by Don Zolidis
“She gets another attack,” I said.
“So which die do I use again?” Amy asked.
A big vein was popping out on Brian’s head. “This is kill-ing us!”
“Dude,” said Groash. “Chill.”
“Sorry,” said Amy. “Is there like an easier version we could play?”
Brian took off his glasses and clutched his face to prevent it from melting. “No…there is no ‘easier’ version.”
Elizabeth chimed in. “I think she should just concentrate on role-playing. You know, the guys get so obsessed with the numbers they don’t even bother with actual role-playing.”
“Bullshit,” said Groash. “I role-play all the time.”
“Your character is exactly like you.”
“Yeah. He’s awesome.”
“O-kay,” said Elizabeth, making a big okay sign with her fingers as sarcastically as possible.
The door opened and Kaitlyn was there, staring at us.
“What the hell,” she said. She was clearly dressed for going out, with her frosted jean jacket and bangly bracelet things that she had taken to wearing. She looked like a visitor from the popular planet.
“Oh great, there’s another one,” said Brian. “Are you gonna play too? Are we gonna have all the girls play now?”
Kaitlyn’s mouth opened in horrified, disgusted shock.
“I want to let you know,” she said, her eyes withering with contempt as she adjusted the bangles on her wrist, “that I am going out, and Mom and Dad said that no one was supposed to be over here.”
Mom and Dad had gone to the casino. We had canceled our family vacation to Florida because plane tickets were too expensive, so instead of that they decided on going on their own vacation to the casino for two days. Seriously. This is what they did. Kaitlyn had suggested that maybe gambling away all our college money was not the best plan, but Mom had said, “Oh, we don’t gamble when we go to the casino,” which confused us just long enough for them to get out the door.
“So what do you think they’re doing?” I’d asked Kaitlyn later.
She’d rolled her eyes majestically. “What do you think they’re doing?”
“I don’t know.”
“They’re going to a hotel resort for two days and not inviting us. What do you think they’re doing?” She said the last part very slowly.
Realization dawned over me like a horrible sunrise. “Oh shit,” I said.
“Yeah.”
Anyway, back in the present, Kaitlyn gestured her bangly arm dismissively. “So your weirdo friends need to get out.”
“Why do you care?” I said.
“I care because Mom and Dad put me in charge. So there.”
“That’s a lie—”
“JUST GO,” she declared.
“What’s up?” replied Groash, nodding his head ever so slightly.
“We have a lot scheduled for tonight,” said Brian. “And it’s hard enough trying to get through it while there are certain distractions.”
Kaitlyn looked at Amy, confused. “God, you’re doing this now?” You could tell that something inside her brain was being reordered. Like, they were both hot girls; they both spoke a certain secret hot-girl language; and I’m sure she had no idea why Amy was going out with me. Not only that, here she was, dwelling in a basement with a bunch of nerds and dice and dragon figurines. Kaitlyn’s understanding of the universe was collapsing.
“It’s fun,” lied Amy.
“Um…it’s not fun,” protested Brian. “It’s thrilling.”
“Oh God,” said Kaitlyn. “Make it stop.”
“All right, all right, we’ll cancel the game,” I said, reluctantly getting up from the couch. “Where are you going, anyway?”
“None of your business.”
“If Mom and Dad call, what am I supposed to tell them?”
“Tell them I’m in the bathroom.”
“I’m not gonna lie for you.”
“Yes, you are.” She stared at me like she was using a Jedi mind trick. “Because I’m telling you, brother, there’s going to be a time when you need me to lie for you. I have a long memory, and I am vindictive as hell.”
“Okay,” I said in a quiet voice.
“All right, get out of here. Git.”
“Lame,” said Groash on his way out. “So what are you doing later?”
“Get the hell away from me.”
“So that’s a maybe?”
Elizabeth, Brian, and Groash left, with Elizabeth driving her Cutlass Ciera, which was the size of a boat and spun out in circles whenever the roads got slick. Then Kaitlyn left to go to whatever party she was going to, which left just…
Me and Amy.
In the house.
With no parents until Sunday night.
Which led to…
This seems like a good time to talk about my bedroom. Even though I largely existed in my basement, I did, in fact, have a bedroom on the first floor of my house. Unfortunately, it had been decorated by an idiot: me. At this point, Amy and I had gone out on four separate occasions for a grand total of eleven weeks or so, and she had never been to my room. Ever. She was probably thinking that I had a dead body stashed in there. The reality was worse.
Before I describe this room, I want you to imagine that you harbor romantic feelings for me. Let’s say you thought I was cute, somehow enjoyed looking at my dark, woolen trench coat, and appreciated the fact that my hair, though not perfect, was still a reassuring shade of brown. And even though I had the physique of a twelve-year-old Albanian girl, you still found me attractive. Furthermore, let’s imagine that the knowledge that I played Dungeons & Dragons didn’t cause you to implode from embarrassment. You’re fine with all that.
You would not be fine with my room.
I decorated it when I was thirteen. Let’s put that out there. And what I had done, with my tiny thirteen-year-old brain, was take the covers off all my favorite comic books (of which I had hundreds and hundreds) and staple them to the walls of my room. It took me a week, and every so often, Kaitlyn would enter and shake her head. Or my dad would come in and say, “I don’t think this is a good idea. But it’s your room. You just have to live here.” In the hallway I’d hear my mom say, “He has to make his own mistakes, dear.” So my room was floor-to-ceiling comic-book covers. It was as if wallpaper had mutated into hundreds of costumed, heavily muscled maniacs.
I’m not done.
That’s the background. I had also hung quite a few pictures on the walls, over the comic books: pictures of M. C. Escher prints and weird monsters torn from magazines and, yes, the aforementioned poster of a girl in a chain-mail bikini. I had meant to take that down. Honestly. I also went through a glow-in-the-dark-skulls-are-cool phase, which had resulted in three of them clustering on my desk leering at us.
So, yes, my room was a nightmare.
After everyone left, Amy and I were downstairs on the couch, when she said, “It’s pretty tough at my house right now, so I don’t really want to go home.”
“I know.”
“Can we go to your room?”
And I stupidly said, “Sure.”
And when we got there, she said, “What the hell is this?”
“Um…I’m not normal.”
She smiled and touched me on the chest and said, “I don’t want normal.”
Then she kissed my neck and wrapped her arms around me. “Maybe you should turn out the light.” And I was just about to do that when she said, “What’s going on with that poster?”
Contrary to popular belief, the poster of a scantily clad lady on your wall does not produce similar results in actual females. Quite the opposite, in fact.
“Oh, um…shit. That’s not mine. That’s like…uh…robbers came in here.”
“Robbers?”
“Yeah. And they put that up. As they were leaving. Sort of an apology for robbing me.”
“You’re a dork.”
“I’m going to take it down, now tha
t you mention it.” I took hold of it and realized that my stapling method of attaching things to the walls was yet another poor choice in an entire room of them. I was trying to remove it delicately, but it wasn’t working.
“That’s okay,” she said. “I’m going to put like thirty posters of shirtless lumberjacks in my room.”
“Really? Lumberjacks? That’s your dream occupation for your man?”
“Clearly that girl has a PhD.”
I had wedged my fingernails in the staples, but I couldn’t pull them out. “She’s probably a scientist actually.”
“Did you read that in her profile? What are her turnoffs? Staples? Sexist men ogling her? Clothes?” Amy poked me as I continued to struggle with it. “Here,” she said, grabbing a Post-it note off my desk. She scrawled STOP SEXISM NOW on it in broad black letters and slapped it right over the girl’s boobs. “That’s better.”
I turned out the light. The glow-in-the-dark skulls grinned.
THIS IS THE DIRTY PART
Before I had started going out with Amy, my entire experience with kissing involved that unfortunate bet on the bus. And that wasn’t much of a kiss, it was more like being pecked by a salamander. A salamander that skittered away to its friends, collected its money, and laughed at you. So I was extremely self-conscious about the whole affair.
But that didn’t matter.
Besides the glowing skulls, the only light came from the streetlight outside, which shone through the cracks in my blinds and sent slashes of yellow light glancing around the room. I had never been like this with her before, with no one home. My window was open a crack, and I could hear the crickets chirping outside and felt the soft breeze of the cool night air.
This was what I had been waiting for my whole life. My heart was thrumming in my chest as she kissed me; I wanted to tell her I loved her, I wanted to compose sonnets on the fly, I wanted to be able to give voice to the things that were breaking loose inside of me. All the time I spent as a picked-on little kid, being teased, being an outcast, with the feeling that no one really liked me—it was all cracking open and vanishing.
That’s what I wanted to say. Our actual conversation went like this:
ME: Okay.
HER: What?
ME: Did you say something?
HER: No.
ME: Oh. Did you want to say something?
HER: I don’t think so.
ME: Okay.
HER: What?
ME: Did you say what?
So we kept kissing. And the thought occurred to me:
We’re going to have sex.
And then the next thought:
Does she want to have sex? Would that be taking advantage of her emotionally in this circumstance? But maybe sex will make her feel better. If we do it right. Shit. I’m overthinking this. Get it together, Craig. Should I say something? Maybe I should make words with my mouth. No, that seems too complicated. I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing.
That’s a dumb idea. I’m stupid. Is that Captain America issue #314 up there? Why did I put that on the ceiling? Are the skulls watching me?
We kept going. The clock ticked away. The breeze turned colder, but we didn’t notice. Clothes were removed.
It took about three hours of making out to get to the point where I could actually make the words come out of my mouth.
“So do you want…to…?”
“Want…to…what?” she said, kissing my neck.
“Have…the…thing…where…we…try to…do the sex?”
She looked me in the eyes. Her pupils were huge and black in the dim light. “Okay.”
“Is that a yes? That’s a yes, right?”
“Yes.”
“Yes?”
“Yes.”
If there was a cheering section in my brain, it was going wild.
There was one slight problem.
There’s no other way to put this but…my manhood was asleep. In a manner of speaking.
Remember, we had been making out for three hours. Most of that time, I had been working fine, but I wasn’t an athlete like my sister. There were limits to my physical abilities. Quite a lot of them, actually, but that’s neither here nor there. So before you get all judgey-laughey about this, let me remind you that three hours is a long-ass time. So anyway…so…um…things were not functioning properly. We got fully naked and then…nothing.
Nothing at all.
I’m gonna take another time-out here.
Since puberty, there had been exactly one goal in my life. Yes, I know I wanted to go to college and fit in and find my voice, but really there was just one goal. I wouldn’t get out of bed in the mornings if there were not some way to advance toward that goal. For about six consecutive years, I had spent nearly every waking minute thinking about this specific moment, and now…now it was here, and I DID NOT WORK.
I may have broken down a little bit. It’s true. I may have had some harsh words for my penis or the superheroes on the walls. There might have been tears.
Anyway, twenty minutes later, after a dismal and awkward failure, we had our clothes on again.
The breeze from outside had grown colder. Amy sat on the edge of the bed, brushing out her hair with her fingers. I sat on the other edge of the bed, a million miles away, washed in a cloud of failure and shame.
“So I guess I need to go home,” she said.
I could barely make out the comic books. The words on the covers rearranged themselves.
Avengers #275: Disaster!
The Uncanny X-Men #216: Nightmare world!
Fantastic Four #306: A Monster once more!
Wolverine #2: The erectile dysfunction issue!
“It’s okay, Craig,” said Amy.
I didn’t say anything.
“Are you all right?”
“I am never going to be all right again,” I said.
“That doesn’t really make me feel good.”
“I’m not blaming you.”
“I’d hope not. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
I gritted my teeth. “Next time it’s gonna be great, I promise. I’ll study or something. Calisthenics, maybe.” I was hoping for a laugh or something, but she just sighed.
“This was probably a stupid idea. We don’t have to have sex.”
“Yes, we do!”
In retrospect, I realize I made a series of mistakes in this conversation. She was trying to steer things back in the right direction, but I was not listening. So, please, enjoy the upcoming verbal carnage.
“I just don’t think we were…ready, you know?” said Amy. “Like, we haven’t gotten to this point yet in our relationship, and I just…Let’s just take it slow.”
“Did you get to this point with Chad?” I asked.
Boom. There it was. Oh, Craig, you are a fucking idiot.
“Yes,” she said. “I did.”
“I figured.”
“Oh. You figured? Why did you figure that?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? Is that why you thought we should have sex tonight?”
“Well, you did it with him.”
Of the first six breakups with Amy, this one was the most my fault. You can see it coming, right?
I’m going to spare you the apocalypse that followed that last comment and fast-forward to about an hour later when she was finished tearing me a new asshole. I believe her last words were “Fuck you!” and she was out the door.
Just as Kaitlyn was pulling into the driveway.
“Karma,” said Kaitlyn.
It was two in the morning, about an hour after Amy left. I was languishing in the kitchen. My rib cage felt like someone had taken a baseball bat to my heart. My hands ached. The evil fluorescent lights gleamed maliciously. Kaitlyn was leaning against the fridge with a can of Coke.
“This is karma coming back to bite you in the butt.”
I could barely find the energy to speak. I wanted to crawl in a hole. “What karma?”
“You’re taunting the universe with this whole Amy Carlson thing, and the universe is striking back.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The universe hates you. Therefore, Amy Carlson is dumping your ass over and over again. It makes perfect sense to me. This is intensely gratifying to watch.”
“Shouldn’t you be, like, consoling me right now?”
“Nope. Not at all. You suck.”
I put my head down on the counter. We had a little island-type thing in the kitchen with these horrifically uncomfortable barstools. Mom had gone on a redecorating kick at the end of the ’80s and had made a series of poor choices. The counter felt cold and plastic, like the surface of some alien spaceship.
I felt tears brimming.
“Oh God,” said Kaitlyn. “Seriously, stop it. Stop what you’re doing.” She let out a huge sigh. “Fine. What happened?”
I told her.
“God, you’re dumb,” she said. “You think she owes you?”
“I didn’t say she owed me—”
“You acted like it. Like, as soon as she has sex with somebody, then she’s required to have sex with everybody else? That’s basically what you said to her.”
I was quiet. Kaitlyn kept going.
“What she did with another guy doesn’t change how she feels about you. Otherwise you’re going to be competing with every guy she’s ever been with, you dumbass.”
“How many guys do you think she’s been with?”
“WHO CARES?” Kaitlyn rapped on my forehead with her knuckle. “She’s not with them now, is she? She’s with you. She wants to be with you for some reason. If you want to have sex, you need to be adult enough to handle sex. Period. And part of that, moron, is realizing that you don’t own her past and you don’t get to retroactively make her feel bad for everything she’s done before she met you. ’Cause you know what that makes you? If you’re going to make her feel bad about stuff she can’t control now? That makes you a dick.”
She sipped her Coke in triumph and leaned back again.
“…Yeah,” I said, not feeling any better.
“What was that?”
“You’re right,” I said.
“Thank you. You know what I would do if I was you—”
