Play Me Backwards (20 page)

But a deal was a deal, and I felt like I was ready to give it a try.

There was just one minor complication: When we got to the back of Earthways, a car—Leslie's, according to Paige—was in the nook, rocking enough that the edges bumped into the brick walls now and then.

We sat there and sort of laughed for a second at the general absurdity of the whole night.

“I wish we had one of those lovers' lanes, like they always do on TV,” Paige said. “Every town like this on TV has some place where you can park on a cliff and look out over the whole city.”

I nodded, then took a sip of my Slushee and had a minor epiphany. “Hey,” I said. “I've been thinking white grapes weren't a real thing, but if they aren't, what do they make white wine out of?”

“Huh,” she said. “Maybe it's just another name for green grapes.”

“So this is, like, a chardonnay Slushee,” I said. “Class and a
half
.”

“A nonalcoholic wine cooler.”

We toasted with our Slushees and thought about driving around the block, but if we did, some other car might come and snatch up the nook the second Leslie left. We ended up waiting until her car backed out and pulled away.

It was a tight enough spot that we couldn't open the doors, so we clumsily climbed over the front seats to get to the back, got as
comfortable as we could, and started making out. Our mouths were cold from the Slushees, and so was her left hand, the one she'd been using to hold her cup and was now using to touch me. But then we rotated a bit; her right hand, the one that had been by the heat vent in the car, was warm.

And pretty soon, the rest of her had warmed up too.

The windows fogged up, we took off our shirts, and then, for the first time, all the rest of our clothes. We'd shoved them out of the way before, but never taken everything off. Undressing in a crowded car required some regular acrobatics, and took a couple of tries, but at least laughing at our own inability to get undressed without elbowing each other in the head kept the mood light.

When we were naked, I held her against me as she sat facing me on my lap. Her skin felt fantastic against mine. There's no feeling in the world like feeling someone's skin against yours.

She looked into my eyes while she moved her hands up and down my bare sides.

“I love you, Leon,” she said.

For a second I panicked, but then I heard myself saying, “I love you, too.”

She kissed me hard on the mouth and I moved my hands up to her breasts, then slid them down her body, and we slowly progressed from there.

I did my job about as well as anyone probably could, under the circumstances. The actual sex was awkward, sweaty, a little painful, and hampered a bit by the added pressure of knowing that another car had pulled into the back of Earthways and was waiting its turn to use the nook.

But we took our time.

And it isn't saying much, but whatever might have been wrong with it, it was the best I had ever had.

I think she was lying, but she told me it was the best she'd had too. Even if she
was
lying, it was a lot better than saying, “Well, it's not what I'm used to.” There are some times when you just don't want the other person to be completely honest with you.

As we drove off, I felt . . . accomplished. I'd made it clear to “Thar she blows,” found the mysterious white grape Slushee (which turned out to be the ideal precoital iced novelty beverage), and managed to hold up my end of the deal sexually, even without her pretending to be a nurse or anything. Just knowing I was capable of having sex at all made me feel like a huge burden had been lifted off of my back and was now floating away towards the stars that shone down in the central Iowa skies.

It was only late that night, when I got home, that I turned my phone on and saw that there was a voice mail from a UK phone number.

The fact that I'd first had sex with Paige about fifty feet away from the spot where Anna and I kissed in the snow had not escaped me. I wished it had, but it hadn't.

Neither had the fact that Anna probably would have liked my “hump like a snow hill” joke, or at least pretended to, even though it was pretty awful. Or the fact that Paige's remark about the “nonalcoholic wine cooler” might have symbolized me becoming more like the kind of people
she
normally hung out with and less like I fit in with all the old gifted pool hooligans who circulated among the Ice Cave and went to parties in Stan's basement.

I had made a point of not programming Anna's new number into my phone, but I knew that the voice mail had to be from her. My instinct was to delete it without listening to it. What good could come of it? I was with Paige now. I was in love.

But at two in the morning, as I lay awake in bed, I couldn't shake
the voice in my head saying that the kiss with Anna had been way better than the sex with Paige.

That wasn't fair. All of the conditions were right for that kiss. It was an event that I'd prayed would happen, and never quite believed would, and everything in the environment had made it seem more romantic and monumental. There's no reason that a first proper kiss in conditions like that
shouldn't
seem more earth-shattering than sex in a car parked in a place that was designed to hold a Dumpster. Especially with someone in another car behind you, waiting for you to finish and flashing their lights like assholes.

And it's not like Anna and I
really
changed the weather that night. The snow would have kept falling and shut the schools down whether the two of us had kissed or not. If she had said, “So, anyway,” and pulled back, it just would have seemed like a storm had come to bury all my hopes and dreams under the thick blanket of snow.

I thought of going back to Paige's house and trying to sneak into her bedroom, where we might be able to do it better.

I thought about going to Stan's. I had almost forgotten that there was a party going on.

I thought about getting some bottles from the cabinet and using them to help me get to sleep.

Then I gave in and pushed the button on my phone to listen to the voice mail.

“Hi, Leon, it's Anna. Can you give me a call when you get this? Sometime when it's not the middle of the night, preferably. See ya!”

I listened to it five or six times in a row, then calculated that it was about eight in the morning in the UK.

That was probably late enough that she'd be up. I could get this out of the way.

She knew who it was right away when she answered.

“Hi, Leon!”

“Hey,” I said. “What's up?”

“Just catching up,” she said. “My dad got an offer for a job at Drake.”

“Yeah?”

“For about five minutes we actually talked about moving back to Des Moines.”

My heart rose and sank all at the same time. It moved sideways, I guess.

“But just for about five minutes?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“So you're not coming back?”

“Doesn't look like it,” she said. “He'll probably go in for a meeting, but that'll be it. I'm probably going to Oxford, anyway. Are you springing for something out of state, or sticking around Iowa?”

“I don't know,” I said. “I'm going to wait a semester or two first, and save money. I didn't even sign up for the SAT until a few days ago.”

“Really?” she asked. When I didn't answer, she chuckled a bit. “Remember when we did that whole thing with the Gradgrind test in eighth grade?”

“Yeah, that was a kick.”

That was our last truly great gifted pool initiative, the one we referred to in our notes and e-mails as “Operation Take This Test (and Shove It).” We told the school that we'd throw the test—like,
fill in random circles on the Scantron sheets—if they wouldn't cut us in for a chunk of the funding they'd get to reward our high scores. We were the gifted pool, after all. They needed us to get the average scores higher. Of course, they ended up just threatening to expel us all instead of offering to pay us, but it was worth a shot.

“Have you guys pulled any more big pranks like we used to do?” she asked.

“Nah,” I said. “Not really.”

“Really?” she asked. “Nothing?”

“I slipped a poem with a Satanic message into the yearbook,” I said. “And the other day I accused Mrs. Smollet of eating the placentas of teen mothers to preserve her youth. But that's about it. Nothing anyone's noticed.”

“Huh,” she said. “I kind of imagined you guys being the terror of Des Moines.”

“We mostly just hang around in the back of the Ice Cave these days,” I said. “Remember that place? Right next to Sip?”

“I think I only went once or twice,” she said. “Has it gotten better?”

“No. And there's a Willy the Whale ice cream cake in the freezer that I'm sure was there before you moved.”

“Huh,” she said. “And you hang out there, not at Sip?”

“Well, Dustin and I work there,” I said. “And the break room is sort of a hangout now. The coffee isn't as a good as Sip, but it's free.”

“Huh,” she said again.

I felt as though she was pretty disappointed in me. She probably figured we were out occupying the banks or something.

We talked for a few more minutes, then she had to head off to class. I collapsed onto my bed, still fully dressed and now feeling
almost exactly as bad as I had the last time I'd spoken to her.

My head was spinning, though maybe not in the same directions as it had been before.

Anna was going to Oxford, probably. And I was just thinking that maybe I could get into community college.

All at once I was fourteen again, wondering if I could ever possibly be cool enough to be with Anna, or if she was completely out of my league. She sure was now.

But what did it matter? She was gone, she wasn't coming back, and I had just told Paige I loved her.

Maybe it was time I just broke off ties from everyone from middle school and started hanging around more with Paige's friends. There was no reason to go on feeling sick with myself for not acting like a person who wasn't even me anymore. Who's still the same person at eighteen that they were at fourteen? Who the hell
should
be?

Suddenly, I found myself fretting about what I'd be doing with Paige for the rest of the school year. Our Slushee-hunting career was probably over—even if there was another flavor we hadn't tried, hiding in some far-flung gas station, I didn't think Paige would be into the quest anymore.

When they found the great white whale, the sailors in
Moby-Dick
all went off to die. What would
I
do after finding the white Slushee?

The one other activity Paige and I tended to agree on was fooling around. The thought that there was probably a lot of sex in my future
should
have been encouraging, but somehow it wasn't.

Eventually I gave up on getting to sleep, crawled out of bed, and drove clear back to the gas station in Waukee to get another white
grape Slushee. I put it in my cup holder and drove to Stan's house. With everything else that had happened, I'd almost forgotten that there was a party going on.

Things were well underway by the time I got there. The air was thick with at least three kinds of smoke, music was blasting, and a Dungeons and Dragons game was sitting abandoned on the table next to a large pile of lunch meat packets and a thing of mustard.

In the flickering light of the TV screen I could see that a couple of people I didn't even recognize were dry humping on the couch, and I watched for a minute to see if I could pick up some pointers or something, but they didn't really seem like they were having much fun. They were just kind of attacking each other. The kind of sex that any idiot can have if they've had a few energy drinks.

Three girls sat around a bong near the TV in the back corner where a couple of guys I didn't recognize were playing video games. Dustin Eddlebeck was huddled against a wall by the table, talking and laughing with Catherine, who was doing a bad job of trying not to look at Mindy and a naked guy who were dancing across the room. Catherine had survived her game of Permissions, and was now hanging out in Stan's basement. She and Dustin were eating plain lunch meat out of a bag that they shared. Her journey towards the dark side was complete.

Stan was sitting on his throne. He surveyed the whole scene with a smile, and laughed triumphantly when I presented him with the white grape Slushee. Red lights flashed on the TV screen and lit up his face.

“Well done, young minion,” he said, as he took it from my hands.

“I guess we need another task now,” I said.

“You want another one?”

“I need something I can talk to her friends about besides turds.”

“So? That works, right?”

“Yeah, but now I'm starting to get a reputation as the Poop Guy.”

He nodded and took a long sip of the Slushee. “It will pass. Soon, there will come a great plague and the halls will flow with the blood of the unbeliever.”

“Right.”

“Indubitably.”

“Naturally.”

“So let it be written, so let it be done.”

Paige was probably asleep by then, in her comfortable bed, with the stuffed turtle that she always slept with. I wished I was there with her, instead of getting a contact high and a headache in a filthy basement. The stains on the ceiling—the ones I didn't dare ask about—took on cryptic and threatening shapes above me, and a sick feeling gnawed at my spleen. Or maybe it was my liver. I coasted through biology.

Staring at the stains is the last thing I remember before I fell asleep. I don't remember having a drink, but I woke up with a splitting headache on Stan's floor.

A few other people were asleep in chairs and on the floor, and some others were awake, in various states of undress and sobriety. Those who were awake were stumbling slowly around the basement like zombies in a graveyard looking for brains.