Play Me Backwards (15 page)

“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.

“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.

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.”

“Come on,” I said. “I'm going to have sex anyway, right? Don't you want me to be safe?”

“The only safe way is not doing it, Leon.”

“I'll bet I know what's
really
going on here,” I said. “You
want
girls to get pregnant. You probably think that eating the placentas of teen mothers will keep you young or something. That's why you don't give out condoms, right?”

She made a face like she was about to gag, and I felt, for just a second, like I had been born again.

“Seriously,” I said. “
That's
why you don't like birth control or abortions. So you can get your grubby mitts on regular helpings of locally grown teen placenta.”

She started to say something, but I kept talking.

“So, do you glug them straight out of the bucket, or do you mix them in with a shake every day for breakfast and lunch, and then have a sensible dinner?”

She gave me this look like a caterpillar had just crawled up her ass and she was trying not to react.

“I'd thought you'd matured past this phase, Leon,” she said.

“Nope.”

She was probably the only person on the planet who felt like I was more mature now than I was in middle school.

If I had matured at all, really, besides just in the sense of starting
to grow facial hair and all that shit, the only real evidence was that I had pretty much come to grips, psychologically, with the fact that I really wasn't any cooler than my father.

My father was a dork. A complete dork. There's no nicer way to say it. But he was no slacker; after a long day of being the bad boy of the accounting firm, he'd come home and mess around with his various collections, cook up a “food disaster” with mom, or get to work on one of the inventions he was always working on. I hated his posters with dopey motivational phrases on them, which he plastered all over the house, but they seemed to work for him. He was no slacker, at least. He was cooler and more ambitious than I was, honestly. Accepting that was about as hard a thing as I ever had to do.

I wasn't quite as embarrassed by him or my mom as I had been in middle school, but I was still dreading letting Paige meet them. For one thing I couldn't really trust them not to mention Anna. And I couldn't just ask them not to, because then I'd get the old “it sounds like you're not really over her” lecture.

Furthermore, Paige wanted to come over on a food disaster night. She had thought they sounded hilarious when I made the mistake of telling her about them.

It wasn't as simple as just cooking a bad meal. When they did a “food disaster,” they actually dressed up in appropriate attire for each particular disaster meal. If the cookbook they were using was from the 1950s, Mom would wear a poodle skirt and talk about Eisenhower. Dad wore hideous leisure suits that he bought at thrift stores for stuff from cookbooks from the 1970s.

When I was in eighth grade, they found a stapled-together,
hand-typed-and-photocopied cookbook called
True Americans Are Grilling Americans
. For that they had taken on the roles of Lester and Wanda: Grilling Americans—a couple of white trash hicks who wore muscle shirts and talked about
Wheel of Fortune
and killing bears a lot, in between talking about food (which usually consisted of well-done meat and enough ketchup to choke a whale). They liked being Lester and Wanda so much that they'd kept playing them occasionally, even when they moved on to other cookbooks.

Now, after four years, the saga of Lester and Wanda was like one of those epic Viking poems that goes on for eleven thousand pages. They had backstories; there were subplots, recurring characters, and everything. Probably even some symbolism. I took on the role of Americus, Lester and Wanda's no-good son. I didn't say much at the meals—I mostly just grunted and acted like a total bum, which wasn't exactly hard. A lot of nights I was really just playing myself.

On the night in question, when Paige was coming, my mother made something called a Pop Art Pineapple Casserole from a 1967 book called
Kitchen Freakout,
which was supposed to be “hippie food” but was probably written by people who'd only seen hippies in cartoons. The picture of it in the book looked like something you'd normally see in a petri dish.

When I left to pick Paige up, Mom and Dad were sitting at the kitchen table, dressed in grungy clothes and pretending to be Lester and Wanda reacting to a hippie cookbook.

“You don't s'pose eatin' this stuff will make us into no godless commies, do you?” asked Mom/Wanda.

“Don't worry,” said Dad/Lester. “If it does, I know a fella we can call to come shoot us.”

“You guys think maybe you can turn it down a bit tonight?” I asked.

“We'll try,” said Dad, in his normal voice. “But isn't this what people in Oak Meadow Mills think we slobs on August Avenue act like, anyway?”

Mom laughed and socked Dad in the arm.

“Don't worry, Leon,” she said in her own normal voice. “We've got our embarrassing stories about you carefully picked out. We won't stay in character for long.”