Play Me Backwards (5 page)

Jake said he hadn't made a payment on his car insurance in months. If he didn't come up with the cash, he'd be stranded out in Preston, the far-flung suburb about two miles north of nowhere where he lived, unable to make any more trips to the Cave.

Jenny was probably lying when she talked about how much pot she was smoking lately, and everyone knew it, but no one called her on it. Lies were not really frowned upon in the Ice Cave. It was generally known that she was only able to come to the Cave at all because her parents thought it was a study group.

I talked about how I needed to find some way to serve about two hundred hours of detention for cutting gym before they'd give me a diploma. I hadn't served any yet.

Stan talked about how he'd been cast out of Heaven by a vengeful god, and how it was harder to sneak his message into people's brains now that computers made it so easy to play “Stairway to Heaven” backwards.

This was our life. And it always would be. Even if I one day got a job, say, making training films for a living, if I ever ran into one of these guys, I would tell them that I made
fucked up
training films.

We all at least made a show of acting like it didn't bug us. I didn't tell people that I sometimes woke up in the middle of the
night sweating and wondering what the hell I was going to do if my parents got a note or a phone call explaining things. There was a gnawing, hungry feeling of dread in my guts, that little cartoon monster that I could only ever ignore, not get rid of. The thought of Anna coming back only made me feel it more plainly, and I decided to change the subject before things got worse.

“So, speaking of trouble at school,” I said, “Remember when we tried to talk the board into starting up a crotch-kicking team?”

Edie stood up and did a karate kick in the air. “Hell yeah.”

“I just had Paige Becwar half-convinced that I was a wide deliverer on the team.”

“Did you sing her the fight song?” Edie asked.

I shook my head, so she and Jenny launched into a stirring rendition of the song Dustin had written for our proposal, which was called “Till They Can Taste 'Em.” I joined in on the lines I remembered, and Dustin stuck his head into the back room to sing out the last line. It was a beautiful moment.

“I fucking hate girls like Becwar,” said Danny. “They get all pissed off and freak out if someone's wearing white after Labor Day. Say what you will about us, man, at least we don't judge people like that back here.”

“What?” I asked. “You wouldn't pick on someone if he came back here in a polo shirt and a Nike hat?”

“I'd have to punch him,” said Danny. “But I wouldn't
mean
anything by it. And we'd be cool afterwards.”

He had a point. There wasn't a lot of judgment going on in the Ice Cave. We all met as equals. Then again, it wasn't like we had anything to test our tolerance. People like Paige and Joey almost never came to the back.

All the while, Stan was sort of staring at me.

“Where did you run into Paige?” he asked.

“She came into Captain Jack's while I was there,” I said.

“And what were you doing at Captain Jack's?” he asked.

He'd caught me, and he knew it.

“Listening to
Moby-Dick
put me in the mood for seafood.”

He nodded, like he'd known all along that listening to that damned book would lead me to eat at Captain Jack's, and that Paige would be there needing a ride home. And like he already knew what was going to happen for the next several months, too. It was times like this that I remembered why I tended to give him the benefit of the doubt on his stories about being the devil.

“All as I have forseen,” he said. “Soon, there will come a great plague. The halls of your school will flow with the blood of the unbeliever. How's
Moby-Dick
so far?”

“It's okay,” I said. “But what's the point? That I should go get a job on a whaling vessel so Anna doesn't find out I'm a loser now?”

Stan shook his head. “Commercial whaling has been globally outlawed since 1986,” he said. “So you'd be fucked. My plans work a little better than
that
.”

“She'd never think you were a loser, Leon,” said Jenny. “She
loved
you!”

“Yeah, I had her totally tricked into thinking I was cool,” I said. “But I'm not, and I don't know if I can fake it anymore.”

Jenny laughed. “Do you know how much effort she put in to seeming all cool and intellectual and artsy for you? All that stuff you thought was spontaneous took
weeks
of planning.”

“Right,” I said.

“It's true,” said Edie. “Like, how she used to wear that Kermit the Frog shirt that was long enough to cover her shorts, so it looked like she wasn't wearing any if she didn't move around too much? She practiced in front of the mirror.”

“We used to get sick of her talking about you,” said Jenny.

I had never heard that before, and I didn't exactly believe it. The idea of
Anna
doing something to impress
me
just seemed absurd to me. Jenny couldn't have actually known it if she did, anyway. She was barely allowed out of the house outside of school hours in those days.

Talking about Anna was just about the last thing I really wanted to do at the moment. I knew myself well enough to know that if I got started thinking about her, I'd get sucked back into the same misery I'd felt when she first left, so I took off for home shortly after that, quitting while I was ahead.

As I drove home I listened to another few minutes of
Moby-Dick
, and tried to think of whether I'd heard Ishmael say a single thing about women. I didn't think he had. Then again he hadn't said what put him into that “damp November” mood at the beginning in the first place. I would have bet a hundred bucks that it was a woman.

Or a guy, if that's the way he rolled. I think there was a really good chance that Ishmael and Queequeg, the cannibal guy, were fucking. I could imagine whaling, a job where you get shut up in a ship for years at a time with big beefy harpoon-wielding guys, probably attracted its share of nineteenth-century gays.

But I didn't really pay attention to what was happening in the book. I mostly just thought about Anna and felt like I was driving off of a cliff.

She was eighteen by now. That was the drinking age over there, so she was probably going to wine tastings and shit. She probably had a boyfriend, and he was probably the son of the Earl of Wigton or something. The two of them and her parents probably sat around talking about global politics while they ate gourmet food.

Meanwhile, my parents had probably spent their Valentine's night eating some sort of casserole where the recipe called for ungodly amounts of lard, canned vegetables, and ketchup.

My parents call themselves “food disaster hobbyists,” which is a fancy way of saying that they get their jollies by buying up vintage cookbooks at flea markets, finding the most disgusting recipes in them, then cooking them and eating them so they can make fun of them. It's sort of like watching bad movies just to riff on them, only half the time you get diarrhea. For years—like, up until my sophomore year in high school—I thought that this was a real activity, and there were food disaster hobbyists all over the world. Then I Googled it and found out that it was pretty much just them. I didn't even like to think about where they were
really
going when they told me they were going away to conventions for the weekend.

I didn't participate too much anymore. My habit was to stay at work or at Stan's until I was pretty sure dinner would be over, then drive through Be-Bop's or Burger Box on the way home. Eating alone in my room or my car not only saved me from the food disasters, it saved me from getting nagged about how I was doing. Mom and Dad knew that I wasn't going to college right away, but they thought I was just planning to save some money first so I wouldn't have to work too much once I started. They had no idea
that I wasn't sure how the hell I was even going to graduate in the first place. I was good enough at faking my way through classes that my grades hadn't suffered much, but I still had all those detention hours to work off. The less I spoke to them, the less likely they were to find out.

When I got in, they were sitting on the couch, watching TV.

“Hey, hon,” said Mom. “How was work?”

“Same as any other night, really,” I said.

“Anna called.”

I grabbed the nearest sheet of paper I could find—a piece of junk mail from the table—and pretended to read it, so she wouldn't know I was sort of freaking out, even though I was relieved, on one level, that they'd said “Anna called,” not “the school called.”

“Did she?” I asked.

“She just wanted to see if you were around,” said Mom.

“Did she leave a message?”

“She said she'd e-mail you her new number. She's picked up a tiny bit of a British accent.”

Great. Something to make her even
more
out of my league.

I turned to head up to my room, but Mom caught me by the shoulder. “Not so fast,” she said. “What's she up to these days?”

“Probably just studying all the time,” I said. “I don't know.”

“You two made the cutest middle school couple,” said Dad, who hadn't gotten up from his chair. “You reminded me of your mother and me.”

“Mom,” I said, “if you could move your hand a few inches up towards my neck and squeeze until I go limp, I'd be very grateful right about now.”

She pushed me away. “Not funny,” she said. “Go check your mail, kid.”

One thing my parents have not figured out is that you get to a certain age when teasing your kid just makes you
both
look stupid.

Sure enough, on my computer there was another brief e-mail from Anna. With a phone number. For a long time I just stared at it, and then at the dirt under my fingernails, and wondered what the hell I could say to her.

What if she'd, like,
waited
for me, and I'd repaid her by growing up to be a complete bum who screws around with really unpleasant girls at parties in Stan's basement? She might want to kill me, and I wouldn't blame her.

Or what if she hadn't thought of me in a long time?

It rang three times before she picked up. Her voice—the first time I'd heard it in three years—sounded groggy.

“Hello?”

“Anna!” I said. “It's Leon.”

“Oh, wow,” she said slowly. “Your voice changed.”

I freaked out for a second, then realized she probably just meant that it was deeper now, not that she could tell I wasn't the same person I used to be.

“Did it?” I asked. “I guess it changes so gradually that you don't really notice it when it's happening.”

She laughed. “You do realize that it's four in the morning here, right?”

“Oh, shit,” I said. “I'm sorry! I didn't even think about the time difference.”

“Don't worry. I'm up now.”

She had, in fact, picked up a bit of an accent. Fuck. Even the kinds of British accents that people in England think make people sound stupid sound about 50 percent classier than any American accent. I couldn't possibly imagine anyone with a British accent in the Ice Cave.

“So, you're moving back to Iowa?” I asked.

“Well,” she said, “as of last night we were thinking about coming back for a few days, at least, but I can't imagine we'll actually move. Mom mentioned that we could get a mansion south of Grand Avenue back in Des Moines for what we pay for a flat here, but I think it's about a thousand to one odds. And I love it here.”

“Oh,” I said. “Okay.”

I didn't know whether to feel relieved or heartbroken. It was a bit of both.

“What have you been doing out there, anyway?” I asked.

“Working my ass off, mostly. I'm taking a lot of university classes this year. Any spare time I have I'm volunteering at the theater.”

Of course. Volunteering at a theater. I instantly imagined her sitting around backstage chatting about metaphysics and Shakespeare with a bunch of guys from
Doctor Who
, even though it was probably just the theater at whatever school her dad was teaching at. Still—that meant she was hanging out with a bunch of British college guys. Way out of my league.

“Sounds like a good life,” I said.

“It's not bad. I never get in trouble anymore, though, so I miss you guys. How's everybody been?”

“Getting by,” I said. “Not too much to report, I guess. Edie has a girlfriend. So that's new.”

“She's not with Brian anymore?”

“Nah, it was a pretty messy breakup. I haven't seen him around much lately. Hey, you didn't have fish-and-chips for dinner tonight, did you?”

She laughed. “I made chicken tikka masala,” she said. “Why?”

“I had fish-and-chips,” I said. “I thought it would be cool if maybe you did too.”

“Yeah, it would have been,” she said. But she said it awkwardly, like she was a bit creeped out, and I couldn't help but notice that she specified that she missed “you guys,” not “you.” My attempts at flirting and seeming all romantic and profound were clearly going nowhere.

“Hey,” she said, “Sorry to cut this short, but like I said, it's four a.m. here. Will you be online tomorrow?”

“I have to work,” I said, “but I'll be on when I can.”

“Great,” she said. “Talk to you then.”

And we said “see ya” a few times, then hung up.

So that was it.

She wasn't moving back. If anything she would stop by just long enough to put my heart back inside my sternum, then rip it back out all over again. That was worse than never seeing her again, really.