by Adam Selzer
“I’m still gonna tell Doug to watch out,” I say. “I mean, a treaty’s probably only as good as the paper it’s printed on.”
“It’ll be fine,” says Sadie. “He’s just acting all tough. If that Council of Elders finds him guilty of attacking anyone, they’ll rip him to shreds. Literally.”
And so we get back to shopping. We end up finding some awesome black dresses at Hot Topic, which used to be a normal-sized mall store but is now one of the anchor stores, like Sears. They’ve really expanded in the post-human era. I pick out a vintage-looking red and black ball gown; it looks sort of like something Trinity would wear, only she’d cover it with safety pins and punk-rock buttons and stuff.
I want to send Doug a picture of it over my phone, but I decide to just surprise him. I can’t believe how girly I’m getting about all this stuff (assuming he takes me to prom in the first place). It doesn’t feel like me. In fact, it almost seems like Alley the Ice Queen is just a girl I used to know but haven’t heard from in a while. It’s a weird feeling, but not really a bad one. The idea of changing is always scary, but once it happens, sometimes it’s not so bad. It just feels natural. And all this after one date!
There’s only one explanation: Doug is awesome.
As Sadie and I are heading home, I send him a “thinking of you” text.
Five minutes later, shortly after I get to my room, he texts back with: “Dinner tonight?”
I text back “7?” and start digging through my closet, trying to find something cute yet sophisticated.
6
The sun is just setting over Towson Street when Doug’s car pulls up. This time, both of my parents are pretending not to be waiting by the front door, but I can see that they are. I never should have told them I was going out with a guy instead of staying home. I should have just told them I was going to hang out with Sadie.
“Are you going to introduce us?” Dad asks.
“No,” I say.
“You know, there was a time when meeting the parents was something a boy had to do before a date,” says Dad.
“Hate to tell you, Dad,” I say, “but if any guy ever asks your permission to marry me, I’m telling him no when he asks me.”
“Attagirl,” says Mom.
“Hey,” says Dad. “It’s not like I’m trying to be all old-fashioned or anything. I want to meet this guy for entirely selfish reasons. I’m just curious.”
“Just promise you’ll call if either of you is too drunk to drive home,” says Mom. “Not that I want you to be drinking, but I was a teenager once. I know what goes on.”
“I know,” I say. “You were a teenager until you were, like, thirty.”
Mom blushes a bit. “Let it go, Alley,” she says.
She really was still in “college party animal” mode when I was a kid. And even now that she’s finally a responsible, smart, even cool adult 99 percent of the time, she still gets trashed about once a year when her old friends come over. It’s pretty embarrassing to watch.
I can see that Doug is getting out of the car and is about to walk up to the door, so I run out to his car before he gets far to save us all the “meet the parents” ritual. As soon as we’re safely in his car, I lean over and kiss him.
He kisses me back and smiles. That weird medicine taste is starting to get almost arousing—it’s kinda gross, but it also tastes like him.
I can only imagine all the things I would be saying at the lunch table about his smell if I didn’t like him. But even though a couple of brilliant zingers occur to me, I keep them to myself. It would just be mean. It always was mean, of course. Now I’m starting to feel bad about every joke I ever cracked about a guy who hit on me. Was it so wrong of them to try to start up a conversation with me, even if they did do a lousy job of it?
Doug’s wearing the same outfit he’s worn for the last two days. This sort of disturbs me for a second, and my mind immediately jumps right to making up jokes, but then I think, You know, goth gear isn’t exactly cheap. He probably can’t afford too many outfits. Maybe he feels like he has to stay in goth mode to impress me. It’s kind of sweet.
“Thought about you a lot today,” I say.
“You too,” he breathes. “Where do you want to eat?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Someplace downtown again?” I don’t tell him I want to be someplace where no one at school will see us. I have a reputation to hang on to. An image, in a way. Everyone has one, whether they like it or not. Even if people find out that Doug and I are hooking up somehow (and Will had better not have done some kind of sneaky vampire spying to find out), they can at least imagine that I’m spending all the dates subtly mocking him, like I do with every other guy I’m ever seen with. I’m not quite ready to let that image go. It’s been part of who I am for too long, I guess.
“I know a place,” he says. And we drive off toward the interstate, with the Alley playlist blaring just loudly enough that we can talk over it without having to shout.
“Is this the way you thought the world would be when you were in high school?” I ask, just making conversation.
He chuckles. “Getting closer. But up till the other day, not at all.”
“Me neither,” I say. “My uncle had this whole stack of Archie comics. I used to think being a teenager was all hanging out at the malt shop and going to the beach in a beat-up old car.”
“Yeah,” he says. “Pulling pranks on the teachers, accidentally getting two dates for Valentine’s Day … at least I’ve got the beat-up old car.” He looks off down the road almost wistfully.
“I’ll bet that malt shop in Archie’s neighborhood got driven out of town by major chains years ago, anyway,” I say.
“No one really gets the teenage life they dream about, do they?” asks Doug. “I mean, people who say it’s the best years of your life are probably pretty miserable as adults.”
“I sure hope so,” I say. “’Cause if this is as good as it gets, I want my money back.”
Until I was eleven, I honestly thought everyone in high school went out on dates every night. And that part-time jobs and babysitting paid enough that I’d be able to afford to buy most of the clothes in the fashion spreads in Seventeen, not just the shoelaces. I know a lot of crazy, psycho girls, and I think half of them got that way because their real life as a teenager falls so far short of what they believed it was supposed to be. They probably wouldn’t date Doug because of his health or the way his skin looks, because he doesn’t look like the imaginary boyfriend they’ve had since they were eight. They’d feel like they were “settling” for him and act all bitter about it.
But now, out on a date with him myself, I feel like I’m finally getting the teenage life I was promised by TV and magazines.
“One thing I can tell you,” he says as we cruise up Cedar Avenue, “I sure didn’t think I’d have to be taking medicine every four hours.”
“I’ll bet,” I say.
Then he pulls off the road and into a strip-mall parking lot.
“I hate to have to do this during a date,” he says, “but I need to pick up some more medicine.”
I look up. It’s Megamart. Even before they started bringing people back from the dead to work for them, this store basically closed half the businesses in town. It makes me almost wanna throw up a little just looking at it.
“You have to get it here?” I ask. “You don’t strike me as a Megamart type.”
“I don’t buy stuff from them,” he says. “I get it free. Part of a legal settlement.”
“I guess that’s okay,” I say. “It’s not like you’re supporting the business or anything.”
“Nah,” he says. “But I don’t blame you if you just want to wait in the car.”
“Okay,” I say.
Call me a snob, but I honestly don’t think I can set foot in that store. I’d feel gross the whole rest of the night, and not just because of that smell Megamart stores always have. I mean, it was the way Megamart was treating the dead t
hat led vampires to go public after thousands of years. When that story first broke, Megamart had something like ten thousand zombie employees in Iowa alone working as slaves behind the scenes, sort of like undead Oompa-Loompas or something. None of them kept working there after the laws were changed; most of the zombies stopped doing whatever it took to keep them “alive” and sort of crumbled into dust shortly after the laws that freed them were passed.
But it’s still pretty well known that Megamart doesn’t treat their regular employees much better than they treated the dead ones.
While Doug is in there, I find the book of CDs sitting in his backseat and flip through it. Besides a Cole Porter “best of” disc and more original cast recordings than any other straight guy alive probably owns, there’s a whole section of Leonard Cohen, some Moldy Peaches, Nick Drake, the Pogues, Death Cab, Of Montreal, Tom Waits … all the stuff I’d expect a hipster to have (and none of which is in the pathetic excuse for a record section Megamart has). Good taste, but strangely, other than a copy of The Devil’s Bris by Voltaire, I really don’t see any goth. He doesn’t seem like the kind who’s just in it for fashion. I would have expected to at least see a few Cure, Cruxshadows or Bauhaus albums or something.
After a while, Doug comes out carrying an unlabeled box, which he loads into his trunk, and we’re back on Cedar Avenue and heading to the interstate. Des Moines has a small-enough metro area that we’re downtown in all of fifteen minutes, during which the iPod plays “Miss Otis Regrets” (awesome), “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” and “Don’t Fence Me In” (which has never been high on my list, but now I kind of like it), all of which are by Cole Porter, and “Anthem,” by Leonard Cohen, which happens to be one of my favorite of his songs.
We don’t say too much; I know it gets hard for Doug to talk, and I don’t want to wear him out or anything. So mostly, we just ride and listen to the music with our hands touching until we’re in the heart of the city.
Doug parks in front of a little Italian place that I swear is right out of Lady and the Tramp. There are checkered tablecloths. The waiter talks in a thick accent. Just like at the Noir Café, I don’t feel like I’m in Iowa at all.
I slide into the booth, make sure my foot is on top of his and try to look as cute as humanly possible.
“So, tell me more about yourself,” I say. “Where do you live? What do your parents do?”
“I’m on my own,” he says. “My parents are in Florida.”
“On vacation?” I ask. What we can do with his parents out of town is not lost on me for one second.
“No, they moved there,” he says. “I never really got along with them anyway, so I stayed here.”
“You have your own place?” I ask. “Are you serious?”
He looks almost embarrassed. “It’s not much to look at,” he says. “I mean, it’s tiny, to start with. And there’s dirt everywhere.”
“But that’s so mature of you!” I say. “Living on your own and everything. I mean, you’re what, eighteen?”
“Seventeen.” All of a sudden, he looks really nervous, and I feel like I’m prying.
“If you don’t want to talk about this stuff, that’s okay,” I say.
He shrugs. “It’s complicated,” he says. “Some days I feel like I’m doing well. Other times I’m just falling apart, you know?”
“Totally,” I say. “Your health probably doesn’t help much.”
“It’s hell, if you want to know the truth of it,” he sighs. “I’m in pain, like, all the time. Every move I make hurts. Some days I can hardly walk. I just, like, lurch around.”
I almost say “I know the feeling,” but I stop myself.
I can’t imagine what it must like to be Doug, in pain all the time. I don’t know if I could do it. I just want to kiss him and make it all better. Or do anything to make it all better.
The waiter comes to take our order. I get spaghetti; Doug gets iced coffee and soup with an ice cube in it to cool it down. He tells me he can’t really do solids or hot stuff very often.
“That’s so sad!” I say. “You’re breaking my heart!”
“I’m used to it,” he says. “I don’t even really get hungry much. The medicine takes care of it.”
“Do you at least get to take any cool painkillers?”
He shakes his head. “They don’t do much for me anymore. There’s one thing I can take, but it’s hard to get.”
“Too expensive?” I ask.
He nods. “To start with.”
“You should move to England,” I say. “Or Canada, even. Health care is so much easier to get there.”
“Yeah,” he says. “I’d love to live in London.”
My heart flutters a bit more. There’s a chance that I won’t end up stuck in Iowa if the stars all keep lining up and I wrap my life around Doug’s. The drawbacks of being in a relationship just seem to be dropping away one by one.
But then he looks away kind of wistfully and says, “I don’t know if I can ever leave Des Moines, though. Moving would probably be impossible.”
I take a sip of water just to put a cup in front of my face in case I’m not doing a good-enough job of not looking disappointed.
But maybe I can work with this. After all, what’s the real point in moving to a bigger city, if it isn’t to find a bigger pool of datable guys? There are more reasons, of course, but I can’t think of them right now.
“Does it hurt to kiss me?” I ask.
He smiles a bit. “Yeah,” he says. “But it’s totally worth it.”
And he leans over and kisses me. It’s the first of about a million kisses over the course of the evening.
By the time we’re done eating, his voice is worn out to below a whisper, and if he was any other guy I’ve ever kissed, the rest of the evening would be one long, uncomfortable silence. But it’s almost like we’re talking with our eyes. We don’t go so far as to do the Lady and the Tramp spaghetti kiss, since Doug isn’t eating, but I wouldn’t feel totally embarrassed if we did.
And that’s when I start to think this might already be love. If you can even think about doing a spaghetti kiss without feeling like a dork, it kind of has to be.
I’ve probably heard about ten million love songs in my life. And sometimes I’ve found them really moving. But now I want to go home and listen to them all again, because I know they’re going to sound totally different.
I feel totally different. Like the person I was just a couple of days ago was someone else altogether.
Forget my reputation. What good is an image if it’s not who you are?
Back at the car, Doug takes a swig of his medicine, which helps him get his voice back.
“Hey, Doug,” I say as we start to drive away. “I think I’m going to start going by Gonk.”
“Gonk?”
“Yeah … the middle part of my name. Everyone at school knows Alley the Ice Queen of the Vicious Circle. That’s what they call our lunch table. The Vicious Circle.”
“Why do they call it that?”
“Well, the table is shaped like a circle, for one thing. The ‘vicious’ part is because we’re kind of jerks. There’s a column in the paper that’s just reports of us making fun of stuff all the time. I’ve never acted that way around you.”
“Well, thanks, I think,” says Doug.
“It’s hard,” I say. “I have, like, an instinct to say mean things about people. But I don’t want to be that person around you.”
“Gonk,” he says, like he’s trying the word out. “That’s a cool name. Sounds like a noise.”
“Gonk Rhodes,” I say out loud for the first time. “That’s who I am from now on.”
“Cool,” he says. “So, Gonk, I talked to Nat this afternoon.”
“Is he pissed about the review?”
“Nah, the band’s breaking up at the end of the summer anyway, when he goes to college. He only hired Will to get people to come to the show. He thought the review was funny.”
“Th
ank God,” I say.
“But he was telling me prom at Cornersville Trace is on Saturday.”
I feel the air getting sucked out of my lungs. Here it comes.
“True,” I say.
“I assume you have a date,” he says. He’s obviously nervous. It’s very cute.
“Nope,” I say. “Who wants to date an ice queen?”
“Can I volunteer?”
I grin. “If you want to take me, wild corpses couldn’t drag me away.”
“Sweet.”
I smile. He smiles. We’re both smiling so big that we don’t even talk, until he says, “They really call you an ice queen?”
“Sometimes.”
“Well, would it offend you if we went for a dessert with ice cream in it?”
“Not at all.”
“I know the perfect place.”
He turns off the road we’re on, and I send Sadie a quick “he asked!” text, then put my phone in my pocket, feeling it buzz as she sends me a million responses that I’ll ignore until I get home.
Doug drives out of downtown, past the Playhouse on Forty-second and then onto Hickman, and a few minutes later we’re parked in front of Snookie’s Malt Shop. An actual, honest-to-God malt shop. Just like in Archie comics.
We share a chocolate malt, and I half expect him to give me his pin and ask me to “go steady.” Hell, I half expect to hear the sound of all the other girls at school singing a song about it off in the distance, like in Bye Bye Birdie or something. The drama department did that show one year and I felt like I was watching something from another planet, even though the story didn’t take place that long ago, really. I mean, it’s almost impossible to believe that people really lived like that before they were liberated by the Beatles in 1964.
But now I’m actually living it out.
And I hope it never ends.
Of course, if the real me—or the old me, I guess, Alley the Ice Queen—was in control of my head at this point, she would be shouting, “You idiot! This is all going to fall apart. No good will come of this!”
