Dave sits quietly and asks the waitress for a whiskey.
“How have you been?” Dave asks Jacob.
Jacob stares off into the distance. He mumbles the word “Fine.”
Dave smiles at Jacob. “It’s okay. I’m not here to fight with you. I just wanted to see how you were doing.”
“Fine,” Jacob repeats.
“Well, you finally got what you wanted.”
“If you’re going to be an a–hole, then I’m not doing this.”
“No, I’m sorry—I didn’t mean it to come out like that. I’m honestly really happy that you’re here. They tell me you’re going on auditions, and I hear they’re going well.”
“It is.” Jacob has tears welling up in his eyes. “I’m really sorry, I—”
“Stop, you’re not that sorry. Look what it got you. And if you were really sorry, you would have taken that video down when I asked.” Dave puts his hand on Jacob’s hand and whispers, “You don’t have to do this.”
Jacob smirks then looks directly at Dave. “You would like that, wouldn’t you, that I just go back to not existing?”
Dave gets even closer to Jacob. His words are hard to hear. We see words on the screen: “I know you. This isn’t you. Why are you doing this?”
Jacob whispers back; it is inaudible, so the text appears on screen: “I did it because my agent hadn’t called me in nine months, and I just felt like I was supposed to be someone. And …” Jacob takes a long breath, “my agent said I had to do something big.”
Dave looks away. He finishes the rest of his whiskey, then says, “Well, are you f--- happy?”
“Dave.”
“What? Are you happy?”
“I’m the happiest I’ve been in so long.”
Dave stares directly at Jacob then lowers his gaze down to his lap. He presses his fingers to his eyes, wipes his cheeks. “I forgive you,” Dave says as he gets up.
Jacob stares at the menu until Dave walks away.
“F---.”
The scene cuts to Jacob outside of the restaurant having a smoke. He paces back and forth. He kicks a nearby postage box and says, “F---.” The scene cuts to Jacob in a cab, looking at his phone, talking out loud. “The last thing he ever texted me was, ‘who was this for?’ and that was eight months ago. I never texted him back because I honestly didn’t know the answer. I’m still not sure.”
The camera cuts to Jacob getting ready for bed. He turns on his phone and plays a video. The sounds of Dave crying and begging him to stay repeat, over and over again. Jacob replays the entire video, then plays it one more time. His face is illuminated by the phone. The camera pulls away. Jacob’s glowing face blurs and expands in the frame. The glow from his face grows to cover the screen. The screen fades to white.
Credits roll.
we took your flesh and built you back up again using a metal frame, you looked exactly the same, just smaller. sometimes, when i would hold you, i could hear your heart beat, but it was just the metal frame, clicking against itself.
SLIPS
He flips through her dresses, which are in a room built just for her clothes. He slides his hand over the fabrics. The room still smells of the oils from her skin. He finds the jewels she always wore, the shoes she never wore, the dresses she was saving for special occasions.
He gets back into the limo that drives them past her first home, her mother’s home, the park they used to play in, the schools they went to, and finally to the cemetery she will be buried in.
When he arrives home, he unpacks his luggage. He pulls out the dresses, all the ones she never wore, with the jewels, the shoes, and places them on his bed. Organizes them they way she would have.
He puts them on one by one, pinching in the sides because they fit a little too wide and are a little too short. He chooses the red one and picks out the nail polish to match. He remembers the way she would polish her nails in the car when she drove them to school. The way she would drive slower than the speed limit, careful.
He cinches the dress tightly to his body using a stapler, then puts the final touches on his makeup. He picks up the square-cut aqua gem necklace and the matching ring and rubs them gently against his duvet to polish them. The necklace falls high on his collar bone with his hair rustling against it. The ring fits snugly on his pinky finger.
She takes a final look in the mirror and smiles, notices lipstick on her teeth, and wipes it off with a towel.
She makes her way to a dimly lit hotel bar, checks her phone, has a drink. She feels the dizziness of Prosecco on an empty stomach. She orders another, clinking the gem ring against the tall fluted glass. She orders a third drink, flirts with the waiter, pays her bill, and slides off the thick leather pub stool. The dark hotel bar feels like it will swallow her if she doesn’t escape it soon.
She stumbles through the back door of The Odyssey. The club smells sour and sweet from the cran-and-vodka soaked carpets. A drag queen asks who she is, so she thinks of a lie and says she’s new in town. She awkwardly holds out her hand to be kissed. The drag queen laughs and says, “We double kiss; we don’t do hand gestures.” She orders a whiskey, and the bartender doesn’t charge her. She smiles and walks to the back to watch the men dance. Another drag queen walks up to her and asks her name. The drag queen asks if she has performed here before. She lies and says yes. The drag queen touches her hand and says that if she came by her house, she could help her with her nails. She looks down and notices that there is polish on the skin around some of her nails and absent from the tips of other nails.
She thinks about the way her mother used to paint her nails but clean them off before his father came home. Each night, her little-boy hands would be painted with all the shades of red the mother owned. The polish looked thick with glitter, folding in on itself in the bottle, swirled like lava.
She walks back home but doesn’t go upstairs. She gets in her car and drives. She feels the pull toward her old home. She thinks about how if she had just driven there five days earlier, she could have asked her mother what it would be like to stay. She is driving five days back in time. She knows that she can do this, or she thinks she can, or she can at least drive fast enough to pause time so that it doesn’t take her mother further away. The world in front of the windshield is blurry. She rolls down her window to smoke. Her car weaves and hits parked cars, knocking off mirrors and scraping paint off doors.
The summer heat keeps the night air from cooling her down. The sweat reminds her of the time she was feverish and her mother had to take care of all of the kids single-handedly, carrying their dizzy bodies to the bathroom, pressing damp towels to their heads.
She doesn’t see the stop sign, and another car glides through it, hits her front wheel, and spins her into the house on the corner of the street.
Blood trickles down her hands. It’s the same colour red she painted on her nails. A small glowing particle floats around his head. He tries to grab it, but it slips out the window. It took something from him, and he can’t figure out what. Time hasn’t stopped like he had hoped. When he rolls out of the car, the dress is missing. He doesn’t ever really remember putting it on. The summer wind blows cold on his arms, sticky and wet. It lets the dark sail in.
DREAM BOY
the house is filled with old, empty boxes. i wander around trying to find you again, but it’s just old empty boxes, and the boxes pile up and pile up. in the next room is a house party; it’s a kitchen filled with strangers. a man grabs my phone. he is handsome and strong, but i let him take my phone. he takes a selfie. i wake up with my phone in my hand, and i’m sleeping on a plane that bucks and shakes. the pilot asks everyone to close their eyes as we nosedive into the ground
///
I felt a sharp corner poking into my stomach as I turned over in bed. My phone was lodged between my underwear and undershirt. I pulled it up to my face, unlocked it with one eye open. Scrolled through a group text.
CD: “Danny, wake the fuck up.”
RB: “Butthead,
we are going for brunch, get up”
I typed out with my thumb, “k, getting up rn.”
C and R were waiting in line at the front of the restaurant. C pulled me under his armpit and put me in a tight hold.
“I haven’t showered yet, smell the ripeness.”
“You’re fucking disgusting, C.”
“No, lineups for brunch are fucking disgusting.”
We settled into a booth, and I slid open the screen of my phone.
“Hey, I want you to check this out. Last night, I had this dream.”
“Danny, no one cares about people’s dreams. It’s boring.”
“I know, I know! But I had this dream where a hot guy took a photo of himself on my phone.”
“So?” R was hungover and rubbing his eyes.
“So—look how hot he is!” I pulled my phone out to show them the most recent. The edges of the image were pitch-black, but a scruffy handsome man with bright green eyes was visible.
“Danny, he’s just alright, and I keep telling you, talking about dreams is like trying to tell people about your childhood. It’s only interesting to you.”
I scrunched back into my seat and zoomed into his face. “I need a drink.”
///
we walk through the amusement park. it’s the dead of winter, and no one is on the rides, but they’re still working. you take me to the wooden roller coaster. we ride for hours. the wooden tracks wobble and break open, and we fall into the earth
///
I woke up well past my alarm—it was 1:30 in the afternoon, and I was already late for a meeting. A cold panic hit me as I quickly showered and headed out the door.
When I pulled up to the coffee shop, the team was halfway through the meeting.
“Daniel, you’re an hour and a half late.”
“Sorry, I completely slept in.”
“Were you out late last night?”
“No, it’s just that, I met this guy and we’ve been really hitting it off.”
“Where did you meet him?”
“In my dreams.”
“Well, that’s not much of an excuse for being so late. You literally sleep every night, and our meetings are only once a week.”
I nodded. I opened my phone and flipped through the images. There was a short video of us on the wooden roller coaster. I slid the photo right, and there was a photo of us on the carousel. The head of the unicorn we were sitting on was lopped off. I giggled.
“Could you please pay attention? We are almost done budgeting for the year.”
“Yeah, sorry.”
///
we were in a house. it was completely empty. the house began to move upward; it was an elevator the size of an entire apartment. i could see the earth moving by the windows, dirt pressed against glass, then bushes, then trees. furniture sprang into the room from thin air. he made me cocktails that never ended. friends appeared as we continued to go further and further up. the apartment climbed a mountain. i was drunk. we reached the top floor, and the balcony doors slid open. mom was standing there with her apron on, cooking dinner.
///
“Daniel! Daniel, get the fuck out of bed!”
I groggily got up to the front door and let D in.
“You haven’t been answering your calls, and it’s five-thirty—what the fuck?”
“Sorry, we were having a really great date.” I threw my phone to D. She flipped through the photos and finally stopped on one.
“Is this a photo of your mom?”
“Yeah, don’t worry about it.” I snatched the phone from her.
She started to clean my room and throw my clothes into the laundry basket. I jumped out of bed and made coffee. There was a big brown bag on the counter.
“I brought some dinner.”
“I’m not hungry!” I yelled out.
“Are you making decaf?”
“No, it’s regular,” I lied.
///
we floated over mountains covered in wildflowers. you took my hand and showed me deep caves that we dived in, where gravity escaped so the dives never ended, stalactites turned into trees that flipped onto the other side of the earth. we landed on a beach where the water pooled in a circle. we jumped in a boat that spun in the centre, and we ate dinner at the bottom of the boat where there was a booth encased in glass. you said that we had a special date, and my mother walked in. i started to yell at you and asked why you brought her here—she wasn’t supposed to be here. i yelled until you floated away, and i heard someone knock on the glass and scream my name
///
I felt hands shake me. It took a lot of energy to open my eyes.
“Oh, thank god. You’ve been asleep for two whole fucking days.”
“That’s impossible.” I checked my phone; it was two days after I’d gone to sleep, and its memory storage was full. I scanned through the photos; they were countless—photos of us in deserts made of ice and rooms where the furniture was all over the walls and ceiling.
“Daniel, you have to stop this. People don’t come back from this, and you haven’t eaten in days.”
I stared at the floor. I was so tired and just wanted to go back to sleep. “You gotta give this guy up. What do you even know about him?”
I flipped through the photos and couldn’t respond.
“Does he even have a name?”
“He doesn’t need a name—it’s different. It’s everything I’ve ever wanted.”
“Great, then I can’t wait to meet him and go on a double date with you two.”
“You don’t need to be a sarcastic bitch about it. It’s just that my mom keeps showing up and ruining it for me.”
“Daniel, I don’t think that’s the problem.”
“No, it’s definitely the problem. We’re perfectly fine, and then my mom interrupts the dates.”
“But isn’t it nice to see your mom again?”
“It doesn’t feel nice. It makes me feel fucking terrible. I need to figure out a way to get her to stop.”
“Daniel.”
“You don’t get it.”
She put some cookies on a plate next to my bed. “Just eat something. I have to head off, but I’ll be back to check on you.”
///
my childhood home expands to the size of the earth. we walk for days; we make flowers into dinner; we make candies out of the ocean; he proposes to me; he places the ring of saturn on my finger. we want to elope so we fly to vegas. we walk up the casino church aisles lined with slot machines, and my mother is at the end of the aisle waiting for me. i scream at her, “you don’t belong here, you can’t be here!” i cover her in fabric, and the fabric spins until it turns to ashes. the ashes float up, and they return with force at me until they spin and turn back into my mother. she is sad. she begs me to forgive her.
///
My face is stinging. I wake up to C standing over me in my bed, slapping me.
“What the fuck? Why did you wake me up?”
“Are you fucking insane? You’re going to be hospitalized. You have to get up and eat something.”
I got up. It felt as though I had only enough energy to sit up, and I fell to the floor next to the bed. C lifted me, carried me to the kitchen. My eyes were closing again. I could feel him shoving food in my mouth. I spat it out. His voice became faint, the dark circled me, and I let it.
///
the park outgrew its space there were sunflowers growing oversized into a forest he pulled me along a yellow brick path and we ran but our feet didn’t move we ran and the earth moved beneath us until he pulled me up to a giant temple that reached up into the sky he said there and pointed to the top and i said yes and we walked to the entrance and it was an elevator up i felt a happiness i’ve never felt before my whole body was warm and then my mother grabbed his hand and i screamed at her i yelled that she can’t be here and that this isn’t about her and she just smiled and said she wasn’t feeling good that she was sick then she said “i told you about handsom
e men” and he held her hand tightly and the doors to the elevator opened they walked in together and he smiled waving me in but i screamed that she couldn’t come with us and he just continued to wave me in as the elevator doors closed and i watched as the elevator moved up and up until it was just a dot gliding into the sky
///
I could see a bright light. There was a familiar, sterile smell. My stomach painfully pressed against my ribs. I looked up, and D was sitting there with what was probably a cold coffee.
“My mom took him away.”
“Of course she did.”
“I’m really hungry.”
D smiled. “I’m glad she took him away. He sounded like a real asshole.”
DATE: LUVCUB
Hey
Hi!
How goes it?
…
Hey?
Hi?
Cunt.
Sorry, was just out for a bit.
Oh, lololol thot you were ignoring me
…
hey!
Hey?
Hi?
You know what, your loss! I am actually a really nice person, and you would be lucky to have someone like me in your life.
I bet you just do this to everyone, playing your fucking gay games.
u r a fucking douche
fuck you
So sorry, I went to bed before responding!
Oh lololol
Hey, you wanna hang out later?
I don’t think so.
Cunt.
you have unread messages from a user who has blocked you
PHONE CALLS
It starts and ends with a phone call.
///
“She’s gone.”
I threw my phone against the window. I was speeding through traffic. It was pouring rain, and I couldn’t see. Flying through red lights, I pulled over to catch my breath, but the words came again, “she’s gone,” and I sped through the suburbs until I made it to the house.
I burst through the doors and collapsed into my sister’s arms. “She’s gone.” She assured me that we would be okay and kept repeating the words “We’ll be okay” until the police needed more questions answered.
Everything Is Awful and You're a Terrible Person Page 11
