by Ryan Gebhart
“My dad could be one of your investors. He’s pretty loaded and he’s helped other entrepreneurs out before.”
She shrugs, then sets up the press to print another shirt. “Maybe I’ll take him up on that.”
We each wear one of the shirts to school on Wednesday. We’re twinsies. People are talking about us.
She gooses my ass in the middle of hallway traffic on Thursday.
Another cold front drops the temperature below freezing, accompanied by three inches of snow, which is pretty early in the season, but the weather forecaster says this is just the prologue to something even bigger. He called it a polar vortex. My birthday is four days away, Thanksgiving is one week away, and the shoreline of the river between the mainland and Blue Grass Island has already frozen over. Jenny asks me if I want anything for my birthday. It’s the kind of question a girl asks her boyfriend, and I don’t know what to make of it. Are we officially dating? All her profiles say she’s still single.
“How about for my birthday we make a pact?” I say. We’re bundled up in her tree house and passing a bottle of Heritage Whiskey back and forth. My tongue is loose after the third round. “You and I move to Costa Rica in fifty years.”
“Why Costa Rica?”
“It could be Mexico or the Bahamas. It just has to be someplace tropical. Because we need to be that old couple lying on a nude beach. I’ll have saggy ass cheeks drooping out of a thong, and you’ll have breastcicles, and all the kids on their spring break will be pointing and laughing at us.”
“It’s a date.” She draws her hand toward my pants, and we have drunk sex in her tree house, still bundled up in our winter clothes. Somehow I manage to get a splinter in my left butt cheek that I don’t get out until the next morning.
Maybe this is my future wife. I love her, not just as a girlfriend or as a friend. I even love her like family. This is neat.
On Friday Jenny doesn’t return my text.
ME: You home?
ME: You go out?
We had planned to watch WALL-E and play Monopoly with her folks. She probably just doesn’t have her phone charged.
But on her profile she’s been tagged at South End Bar and Grille, a sports bar that gets clubby at night, even though you have to be at least eighteen to get in.
What the hell? What is she doing there? She didn’t tell me she was going to a bar in Toledo. Does she have a fake ID?
My heart is racing faster because I have two friends tagged at South End. The other is Mark Shugar.
What?
I message him, my fingers fumbling over the screen:
Where you at slug?
Auto-correct has changed shug to slug.
He doesn’t respond either. They’re deliberately ignoring me.
I’m in my truck speeding down Reynolds Road. What if they’re making out on the back patio? What if . . . what if he takes her back to his place tonight?
She’s my girl.
I pound my fists against the steering wheel. “She’s my fucking girl!”
I park my truck at South End. I already hate everyone here. They’re probably all trying to hit on Jenny. She’s my girlfriend and she knows she is.
I show the bouncer my ID. I’m Steve Chapman. I’m twenty-one and I was born on January 5; I weigh one hundred and forty-nine pounds, I’m an organ donor, and I live on East Dussel Drive.
The bouncer holds up his flashlight, then puts the ID near my face. He stamps a black “X” on the inside of my right wrist and lets me in.
All these douchebags are dressed up like assholes. And no one in Ohio should be this tan so close to Thanksgiving. I’ve never gotten in an actual fight before, but I’ve already made my hands into fists.
“Just try me,” I say underneath the music.
It’s cold out and everyone on the back patio has got puffs of steam coming from their mouths. Beneath a heat lamp, Kaitlyn is talking to Jenny. My girlfriend’s hair is back in a braid. She’s wearing a jacket with a fur-trimmed hood. She’s got on makeup and tight jeans and, my God, that ass. She looks like some really hot girl at a club, not my hot girlfriend at a club with me.
I elbow my way through the crowd. Shugar’s at a table talking to Gabe. I pretend like I don’t notice they’re here.
“Can I bum a cigarette?” I say to Jenny, relaxing all the muscles in my face.
Her head cocks back. She reaches into her pack and hands me the last one. “Derek.”
“Hey. I’m just stopping by uninvited. It’s what I do.”
“I . . . didn’t think you wanted to hang out with us.”
“ScroboCop, what’s up, man?” Shugar offers up a high five with a drunk, blissful stare. He has no idea how pissed I am at him.
I go for his high five, but his hand dives below mine. “Dolphin! I just dolphined the shit out of you.”
Jenny laughs, her smile as big as the Cheshire cat’s.
“What are you doing here?” I say to her. “You’re just a kid.”
Her goofy grin drops into an annoyed glare like that. “Okay, Dad.”
“Scrobes,” Shugar says. “You want me to get you a drink?”
“Where’d you get alcohol?”
He lifts up his pant leg, revealing a silver flask strapped around his ankle. “I’ve been ordering cranberry juice all night. Bartender hasn’t said a thing.”
“I thought you said alcohol’s nothing but empty calories.”
“No, no. Beer is empty calories. Vodka cranberry’s got vitamins. You want me to get you a thing of cranberry juice? I’ll make you a drink.”
“Could you?” I say to Shugar, but my eyes are on Jenny. She’s looking at the crowd. She’s looking anywhere possible but at me.
When Shugar leaves and Kaitlyn gets in a conversation with Gabe, I say to Jenny, “You never said anything about going out tonight.”
“I didn’t realize I was supposed to tell you everything I do.”
“Are you mad at me?”
She does an annoyed eye roll. “Well, I wasn’t . . . until now.”
“So what is this?”
“It’s, uh, Friday night? I wanted to go out tonight and so did Kaitlyn. She’s a pretty cool person.”
“Yeah, right. Never touched a drop before Dorton’s and now she’s ‘wild party animal’ because she thinks aliens are going to invade.”
“Or maybe you could stop judging her and get to know her better.”
“Okay, so if this is Girls’ Night Out, then why is Mark here?”
“Why not? I asked him.”
“And yet you didn’t ask me. Funny.”
She shakes her head and sighs. “I feel like I’m being interrogated.”
“Why couldn’t you have told me?”
“I don’t know. I just . . . I wasn’t in the mood to watch WALL-E. Sorry.” She says this not so apologetically. “It’s not that big of a deal.”
Kaitlyn comes up to Jenny with a giddy smile. “Are you ready?”
“You sure you want to do this?”
Kaitlyn downs her cup, then wipes her lips with the back of her wrist. She climbs on top of the table where Gabe’s sitting. Jenny crushes her cigarette in an ashtray and joins her, both of them facing the crowd.
They take off their jackets and hand them to Gabe.
They’re both holding on to the bottom of their shirts.
People are gathering around them. Raising their cups. Cheering them on.
She’s about to flash the crowd.
I tug at the cuff of Jenny’s jeans. “Hey,” I say, my voice being drowned out. So I get louder. “What are you doing?”
She’s raising her shirt up. She can’t do this.
“Hey!” I grab her by the waist and pull her down.
She’s smacking me violently against my chest, her face contorted in anger. “What the actual fuck, Derek!”
She’s still smacking me. She’s kicking my shins.
I say, “You can’t be showing your tits out in public like this!”
/> “You didn’t seem to mind at Dorton’s.”
“Hey, is this guy giving you problems?” says some guy in his twenties with an old-school Bieber haircut and wearing an Ohio State hoodie.
She says to him, “It’s fine.”
I say, “Dude, how old are you? My thirteen-year-old brother has that haircut.”
He spreads his arms out, getting all bro with me, then pointlessly spits on the ground. He probably doesn’t know that he’s got a fleck of glitter below his right eye. “You want to take this out in the parking lot?”
“Whatever, you old-ass fuck hitting on high-school girls. You know, she’s only seventeen.”
“Calm your dick, Derek. There might be undercover cops here.” She then says to the guy, “It’s okay. Really. You can go now.”
He says, “You sure?”
“Please.”
He hesitates, then returns to his group.
I say to her, “What the fuck. You’re hanging around douchebags and assholes.”
“Gee, so glad you’re shaming me like this.”
“What? No.”
“You know, all you ever want to do is play board games and watch movies.”
“That’s so not true.”
“God, you’re acting like we’re married. We’ve been hanging out for what, two weeks?”
“So what do you want to do? You want to climb Mount Everest? I’ll climb Mount Everest with you. You want to see the hippos at the zoo? Let’s go right now. I’m fun. I’ll do things.”
“I want to hang out with other people.” There isn’t a shred of hesitation when she says this, and for the first time, I hate the fact that she’s looking at me.
What the hell? All of a sudden she hates me, and just yesterday — though it seems like a hundred years ago — she agreed to be old and naked with me on a tropical beach.
“That’s cool,” I say, and there’s this switch that flips, and all this raging dick energy starts pouring out of some gland in my brain. I point at her legs, at the fact that they’re clearly touching each other, but only because it looks like she’s cold or she has to pee. “So it looks like that thigh gap is really coming along.”
“Har de har har.” She casually gives me the finger.
“Man, those are some nasty-ass bags beneath your eyes. You should probably get some surgery.”
“Don’t be an asshole.”
“But I am.”
“No, you’re not.”
“I like you, Jenny.”
“I know you do.” Her voice wavers a little, but I have no idea how to interpret that.
I say, “Do you like me too?”
She sighs, like she really doesn’t want to have this conversation. “I don’t know who you think I am. I mean, yeah, I like you. But if you want to hang out with me, you gotta understand that I’m going to be hanging out with other people.”
“Why?”
Her eyes narrow considerably. “What do you mean why? Because I want to.”
“Is it because of your brother?”
“What’s that supposed to mean? No.” She bares her teeth and pushes me with strength I never knew she had. My ass hits the round plastic table where Gabe’s sitting and it skids back. “You know, I’ve hooked up before this past summer, not that it’s any of your business. Do you honestly think I like having fun because my brother died?”
“No. I . . . I don’t know.”
“I’m not defined by his death like you seem to think I am.”
“I never said that.”
“I was wrong: you really are a fucking asshole.”
Shugar reappears. “Yo, ScroboCop, here’s your drink.”
“Fuck off,” I say, and plow through the crowd. I’ve ruined everything, and there’s nothing else for me to do but leave. I can’t stop her from doing whatever it is she has planned for tonight.
My best friend. Of all the people in the world.
“Derek!” Shugar calls from the entrance. I’m already in the parking lot, and I’ve pulled out my key fob and unlocked the doors to my truck. “What’s up your ass, dude?”
I stop. “You’re up my ass.”
Shugar laughs and stumbles over the curb, his hands breaking his fall. He gets back up by grabbing on to some guy’s jacket.
I get up in his face and say, “You’re hanging out with my girlfriend behind my back, and you don’t expect me to get angry about it?”
“Dude. Hey. Buddy.” He puts his hands on my shoulders. His eyes are glazed and his body is swaying. He hiccups. “Trust me: she’s not your girlfriend.”
“Excuse me, sir,” a man says to Shugar. “You haven’t had anything to drink tonight, have you?”
With a shit-eating grin, Shugar turns to him and says with a lisp, “Yes, I had a lemonade. Guilty as charged.”
Some of the people around the front door watching this are laughing, but the guy crosses his arms at his chest, unamused. “How old are you, son?”
“Old enough to party.”
He shows a police badge from inside his jacket. “Let’s see some ID.”
Whoa.
I step back with my hands up, like I had nothing to do with this.
Shugar’s lips purse, then he reaches in his pocket for his wallet. He suddenly looks a lot more sober.
The cop checks his ID. “Mark, it says here you’re eighteen years old. Is that correct?”
Shugar’s legs are slightly apart and he’s grabbing his wrist behind his back, like he’s at ease in the military. “Um, I’m going to want to speak to my mom. She’s an attorney.”
“Keep your hands where I can see them.” The cop takes out a Breathalyzer from inside his jacket. “Okay, Mark, you’re stumbling around like you just got off the Witches’ Wheel, so you got three options: you blow into this, we take a blood test at the station, or I submit you to a few field sobriety tests.”
“I’ll do the tests.”
The cop has Shugar stand on one foot while counting out loud. He then walks heel to toe, and his balance is passable — at least I think it is. I should be upset about this — I mean, he’s my best friend — but instead I’m smiling.
Jenny’s face appears in the crowd. She looks sad.
On the third test, the cop says, “Mark, what level of education have you completed?”
“Um, I’m a senior.”
“So you know the alphabet?”
“I guess.”
“I want you to recite it backward.”
Shugar turns around. “A, B, C, D . . .”
“Now you can put your hands behind your back. You are under arrest for public intoxication and underage drinking.”
The undercover officer slaps the cuffs on him, and a police car appears within seconds, as if it had been staking out the place. With a gathering crowd, he frisks Shugar against the trunk of the car and finds the flask. He reads him his Miranda rights and eases him into the backseat.
I probably should feel guilty — had I not shown up, none of this would have happened. But fuck Mark Shugar. I don’t ever want to see him again. He was trying to hook up with Jenny — I just know it.
The black Audi A4 that his mom gave him when she traded up to the A8 sits near the front door of the bar, and it’s going to be there all night.
Jenny approaches me as the crowd disperses and the police car leaves. “He was my ride home.”
“You were going to let that drive you home? Jenny. He was wasted as shit. What were you thinking?”
“Let’s go back to your place,” she says. “We need to talk.”
My heart — or something similarly shaped — slides up into my throat in a gross, slimy way. This is the end of us.
We get in my truck. Her head, feet, and hands are angled slightly toward the passenger window. She doesn’t say anything, so I turn the radio up. They’re naming the countries that are thinking of cutting diplomatic ties with the United States if we deploy troops into Raya.
We sit on my porch steps.
I s
ay, “I love you.” I’m fighting back tears because this is the first time I’ve said those words to any girl other than my dog. “I’m sorry.”
She grazes my cheek with her palm like she’s sorry for me. I sink into her. I want her to say “I love you” back. I need her to.
She says, “I think we’ve been spending too much time together.”
She’s breaking up with me.
I’m crying so ugly. My eyes are pinched shut. My life is over. “Why did you ask me to play beer pong? Were you just trying to milk me for information about Mark?”
“You asked if someone wanted to play. I wanted to play.”
“Do you even like me?”
With her arm around me, she pats my shoulder like I’m a Little Leaguer who lost the big game and she’s about to take me out for ice cream. “You think I would have spent the last two weeks with you if I didn’t? Hey. You’re cute, and you’re funny.”
“This fucking sucks.”
Her forehead is gently touching my jawbone. Her slow, warm breaths on my neck rise up in steamy swirls. There’s something she wants to tell me that she hasn’t already said.
“It’s cold,” she says. “Can we go inside?”
I wipe the tears from my face. I unlock the front door, and my dog lets out an obnoxious howl.
“Hey, be quiet!” I whisper harshly.
She’s dancing on her hind legs like she always does when someone new comes to the house. Jenny kneels to pet her, and Princess immediately goes for the face, getting tongue in her mouth.
Jenny wipes her lips. “What’s his name?”
“It’s a she. Her name’s Princess Pumpkin Pants.”
“That’s really cute. Who named her?”
“I did. I was six.”
She rubs Princess’s ears for a minute, then gets up. “I thought you’d have a bigger house.”
I catch my reflection in the window. My face is red and blotchy from crying, and the place between my nose and my upper lip is shiny with runny snot. I look away so she can’t see. “My dad does. He lives with my little bro in Texas.”
“I never knew you had a little brother.”
“Yeah, he’s an okay kid, I guess. He’s already reading at a seventh-grade level.”
“What grade is he in?”
“Eighth.”
