Play Me Backwards

by Adam Selzer

“I’m not really a geek, exactly,” I said. “I don’t have any comic books and I hardly ever go to movies.”

  “Well, I’m not really a cheerleader,” she said. “Not since middle school. So we’re not as opposite as we thought.”

  “You’d still be better off just patching things up with Joey.”

  For a second she didn’t move a muscle. Her face stayed fixed in a crooked sort of smile. But then it slowly faded and she stepped back over to her car. I thought she was going to leave for a second, but instead she sat down on the front bumper and looked over at me. She motioned with her head for me to come over towards her, and for some reason, I did. I sat down next to her, in front of one of the headlights. It was still glowing, and warm.

  “Now there’s snow on my butt,” she said. “I hate snow.”

  “I sort of like it.”

  She looked over at me.

  “Are you gay?” she asked. “Is that it? Is Anna, like, the girlfriend you say you have in London so no one suspects?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m pretty straight.”

  “Then what the fuck is wrong with me?” she asked. “I just kissed you and hinted that I’d show you my superhero underwear and you totally blew me off.”

  “Nothing’s wrong with you. I just . . . I don’t think this is a good idea.”

  “Guys never say no. Not even when fugly girls throw themselves at them like that. They can’t help it.”

  “Yeah, they can,” I said.

  “But they don’t. Am I seriously that disgusting?”

  Well, this was awkward.

  I supposed that I could see where she was coming from. If you think guys never say no, but a guy like me turns you down, it’s got to hurt. What if she went into some sort of shame spiral because of this? This was more pressure than I was used to having in my life.

  “It’s not that,” I said. “But I don’t think you’re really into me. I think you’re just upset.”

  “No,” she said. “That’s not it.”

  “If you hooked up with me tonight, you’d wake up wishing you hadn’t. You’d probably say I drugged your fries or something.”

  “I’m a big girl,” Paige said. “If I regret it tomorrow, I’ll remember I wanted it now.”

  “And Anna might be moving back,” I said.

  “Might be or is?”

  I paused. “She probably isn’t. It’s about a thousand to one.”

  Paige scooted across the bumper towards me, looked me right in the eye for a second, then put a cold hand on my cheek and kissed me again.

  This time it was different than before, probably because I didn’t instantly recoil. She slid her hand behind my head so I couldn’t pull back. After a second I just sort of let it happen, if only out of scientific curiosity, because I realized I was being kissed in a way I’d never been kissed before. I mean, every kiss with Anna had been great and all, but we were a couple of middle schoolers trying to figure out how to do things like kissing. They were great because I was kissing Anna Brandenburg, the girl I’d liked forever, not because they were actually great kisses from a strictly physical sense. And the girls at Stan’s parties tended to kiss you as though they were attacking you or marking you for death or something.

  This was a kiss from a girl who really knew her shit. She probably read magazine articles about how to be a good kisser and stuff.

  Eventually she pulled back, smiled, and said, “Well, think about it then, okay? Take a chance.” She got off the bumper, climbed back into her SUV, smiled again out the window, and pulled away.

  I had to admit that was smooth. She left at the one second of the whole encounter when I would have been most tempted to ask her to stay.

  Once she was gone, I walked up to the front porch and sat on the bottom of the steps for a while. The wet from the sidewalk worked its way through my jeans to my ass and the wind made my lips chapped. But I could feel a bit of pressure on them, as though the weight of Paige’s lips was still pressing against my own. Sort of like having vertigo after falling off a building. Or the way you feel like you’re still going up and down when you’re lying in bed after a day of riding roller coasters.

  For a moment all I could do was sit there and wonder if maybe Stan’s hangover cures caused hallucinations, and that the whole thing had never actually happened. It seemed more logical than believing that Paige Becwar had come to my house and pretty much thrown herself at me on Valentine’s Day.

  I drew a little pentagram in the fresh snow with my finger and decided to ask Stan for advice. I started to text him, but the story got so long that I ended up just calling and giving him a full recap. He sat listening patiently until I was done, but I couldn’t help but feel as though I was telling him things he already knew.

  When I finished, he said, “Leon, when a girl asks you if you want to see her superhero panties, you say yes.”

  “I couldn’t, man,” I said. “I felt kind of like a scumbag just for thinking about it.”

  “You are a scumbag,” he said. “But you were being even less polite by telling her no.”

  “I don’t know if that’s logical.”

  I heard him exhale. “You hear any more about that girl in England?”

  “I talked to her,” I said. “Just before Paige showed up.”

  “Is she moving back?”

  “Doesn’t look like it. Probably not even coming back to visit.”

  “Hmm,” he said. “Hmmm.”

  Just what I needed. Someone to quote from the wisdom of the walk-in freezer.

  Then he said, “Intriguing.”

  And I said, “Most peculiar.”

  “Fascinating.”

  “Worthy of further study.”

  “Certainly one to put forth among the gentlemen at the academy.”

  “Shit, man,” I groaned. “Paige fucking Becwar just threw herself at me. Maybe all this apocalypse shit is true after all.”

  “There are dark days ahead, young minion,” said Stan. “There shall come a great plague. The high school hallways will flow with the blood of the unbeliever.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  I heard him exhaling. “Look,” he said. “You’ve been thinking you need to clean up your act in the event that Anna came back, right?”

  “Yeah, maybe,” I said.

  “You should at least clean out your car,” he said. “And if I were you, I’d go out with Paige.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Have you bothered to read The Satanic Bible yet?”

  “No.”

  “Lack of style and aesthetics is one of the nine Satanic sins, and you’ve gotten to be a real sinner in that regard. Your car looks like an annex to the city dump, and the smell rubs off on you.”

  “Like you should talk,” I said. “Even most rats with any self-respect won’t go in your basement.”

  “Plenty of people who have their shit together better than you do come to my place,” he said. “Paige will at least get you to start shaving those pubes on your chin.”

  I snuck a look over at my reflection in my window.

  My whiskers did kind of look like pubes.

  “Huh,” I said. “Well, it’s too late now, anyway. Tomorrow I’ll probably get a message from her saying she’ll kill me if I ever tell anyone about tonight.”

  “No. She’ll be in the Cave tomorrow,” he said.

  “You think so?”

  “She’ll come for you. Trust me. I’m the fucking devil.”

  He hung up, and I sat still for a minute.

  I needed to get my head together, and I couldn’t do it in a room like this. I had almost convinced myself that there was something wonderfully noble about living in self-imposed squalor, but when I got Anna’s e-mail, I was suddenly sick of feeling disgusted all the time. I was sick of that gnawing feeling in my guts that wouldn’t go away no matter how many times I told myself I already had my dream job. Once Valentine’s Day was over, and it sunk in that Anna was never coming back, I could proba
bly get back to being happy with myself and my life as a burned-out loser, but I figured I should take advantage of this moment of clarity. I resolved to start serving some detention hours, and decided to start trying to make my room halfway habitable right then.

  Getting all the dishes and glasses and silverware that were under my bed down to the kitchen took three trips.

  Once I had bagged up all the trash from my room, I decided to clean out my car some too. I could probably get five more miles to the gallon if I got the junk out of it. I took a handful of plastic grocery bags from the bin in the garage out to the driveway and gathered up all the empty cans, sacks of fast-food junk, and shit like that out of the backseat. I peeled up the duct tape that was covering the stains and scrubbed them as well as I could. Then I started getting the crap out of the trunk—textbooks, dirty laundry, and a busted folding chair I’d found behind the Ice Cave and thought I could fix up. All the while the snow fell against my face and the night air stung my skin.

  There was already a pile of trash bags on the curb, waiting for the garbagemen to come overnight. It was garbage night.

  Valentine’s Day, Garbage Night.

  When I brought all the bags to the curb, the snow-covered pile of trash looked like a great white whale.

  6. DREAD

  Lingering dread. That’s what that gnawing, hungry feeling in my guts was. The kind of feeling you get when you quickly wad up your ATM receipt and throw it out before you can see for sure that the balance is negative. The feeling that if you actually checked your grades, you’d be failing a class or two.

  The feeling that you left your headlights on, or your door unlocked.

  It’s the feeling that you left a burner going on the stove.

  Or forgot to clear the browser history.

  And the certain knowledge that no matter how well you think you’ve kept it under wraps, pretty soon someone will figure out that you’re a terrible person who shouldn’t be allowed out in public.

  It’s the fear that the next phone call you get will be the one telling your parents that you probably won’t be graduating on time.

  That the next letter you get will be a note from the school about a test you cheated on a couple of years ago.

  That the next e-mail you get will be from the Recording Industry Association of America saying that you’re going to be the next person they randomly pick to sue for downloading music illegally.

  That the next knock on your door will be policemen asking you about a City of Des Moines van that someone bumped into in a parking lot a while ago.

  It’s the feeling that the world is going to figure out you’ve been playing a straight flush with only four cards all this time.

  It’s the feeling that you left a fingerprint behind someplace.

  It was with me all the time. Honestly, sometimes I think it’s with everyone all the time. Everyone has a few stains on their soul.

  I’d learned to live with it, for the most part. In the back room of the Cave, it was even a point of pride to have this gnawing feeling of lingering dread in my guts. It was proof that I belonged.

  It had gotten stronger and more painful when I first got Anna’s e-mail. The fact that she wasn’t coming back was actually a relief.

  The thought of going out with Paige really didn’t help it.

  But the thought of telling her no made it even worse.

  7. YES

  The last time I did anything to make a teacher—or anyone else—take much notice of me was in the first week of freshman year, when I had health class with Anna.

  Our health teacher, Coach Humboldt, was a real jackass—one of those football coaches who get wrangled into teaching something else, since they’re already on payroll, but don’t know a thing about their subject. His whole method of teaching was to pass out Xeroxed magazine articles about health, which we’d take turns reading out loud while he sat at his desk.

  All he ever did was add a comment or two; usually something about the evils of getting a divorce or being on welfare. I don’t think he ever even read the articles himself, because if he ever did any reading himself, he would presumably know how to spell a little better. Coach Humboldt was not really spelling bee material; sometimes he’d pass something out that he’d written himself, and it was clear that he was one of those guys who didn’t believe that one single way to spell a word should be enough. His spelling errors were not just the kinds of mistakes where you leave out a silent M or put the I before the E when it’s supposed to be the other way around. He was misspelling words that any second grader should have been able to handle, and doing so with a real streak of creativity. You might even say he turned poor spelling into a sort of outsider art.

  The longest handout was his list of classroom rules, which he passed out the first day.

  My favorite was rule number seven:

  7. USE THE BATHROOM’S BEFOR SCHOOL, AFTER SCHOOL, DURING YOU’RE LUNCH, OR BETWEEN CLASSES. IF YOU NEED TO GO MORE TIMES THAN THAT, WEAR A DIPPER!

  It was a totally unfair, mean-spirited rule, and Anna and I decided to give him some hell for it. We thought about telling him we had some sort of health issue, like a spastic bladder or something, or just explaining that with only four minutes between classes on a campus a quarter of a mile long, no one ever had time to get to a bathroom.

  But we decided to pick on the spelling mistake instead.

  On the second day of class she and I both wore ladles—dippers—on strings around our necks.

  Halfway through class, Anna raised her hand and said, “Excuse me, Coach Humboldt. My dipper didn’t work. Can I go get a mop?”

  It would have been a better prank if we didn’t have to spend several minutes explaining it to Coach Humboldt, who was not exactly quick on the uptake. He sent Anna to the office for being a smart aleck, and I got to go along because I was wearing a dipper too.

  Partners in crime.

  When I got up the day after Valentine’s Day and found that Paige had added me as a friend on various social media sites that I’d signed up for and never actually used, and sent a message through one that she would swing by the Cave that afternoon, just as Stan had foreseen, I could have almost used a dipper for real.

  She arrived halfway through the afternoon shift, and neither Stan or I had said a word about our conversation from the night before. Not that we had much else to do; it was far too cold for most people to want any ice cream. A cold front had blown in at the end of the snowstorm, so the high temperature for the day was twelve.

  But when Paige’s SUV pulled into the parking lot, she stepped out of it wearing the same sort of short dress she’d had on the day before, only shorter, and with no coat. The sheer notion that she’d dressed up like that to look good for me made me feel like an asshole. I was flattered, in a way, but anyone who wants you to dress like that in twelve-degree weather is not really your friend.

  Stan and I watched as she walked up to the door.

  “I’ll bet she’s getting frostbite in some scandalous places,” said Stan.

  “Most likely.”

  “Lo, though your hands and ears freeze in the winter winds, I say rejoice, for Hell shall burn below to keep your feet warm.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “Go to the back, will ya?” I asked.

  “You don’t want me to tell you what to tell her?”

  “I’ll handle this.”

  “Say yes to her. Whatever she asks, say yes. Your Satanic master commands you.”

  “Just go to the fucking back.”

  Stan laughed and disappeared into the dark recesses of the break room.

  The wind blew in from the parking lot and stung my cheeks as Paige stepped inside. I shuddered to think what parts of her it was stinging.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “I hoped you’d be working today,” she said. “Otherwise I’d feel pretty dumb dressed like this.”

  “You’re not even wearing a coat.”


  She smirked. “Girls have to suffer to look good.”

  “You must be freezing your ass off.”

  “I’m freezing lots of parts off.”

  She gave me a sort of pouty, suggestive look, and I just stood there for a second, looking stupid, until I thought to tell her we had a space heater in the back.

  “Can we go back there?” she asked.

  My knees were shaking, but I followed Stan’s orders and told her yes.

  For some reason, she didn’t run screaming when I opened the back door and led her into the dim, fetid break room. She smiled and waved at Stan, who was stretched out on the couch, flipping through an issue of Auto Trader.

  “Hey, guys,” he said. “You want the room?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Can you watch the front?”

  “Yes,” he said. He said it that way—like, italicized—to remind me that I was supposed to say “yes” to every question Paige asked. I nodded to show that I got it.

  He crawled off the couch, and Paige and I sat down on it, even though I felt like I should spread some plastic over it first. Paige would never have sat on it with so much bare skin if she knew what went on there sometimes. But I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to freak her out.

  “So,” she said, “have you thought about it yet? About us?”

  I took a deep breath. I had.

  I didn’t actively dislike Paige. I’d even had a pretty good time talking with her the night before while I drove her home. And I didn’t have a crush on anyone else who lived nearby. Maybe a relationship with someone else was what I really needed in order to get over Anna. In fact, it had to be. I’d never move on if I didn’t have something to move on to.

  Still, I had some reservations that Paige was the right person for the job.

  “I don’t know if I’m . . . like, qualified to go out with you,” I said. “You’d probably want to hide me from your friends, right? Keep the whole thing a secret?”

  She shook her head. “The worst of them will just think you have good weed or something,” she said. “Or a giant dick. Haven’t you ever seen a hot girl going out with a total douche bag?”

  “I guess.”

  I took a deep breath as she moved closer to me on the couch and tried to decide whether or not to be offended that she’d sort of just compared me to a giant douche bag. I guess I looked freaked out, because she gave me a reassuring smile.