Play Me Backwards (6 page)

And the way she reacted to my question about fish-and-chips made me think she was a little turned off by the notion that there might still be something between us. Maybe I was just being paranoid, but if I had to guess, I'd say that she was seeing someone else now.

Some British college theater guy.

And why shouldn't she? It wasn't like
I
hadn't been with anyone else.

I wandered over to my window to stare over the tree line. On
winter days when the leaves were gone, I could see some of the lights of the signs for the restaurants on Cedar Avenue. Back in my more intellectual days I used to stare at the green light of the Wackford's Coffee sign and pretend I was the Great Gatsby.

Now the green light looked like it was flickering as the tree branches swayed in front of it. As I stared on, I became acutely aware of just how horrific the smell in my room had gotten. I was standing in a pile of empty pizza boxes, crumpled up sacks from fast-food places, broken speakers, dirty dishes, and crusty laundry.

But I felt at home. Like I belonged here, among the detritus and debris.

After a while I looked away from the light and saw that there was an SUV in the driveway.

And Paige Becwar was sitting at the wheel.

My first thought was that maybe Paige was in one of those groups like Active Christian Teens or something, and her whole thing at Captain Jack's had been part of some elaborate experiment. Maybe she and the other members had been going into one fast-food restaurant after another all night to see if anyone would offer to help a crying girl, and since I had, they were going to give me a prize. Like the SUV she was in. I could have used an SUV. To call my car a piece of shit would have been offensive to most turds.

But when I stepped outside, she got out of the driver's side, walked up to me, and said, “Hey.”

“Hey,” I said.

She came really close, close enough that our toes were almost touching, and I could still smell the fries on her breath. She stood there for a second, like she was nervous, or maybe noticing that
my
breath smelled like hush puppies, then inched a little closer. She looked . . .
relieved, I guess. Like she'd lost her keys and finally found them.

“Well,” she said, “I'll bet neither of us saw this coming, huh?”

“What?” I asked.

Then she leaned in and kissed me hard on the mouth.

I was too surprised to pull back at first, but as she put her hand on my shoulder, I moved away from her and felt my knees shaking.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“You can't tell me you didn't feel it.”

“Feel what?”

“The spark!” she said. “When we had that
amaz
ing conversation in your car.”

“Which one?”

“About, like, literature, and stuff,” she said. “And about the school crotch-kicking team. You're
so
funny!”

I took a step away from her, but she ran a hand down my arm and held on to the end of my sleeve. I thought she might have started crying again, which is about what I'd expect from someone who had just kissed me, but she was smiling, so maybe it was just the snowflakes melting when they hit her cheek.

There had obviously been signs in the car that I hadn't picked up on. Maybe I'd be sending out a few of my own that I wasn't even aware of. That wasn't impossible.

“I'm kind of hung up on someone else right now.”

The look in her eyes changed, like, instantly. All of a sudden she went from looking like a puppy to looking like a fighter who could have taken Danny down in one punch at a low-down, no-good boxing club on an old TV show.

“Who?” she asked.

“Anna Brandenburg,” I said. “Sort of.”

“That girl who moved to England?”

“Yeah,” I said.

Paige's face went back to normal. She laughed, took a step closer, put her arms around my waist and kissed my cheek, then just sort of hugged me casually, like we were already an established couple or something, and comfortable around each other. I tried to turn my head away. Logically I should have run or pushed her away or something, but that would have made me look like a complete asshole.

“Wasn't she kind of a freak?” she whispered in my ear.

“In a good way, maybe.”

“And isn't she gone now?”

“Yeah,” I said. “But we never officially broke up or anything.”

“But she's gone. If she's not with you on Valentine's Day, you're not really together.”

She was still so close that her lips brushed my cheek some when she talked. Now she pulled her head back away from my face and seemed to get into position to kiss my lips again, but I took a step backward up the driveway and away from her.

“Listen,” I said. “You're just upset because you got dumped. You don't want to hook up with me.”

“I don't just want to hook up,” she said. “I want to try something with you. Something more.”

“No, you don't,” I said. “We have nothing in common.”

She took a step back. “Come on, Leon,” she said. “I felt a
spark
. I never felt one of those with Joey, or my last couple of boyfriends, for that matter. We'll find things that we have in common.”

“Look, I couldn't go out with you anyway,” I said. “I mean, your
friends would go nuts if you dated a guy like me, wouldn't they?”

“What, because you're a geek?”

“Geeks don't really just sit around dreaming of dating cheerleaders, you know. That's just in movies.”

“I could be a geek,” she said. “I'm wearing superhero undies right now.” Then she gave me a smile that must have taken years of practice. “Can you honestly tell me you wouldn't like to see them?”

Okay. I'm not going to lie. I was tempted. Really tempted. She wasn't, like, a supermodel or anything—in fact, I could imagine her looking just like one of my mom's friends in ten or twenty years. But she certainly looked better than most of the girls who went around showing their underwear in the back of the Ice Cave or in Stan's basement. Seeing Paige's panties would have been among the top five or six most erotic moments of my short, miserable life. But even though I can't claim to
mind
seeing girls in their underwear, I always feel like an asshole for looking if I'm not actually making out with the girl at the time.

I continued my basic routine of saying the stupidest shit possible.

“I'm not really a geek, exactly,” I said. “I don't have any comic books and I hardly ever go to movies.”

“Well, I'm not really a cheerleader,” she said. “Not since middle school. So we're not as opposite as we thought.”

“You'd still be better off just patching things up with Joey.”

For a second she didn't move a muscle. Her face stayed fixed in a crooked sort of smile. But then it slowly faded and she stepped back over to her car. I thought she was going to leave for a second, but instead she sat down on the front bumper and looked over at me. She motioned with her head for me to come over towards her, and
for some reason, I did. I sat down next to her, in front of one of the headlights. It was still glowing, and warm.

“Now there's snow on my butt,” she said. “I hate snow.”

“I sort of like it.”

She looked over at me.

“Are you gay?” she asked. “Is that it? Is Anna, like, the girlfriend you say you have in London so no one suspects?”

“No,” I said. “I'm pretty straight.”

“Then what the fuck is
wrong
with me?” she asked. “I just kissed you and hinted that I'd show you my superhero underwear and you totally blew me off.”

“Nothing's wrong with you. I just . . . I don't think this is a good idea.”

“Guys
never
say no. Not even when fugly girls throw themselves at them like that. They can't help it.”

“Yeah, they can,” I said.

“But they don't. Am I seriously
that
disgusting?”

Well, this was awkward.

I supposed that I could see where she was coming from. If you think guys never say no, but a guy like
me
turns you down, it's got to hurt. What if she went into some sort of shame spiral because of this? This was more pressure than I was used to having in my life.

“It's not that,” I said. “But I don't think you're really into me. I think you're just upset.”

“No,” she said. “That's not it.”

“If you hooked up with me tonight, you'd wake up wishing you hadn't. You'd probably say I drugged your fries or something.”

“I'm a big girl,” Paige said. “If I regret it tomorrow, I'll remember I wanted it now.”

“And Anna might be moving back,” I said.

“Might be or is?”

I paused. “She probably isn't. It's about a thousand to one.”

Paige scooted across the bumper towards me, looked me right in the eye for a second, then put a cold hand on my cheek and kissed me again.

This time it was different than before, probably because I didn't instantly recoil. She slid her hand behind my head so I couldn't pull back. After a second I just sort of let it happen, if only out of scientific curiosity, because I realized I was being kissed in a way I'd never been kissed before. I mean, every kiss with Anna had been great and all, but we were a couple of middle schoolers trying to figure out how to do things like kissing. They were great because I was
kissing Anna Brandenburg,
the girl I'd liked forever, not because they were actually great kisses from a strictly physical sense. And the girls at Stan's parties tended to kiss you as though they were attacking you or marking you for death or something.

This was a kiss from a girl who really knew her shit. She probably read magazine articles about how to be a good kisser and stuff.

Eventually she pulled back, smiled, and said, “Well, think about it then, okay? Take a chance.” She got off the bumper, climbed back into her SUV, smiled again out the window, and pulled away.

I had to admit that was smooth. She left at the one second of the whole encounter when I would have been most tempted to ask her to stay.

Once she was gone, I walked up to the front porch and sat on the
bottom of the steps for a while. The wet from the sidewalk worked its way through my jeans to my ass and the wind made my lips chapped. But I could feel a bit of pressure on them, as though the weight of Paige's lips was still pressing against my own. Sort of like having vertigo after falling off a building. Or the way you feel like you're still going up and down when you're lying in bed after a day of riding roller coasters.

For a moment all I could do was sit there and wonder if maybe Stan's hangover cures caused hallucinations, and that the whole thing had never actually happened. It seemed more logical than believing that Paige Becwar had come to my house and pretty much thrown herself at me on Valentine's Day.

I drew a little pentagram in the fresh snow with my finger and decided to ask Stan for advice. I started to text him, but the story got so long that I ended up just calling and giving him a full recap. He sat listening patiently until I was done, but I couldn't help but feel as though I was telling him things he already knew.

When I finished, he said, “Leon, when a girl asks you if you want to see her superhero panties,
you say yes
.”

“I couldn't, man,” I said. “I felt kind of like a scumbag just for thinking about it.”

“You
are
a scumbag,” he said. “But you were being even
less
polite by telling her no.”

“I don't know if that's logical.”

I heard him exhale. “You hear any more about that girl in England?”

“I talked to her,” I said. “Just before Paige showed up.”

“Is she moving back?”

“Doesn't look like it. Probably not even coming back to visit.”

“Hmm,” he said. “Hmmm.”

Just what I needed. Someone to quote from the wisdom of the walk-in freezer.

Then he said, “Intriguing.”

And I said, “Most peculiar.”

“Fascinating.”

“Worthy of further study.”

“Certainly one to put forth among the gentlemen at the academy.”

“Shit, man,” I groaned. “Paige fucking Becwar just threw herself at me. Maybe all this apocalypse shit is true after all.”

“There are dark days ahead, young minion,” said Stan. “There shall come a great plague. The high school hallways will flow with the blood of the unbeliever.”

“Of course,” I said.

I heard him exhaling. “Look,” he said. “You've been thinking you need to clean up your act in the event that Anna came back, right?”

“Yeah, maybe,” I said.

“You should at least clean out your car,” he said. “And if I were you, I'd go out with Paige.”

“Seriously?”

“Have you bothered to read
The Satanic Bible
yet?”

“No.”

“Lack of style and aesthetics is one of the nine Satanic sins, and you've gotten to be a real sinner in that regard. Your car looks like an annex to the city dump, and the smell rubs off on you.”

“Like you should talk,” I said. “Even most rats with any self-respect won't go in your basement.”

“Plenty of people who have their shit together better than you do come to my place,” he said. “Paige will at least get you to start shaving those pubes on your chin.”

I snuck a look over at my reflection in my window.

My whiskers
did
kind of look like pubes.

“Huh,” I said. “Well, it's too late now, anyway. Tomorrow I'll probably get a message from her saying she'll kill me if I ever tell anyone about tonight.”