Play Me Backwards

by Adam Selzer

  I gave her my most charming smile.

  “Hi,” I said. “I’m Leon.”

  “I’m Renee, Paige’s mom,” she said. “Come in. Make yourself at home!”

  Paige and I followed her into the kitchen, where Paige’s twelve-year-old sister, Autumn, was sitting at the table already, staring at her phone. Their dad, Gene, whom I’d already met the day he threatened to stab me, was cooking something on the stove.

  “Hi, Leon,” he called out. “Have a seat. We’re casual here.”

  Nothing weird had happened, but I could tell Paige was totally embarrassed already. She gave this Oh my God, I’m SO sorry look as we sat at the table, with me across from Autumn, who was wearing so much makeup that if you pushed the edge of a quarter against her cheek, the makeup probably would have held it in place.

  The family all prayed before dinner. I kinda felt like they should have made sure I wasn’t Jewish or anything first, but I suppose Paige would have told them if I was.

  After they said “Amen” and we all started on our salads, Autumn said, “Is it true that everyone who works at the Ice Cave worships the devil?”

  “Autumn!” said Renee. “That is not polite!”

  “Natasha said they did!” said Autumn. “I’m just curious. God.”

  Autumn did that thing you hear from girls a lot where she added an “uh” at the end of every sentence. Like, she pronounced “God” as “God-uh.”

  Paige did it occasionally too. It kinda bugged me, but I was learning to live with it.

  I dodged the question, of course. There was a woodcut print of the Little Brown Church in the Vale, one of Iowa’s few landmarks, on the wall, so I obviously wasn’t going to score any points by trying to explain that it was mostly agnostics and pagans back there. I was not going to mention Stan under any circumstances.

  I was just turning myself off and faking it, the way I sometimes did in group outings, and the way I did just about any time I had to talk to a teacher or my own parents. It’s about like going to someone else’s church: Stand when they stand, sit when they sit, and hope you don’t end up getting sacrificed with a big knife or something.

  “Did you ever think about one of the other ice cream places?” Gene asked from the stove. “We like Penguin Foot Creamery.”

  “I worked there for a while,” I said.

  “It’s supposed to be a great place to work,” he said. “They made some list in Forbes. Something about the best employers or fastest growing companies.”

  “They talk a big game,” I said, “but I get more hours at the Ice Cave, and I have a better chance of moving up to management sooner. All of the managers at Penguin Foot have to go to college first.”

  “Well, there’s nothing wrong with that,” said Renee.

  “Yeah, but I can’t really imagine going to college just to go into retail management,” I said. “I’m probably better off getting into it now and getting it on the résumé ahead of time.”

  “Smart,” said Gene. “Didn’t I tell you he was smart, Renee?”

  “You did,” said Renee. “You sure did. Which college are you going to, Leon?”

  The answer, of course, was nowhere. But I had rehearsed for this by telling my stock lie to my parents over and over. I was on autopilot, not even thinking about what I was saying now.

  “Just junior college for the first year or two,” I said. “So I can work more and save money while I get the requirements out of the way. You don’t do anything in your major the first couple years anyway.”

  “What’s your major?”

  “Undeclared for now. I haven’t quite decided. But the requirements are the same for a lot of them.”

  Gene set the food down on the table—steaks. Nice ones. Mashed potatoes, too.

  “Can I grab you a beer, there, Leon?” he asked.

  I looked up, thinking, Hell yeah, but not knowing whether I ought to say that. But then he slapped me on the back and said, “Just kidding! Ha!”

  Har de har har.

  There were only two particularly awkward moments over the course of the dinner, really, but they were big and notable ones.

  The first was about halfway through the main course, when Autumn looked me right in the eye and said, “Do you guys have sex?”

  I didn’t have to answer, because Renee shouted, “Autumn! This is the dinner table. That is very rude.”

  “I was just asking,” said Autumn.

  Paige fixed her with one of her serious glares, only way more serious than the ones she gave me, and her dad started asking if I ever played golf. Which, of course, I did not. I hadn’t even played miniature golf in a long time. He offered to take me out to play the back nine at the country club some time, and I said it sounded great.

  I felt like kind of a chump saying that, but it’s not like I could say it sounded awful, and that I knew it would give him a good chance to get me to a secluded place to give me a sex talk. Stand when they stand, sit when they sit.

  The next big, notable, awkward moment came when Paige’s mom asked me a question for which I was really, really unprepared. One that I could not have prepared for and couldn’t handle on autopilot.

  “So,” said Renee, “you’re escorting Paige to her debutante ball, right?”

  “Oh, God, Mom, you cannot bring that up,” said Paige.

  “Debutante ball?” I asked. “They still have debutante balls?”

  At first I tried not to laugh. I’d seen debutante balls in, like, cartoons now and then, but I thought they were one of those things that used to exist, and maybe still did, but that I’d never meet anyone who’d been to one. Like 4-H Club meetings. Or low-down boxing clubs and mirror mazes.

  If those were real, she might as well have asked me if I was going to the moon or something.

  Paige was sort of blushing. “They still have them,” she said, “but the only people who care are the debutantes’ moms.”

  “Well, technically, it’s not a debutante ball,” said Renee. “It’s a scholarship cotillion that the Harvester Club puts on every year. But we call it the debutante ball. I’m surprised Paige didn’t tell you about it. Lots of her friends are going.”

  The thought of actually going to one brought about that same familiar gnawing feeling in my guts that had been less noticeable since I got the detention dealt with. I didn’t know shit about debutante balls, but something told me I couldn’t count on the fact that everyone poops to help me make small talk at one of them. I went straight to looking for a way out. Paige didn’t seem excited about it, so I didn’t feel obligated to go along with it.

  “I’d need a suit, wouldn’t I?” I asked.

  “Every man should have a suit,” said her dad. “I’ll take you shopping myself.”

  Sweet Satan, this guy was desperate to get me alone. I was starting to think maybe he was a pervert or something.

  “I think I have one,” I said. “I just don’t wear it much.”

  “Don’t tell me you spilled a Slushee on it.” He laughed as he picked up his fork. Renee gave him a weird look, and Gene said, “Didn’t Paige tell you about that? The two of them go driving around looking for some weird Slushee flavor,” before putting the steak in his mouth.

  “They do not,” said Autumn. “They probably just park the car and have sex.”

  “Shut up, Autumn!” said Paige. “We drive around town and, like, explore.”

  “Explore sex,” said Autumn.

  “That’s enough, Autumn,” said Renee. “Didn’t you also say you were listening to an audio book together, Paige?”

  “Uh-huh,” said Paige. “Leon has been listening to Moby-Dick.”

  “See? Dick!” said Autumn.

  Gene put his silverware down, swallowed the food he was chewing, and gave her a stern, fatherly look.

  “Autumn,” he said, “I’m sure they aren’t doing anything I wouldn’t want them to do.”

  He gave me a very quick you’d better not be look.

  “And that’s a
real classic book, isn’t it?” asked Paige’s mom. “It’s very famous.” Then she looked at Autumn and said, “And it’s very old, so there’s no sex in it.”

  “Not so far,” I said. “I’m only about halfway through, though.”

  I’d been making a point of listening to it more lately, now that I’d calculated that if I didn’t hurry up, I could be listening for months. I usually had it playing while I was working by myself, and any time I was in the car. And I was more and more sure that Ishmael and Queequeg were more than friends.

  Paige, meanwhile, was clearly getting desperate to leave before anyone said anything else about sex.

  “Don’t we have some yearbook work to do, Leon?” she asked, the second I finished my steak.

  “Yeah,” I said. “We’d better get going, huh?”

  Autumn opened her mouth, obviously to say we were going to go have sex, but both parents stopped her with another look. I did all of the necessary hand-shaking and talking about how good the food was (which at least wasn’t a lie—that steak could have been the food of Danish kings), and we hustled out the door into my car.

  “You want to go to the Ice Cave?” Paige asked.

  “Yeah, I think I need a squalor fix.”

  “Sorry about my sister,” she said. “That kid is obsessed with sex. You guys probably don’t talk about sex in that back room as much as she does.”

  I pulled out of the driveway and shook my head. “The people at Casa Bravo talk about it way more than we do.”

  “Huh,” she said.

  I’d been at Casa Bravo enough now to know that Paige’s coworkers were at least as sick as mine, and probably more so. They were mostly older than us, so when they talked about sex, which they did constantly when there weren’t any customers around, none of them were as likely to be lying about it as we were.

  “So,” I said, “to change the subject . . . what’s the Harvester Club?”

  “It’s one of those service organizations,” said Paige. “Like Rotary or Lions or whatever. And every year they have a debutante ball.”

  “Is there any chance of me getting through one of those without making a complete fool of myself?”

  “It’s no big deal,” she said. “All you have to do is get through a meal and a cocktail party, then escort me down a runway to a dance floor.”

  “Cocktail party?”

  “With Shirley Temples.”

  “That doesn’t sound completely impossible.”

  I kind of turned this over as we drove along, until she reached over and slipped her hand into my pants. Her fingers were chilly from being against the window, and I sort of cringed.

  “Cold!” I said.

  “Sorry,” she said as she took it back out. “Could that, like, give you shrinkage?”

  “Probably.”

  “I normally want it to go the other way,” she said. “But I always wondered what they looked like with shrinkage. Just . . . you know . . . medical curiosity.”

  I suppose I should have been more turned on. But with her talking about me getting shrinkage, her little sister pretty obviously imagining the two of us naked right that very second, and her dad being suspiciously eager to get me alone (even though that had to be all in my head), I felt kind of . . . violated, in a way. Like her whole damned family was picturing me naked, and she was picturing me, like, extra naked. Naked and shriveled.

  So I changed the subject and asked the first question that came to mind, even though I already knew what the answer was.

  “So, Iowa State,” I said. “Are you going to stay in the dorms, or are you just going to commute out to Ames?”

  “Dorms,” she said. “As much gas as my car eats, driving an hour and a half every day would probably cost even more than the dorms.”

  “Makes sense,” I said.

  “Are you really going to junior college? I thought you were waiting or something.”

  “I don’t know, honestly. I’ve been telling my parents I’d wait until second semester or next year, but I’m really not even thinking that far ahead. I haven’t even taken the SAT yet.”

  “You really should,” she said. “Time’s running out.”

  “I know. I’ll sign up for it tomorrow.”

  We made it to Cedar Avenue, then turned onto Seventy-sixth Street and went past the pond and the middle school. There was still a bit of ice on the pond, but a couple of ducks had come back from their winter trip south and were lounging around in the water. The fountain hadn’t been turned back on yet, though.

  “I didn’t really know you before last month, but I always thought you were, like, a genius,” Paige said. “And that you were going to MIT or something. Or film school.”

  “Nah,” I said. “I planned to do stuff like that when I was kid, but I kind of let myself go.”

  “How come?”

  I drove over a speed bump, then said, “You know. After Anna moved.”

  We got quiet for a second. Then another. The streetlights came on, and Anna’s name just kind of hung in the air. I sure as hell didn’t mention that when we passed Horton Street, you could actually see her old house out the driver’s-side window if you looked down the road.

  Then Paige said, “Steering wheels.”

  “Huh?”

  “Free-form Dead Celebrities. I said ‘steering wheels.’ Your turn.”

  “Oh. Narwhal tusks.”

  She smiled. “My sister’s cheap makeup.”

  “Golf.”

  “Care Bears.”

  “Fireworks.”

  “The birthplace of Herbert Hoover.”

  “Spray-on tans.”

  And so we went on like that, all the way to the Ice Cave. Inside, Dustin was working the counter, but other than that it seemed quiet.

  “Anybody here?” I asked him.

  He shook his head. “A bunch of people went to Stan’s house.”

  “I don’t suppose you want to go there?” I asked.

  Paige shook her head. “We can just hang out in the back room here,” she said. “Sounds like we’ll have it all to ourselves.”

  I nodded, and we walked back and had some gummy worms. She set the stereo to radio mode and found a hip-hop station.

  “I don’t really care about the debutante ball,” she said, “but it’s a big deal to my mom. Can you take me?”

  “I guess so,” I said.

  “I’ll owe you big-time,” she said.

  “Oh, yeah?”

  She sat next to me on the couch and smiled. “I tell you what,” she said. “If you promise to take me to the ball, then I’ll fuck your brains out.”

  “You mean right now?”

  “No, some place where I can be naked and not get a rash. And not tonight, anyway. It’s my period. But sometime soon.”

  I tried not to look like I was panicking a bit, and not just because I didn’t want her to think I was all weirded out by her mentioning her period. We’d done a lot of fooling around by then, but actual sex still seemed like a disaster waiting to happen. I couldn’t put it off forever, though.

  All at once the answer came to me.

  “I have an idea,” I said. “We’ll do it the day we find the white grape Slushee.”

  She giggled. “If it doesn’t take too long.”

  “Okay.”

  “That or the night of the ball,” she said. “Whichever comes first.”

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s shake on it.”

  She shook my hand with great dignity.

  “When Captain Ahab orders everyone to get Moby Dick, he nails a gold coin to the mast,” I said. “I wish we had one we could nail to the wall.”

  We laughed, and we kept shaking hands for a second, then she went over and messed with the radio until she came to something slow, then held her hand out in front of me.

  “Stand up,” she said.

  I took her hand and got up, but didn’t know what she had in mind. Then she put my hand on her side and grabbed the other one.

&nbs
p; “Come on,” she said. “If you’re taking me to the ball, you need to be able to dance.”

  “Hey, no one said anything about dancing,” I said. “You just said I had to escort you down a walkway and mingle with people.”

  “The more you dance, the less mingling you have to do. Did you cut gym the weeks they did ballroom dancing?”

  “Yeah.

  “Do you know how to dance at all?”

  “No.”

  “Then I’m going to teach you.”

  And she did.

  And I guess Dustin must have been listening in and relating all of this back to Stan. There’s no other logical explanation for the fact that I went in to work the next day and found a gold-colored coin with a hole in the middle—a five-yen piece from Japan—nailed to the wall in the back room.

  16. HAIR

  The very next morning I went to see the guidance counselor, a woman named Mrs. Smollet who, according to well-placed sources, slept in a coffin and sprinkled rats’ assholes on her oatmeal in the morning.

  She was in charge of the gifted pool program for a while when I was in middle school, and scaring the shit out of her was one of our greatest pleasures. When she saw Anna wearing devil horns, it seemed like it took all her willpower not to drag her by the ear into the nearest bathroom and baptize her in the toilet.

  We’d hated each other back then, but she was very professional with me when I came to her office now to look at upcoming SAT dates. That was kind of a relief, but it felt wrong to me, somehow, to sit there talking to her and not say anything to frighten her. There are some enemies you should just keep as enemies. Being courteous with her just made me feel like I’d gone soft and given up.

  So after I’d arranged to take the test the day after the debutante ball, I asked if I could pick up a few condoms while I was in the office.

  Mrs. Smollet just looked at me like she was trying to figure out if I was serious or just messing with her. It was a little of both, really.

  “You know I don’t give out condoms,” she said. “I don’t run that kind of counselor’s office.”