by Arvin Ahmadi
“Hey. Buddy. Scott.” He put his arm around my shoulder the way a coach does right before giving a pep talk, which was exactly what I was getting. “I don’t know if you realize this, Scotty Too Hotty, but you’re a fucking catch. A jawline like that? Man, you could cut a marble statue with it. Your olive skin? Damn. Share a little with pasty ol’ Trent. And those green eyes? Boy, oh boy, I feel sorry for all the girls who got lost in those eyes. May they rest in peace.”
I closed my eyes, laughed, and shook my head, but Trent kept going.
“Plus, you’ve got an actual personality, which beats most other guys. All you need is some confidence.”
“Where do I get that?” I asked. As if confidence were something you could buy off Amazon. Free two-day shipping!
“You’ll find it when you need it,” he said, slapping me on the back so hard, I bumped into the bar—which sent his tower of glasses tumbling down. Fortunately, none of them actually fell to the ground or broke.
We laughed tremendously.
At the end of my shift, Trent pulled out a small wad of cash. “Here,” he said, counting five crisp twenties. “A hundred bucks. Good work today.”
“I’m confused. That’s double what you paid me Sunday, but I only worked half the hours,” I said.
“You earned it,” Trent said.
I never had a job growing up, so earning money was a new concept for me. My parents were by no means rich, but they had a strict internships-only rule, because anything else would distract from my studies. Salaries meant nothing to me; I’d never seen ten bucks an hour or $60,000 a year in material form.
“I don’t deserve this,” I told Trent. “Definitely not this much.”
“Come on, man, you’re doing a good job,” he said.
“But—”
“Scott! Here we go again. Confidence. Con-fi-dence,” Trent repeated. “You need to stop seeing yourself as a pansy and start seeing yourself as the badass, runaway rock star that you’ve become.”
“That’s very nice of you,” I said.
He shoved the money back in my hands. “Here. Take it.”
I counted the money in disbelief. Twenty, forty, sixty, eighty . . . one hundred.
All of a sudden I experienced a feeling that could only be described as ecstasy. Like the drug. I’d never tried ecstasy, but Kevin’s cousin did it in Europe, and he told us it felt like the most attractive girl in the world had just given him a compliment. That’s how I always pictured confidence, and a hundred bucks and a pep talk later, that’s how I felt. Confident. I even quashed my What If doubts. I considered them, sure, but I squashed them with a series of So Whats. So what if my confidence was shallow? So what if it was a placebo? So what if it wouldn’t last forever?
I knew I hadn’t quite swallowed confidence yet; I was just getting a taste. But I nonetheless savored the moment with a grin.
Trent noticed. “There we go,” he said, smiling. “Right on, buddy.”
“But—”
“Oh, Lord.”
“What about taxes?”
“Ha! Fuck Uncle Sam. You’re dealing with a Libertarian, remember?”
I chuckled. “A Libertarian who wants to run for office. I could blackmail your future campaign.”
“And you’re a runaway who won’t admit he likes my best friend,” Trent shot back. “I could blackmail your operation, too.”
We entered an intense staring contest—which I of course lost after, like, four seconds.
“Fine,” I said, giggling helplessly like a toddler. “I won’t tell the government.”
“And I won’t tell Jeanette,” Trent said. “Or Fiora.” He stepped out from behind the bar, untucking his shirt along the way. “Our stupid little secret.”
At the end of the night, I dragged myself back to the hostel. My body ached with exhaustion. The last two days had been such a whirlwind that I’d forgotten about my phone, which died God-knows-when. I plugged it into the wall outlet and crawled into bed.
I was dozing off when I heard my phone fire off. Buzz, buzz, buzz-buzz-buzz-buzzzzzzzzz. I must have missed a lot of calls or texts. From who? My parents?
Reluctantly I climbed down from my bunk bed to check. I had an onslaught of text messages from Jeanette. Eleven. Eleven individual messages.
Wed. 6/30, 3:01 p.m.: Had a wonderful time yesterday! Hope you are relieved of your headache.
Wed. 6/30, 3:04 p.m.: Lmk if you have any free time after work today.
Wed. 6/30, 6:01 p.m.: I’m sure you are swamped at work, but I sincerely hope to hear back tonight! :P
Wed. 6/30, 8:05 p.m.: Scott, is everything OK? Did the headache manifest into something more serious? I have an hour for lunch tomorrow so if you are not feeling well I can bring you soup or Advil. Let me know.
Wed. 6/30, 8:11 p.m.: Just let me know you’re alright.
Wed. 6/30, 8:50 p.m.: Scott?
Wed. 6/30, 10:00 p.m.: Perhaps you had a grueling day of research! Sorry for the incessant texts, I’m just a bit . . . puzzled.
Thurs. 7/1, 7:01 a.m.: Strange that I haven’t heard back from you.
Thurs. 7/1, 7:02 a.m.: Happy July.
Thurs. 7/1, 12:02 p.m.: Scott, please let me know you’re alright. Or if you would rather not see me again. I can’t say I am not a little bit worried.
Thurs. 7/1, 9 p.m.: OMG! I’m so sorry. I had dinner at Tonic tonight and I saw you working behind the bar. You looked so busy. I didn’t know you worked two jobs! I’m so, so sorry for bugging you. I can only imagine how busy you must be. Reply when you have a free minute, dear Scott!
“Did someone die?”
The guy in the bunk below mine, a long-haired hippie who was in town for a protest, looked on with concern as I read Jeanette’s texts.
“No, no,” I said, wiping the horrified expression off my face.
By this point, I should have ignored Jeanette or just cut things off. I should have replied saying: Hey, you’re great, but I’m not interested. All signs pointed to Jeanette being crazy, anyway—crazy obsessed with me. But I didn’t want to shoot down her persistence. I had to admire it, right? She was being gritty, and grit should pay off. So I texted her back:
Hey. Yeah, been swamped with my two jobs. Shoulda mentioned that earlier. Coffee this weekend?
HOLY SHIT—who was calling me at six in the morning?
I climbed down from my bunk to unplug my phone from the charger. It was Fiora.
“Hello? Is everything okay?”
“Saaket!” she cheered. I cringed at her enthusiasm. “Good morning! How’s my favorite DC runaway doing?”
“Kicking myself for picking up the phone . . .” I said as I climbed back up the ladder.
“Are you still in bed?”
“Um. It depends,” I said. I lay on my back, staring at the ceiling. I followed the white wire around the edge of the room all the way to the corner where Fiora was sitting a week ago. “Do you need me to get out of bed?”
“Saaket. I don’t feel comfortable dictating your bed activities,” Fiora said. I was speechless. Literally—my jaw dropped for about three seconds. “However, if you are so willing, my crossword buddies and I are puzzling in Dupont at seven a.m. if you’d like to join.”
“That sounds fun. But, um. Why?”
“Because.” She paused. “The last time I called you this early, it was for something depressing. I wanted to fix that.”
“How are you feeling, by the way?” I closed my eyes, picturing the white hospital sheets, white walls, white gown . . . and our black-and-white grid. “Better?”
“I’ll feel better if you join me at seven.”
I bit my lip, containing a smile that surged throughout my body. I could feel Fiora smiling through the phone, too. I had to go.
“Okay. Sure,” I said coolly. Inside I was leaping for joy.
I heard an extended beep. Fiora had hung up.
I would see her before work.
There was something invigorating about DC so early in the morning. You could hear chirping sparrows just as plainly as roaring Ford Escalades carrying bureaucrats. It was a short walk to Dupont Circle, but I made the most of it, taking long strides up New Hampshire and thinking, for the first time, that maybe I was better off here in DC than in Southeast Asia with Jack and Kevin.
If my friends believed they were experiencing foreign cultures abroad . . . they clearly hadn’t met Fiora’s “crossword buddies.” I had figured out early that Fiora marched to her own drumbeat and didn’t get along with her classmates. She made those points very clear. But I still expected her to have cool friends. Other people who hated other people and marched to their own percussion instrument. I figured that among the 1 percent of her classmates who didn’t suck, there might have even been a few who also liked crossword puzzles. Maybe those friends did exist, but they weren’t who I’d meet today. That became clear as soon as I saw Fiora in Dupont Circle.
“Saaket!” She perked up in an uncharacteristically friendly way, like she was actually happy to see me—like she had dropped her poker face at the crossword table. Fiora pulled out a chair for me. “Guys, this is Saaket.”
The guys appeared less enthusiastic. There were three of them seated at the table, all middle-aged, balding, cookie-cutter dorks.
“Hello,” I said, and I repeated it after a few seconds of awkward silence. I sat down in the plastic lawn chair Fiora had pulled out for me.
One of the men greeted me with an inaudible mumble. He was busy organizing a thin stack of papers. The other two kept their heads down, fiddling with their fingers. One played with his thumbs in a masturbatory thumb war, and the other was cracking his knuckles two at a time. Obviously I could relate to their fidgeting, but still. Social awareness is a thing.
The guy with the papers suddenly jerked his head left and right, like a paranoid alien, before standing up. He cleared his throat: “Ahem. Welcome. Let us begin today’s fun with some anagrams.”
Fiora leaned over and whispered into my ear, “That’s Eugene. He’s the leader of this whole mafia. We all pitch in puzzles and take turns printing, but he runs the show.”
Eugene looked exactly like you’d expect a Eugene to look—bald, pasty, and white, with a turtley head and gentle blue eyes. His demeanor was almost as square and straight- edge as his checkered shirt, which was buttoned all the way to the top. “I prepared a roundup of some of this year’s most noteworthy pop culture icons. May we begin?”
“Awww, come on, Eugene,” Fiora said, leaning back in her seat. “Don’t you want to tell us how your week was? Anything exciting?”
Eugene shriveled his nose. “It was fine,” he said dryly. For the group leader, he wasn’t much of a talker.
The guys, Fiora told me, called themselves the Crossword Crusaders. Something to do with the sword part of crossword. I imagined they had secret handshakes and gang symbols and such, but I didn’t get a chance to ask. They jumped right into their anagram activity, which, contrary to my first impression of the group, was actually a lot of fun. Eugene would say an anagram, like “So Long, Lane Skew” and give a description like, “She’s a popular R & B singer whose sister is married to Shawn Carter.” (Answer: Solange Knowles.) I got one or two of them, which was one or two more than I was expecting to get. We blew through about a dozen anagrams before Eugene revealed the answers and declared Stu the winner.
Stu was a funny dude. He wore a short-sleeve Hawaiian button-up shirt with a rubber ducky–themed tie. He also had these humongous, thick-rimmed glasses that kept sliding down the bridge of his nose, and every few seconds he would push them back up. “But he’s a crossword BAMF,” Fiora whispered in my ear. “He can solve anything you give him in ten minutes or less.”
The time came to put that claim to the test. After the anagrams, Eugene pulled out a paper-clipped stack of papers from his heap and passed one sheet to each person, facedown. I could see through Fiora’s that it was a crossword puzzle. I used to do this with quizzes and exams all the time. I’d lean in a little closer to the exam and try to decipher a few of the questions before we were allowed to flip it over. Who was I kidding? I still did this. No one’s perfect, but so many people pretend to be. That was why I liked Fiora. She lied, stole, manipulated, teased, and broke down just like everyone else. But she was an honest liar, self-admitted thief, straightforward tease, and transparent manipulator. And like the rest of us, she had bad days.
“What about the third guy?” I whispered to Fiora, pointing at the Humpty Dumpty–looking man on her other side.
“That’s just Charles,” Fiora said, not really whispering. “He’s a total loser, as you can probably tell. But what you can’t tell is, he writes these trippy puzzles that are surprisingly fun . . . if you’re high enough.”
Charles leaned over. “I heard that, Fiora.”
“Love you, too, Charles,” Fiora joked. “You’re my favorite weirdo constructor.”
Charles winked back at Fiora.
Eugene shot a harsh look to our side of the table. “Ready? Begin.”
Charles, Stu, and Fiora immediately flipped their sheets over and attacked the puzzle. (Eugene didn’t get one because he constructed the puzzle, and I didn’t get one because I wanted to watch the first time around.)
“There are an awful lot of threes,” Stu mumbled under his breath.
“Shit. There are a shit ton of threes,” Fiora said, tapping her pen furiously. “Way too many threes.” She bounced her pencil from box to box; each time she’d draw tiny, vigorous circles in the air before filling in the boxes with invisible letters. Sometimes she wrote the letter down, but more often than not, Fiora just shook her head and hopped over to the next clue.
I took a peek at her grid and imagined the thought process behind each hop.
The third letter in 43-Across has to be a T, I thought. But 27-Down is TR_M_ _. And the last letter in 43-Across intersects the third letter from 27-Down, so first I should figure out the remaining two letters of 27-Down. Then I’ll figure out all the other words that intersect 27-Down, and I’ll have more context for 43-Across.
My head was already hurting from the crossword logic, which seemed more complex than an Ikea instruction manual. I looked over at the group of men playing chess about thirty feet away. Those guys had nicer chairs than we did, not to mention proper stone tables with superimposed chessboards. Our table was one of those cheap plastic ones you’d buy and keep in your storage shed for when you’re really desperate.
“Cocky chess freaks,” Fiora muttered. She must have caught me staring.
Whoa. I looked down at Fiora’s grid, and somehow, in the time that I got distracted by the Cocky Chess Freaks, she’d gone from an empty grid to halfway done. Fiora was hopping and nodding and filling in squares with real, not-invisible words. Something was definitely going right, or at least in the right direction. I started nodding in support, chock-full of secondhand adrenaline, knowing that even though it wasn’t exactly a competition, Fiora could actually win—
Flip. Showing no reaction whatsoever, Stu flipped his puzzle over. He was finished. He checked his watch and marked the time: six minutes and forty-three seconds. Fiora wasn’t kidding; this guy was fast. No one looked up to congratulate him, no one was jealous, nothing—and Stu didn’t seem to care. He simply took a sip of his iced tea. And you know what? That was what got him. As soon as he gulped the tea, Stu’s eyebrows shot up, as if the bittersweet drink caught him more off guard than a HUNDRED RANDOM CLUES.
Crossword puzzles were supposed to be Fiora’s way of taking the world less seriously, yet here she was, stressing out over the one in front of her. Her pencil hovered over the grid as if casting a spell—expecting the words to magically appear in their boxes. All of a sudden she stopped hovering and po
unced at the grid, but a minute later, she retreated, rubbing her temples in defeat. Meanwhile Charles bounced his eraser and nodded in unison, all the while twirling his pencil intermittently and filling in some squares. Even Eugene picked up his pencil and tapped it against his head every now and then. These guys were all fidgety with their hands. Maybe it was a cruciverbalist thing.
Then it hit me: these were Fiora’s friends. Not the future dickheads or the imbeciles or the fraternity bros and sorority girls, but three middle-aged crossword dudes at a picnic table in Dupont Circle, sitting in the shadows of the “cool kids,” aka a slightly less scrappy league of Bobby Fischer wannabes. At least those guys had proper chess tables. But despite their shortcomings, the Crossword Crusaders’ spirit never waned—and Fiora was never nicer to me. She never appeared more comfortable or at ease, it seemed, than she was around puzzles. Crossword Fiora was a gentler Fiora.
Twenty minutes later she turned her puzzle over, and shortly after, Charles either admitted defeat or finished up, too.
“It appears all pens and pencils are down,” Eugene announced. “Shall I read out the answers now?”
I half expected Fiora to fire back with something sarcastic like: No, Eugene, get them tattooed on your back and then we’ll talk. Instead, she nodded along with the other Crusaders. Eugene revealed that the theme of this particular crossword was quite the mindfuck. Literally, the theme was “mindfuck.” With each theme answer, you had to change the first letter—the “head”—so that it worked with the intersecting word. So if the clue was “Dragon-related circus performer,” then the answer would be FIREEATER, except you’d have to change it to TIREEATER for the word intersecting the “head” to work. (Because the only thing weirder than a guy who downs fire is the woman from My Strange Addiction who ate rubber wheels . . .) Mindfuck.
“So pretty much every theme answer was a lie?” I asked.
“Precisely,” Eugene said.
Charles banged his head against the table in slow motion. Fiora and Stu exchanged spirited high fives. Eugene collected everyone’s puzzle to determine the winner—obviously Stu. And me? I just grinned from ear to ear, thankful to this quirky squad for letting me in on their unadulterated fun.
