Metro

by Stephen Romano

  You know, just because.

  “Some of us totally have ambitions to save the world,” Jollie says, almost squealing. “Do you know why we threw this party tonight?”

  “Um, no.”

  “Do you watch much news? Do you know what’s going on right now in Congress?”

  “Oh yeah, isn’t there a protest or something?”

  “They call it a filibuster. When a senator won’t sit down after he’s recognized.”

  “Yeah, yeah. He’s been, like, standing up for a couple of days, right?”

  “Twenty-seven hours just now. Senator Bob Wilson.”

  “Yeah, it was all over Google and CNN this morning.”

  “It still is. Biggest goddamn news item of two thousand and fucking fifteen.”

  “Okay, so what about it?”

  Jollie smiles like a proud parent. “Well, those are my guys.”

  “What do you mean your guys?”

  “I mean the people behind that filibuster protest are my guys—my friends in Philadelphia. They organized the whole thing in advance. I’m not really sure how Peanut managed to pull it off, but he’s been in Senator Bob’s ear for months now. It’s all about a bill before Congress that was really a front for toll-road kickbacks in New York.”

  “Peanut?”

  “That’s my boy in Philly.”

  “Sounds like a rapper.”

  “He might as well be. He’s kinda this crazy rich kid who came out of the suburbs when he was sixteen, took it to the street, and rapidly became known as the Eminem of the political blog scene. A scary zeitgeist activist who makes scary moves that require big money and brass blackmail balls. One of those virtual information terrorists who usually gets groomed early to work freelance for government subagencies run by the CIA. He’s just that awesome at what he does. But he’s one of the good guys.”

  “Wait a second,” Platinum Lizzie says. “So you’re telling me some twentysomething civil-rights protestor with a trust fund bought a senator somewhere and got him to stand up in the House of Representatives?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m telling you.”

  “That’s crazy. How is something like that even done?”

  “It’s easier than you might think. We learned it from a Billy Jack movie.”

  “Who’s Billy Jack?”

  “A cool dude,” Jollie says, laughing. Then she dismisses it with a silly wave. Like If you gotta have it explained, you don’t need to know, baby.

  “I don’t know any dudes that are cool,” Platinum Lizzie says.

  “I’m sure you don’t,” Jollie giggles. “Anyway, Senator Bob has the floor as we speak. He’s just been reading off hundreds of pages of names and dates and more names—all provided to him and verified by our people. The seventeen members of Congress who were bought off, the five major above-the-line corporations involved in the conspiracy, the two million stockholders who profited illegally from the scam. I was one of the fact finders. It’s all a part of the Wildcat River mission.”

  “Is that a blog or something?”

  “Something.”

  “Sounds like you’re playing with fire,” Platinum Lizzie says, her tongue planted firmly in cheek, not exactly believing any of this, but sort of believing some of it. “I mean, it’s a pretty impressive thing in terms of organizational skills, I guess . . . but what are you people really hoping to achieve by kicking the hornet’s nest like that?”

  Jollie almost laughs again.

  Whaddaya mean “you people”?

  Jollie shivers just a bit from the cool air wafting through the open window of her room, sharp dampness and the muddy smell of autumn leaves a vague comfort, hovering at the edge of the party. Then, just like a politician’s aide giving a quote to the media, she pauses, checks herself, and carefully selects her next answer. It flows sweetly from her full lips, and Jollie instantly radars that Platinum Lizzie wants to have her in the sack more than ever when the words hit home:

  “Robin Hood once stood on a mountain and asked his personal god why it was necessary to keep hammering the Sheriff of Nottingham. Robin said he was tired and outnumbered and beaten down and his quest was like shooting arrows at the moon. And Robin’s god, who was Herne the Hunter, replied to him: It is enough to aim.”

  Platinum Lizzie leans forward to kiss Jollie in the doorway, and Jollie pushes past her.

  “Keep aiming, pretty,” Jollie says, and melts into the dim hallway, ducking under plumes of smoke and streams of spirited conversation, homing toward the living room music. She’s thinking about her boys. Thinking about Robin Hood.

  Thinking that the moon isn’t so far away after all.

  55 minutes and COUNTING . . .

  She’s the girl everyone in Austin wants, but her beauty comes from being smart, and being smart isn’t just about books or experience or street savvy—it’s about being beautiful. She explains a lot to Andy what she means by that, and Andy doesn’t really get it most of the time. It’s too complicated for him. And then Andy will say something stupid and twentysomething like The beautiful people rule us all, and she’ll pretend not to understand what he means for a second or two before she busts him on being a two-dimensional thinker, and he’ll sincerely apologize and come at her a different way. Then she’ll tell him that he’ll never really understand because he doesn’t have to work for these things, he’s never lived through any of it. See, Andy is one of the beautiful people. He might be a sweet guy under all that silly surface posturing, but he’s been beautiful all his life—obvious, mainstream, outside beautiful, the kind that most people run straight for. She’s just as guilty as the next lady of seeing him as a piece of boy meat, but old-school humanity dies real hard, even for the intellectuals.

  Still, Andy desires her more than any woman he’s ever known.

  And Jollie Meeker ain’t beautiful on the outside—not like he is.

  But she’s the girl you want because she’s smarter than everyone, short and sassy, lives to stick it to the man, sways like a flower child at hip-hop shows, dresses like a plump, sexy 1970s time-warp experiment, and her poetry is actually damn good. Ask her what she does for a living and you might get any number of answers, but when you Google her, you’ll get a lot of hits, mostly tied to her political blogs, which she runs in a network with three other guys in Alaska, New York, and Philly. But Jollie is also smart enough to realize you gotta pay the rent before the revolution hits, so there’s the three other websites devoted to entertainment news, which she runs under aliases. That’s where most of her money comes from. The horror movie site is her favorite—a gothy, pop-up-crazy abomination called Dripping Fangs of Doom, where she stirs a melting pot of super nerds who blog out about the latest thing in splatter porn or how much ice the new found-footage Freddy flick sucks on. She logs on as Scary Mary once a week, gets quarterly checks from online advertisers, clocks regular wait shifts slinging pancakes at Kerbey Lane Cafe South, and saves her pennies to get on planes and protest at Capitol Hill during budget hearings. She sees a lot of dumb, beautiful people at those gatherings.

  Jollie would rather be fat and smart.

  She was twelve when she noticed her baby rolls for the first time, when she realized her nose was round and cute in a puggy sort of way, not sharp and upturned in a bitchy sort of way. Realized she liked ladies and men, but not equally. She aced high school in a few fast eyeblinks. Her mom was dead just a year after. Jollie tells the story now with detached amusement—the kind worn through years of denial, and you don’t have to ask her about it either. She’ll tell you right off any number of triggers. Mark thinks that’s a sign that she’s deeply depressed.

  Mom blew herself away, you see.

  Aimed a gun right for her own head with a .45 Magnum purchased just for the occasion and unloaded the one bullet in the chamber. Instant mommy hash, Jollie calls it now. Jollie was looking right i
n Mommy’s eyes when the hash happened. She was seventeen and still a virgin. She’s still a virgin now, at twenty-six.

  She’ll tell you all about that when you first meet her. She told it to Mark when she first met him, in so many words. That was five years ago. They’ve been living with Andy in this house ever since then.

  The Kingdom.

  The House of JAM.

  (That’s Jollie, Andy, and Mark, silly you.)

  Her own social scene.

  Mark says he’s in love with her, Andy says he can’t imagine a world without her, and everybody else in Austin wants her.

  She smiles and lets it ride, knowing this is her time, that 2015 is her year, because she is still young and beautiful—the right kind of beautiful. Sometimes, in those weird midnight moments, when she sits in the dining room nook pounding at the truth, the party long over, her angelic cherub face awash in the dreamy blue glow of the laptop screen, she wonders how long that beauty will last. How long will it take to break me? How long can I survive in a world filled with so many people who see things so differently? And then she’ll see her thick smile reflected in the screen and she’ll shift her great weight in the comfy chair, and she’ll realize how lucky she is. Lucky that she never gave a shit about those cheerleaders in high school. Lucky that she never understood why men chase after ideals they don’t even comprehend. Lucky that she knows—like most people don’t—that the world is ending and she has to do something about it.

  And still she wonders.

  How long will it take to break me?

  52 minutes and COUNTING . . .

  “I have no clue,” Andy says, and he really means it, on multiple levels.

  He’s answering a question posed by a dazzling young teenage girl in a Spider-Man T-shirt, and his voice is gentle and pretty and even understanding in a way she wouldn’t have expected. He emphasizes the word clue with an upturned sense of wonder, like he really wants to know what’s on her mind in this moment, and he leans slightly forward, moving toward her on the couch in a way that isn’t exactly practiced, and not exactly insincere. He can tell she wants to say back off, buddy, but he disarms her, tilting his head with a gentle smile, as if to say Please explain it to me. And he comes off like a fucking saint.

  Her question was this:

  Can you tell how old I am in dog years?

  Andy doesn’t even know what the heck a dog year is.

  (Does anyone?)

  He thinks she may have been talking about her dog when she brought that up, in the middle of some weird tangent he can piece together now if he really works on it. The peak of the Molly is so strong on him and the party has gotten so loud on that endless Bob Marley loop that each moment blurs forward into the moment after it very quickly, coloring his ADD in beautiful waves. He focuses on her pretty eyes and her hard chin and her white hair as she speaks again: “A dog sees time differently than we do because they only have a fifth of our brain capacity.”

  Andy makes a face and says the first thing that pops into his mind: “I thought it was just because dogs slept all day long.”

  “It’s a quantum reality thing.”

  “Really?”

  “Really, smarty boy. I’ve been studying in a holistic prayer group for a few years.”

  “Dog years?”

  She almost giggles because he says it with a big goofy grin, like it’s a real question, not a smartass remark. It charms the hell out of her.

  “I walked right into that one,” she says. “You’re good.”

  “Not really. I just make it up as I go.”

  “You look cute doing it though.”

  “So how old are you in dog years?”

  “It’s not polite to ask a lady how old she is.”

  “But you said, just a minute ago . . .”

  “I asked if you could tell, good sir. I didn’t ask you to ask me.”

  “My brain hurts now.”

  “I bet it does. Your eyes tell chemical secrets.”

  “It’s that obvious, huh?”

  “Don’t worry, I’m not a tattletale. What I am is a very nice young lady. And I sure wouldn’t mind if you shared the warmth. Got any extra?”

  “That may very well be a possibility, nice young lady.”

  Then he winks at her and adds his super-silly, totally dated trademark:

  “Booyah.”

  Says it playful and light, without irony.

  Spider-Girl smiles at his silliness and runs her finger along his open, oversize work shirt, eyeing the faded tee underneath, which reads in large, friendly letters: DON’T PANIC.

  “Good advice,” she says, noticing his clothes reek of Mexican food, as she sizes up the rest of him. A bit too thin maybe, but he’s hot. Short black hair with a floppy cowlick, pretty mouth. Baggy jeans and a webbed belt with a Green Lantern insignia on the buckle, hanging halfway off his waist. Bare feet, which match his neo-hippie ethic. You know, the Goodwill Emo Nerd look.

  “So what was your name again, smarty boy?”

  “Andy Culpepper. Boy Prince of the Kingdom.”

  “Boy prince, huh?”

  He sees her looking at him a little too unashamedly. “Am I turning into a lamb chop before your eyes already?”

  She grins crookedly. “Does that happen a lot?”

  “Only when I’m awake.”

  “Cocky too. We’ll have to do something about that.”

  He smiles, really big and sweet. “I wasn’t trying to be cocky.”

  “I didn’t mind. You make it fun.”

  Jollie comes into the living room, ducking under the shadow of two shapeless lovers making out against the wall. She sees the teenager in the Spider-Man shirt before she sees the Boy Prince—the girl is super cute and super blonde and looks super dumb too.

  Typical Andy.

  As Jollie homes over to them, the Boy Prince holds out his arms and brings her in with a big sigh: “Beautiful lady, come and meet a beautiful lady.”

  Spider-Girl holds out a hand, smiling at Jollie. “I’m the lady of the moment, apparently.”

  “She’s a hundred and seventy-three in dog years,” the Boy Prince says.

  Jollie takes the girl’s hand, smirking. “You must be very wise.”

  “I’m tired from sleeping all day.”

  “Looks like you’re a Marvel fan too,” Jollie says, eyeing her shirt.

  “Only when I’m awake.”

  Spider-Girl winks at Andy.

  A hot comic book nerd, Jollie thinks. What are the odds? Mark is gonna be pissed off that he missed out on this.

  “The lovely lady here has just inquired about the availability of certain mood-enhancement items,” Andy says.

  Jollie bows regally. “Does the lovely lady have cash in hand?”

  “The lovely lady is rich beyond the dreams of Avarice,” Spider-Girl sighs. “Say the words and all will be yours.”

  Jollie smirks again. “Where did you hear that?”

  Spider-Girl smiles big. “Hear what?”

  “Rich beyond the dreams of Avarice.”

  “Avarice is one of the seven deadly sins.”

  “I know, but where did you hear that particular phrase?”

  “Umm. I’m not sure. Maybe I heard someone say it somewhere?”

  Wrong answer.

  If Mark were here, he would have called Spider-Girl’s ignorance up front and ruined any chances of conquesting the beautiful specimen. He always screws himself like that, getting too far into the minutiae with nerds who have nice boobs. See, there’s a big dif between chicks who dig Peter Parker and people who are just plain mentally ill.

  Poor Mark.

  He’s probably the last nerd just out of his thirties who knows that the first use of the phrase “rich beyond the dreams of Avarice” was in a stage play produced in
1753 called The Gamester—the only significant work of a mediocre English poet and second-rate short-story writer named Edward Moore, a guy who drank himself to death before he reached sixty-three. Mark knows that because he knows everything about classical literature. Most people his age think the phrase comes from a Star Trek movie—number four, the one about saving the whales. Mark knows that because he also knows everything about Star Trek.

  And Spider-Man.

  And all the other stuff.

  49 minutes and COUNTING . . .

  “Step into my parlor, kids,” Jollie says, moving toward the hallway. Andy takes Spider-Girl’s hand and jumps over the back of the couch, which is situated oddly in the center of the room, way too close to an old brick fireplace, which hasn’t had a fire in it for years. Instead, it’s filled with an antique Zenith cabinet TV set, which Mark bought for twenty dollars at a pawn shop in the early 2000s. (No flat screens here—that would mean we’re rich and awful.) The Spider-Blonde stumbles after Andy, almost knocking over the couch, and she giggles all the way, looking at the walls, which are busy as hell. Every surface in the place—even the ceilings and the furniture—are covered in an endless free-form mural of magazine clippings, collage art, old buttons, scraps of paper with dirty limericks written on them, pages from comic books filled with glorious gore and two-fisted heroes, poems pasted and stapled together from the works of Hunter S. Thompson and Charles Bukowski, painted faces and scribbled emotions, all train-wrecked together in an explosion of scrapbook photos that trace all the people who ever lived here and the magic they brought with them, labels from booze bottles, Mardi Gras beads and film festival badges, plastic Hawaiian flower leis and rubber snakes and strings of glittering Christmas-tree lights, purple velvet pouches with lacy yellow trim that used to be filled with bottles of Crown Royal, a button that says DAMN I’M GOOD and a sign that says NO FOUL LANGUAGE IN THIS ROOM PLEASE, crayon art scrawled by lazy, crazy people in the midnight hour, cartoons scissored from the Sunday papers and pasted in layers to make a new joke, an ad for Skyy Vodka that shows Ben Stiller as Zoolander making a martini, James Bond looking cool with his Walther 9 mm, drawing down through a gun barrel oozing with blood, video covers and love letters and cashed check stubs kept as souvenirs . . . and movie posters. Lots and lots of movie posters.