Cheeseburger Subversive (21 page)

“Hey. Who's
this
guy?”

The Hefner wannabe smirks.

“Hey, babe, it's no wonder you don't like men, if
this
friggin' geek's your boyfriend!”

“I'd like to be!” says Tristan.

“He's got a better chance than you do, jerk!” Veronica barks.

“I do?” coos Tristan.

“Aw! She must be a lesbian!” says the guy too loudly. His compatriots no longer seem to find any of this very amusing. Dressing up in funny outfits and drinking beer is one thing, but demeaning cute young women — potential
dates
is not what they had in mind.

“Yup,” says Mr. Charming, “I think she's a rug-muncher!”

Veronica flushes. She glares at her nemesis, throws her arms around Tristan, and locks onto his face with one of the most vacuum-intensive kisses I have ever witnessed. When she finally pulls herself away, Tristan is cross-eyed with elation. Veronica wears a tight-lipped smile.

“Wrong guess, asshole,” she says to Mr. Charming.

“Bitch!” he spits.

Tristan's expression blanks, and he does something that approaches the Humphrey Bogart level of coolness. I am totally amazed — maybe he
has
learned something from all those comic books!

“Wrong again, buddy,” he says. “That's zero out of two. Shall we try for three?”

He launches a fist in the direction of his beloved's nemesis.
Tres cool
, Tristan!

Unfortunately, his aim is poor and his punch glances off the guy's shoulder. Mr. Charming socks Tristan in the eye, sending him crashing into an onlooker's table.

What the hell am
I
doing? I'm on my feet. I'm sprinting towards Mr. Charming. I've got him by the shoulders. I've spun him around. I've got his arms behind his back. I'm pushing him towards the door.

Where did I learn
this
stuff?

“Out!” I bark, as I launch him through the door, his ass via my foot.

Back at the other side of the bar, the remaining engineers are apologizing profusely to the more attractive members of the W.I.C. contingent. Veronica and Tristan are now sitting together in a dark corner. She is dabbing at his eye with an ice cube. Tristan wears the expression of a heaven-bound soul.

“I thought you were in love with Kurt Cobain?” Tristan sighs.

“Only in theory, Tristan,” Veronica says.

Zoe joins me at the exit.

“Your lip is bleeding,” she says.

I touch my fingers to my lip. Yep, it's blood.

“Geeze, I hate violence,” I gripe.

“Except at hockey games, right?” Zoe says.

“I'm not so crazy about it when it involves me personally.”

Instinctively, I put on my Don Cherry impersonation voice.

“Let this be a lesson to all you kids out there — keep those sticks down!”

Zoe's face. Is she grinning? Yes, I'm sure of it. A grin! But now it's gone.

“Well,” she says.

“Well,” I reply.

“See you later, I guess . . . ”

She turns, pushes the crash bar of the exit door, and she's gone.

I nearly follow her but it occurs to me that Mr. Charming could still be out there waiting to put my teeth into my digestive regions. I opt for the back door.

I catch Tristan's eye as I pass. He gives me the thumbs-up sign as Veronica whispers in his ear.

I sit on the curb behind the Elbow Room, leaning against a plump garbage bag. I'm thinking about the Valentine card I made for Zoe in grade six. On the back of it I wrote, “I want to be Han Solo to your Princess Leia,” then I promptly ripped it up to avoid being taunted by the other boys at school. I'm thinking about our first car date, when I blew up the engine in my doomed old Pontiac trying to race a guy in a Camaro. I'm thinking about when we used her pantyhose to fix my old Ford truck. I'm thinking about how she wiped root beer from my eyes after my
disagreement
with a McDonald's counter boy last year, and about how she wiped blood off my lip after I got punched on the school bus in grade six. I'm thinking about the time in grade eleven, when she wasn't speaking to me, and I wrote a poem for her and read it out loud in class and didn't care if anyone laughed. I'm thinking about how I discovered later that she retrieved that poem from the classroom garbage, smoothed it out, and put it in a pewter frame on her bedside table.

Most of all, I'm thinking about the first time I kissed her, how her lips felt so perfectly warm, like waking in a pool of sunshine through a window pane on a summer morning. I remember how her lips tasted like a strawberry milkshake, how her hair smelled fresh like a forest after a late spring rain. One complex feeling kept crashing over me like a wave as her lips touched mine:
You care about people, you are thoughtful and kind, you are
forgiving, and you are so much more than the pretty face and
body that initially attracted me to you. You are smarter, wiser,
stronger, and braver than I. You are light years ahead of me. I
love you, Zoe Perry.

And this is the thought that finally breaks the dam and lets the tears flow, and I don't even give a shit that I look like a pathetic drunken loser, crying and sitting on a pile of garbage in an alley behind a bar.

“Cruddy night, buddy?” mumbles a drunk who has wandered into the alley (He must be a closet poet, too).

“You doan look so good, pal,” he says as he passes. “Here. Call yerself a cab.”

A quarter clinks before me on the sidewalk. Right.

I try to ignore it.

Oh, what the hell. I toss the quarter. It lands on the pavement, heads up.

Mere chance. I toss it again.

Heads.

And again.

Heads.

Should I go after Zoe?

Heads.

If I were to tell her that I really am sorry, that I feel terrible about what I did, that I really, really miss her and would do practically anything to get her back, will she forgive me?

Heads.

Can I catch her if I run?

Heads.

I know this is crazy, I know I should be locked away in a padded room somewhere . . .

but I'm running.