Play Me Backwards (11 page)

Everywhere I went there was another threat of being stabbed. By
the day of the cherry limeade massacre, when her dad threatened to stab me within the first few seconds of meeting me, I was starting to take it in stride.

I kept listening to
Moby-Dick,
off and on, all the while. Ishmael was talking about setting out on the voyage, the crew of the ship, and all of the ins and outs of the whaling business. But as much time as he spent talking about it, he seemed like he was leaving out some pretty basic stuff that maybe everyone just
knew
back when he wrote it.

Like, how did all the whalers have their own harpoons? Wouldn't those get lost a lot when you used them to fight whales? I would have thought whalers went through harpoons like guitarists go through picks.

And how the hell did they get the dead whales onto the ship, anyway? I got the impression that the way they fought the whales was that they spotted one, then loaded everyone into three small boats to go out and harpoon them. If your harpoon was attached to a dead whale, wouldn't it sink down and drag you to a soggy grave?

Every now and then I'd just listen and think,
Fuck. I don't know
anything
about commercial whaling
. Maybe Herman Melville could expect readers to know this stuff back in the day, but living in Iowa, the closest thing to a whale I'd ever seen in person was Willy, the whale-shaped ice cream cake. We didn't use whale oil to light our lamps.

But I picked up the basics over time by listening to Ishmael, just like I figured out the basics of being in a relationship by simply trying not to do anything particularly stupid during my time with Paige.

I was “going steady,” as they used to say back when people dated
casually and fucked seriously, instead of the other way around. Steady as she goes. Like the sailors in
Moby-Dick
, I managed my first weeks on the strange new voyage without having to be dumped into the sea as a mangled, bloody corpse.

I knew that they all died in the end, though.

Being with Paige didn't make me stop thinking about Anna. The Slushee hunt, in fact, really only made that problem worse. See, most novelty shaved-ice beverages are about the consistency of snow after someone's stepped in it with a wet boot. And snow had a tendency to make me think about Anna. Lots of things did, but snow was one of the bigger ones.

When we were first starting to turn into a couple, Anna and I both had the same “move.” We would write plays and scripts and stuff where we'd play characters who kissed. We acted out kissing scenes three or four times in eighth grade before we had one proper kiss where it was really just the two of us, not two characters that we were playing.

That one came on a snowy night when we were hanging around outside of Sip, the coffee shop a few doors down from the Ice Cave, waiting for rides home. I was holding the lamppost with one hand
and sort of swinging around it, and Anna was bouncing back and forth to stay warm.

When I saw that she was shivering, I stepped away from the lamppost and dared to put my arm around her. When she didn't shove me away, like I thought she might, I put my other arm around her too, so we were hugging. Then I looked at her and she looked at me. I wanted to ask if I could kiss her, but I'd read that you should never, ever ask for a kiss—you just move in confidently, slowly enough that if she doesn't want to kiss you she'll have time to say, “So, anyway,” and fast enough that you don't seem too nervous.

For a second I stood there, worrying that she could feel my erection through my jeans, then I started to move in slowly.

She didn't say, “So, anyway.”

She let me kiss her, and as I kept my lips on hers I felt myself warming up. You know how when you're cold and you slip into a hot shower you just feel this tingling in your head, like all of the cold molecules in your body have been led there to be burned up?

It was like that.

And I swear to God it started snowing harder the second our lips touched. The next morning there was a ton of snow on the ground and school was canceled. It was the fourth or fifth biggest snow in Des Moines since they started keeping track.

The kiss may not have been as well-executed as the kisses I shared with Paige; we were just a couple of eighth graders who knew nothing about kissing, pushing our faces together and hoping for the best. But it snowed so hard that they closed the schools for two days, and only a hell of a kiss can make it do that.

I couldn't imagine that I'd ever see snow falling in the glow of
a streetlight and not think of Anna again. And the February that I started seeing Paige, it seemed like it was snowing all the time. Even in March, when the snows stopped coming, being around Slushees kept the feeling alive.

Paige seemed to know that she still had to compete with Anna, even though I told her she wasn't moving back. Sometimes when she kissed me she did this thing where she'd seal her lips against mine and sort of suck the wind out of me. It felt great, but a part of me felt like she was deliberately trying to suck every trace of Anna out of my body.

She even mentioned Anna once herself.

“Brent Flores asked her out in seventh grade, you know,” she said.

“Yeah? I didn't know that.”

“Either that or sixth. She called him something in French and walked away. And I'm sorry, but that's just rude.”

I nodded a little. “Well, did he actually ask her out properly, or try to use some lame pickup line?”

“Knowing him, a lame pickup line. But still. Who tells a guy off in French?”

I was about to stick up for Anna, but then we came to a red traffic light and Paige kissed me some more. By the time she was done I had just about forgotten what she'd said.

Just about.

One day in early March, I arrived at the Cave to find George and Stan poring over a large book. A yearbook, from the looks of it. George was chewing on a pencil and looking nervous.

“What's that?” I asked.

“Dustin's yearbook from last year,” said Stan. “We're just doing a little work on the store's mailing list.”

“Yeah?”

George looked up. “Just a new business initiative,” he said.

“We're matching faces to the names in the database,” said Stan. “Getting into the twenty-first century and shit.”

“Very fancy,” I said.

“All Stan's idea,” said George. “All Stan. That's why I pay him the big bucks.”

And he slapped Stan on the back and took off.

I wondered what the hell was really going on. There was no way they were making a database. If anything, George was probably just
looking for names to add to a fake mailing list, like a crooked politician filling voter rolls with names from the cemetery, so he could tell his wife or the IRS or whoever that we actually had customers.

I was sure that the Ice Cave was not making a net profit. In fact, with his general encouragement that we eat all the mix-ins we wanted, I was almost certain that George
wanted
to lose money on the place.

Maybe it was a front for laundering drug money. Or gambling money, more likely. More than once George had come into the store and told us he was heading out to the horse racetrack in Altoona.

Or maybe it was just some sort of tax dodge.

Mine was not to question, in any case. I was just a lowly clerk. There was a chance that I was playing a part in some pretty ugly stuff, in an offhand sort of way, but so is everyone else with a job, if you think about it. Just about everyone who works is earning money for CEOs who may not be the world's greatest human beings.

While Stan flipped through the yearbook, I pretty much forgot about the whole thing and spent most of my shift texting back and forth with Paige. She was working that night too, and whenever she could get away from her tables to the smoking area out back, she'd text me about her dumb customers and how much she was making in tips.

I think she made more off one table than I was going to make all night, but she had to plot and plan and sneak around just to send a text, and I just sat back and messed with my phone half the night. The way I saw it, a relaxing job was more valuable than money, anyway. And if I was only a pawn in George's game of defrauding the IRS or something, so be it. He was beating the system. Good for him.

When George left, Stan kept browsing through the yearbook.

“You know,” he said, “people at Dowling always said the public school girls were better-looking, but I don't really see it.”

I looked up from the defrosting.

“We hear the same thing about Dowling girls,” I said. “Catholic school girls have a mystique all their own.”

“It's just the uniforms. And they don't issue pleated skirts anymore.”

He flipped to one of the back sections, read for a second, and said, “Who's this Aaron Riley guy?”

“Doesn't ring a bell,” I said. “Why?”

“Check out this poem he wrote.”

I walked back to the counter and Stan passed me the yearbook, which was now open to a section of student-submitted poems. The one in question was all about the blood of Jesus. It was really pretty gory—the first two lines rhymed “blood for me” and “Calvary.”

“I thought you guys couldn't do this shit in public schools,” he said.

“If it went to court, they might say it couldn't have yearbook space,” I said. “But no one really complained.”

“Noted,” said Stan. “Noted.”

He slipped into the back with the yearbook and the mailing list, and for a while I heard him and Dustin talking and laughing back there. After an hour or so the two of them came back out to the front, and Stan said he had a new assignment for me.

“Yeah?” I asked.

He grinned.

“I want you to ask Paige to get you on the yearbook committee.”

“Why?”

“You're going to help me get
my
message out the same way that Aaron Riley guy did for the Christians,” said Stan.

Dustin handed me some pieces of paper—a collection of poems scribbled on the backs of discarded Ice Cave receipts and napkins. The first one was more of a fragment than a fully realized literary epic:

HERE'S TO MY SWEET SATAN

W
HO'S THE LEADER OF THE CULT

THAT'S MADE FOR YOU AND ME?

W
HO CAN HELP YOU GET A PERFECT SCORE ON
SAT?

T-H-E

D-E-V

I-L
THAT'S FOR ME!

“You,” said Stan, “are going to get one of these into the yearbook.”

“They're never going to take something like this,” I said.

“They will if you sneak it in,” Stan said with a smile.

I read through a few of them. They were awful. All of them.

Back in the gifted pool days Dustin and James Cole had tried to depress the hell out of the gym teacher by slipping beatnik poetry about how miserable the life of a gym teacher was into his office. The poems had titles like “Locker Room Mausoleum Sutra.”

“Why don't you just submit one of the ones you wrote to Coach What's-his-name?” I asked. “Maybe that one about dodgeball. That was good.”

Dustin smiled, and recited the first of what I remember as
being about a hundred stanzas of “Fortune Has Its Dodgeballs to Throw Out:”

It was October in the calisthenic Earth,

gray winds waltzing on raven wings,

crow's-feet growing ever more crooked

around your eyes

as you thought of catching

a Sunday subway

to some

far dodgeball game

of the heart.

Stan snapped his fingers, as one does.

“Let me put that in,” I said. “That's way better.”

“I'm more interested in promoting my newer material,” said Dustin. “I ain't no oldies act.”

“But these suck.”

“Lots of artists go through a phase of churning out crappy religious stuff.”

I read a few more of the new Satan poems. The worst—or the dumbest, at least—was on the bottom of the pile, written on the back of a worksheet.

Sing a song of Cornersville Trace,

Amazing town, amazing place,

Town where we grow and learn

And work hard for the things we earn

Never fade from 'ere our hearts,

Relive all of the wondrous parts

Under our teacher's watchful eyes

Live we long, our hearts we prize,

Ever sing of this happy place,

Sing a song of Cornersville Trace.

Clearly, the only reason for the poem to exist was that it was an acrostic—the first letter of each line spelled out
SATAN RULES
. In terms of literary merit, it really sucked ass.

I looked at Stan. “You and your fucking hidden messages.”

“It's dumb enough to pass for an actual student-written poem,” said Stan. “I've never entered the hearts of the young through a yearbook before.”

“I suppose metal songs and Harry Potter books get old after a while, huh?” I asked.

“Some things will never get old, but it's nice to try something new now and then.”

I didn't think I could possibly get any of them into the yearbook, but I put the poems in my backpack, then sent Paige a text asking if it was too late for me to join the yearbook committee. I was spending most of the meetings sitting outside in the hall waiting for her, anyway. Signing up seemed like a logical move.

She eventually texted back that she'd try her best, and she escorted me into the yearbook room the next day after school.

Leslie, the president of the club, was one of those girls who acted like she was about thirty when she was twelve. She just had the air of someone who was at that phase of her life, not the one she
was actually living through. Now, at seventeen, she seemed like a thirty-something CEO, and ran the yearbook accordingly. She looked sort of suspicious when Paige asked if I could join.