Play Me Backwards (29 page)

But I hadn't gotten that dizzy feeling very often, the one I got when Anna and I kissed in the snow, when I was with her. Do you just not get that when you're an adult? Everyone always says that when you're a teenager, your highs are higher and your lows are lower. I was still a teenager, but I could see the end in sight. I was only a couple of weeks away from graduating. I'd be twenty in a year and a half.

I didn't feel devastated. Mostly just numb.

As I drove away, my parents tried to call a few times, and I eventually just turned my phone off. There was a good chance Paige would still be texting me a million times, probably trying to explain in minute detail what had gone wrong between us, and I just didn't need to see it. It was over.

When I rolled back into Iowa, the sky was dark with midnight blue clouds, and such trees as there were among the cornfields and hog farms were blowing around like they were banging their heads to a Motörhead song. One cloud off in the distance looked like it was forming into a funnel.

I turned on the radio and found that there were tornado warnings all across western Iowa. This, I thought, was going to be how it ended for me. At the end of
Moby-Dick
, the whale head-butts the ship, then spins around it and creates a whirlpool that sinks the whole thing. It only made sense that I would die in a sort of whirlpool myself. That a tornado would crush my bones and suck me up into the sky, a broken corpse, then spit my body back out into a cornfield someplace. Or into the parking lot of the Ice Cave, if it was a tornado with a sense of the poetic. You always hear stories about tornadoes blowing pianos a hundred miles and setting them down in perfect condition, almost like they had minds of their own. Maybe a tornado would be my great white whale.

But, like Ishmael, I survived. Even my car didn't collapse and die. It stalled out every time I came to a complete stop, but it always came back to life with a roar of messianic glory.

No tornado ever actually appeared, and no whale ate me.

In fact, when I got back to the Ice Cave at ten o'clock, I took the antique Willy the Whale ice cream cake out of the freezer and decided that I would eat the whole thing right then and there, just to show the universe that whales don't eat me, I eat
them
.

I didn't make it past the first bite; it tasted like it hadn't been safe to eat in a good three or four years, and I spit it out on the floor. If I'd eaten it, I really
would
have quite likely been killed by a whale.

But it didn't kill me.

Instead, I hauled it outside and tossed it onto the pavement out back to die. To help it along, I poured a couple of buckets of hot water over it and watched it dissolve into a goop at my feet. The water melted the ice cream down to nothing a lot faster than I
would have expected; in seconds there was nothing left but sludge rolling down the pavement, with fresh raindrops splattering in the puddles it formed.

Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale.

Melt, melt, and let your chocolaty innards roll down the drain between Earthways and the Ice Cave, into the Des Moines River and onwards to the great shroud of the sea.

It turned out I wasn't such an idiot after all; a couple of weeks after Paige and I ended things, during which I mostly just moped around and worked as many hours as I could get, I got my SAT scores back, and I don't mind saying that I kicked some ass. I could take my pick of junior colleges, community colleges, and trade schools, even with my fair-to-middling GPA.

Around the same time, Stan announced that he was now part owner of the Ice Cave, a position that didn't seem like it should give him a much larger income, but somehow did. He bought a nice car, by Ice Cave standards, and started talking about getting his own place and everything. Maybe he'd gotten George to cut him into whatever money he was using the Cave to launder. Maybe he was using his unholy powers to help George pick winning horses down at the track. I never asked.

I could imagine that one day soon we'd find the entrance to his basement locked, and if we knocked on the front door, some old lady
would come to the door and say she'd never heard of anyone named Stan, and she'd been living in the house with her husband, Van, ever since they retired ten years ago. She'd be lonely and bored enough that she'd take us in to see the basement, and it would be full of doilies and crafts and the kind of old-people shit you see taking up space on the tables at crappy garage sales. We'd never see or hear from Stan again.

And if I went back for another white grape Slushee, there'd be an H&R Block or something where the gas station in Waukee used to be.

By the end of May everything that came before seemed to have happened a million years ago. School was wrapping up and I was getting money from all my parents' friends and all my relatives in the mail for graduation.

Prom came and went. I half expected Paige would still want me to take her, but she never asked. I heard she was going with some guy she knew from the Harvester Club or something. I missed her sometimes, but it didn't feel like a knife in my back to imagine her with someone else. I wished her the best.

For my part I'd talked to Brianna a bit, and we'd even flirted enough that I thought she'd probably say yes if I asked her to prom, but one fancy ball a year was more than enough for me, and it certainly didn't seem like her scene, especially for a first date. So I happily volunteered to work the counter on prom night, and spent my evening doing something productive, instead. With no customers to distract me I spent the whole night mixing different ice creams together to invent new flavors. Jake had apparently given up on starting a strip club, and now he was talking about starting up a food
truck, so I figured that maybe if I invented some amazing new ice cream, I could get in on it with him. I mixed strawberry with bubble gum, rocky road with peach, and a bunch of other stuff, trying to make an exciting new combination that would be greater than the sum of its parts.

None of them were all that good, really. But it occurred to me that they were no worse than most food disasters, which made me think that maybe I could suggest that we start up a food truck specializing in those. You never can tell what hipsters will buy. I could imagine them lining up for Turkey Marco Polo. Or bowls of Nards. Hipsters would love to buy bowls of Nards.

On the night before graduation I was alone in the store again. There was a storm going on outside, a classic midwestern crasher that reminded me of the night when Paige and I first went to the nook. To pass the time I mixed orange sorbet with Superman ice cream in the blender as the satellite radio played a bunch of the same Billy Joel songs that had been playing in Captain Jack's on Valentine's Day. Between songs it was quiet enough in the store to hear the walk-in freezer in the back room humming its familiar refrain in harmony with the distant thunder.

Then, at around nine o'clock, cars began to pull into the parking lot. One by one the car doors opened, and a handful of people ran through the rain.

It was a few people from the usual crowd. Couples, mostly. Jenny and Jake. Dustin and Catherine. Edie and Jill. They gathered in the parking lot, in the rain, and then came in, led by Stan.

“Hey, guys,” I said.

They all crowded towards the counter, and I became aware of
the fact that they weren't there to hang out in the back. They'd come to see me. And they were smiling.

Stan made his way through to the counter and grinned at me as the lightning crashed in the window behind him. He was wearing a suit. A nice one. It was probably of the “so expensive it must have been woven from hairs from the queen's butt” variety.

“Your time has come, minion,” he said. “I've come for your soul. Pay up.”

“You brought all these people with you to ask for my soul?” I asked. “And dressed up?”

“You don't go around taking people's souls in a T-shirt. You want some gravity for a ceremony like this. And some witnesses.”

“I never said I'd give it to you,” I said. “Unless you're finally ready to pay, now that you're apparently so flush with cash.”

He just kept grinning, and I noticed that Jenny was trying really, really hard not to crack up behind him.

“I think I've earned it,” he said. “Remind us all of how you felt on Valentine's Day, after you heard that Anna might be moving back.”

I didn't answer, so he answered for me. “You felt like a loser. You didn't want her to see you like that.”

I wiped down the counter again and avoided everyone's gaze. It's embarrassing to have people call you a loser to your face.

“Am I right?” Stan asked.

“Something like that, I guess,” I said. “Seems like a million years ago now. I don't remember.”

Stan turned back to the crowd. “He was freaked out. His car was a mess, he hadn't eaten a vegetable in ages, he probably only bathed once a week, he wasn't sure he was graduating, and hadn't stirred up
any shit at school in years. Mrs. Smollet thought he had matured.”

People laughed and said “Ooooh” and “For shame” in funny accents.

Then he turned back to face me, spinning on his heel like he was Michael Jackson or something, and laughing like Vincent Price.

“What the fuck is this?” I asked. “Can't I just mail in a form about ownership of my soul if I want to turn it over?”

He ignored me and kept up his monologue.

“You're graduating tomorrow,” he said. “Your car barely smells, you've killed the SAT, you're probably going to college, and you led a band of Satanists on a campaign to promote their first amendment rights. You probably got over some performance anxiety issues in bed, too, if I'm not mistaken. And it's
all
because I made you listen to
Moby-Dick
.”

Jenny started to giggle uncontrollably, and I hoped she wasn't giggling about the performance anxiety stuff.

But as the thunder crashed and the rain poured ever harder against the glass windows at the front of the store, it occurred to me that he was right. In addition to all the stuff he pointed out, I'd freaked the hell out of Mrs. Smollet more than once, not to mention a couple of other teachers. I'd become a legend among the staff at a fancy restaurant, and any number of other things. I may not have accomplished too much, but I wasn't just sitting on my ass anymore. I wasn't quite as disgusting a human being as I'd been a few months before.

Now that I thought about it, I didn't even feel that old, gnawing, hungry feeling of dread in my gut anymore. I hadn't since the day I drove to Omaha and back.

I felt like myself again. The version of myself that I liked.

I was saved.

And it really was all because I'd listened to
Moby-Dick
, if you looked at it from a certain angle.

The son of a bitch really had done it.

Stan jumped up onto the counter and faced the crowd.

“There came a great plague, and the hallway flowed with the blood of the unbeliever,” he said. “And I believe in the resurrection of Leon.”

People cheered and laughed and shouted, “Hail Satan,” and Stan turned back to me, looking down from above with a shit-eating grin. I almost expected his eyes to start glowing red. My face already was.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “You guys want any ice cream, or what?”

“No,” said Stan. “I told you. The soul. I earned it.”

With everyone staring, I couldn't argue much. He was right. He'd earned my soul.

One of them, anyway.

I stepped over to the cash register, printed up a blank receipt, and wrote
LEON'S OLD SOUL FROM HIGH SCHOOL
on it with the pen that sat beside the credit card reader.

I made a point of putting “
old
soul.”

Anyone who thinks you only get one soul has never known what it feels like to be fourteen years old and kiss Anna Brandenburg in a snowstorm beneath the streetlight outside of Sip coffee. That's not just acupressure. It's the feeling of getting a new soul.

I'd let that soul, the one I got in that snowstorm, go to waste after Anna moved. It was a beautiful thing once, but now it was just a heavy burden that I'd been lugging around for too long. Being with
Paige had helped me get enough of the rust off that I could pry it loose, and now Stan was welcome to whatever was left of it. I was glad to be rid of it, and I was sure he could find something creative to do with it. Even if he wasn't the actual devil, he had to at least be some sort of trickster spirit.

“Good-bye, high school version of my soul,” I said as I handed the receipt over. “From Hell's heart, I stab at thee.”

Stan folded it up and put it in the pocket on the inside of his suit with all due pomp.

“You know what would have happened if Anna
had
come back, and I hadn't resurrected your ass?” he asked. “You would have fucked it up. Big-time.”

“Probably.”

“You didn't know shit about women or relationships or anything,” he said. “You do now.”

I nodded. “I've learned a bit about how you have to play things backwards to get the hidden messages.”

His grin got wider and wider as he kept talking.

“Of course, if she
did
come back you'd probably find out she wasn't really all that great, and it was all in your head. Or that she grew up and wasn't as cool as she used to be. Or that she was just faking it and had you fooled the whole time.”

“Maybe.”

“Or maybe you'd realize that all of her talk about being artsy and worldly was about as genuine as me telling that girl about carbonated milk.”

“I guess. And her name's Brianna.”

I tried to keep wiping the counter down, but I felt like everyone
was just staring at me. They were. I noticed that, when he was grinning a particularly wide grin, Stan appeared to have more teeth than most people. That had to be an optical illusion.