Play Me Backwards (17 page)

At the Cave, Stan was behind the counter, giving a girl with dirty-blond hair a lesson in how to pronounce “sorbet.”

“It's sor-
bay
,” he said. “It's French.”

“Oh, shit,” she said. “And I've been calling it sor-bit all this time. I'm so embarrassed!”

“Oh, don't be,” said Stan. “Most Americans call it that.”

“But we shouldn't,” she said.

I ducked around the counter and saw that she was wearing one of those vintage anti-George Bush shirts that were popular among the protest crowds lately (at least among the ones who couldn't find an old anti-Reagan shirt, which was the real trademark of quality in that scene). If there was one thing Stan liked more than annoying religious customers, it was messing with liberals. As a Libertarian, he really couldn't stand outspoken liberals, unless they were cute enough, in which case he'd pretend to be on their side for a while.

I had learned not to mention politics around him years before. Back in the day when I was with Anna, I would have argued with him toe-to-toe on point after point, but now I just didn't really care enough. I didn't follow the news much at all anymore. I usually just let Edie Scaduto handle the arguments with him.

“You like foreign stuff?” Stan asked the girl. “Like, Euro-trash and J-pop and all of that? Bollywood?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Totally.”

“Well,” said Stan, “I'll tell you what I'm going to do for you. We just started serving this drink that's really big in Japan right now.”

“For real?”

“Let me whip you up a sample. No charge.”

She smiled at him, and he grinned over at me.

“I had to bug the manager and bug the manager to start serving this,” he said, while he pulled supplies from the cabinets. “He keeps thinking that we should stick to just serving American stuff.”

“Heh,” she said. “Like sorbet?”

“And apple pie. Which is actually German.”

She smiled. “Typical.”

The apple pie we served was probably made in China, actually.

While I got my apron and hat on, Stan poured some milk into a glass, then mixed in a bit of soda water, the kind we used for Italian sodas, and put it on the counter for the girl.

“There,” he said. “Carbonated milk.”

“Really?” she said. “This is big in Japan?”

“Everyone there drinks it. I spent a year living there, and we had it with every meal.”

“Seriously?”

“Hai, Brianna-san.”

He bowed a little and said something else in Japanese. The girl, Brianna, smiled, stared at the glass for a second, then took a sip. I nearly gagged.

“Mmm,” she said.

“See?” he asked. “The Japanese believe that carbonating a normal beverage infuses it with vitality.”

“Awesome.”

I started scrubbing down the counters and helping myself to food while Brianna drank her carbonated milk.

Stan flirted with her for a bit, then turned back to me. “Anything to report?”

“The poem's in the yearbook,” I said. “The acrostic.”

“Excellent,” he said in his best Mr. Burns voice (which was a dead ringer for the real thing). “It's all falling into place. Find the white grape Slushee yet?”

“No.”

“Finish
Moby-Dick
?”

“Jesus, man, you nag worse than my parents. I'm just over halfway done.”

“How are things going with Paige?”

“Pretty good,” I said. “As long as I keep my head down and ignore all the girl drama stuff.”

“Oh, God!” Brianna said. “Girl drama. Ugh.”

“Yeah,” said Stan. “We keep this store a drama-free zone. The back room is, like, a temple of meditation, in a way.”

“Oh, really?” Brianna took another sip. Either she was actually enjoying it or she was a heck of an actress.

“Yeah.” He smiled.

“Hey, did I tell you I have to take Paige to a debuntante ball?” I asked.

Stan turned from Brianna to me and smiled a very different smile before he turned back towards Brianna.

“Do you hear this?” he asked. “A debutante ball! Like, in a Tennessee Williams play or something. With big fancy dresses and ballroom dancing and rich assholes who don't pronounce the letter
R
!”

“That sounds awful,” Brianna said. “I didn't even know they still had those.”

“They do,” I said, “but the only people who really care about them are the debutantes' moms. It's something to do with the Harvester Club raising money and scholarships and stuff.”

“Raising money for rich people?” asked Brianna.

“Dude,” said Stan. “You
have
to go. No matter what. You
must
go to that ball.”

“I am,” I said. “I already told her I'd take her.”

“So you have to get a tux and everything?”

I nodded as I poured myself a cup of coffee and lopped in a scoop of the Superman ice cream, which tasted like vanilla but was red, yellow, and blue.

“I work in a suit place,” said Brianna. “McIntyre's, downtown. I'll hook you up.”

“Noted.”

Stan grinned and drummed his fingers together. He kept talking to Brianna for a few minutes, then asked if she wanted to see the “temple of meditation.” She followed him into the back, but she didn't get far. After one step in she turned right back out.

“There's a girl with her shirt off back there!”

“That's just Mindy,” said Stan. “She won't mind.”

“Won't mind what?” asked Brianna. Then she looked down at the half-empty cup in her hand and her face changed from one sort of grimace to another as she put the pieces together. “Oh, fuck,” she said.

“I wasn't, like, planning a threesome,” Stan said. “I just mean she won't mind if we're back there with her.”

“What did you tell her to get her back there?”

“Nothing. She just strolled in,” said Stan.

“And took her shirt off?”

Stan nodded, and I had no choice but to back him up. “She does that all the time,” I said.

“What the fuck?” asked Brianna. “What, did you tell her it was popular in Sweden to sit around topless?”

“No,” said Stan. “I just told her she could take her shirt off if she wanted to.”

“Playing Permissions?” I asked.

Stan nodded. “Permissions.”

This was one of the most exciting games that had developed in the break room.

“Forget it,” said Brianna.

And she stormed out of the place.

“Some Tempter of Humanity you turned out to be,” I said.

“Hey, you can't win 'em all. Even Faust got away eventually.” Then he grinned and said, “I should have told her Mindy was topless because she's breast-feeding. Protest chicks love that stuff.”

“That might have bought you nearly thirty more seconds before she figured out there wasn't a baby back there,” I said. Then I laughed a bit. “You should have just told her about Permissions. She might've been into it.”

Stan slipped into the back to attend to Mindy just as a car pulled into the driveway. Paige was in it, accompanied by Catherine and Leslie from the yearbook committee. As they came through the front door, Paige gave me a look that translated to,
Fair warning: This is gonna get ugly
.

“Hey, guys!” I said.

Paige smiled and came up to kiss me, then whispered, “Sorry to bring this in here, I just wanted to see you,” in my ear.

Before I could even reply, she'd zipped to a table with Leslie and Catherine, and started in on a massive argument about some drama that I couldn't even figure out. A combination of yearbook stuff and girl stuff. I don't know. There was yelling.

This kind of argument, which came up from time to time, brought out a side of Paige that I would have preferred not to see. It would consume her for hours, and would be all she talked about
for the rest of the day. About every twenty minutes she'd say, “But I don't even care. It doesn't even matter. I'm done with it,” but she never really would be.

The Ice Cave truly was, if nothing else, a low-drama zone, just like Stan said. There were disagreements and all, but most of it could be solved either by Danny punching someone or Stan mixing up a glass of something. If the UN had a grubby break room where everyone could just eat candy and hit each other in the shoulder over a few drinks or a joint, the world would probably run a lot more smoothly.

After a few ugly minutes Paige stood up from the table.

“That's
it
!” she said. “I'm through with this. I don't even care. Whatever.”

She walked around behind the counter and took my hand. “Come on,” she said. “Let's go to the back.”

She tugged my arm, and before I could say anything, she'd opened the door. She took one look in, then pulled her head straight back out. She was blushing bright red.

“I was going to tell you not to go back there,” I said.

“Oh my God, I wish you had,” she said. “I just saw Stan's butt.”

“He's naked?” asked Leslie.

“No,” said Paige, “but his pants are down, for some reason.”

“They're playing Permissions,” I said.

“What's that?” asked Catherine.

“It's pretty much the same thing as truth or dare.” I said. “One time we were back there playing that, and someone asked what the consequence was if someone didn't do a dare. And we realized there sort of wasn't one.”

“Right,” said Leslie. “The reason you do the dares is because deep down, you
want
to.”

“Uh-huh. So instead of saying ‘I dare you to,' you say ‘I give you permission to.' And you can either do it or not. It's kind of liberating, in a way.”

“Huh,” said Catherine. She had a serious look on her face, and kept staring at the door instead of the people who were talking to her, like she was so busy turning something around in her brain that she didn't have any spare synapses available to send the signals to her neck to get it to move.

Catherine was what I guess you'd call a girl-next-door type. Cute, but more “math tutor” cute than “stripper” cute, if that makes sense. She seemed friendly and sort of innocent when she wasn't yelling about yearbook stuff, and as far as I knew she lived up to that image. She wasn't the sort of girl who got in trouble. She was the sort who would say “shit” now and then, though not usually the f-bomb, and even when she did say words like that she normally didn't say them right out loud; she was the sort who whispered her swears, then giggled and looked around the room, like she was afraid Jesus was going to show up to wash her mouth out with soap.

But now she stared at the door to the back room.

“Can anyone play?” she asked.

“I'm sure you'd be welcome if you wanted to,” I said.

Catherine stood up with steely determination and said, “I'm going in.”

And she boldly did, leaving just me, Paige, and Leslie standing there. They'd forgotten all about whatever the drama was. I guess
nothing ends a fight like someone seeing someone's naked butt.

That's another tip for the UN.

Show your ass, save the world.

“She doesn't strike me as the sort of person who would go back there,” I said.

“She normally isn't,” said Leslie. “When she used to play The Nervous Game people wouldn't get past her shins. But she's been blogging about how she's sick of being all goody-goody.”

“Yeah,” said Paige. “I feel like she's been looking for a chance to start her ‘doing whatever my parents don't want me to' phase.”

“Stan claims another soul,” I said.

Meanwhile, Leslie herself was just staring at the door to the back room. “Maybe I'll go back there and just watch,” she said. “Someone should keep an eye on Catherine.” And she slipped into the back, leaving me alone with Paige. I wouldn't have thought Leslie was the type for that sort of depravity, but I guess everyone knows that dark desires lurk behind the shuttered windows of suburbia.

“You don't want to go back there, do you?” asked Paige.

I shrugged. “Stan's playing Permissions with a bunch of girls, two of whom have never been back there. I almost feel obligated to go be a moderator.”

“They can take care of themselves,” said Paige. “Leslie's probably done everything that might come up already, and she won't let Catherine do anything she'll regret too much. But you know what?”

“What?”

“Now I've seen
Stan's
butt, and I've never seen yours.”

I nodded a bit. “I guess not,” I said.

“Every time I get your pants down, we're in the car and you're
sitting on it, so I can't see it. I've touched it, but not seen it, unless you count side-butt. That's weird.”

“I was halfway sure my mom was going to break out pictures of it from when I was a baby the other night,” I said.

“I'll bet it was adorable,” she said.

“Modesty forbids.”

She smiled. “I give you permission to show it.”'

I nodded, turned around, and undid my jeans. If you didn't drop trou in the middle of a shift now and then, it was hard to say what working at the Ice Cave was all about.

When I lowered the back of my boxers, Paige whistled.

Just as the front door opened.

I raced to get my pants back up and turned around. Paige was cracking up, and Big Jake was standing in the doorway, covering his eyes.

“Boy, am I glad it's just you,” I said.

Paige was laughing so hard, she had to sit down in one of the booths.

“It's not funny!” I said, even though I was laughing too. “What if that had been some customer with kids or something?”

“Like any of those ever come here,” said Jake.