me with my head in my hands and came over.

  “How’s it going?” She smiled.

  I looked down at the word dick carved meticulously into the desk. “Um…” I put my hand over it. “Good. Totally good. Brilliant, in fact.”

  “Great,” she said. “Do you have any ideas?”

  “So many. Just…so many it’s hard to pick one,” I lied.

  “That’s always my problem, I’m always like…aah! Where to start?”

  “Exactly!”

  “So I just chuck everything out the window and start with health-care reform.”

  “Oh yeah. Oh totally. Health care is sweet.”

  “My mom’s a cancer survivor, so…”

  I am a dumb person. I am not smart. Why do I say things?

  “But that gets really complicated really fast!” She laughed.

  “I know! So screw it.”

  Her eyelid twitched a bit. So did mine. Did I just say screw health-care reform to a girl whose mother had cancer?

  She managed a smile. “So what’s one of your ideas?”

  “Um…well I’m having trouble framing it, you know?”

  “All you do is just identify the problem,” she said, putting one hand on the table and leaning down just a bit. I could see the fluorescent lights through the waterfall of blond hair that fell off her shoulder. I want to put my face there, I thought. Somewhere, I imagined I heard a chorus of woodland creatures breaking into song. (Or YMCA creatures, which were most likely rats.) “Like, is there a problem that you see?”

  “What?”

  “A problem.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “The problem you’re trying to solve with the law. That you’re writing. Right now.”

  It was excruciating. It was like watching a car wreck in slow motion, where the dummy is ejected from the driver’s seat and smashes his smooth white head into the windshield. Must concentrate so as not to look like a dumbass.

  “Um…leaves. There’s…um…like a leaf problem. In the fall. They fall down.”

  What was I talking about? Was I going to ban leaves falling off trees? Was that my proposed legislation? If I could’ve kicked my brain in the balls at that moment, I would’ve. Wake the hell up and get on your game.

  “Oh,” she said, her hair shimmering like a golden flood of awesomeness. “Yeah, I mean you could do something about the leaves falling down. Like, what is your solution to the leaves?”

  Superglue. On all the trees.

  “Superglue.” And then I realized I had said what I was thinking out loud, which was a real problem when communicating with girls.

  “What?”

  “We superglue the leaves. To all the trees.”

  Have you ever had a lawn mower that you have to start with one of those pull cords? And you pull on it, and the engine goes a little bit? And you pull again and kick the damn thing, and it doesn’t work? And then, finally, you pull as hard as you can, and it starts (sometimes)? My brain finally started.

  “I’m kidding,” I said. “You totally thought my bill was about supergluing leaves to trees!”

  “Yeah, that’s what you said. That’s why I thought that.”

  “Yeah, no, it’s about um…mulching. How leaves in garbage bags contribute to the…uh…landfill problem and how we should make people either mulch their leaves or…um…shred them.” I was doing pretty well until the “shred them.” What the hell was that? Make everyone buy a leaf shredder? Actually, in Wisconsin, I could’ve just said that we should shoot the leaf piles with shotguns to break them up. That would’ve worked.

  “Oh, that’s a good idea,” she said, and I could actually see a wave of relief wash over her as she came to the conclusion that I wasn’t an alien masquerading as a human.

  So that’s how we met. Talking about mulching leaves.

  Cue the romantic music.

  Every Wednesday, we’ d go to the Y; Groash would play pool, and I would work on my bills. There was the mulching bill. There was my proposed bill to lower the drinking age back to eighteen.

  “Please, no more of those,” said Chelsea, putting her face in her hands.

  I wrote a bill preserving forestland from development, which Amy kind of liked. And then I wrote something about raising taxes on rich people to pay for homeless animal shelters, which she liked even more. Basically, my entire legislative philosophy was to figure out what Amy liked and then write that into law. If she liked My Little Pony, I would’ve written a bill taxing the hell out of rich people to pay for My Little Pony statues all over the state.

  Pretty much anytime a guy does something in front of a girl (provided he is attracted to girls), his basic aim is to seduce that girl by being great at it. If only I can put this spherical ball through the hoop, she will love me. If I make this pool shot, she will realize I am the guy for her. For me, it took this form: If I craft perfect legislation, Amy will fall for me.

  This is probably why men become actual senators in the first place. I realize this does not explain female senators. I believe female senators exist because they are trying to, you know, improve things.

  So I tried. Unlike Groash, whose only bill was banning visible back hair (after the first three bills legalizing marijuana had been shot down).

  Even though she was only a junior, Chelsea had the thankless task of trying to mold Groash into a model of a future elected representative. It was difficult because, let’s face it, he was barely housebroken. Most nights she left the Y in an exasperated stupor.

  “You can’t sit like that,” she would say.

  “Dude. This is how I sit.”

  “That’s how you sit when you don’t give a shit. If you want to have people actually listen to you, you have to sit up straight.”

  “You’re like my new dad.”

  But they became kind of friends, and Amy and I sort of hit it off, even though we traveled in completely different social circles. I mean, she was the class president of everything, and I was, at most, the lieutenant of not much at all except dorkishness. However, I happily discovered that there was also a deep vein of weirdness to Amy that manifested itself in her laugh, which was kind of a high-pitched honk. It sounded a little like a chipper seal clapping its flippers together and made her seem a little less perfect, which I loved. So I wrote my bills, and we talked, and every time I saw her my heart leaped into my throat and crushed my windpipe like an aluminum can.

  This went on until Wednesday, November 3.

  Groash was on a periodic vacation from his house. Basically, every so often he would leave without telling his mother where he was going and would crash at somebody else’s house for three or four days until the friend got sick of him. In the pantheon of moms, Groash’s mom was
somewhere just above hamster. She didn’t eat Groash right after he was born, but she didn’t do a whole hell of a lot after that. She usually didn’t notice much when he was gone.

  But he wasn’t coming to YIG (that’s what we called Youth in Government; we used an acronym because we were so damn cool). Chelsea had contracted some kind of avian flu (I assumed Groash was probably the carrier of the disease), and the other couple of people who were part of our team didn’t show up; so it was just me and Amy and Amanda.

  “All right, whatever, I’m leaving,” said Amanda. She probably had things to do, like get high.

  So it was me and Amy. Alone. Amy was wearing a white shirt with the words CHANGE IS GOOD written in small print over the chest. Her hair was back in a ponytail, and she was in the middle of throwing up her hands in frustration.

  “Dang it,” she said. “I guess we can work on doing more bills, or we can just cancel.”

  “My sister’s not coming to pick me up till nine.”

  “Oh.”

  That comment hung in the air for a minute, and I was acutely aware of the room. The old, beat-up pool table. The ancient wooden desks emblazoned with profanity. The musty smell from the sweat of countless generations of young men. My face started tingling. In every situation like this in my life I had gotten scared, I had fled the room, I had found an excuse not to take a chance. But…change is good, right? I felt my pulse throbbing in my temples. I should do something. I should be funny. I should—

  “Well, we should do something fun, then,” she said with a quirky smile.

  “Yes!” I shouted. Or maybe not shouted. Maybe I whispered that huskily while brushing my bangs out of my eyes. Maybe I always did push-ups before I went to Youth in Government to make me look ever-so-slightly more buff.