SEVEN
MIRIAM VERSUS THE FRIEND ZONE
“Wait up; there’s something I have to tell you,” Jace says, trailing after her in his flannel pants and A-Team T-shirt.
But she ignores him. “It’s cool. Not like I saved your hides or anything. Oh, wait! Totally did. Guess your little lives aren’t worth as much as I thought. Shoulda let Cracker Factory Santa poison you all anyway. You know he was an escaped mental patient? That he poisoned seven other kids besides you? Don’t I get a gold star?” She glowers.
“We gave you a place to stay. You were staying under bridges—”
“Yep, like a troll. Thank you from saving me from my troll-like existence for a short time so that I may walk amongst you virtuous mortals, but now comes the time for you to send me back to my bridge—”
“That’s what I’m trying to say, everything will be okay—”
“Yeah,” Miriam says, “it’s all going to be peach fuzz and puppy parades from here on out. Me and the other homeless will tickle-fight one another over who gets the last moldy bread-end. Meanwhile, Cherie the awful whorebag cunt-rag bitch-scag fag-hag—hey, so many rhymes!—will be sleeping on my dumpy-ass futon. A futon I actually bought, by the way, but futons are heavy and I have nowhere to go so I guess I’ll be leaving it behind. I hope she gets bedbugs in her vagina. And they lay eggs. And she becomes the Mother of Bedbugs—”
As she rants, she tosses items into her backpack. A few pairs of jeans. Handful of white T-shirts. Cigarettes. Bear mace. Tiny minibar bottles of Jameson’s. A Santa hat.
“I got you a job!” Jace blurts.
She turns. Makes a poopy face. “Me and jobs don’t play well together. My last real job kind of ended with a shooting. And a stabbing, come to think of it.”
“I don’t mean that kind of job—” He fishes in the pockets of his flannel surrender-pants, pulls out a folded up piece of paper: the world’s most boring origami. He begins to unfold it. “I ran a Craigslist ad—”
“I definitely do not want whatever this job is. Particularly if it has the word hand or rim preceding it—”
“No, wait, shut up for a second. A couple months back I put up an ad for your . . . particular talents, the psychic death thing, and for a while I mostly just got a bunch of trolls who thought I was a pimp—”
“I don’t like where this is going.”
“But last week I got this e-mail.”
He thrusts the unfolded paper at her. Like a beaming toddler proud of his dirty diaper.
She grabs it. Scowls. Reads.
Her gaze suctions onto a very big number in the middle of the e-mail.
Five thousand dollars.
“Five grand,” she says, looking up. “This guy wants to pay me five fucking grand to tell him how he’s going to die?”
Jace nods, grinning ear to ear.
“Are you sure he doesn’t think this is code for sex?”
“I . . . I called him.”
“You called him.”
“I thought he might think it was about sex, so.”
“And it’s not about sex.”
“No, he’s some rich guy in Florida. A little obsessed with his own . . .” Jace flutters his fingers in the air, a gesture he makes when he’s trying to think of a word. “Demise.”
“Five grand.”
“Yep.”
“Rich nutball.”
“Yes.”
“In Florida.”
“Apparently.”
“That means I need to get to Florida.”
He shrugs. “Well. Yeah.”
“Call him.” She snaps her fingers. “Set it up.”
“Okay,” he says. But he just stands there. Staring at her.
“What?”
“What-what?”
“You’re looking at me.”
“I think it’s okay to look at you. You can look at me, too.”
“I am looking at you looking at me, and at this point I’m starting to wonder what’s going on.”
He shifts nervously from foot to foot. “I just thought you could say, you know . . . thank you?”
“Oh. Well.” Miriam clears her throat, loosens some of that tobacco mucus that nests in her vocal cords. “Thank you, Jace. By the way, I hate that name. Jace. Jason—Jason is a good name. Or Jay. I like Jay. It’s like a bird. I like birds. Mostly.”
“Do you like me?”
“Huh?”
“I like you.”
“Oh, sweet Christ on a crumbcake, really?”
“Really what? We’ve known each other for a year now and we’ve kind of skirted around each other and flirted—”
“I did not flirt.”
“We were flirting,” he says, nodding, smirking. “Sometimes people flirt and they don’t even know it.”
She narrows her eyes. “Nnnyeah, I think I’d know.”
“You’re leaving soon.”
“Pretty much now-ish.”
He reaches out. Takes her hand. “That bed looks pretty comfortable.”
She shoves him backward. Not hard enough to crack his skull against the doorframe, but enough to get the message across.
“Hey,” he says, genuinely stung. “Ow.”
“Thank your stars and garters I didn’t perform dentistry using your asshole as the entry point.”
He sighs. “Friend-zoned again. Nice guys finish last.”
The temperature in her mental thermometer pops the glass. “What did you just say? Are you seriously pulling that nice-guy friend-zone crap? You little turd, how’s that supposed to make somebody feel? That my friendship is just a way station to my pussy? Is that what my companionship is worth to you, Jace?”
“It’s not like that. I just thought—”
“You thought what? That because you’re a nice guy, my panties will just drop because you deserve to have my thighs around your ears? Fuck you, dude. Being a nice person is a thing you just do, not a price you pay for poonani. I’m not a tollbooth. A kind word and a favor don’t mean I owe you naked fun time.”
Now he’s mad. Brow stitched. Lip curled. “Oh, like you’re a nice person? Please.”
“I’m not! I’m not nice. And this is not news, dude. I’d rather be a cranky bitch who lets you know what she’s thinking than some passive-aggressive dick-weasel who thinks friendship with a girl is secondary to her putting out. You wanted to fuck me? You shoulda just said so. I would’ve at least respected that, and we wouldn’t have to do this boo-hoo woe-is-me pissy-pants guilt-fest.”
She throws on her jacket and snatches the e-mail out of his hand and slings the bag over her shoulder. A hard elbow to the gut leaves him bent over and oof-ing.
Miriam heads to the door.
He trails after like a bad smell.
Taevon and Cherie watch, goggle-eyed.
“I’m sorry,” Jace says, rubbing his stomach.
“You are sorry,” she says, throwing open the door to the hallway.
“I’m a dick.”
“A tiny dick. An insignificant dick. Positively microbial.”
“Can I call you?”
“Can you . . . No, you can’t call me.”
“But you have the same phone if I wanted to?”
“I’m going to throw it in a bag and burn it.”
“Wait—”
“Bye, everybody.”
She grabs her bee-sting breasts at them. A last fuck you.
Then she’s out the door, slamming it in Jace’s face.