Mom did not triumph at the gathering of CrossFit Worshippers of Central Minnesota. Charlie was ecstatic at her arrival early on Sunday morning and rammed into her shins again and again. I imagined his little doggy voice saying, I humped so many legs this weekend, Mama. It was a good thing he couldn’t talk.
“How was it?” I asked.
She moaned and flopped onto the couch. “I’m going to die.”
“So that’s good? You know what I’ve heard? Pain is just weakness leaving the body.”
She propped herself up on her elbows and gave me the stink-eye. “Can I tell you how many tattoos of that I saw this weekend?” She dropped her head back on the couch cushion and groaned. “I have to work in an hour and my entire body is made out of Jell-O.”
“See, you’ve already achieved my fitness goal.” I ducked as she threw a couch pillow at my head. “Come on, I have to work, too.”
“Don’t wanna,” she whined, rolling facedown onto the couch. Then she looked up. “Why does it smell like cinnamon in here?”
On the bus ride to the Mall of America, we sat next to each other. She stretched out her legs continuously.
“So there was this one part—where I had to flip this tire? It was one of those tractor tires, you know?”
“Yeah, from all my farm experience,” I said.
“Are you aware that there are things called tractors and they have tires?”
“Now I am.”
“Anyway, you have to lift it and flip it over, and then lift it and flip it over again. And you have to keep doing that until you reach the finish line. So I thought: ‘How am I gonna do this? This looks impossible.’ And I see this other woman who’s like five-one and pregnant and she’s next to me, and she just like, GRUNTS, like a wild beast, and she just like HEAVES the thing over—I don’t know if she was having crazy pregnancy strength—”
“Is this even recommended for pregnant women?”
“The body is an amazing thing. So I’m like, ‘If she can do it, I can do it.’ So I grabbed it, and I’m thinking, ‘I own you, tire. I own you.’ And I did it!” She laughed and looked up at the roof of the bus. “I didn’t think it was possible, but I did it. Like four more times, too, before I really twisted something in my back.”
“Probably not, but the adrenaline got me through it.” She patted my knee and turned to look at me. “So I want to thank you for pushing me to go.”
“Oh.”
“No seriously—if you hadn’t pressured me, I wouldn’t have done it, and I wouldn’t have tried, and then I… wouldn’t have known that I could flip a tractor tire.”
“I can imagine that’s going to come in super handy,” I joked. “There’s gonna be a farmer who has an emergency and like calls you—‘By golly, all four of my tires fell off and I need someone to flip them back to the farmhouse. I don’t want them to roll, gol darn it, I want them flipped in the most energy-intensive manner possible!’”
She laughed and looked down at her hands. “Look at this,” she said, flexing and unflexing her fingers. Her palms were still red, and there were thick calluses on the pads just below her fingers. “When I was married to your father, I didn’t ever want to break a goddamn nail. Part of the reason we didn’t get divorced sooner is that I never thought I could make it on my own, you know? I figured I’d be lost without him.” She sniffed, tears welling in her eyes. “I flipped a goddamn tire.”
I leaned my head on her shoulder and wrapped my arms around her jellified, yet muscly core.
The Great American Cookie Factory was already in full meltdown mode when I arrived. Rhonda had called in sick on account of the fact that she was spending Sunday smoking (all right, that was conjecture on my part, but let’s face it, Rhonda was not as invested in the Great American Cookie Factory as she could have been). Valentine’s Day was on Thursday, and the pre-Valentine’s rush is the busiest time of the year for cookie factories around the country. The week prior, Chad had given a brief presentation detailing the war between cookies and chocolates for the soul of lovers everywhere. This was serious.
“Oh, jeez, thank goodness you’re here, we have a crisis,” he said. He seemed to be coated in a thin layer of sugar, frosting, and unidentifiable goop.
“On it, boss,” I said, saluting him.
The ovens in the back were working overtime and were completely stuffed with our signature oversized cookies. The counters were a riot of frosting tubes, sprinkles, and dirty dishes. I exhaled, dumped as many dirty dishes as I could fit into the sink, and tried to clear off a workspace.
Chad came back as soon as he had dispatched the latest customers. “So, um… we’ve been getting a lot of requests for, uh… funny cookies?”
“Oh.”
“And I tried, but oh jeez they were, um…” I looked at one cookie that said BEE MINE, followed by a poorly dabbed honeybee. “It’s funny ’cause it’s a bee. I thought of this one, too.” He pointed to another one, which said HAPPY VALENTIME’S DAY with a clock next to it. “Some kids think it’s Valentime’s Day, not Valentine’s Day, so.”
I looked at them and frowned. “This is some bullshit, Chad.”
He sighed sadly. “Yeah, I know. I need the special Sydney magic.”
“It’s dark magic.”
“I know that.”
“Like witch magic.”
“Gotcha. Just give me some funny cookies.”
I put up a finger as more people arrived at the counter. “I want full artistic autonomy. My cookies might not even have a Valentine’s Day theme, they might scare the hell out of you, but I need you to trust me.”
He nodded. “Done.”
From there, it was ten straight hours of cookie baking, lettering, and decoration. I experimented with different fonts; I perfected the art of making little flowers. I was a human cookie machine. Some of the cookies scared Chad. He wasn’t sure about THE TESTS CAME BACK NEGATIVE with little exclamation points around it (sold in twenty minutes to a group of sorority girls) or THIS HOLIDAY IS BULLSHIT, which also flew off the shelf. Even my HETERONORMATIVE LOVE IS FOR SQUARES found a happy home.
Word continued to spread, and soon there were people lining up to take photos of the cookies and post them on Instagram. In my spare time, I started an Instagram account of my own for the cookies and racked up five hundred followers by the end of the day. We ran out of dough just after three, which caused Chad to lose his mind calling other stores—it took about an hour to get an emergency resupply.
“Hoo!” he exhaled in a gap in the action near the end of my shift as I was putting the finishing touches on a YOUR BEST YEARS ARE BEHIND YOU cookie. “I never realized how bitter and sarcastic a lot of people are about love.”
I smiled. My neck ached. It felt like I’d been flipping tractor tires for the past hour.
“Anytime you want more hours, you let me know.”
“Well, I’m busy in school, so—”
“Oh sure, yah. I know. If you want to drop out of school and make cookies full-time, let me know!”
I tried to laugh it off, but it felt like he had just stuck a needle into my brain.
“Little joke,” he said, noticing my discomfort. “I know that’s not my thing. Jokes, that is.”
“Yeah, I followed you,” I said, shaking it off.
The call bell at the front dinged. It was Elijah. “Service!” he yelled, shaking his fist. “I demand service!”
“Hold your horses,” called out Chad.
“No, it’s cool, that’s my friend,” I said, dusting off my apron. Elijah was wrapped up in his heavy coat. He had taken off his hat, and it jutted out of the pocket. His cheeks were flushed, either from the cold or a mad dash through the Mall of America. He was leaning over and reading the cookies in the display case.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“Just… examining your cookies,” he said, trying to keep a straight face. “They’re… surprisingly big.” He broke into a shit-eating grin as he said it.
“Dude!”
“And… covered with frosting.”
“Would you quit talking about my cookies?”
“I like this one. ‘The Therapist Said I Should Give You Surprises.’”
“My cookies tell it like it is.” I leaned over the counter. “So what are you really doing here?”
“Um… I thought you might want to practice or… I could give you a ride home.”
Chad approached and handed me an envelope. In it was my meager paycheck and about fifty dollars in cash. “What’s the cash for?” I asked.
“People started tipping. After I put out a jar.”
“Damn.”
“You earned it. All right, you crazy kids, get out of here.”
I turned to Elijah. “I need to pay you back for that skirt.”
“I’ve got a way you can do that,” he said, motioning for me to follow him.
“Classy,” I said, looking at the flora and fauna of the Rainforest Café. Every so often, the animatronic apes would lose their shit, shrieking and pounding their robotic fists in impotent fury. Toucans blared a cacophonous chorus, and even the robot elephant would extend his trunk and trumpet about the oncoming appetizers. Overhead, a starry sky winked down at us, punctuated by the occasional shooting star.
Elijah looked around. “This is exactly like being in the deep jungle.”
“I’m sure,” I said, laughing. “Have you spent a lot of time in the wild?”
“Definitely. You’d be surprised at how accurate this is.” He pointed to a four-foot-tall plaster mushroom. “I mean, that is basically where I lived in my former life as an explorer. But there were actually fewer nachos in the jungle.”
The lights of the Rainforest Café were on some kind of bizarre timer; every once in a while they would darken so much that it would be hard to read. “I think it’s nighttime now,” I said, using my phone to light the menu.
“This is when the beasts are most active,” he joked. “The crazy part about this place is the people who bring their toddlers, and the toddlers like lose their minds. ‘Mommy is taking me to the jungle to feed me to the animals.’”
“You could get a job here. Rock the khaki survival outfit look they got going on.”
“Once again, highly accurate to jungle life.”
I laughed. It was easy talking to Elijah, like a playful dance. He’d say something funny, then I’d say something funny back, and we’d try to keep it going like badminton, which had been the one athletic activity I enjoyed as a kid. Basically tennis except much less running and more staring at the sky.
Elijah smiled at me, and I caught the glint of his eyes in the dark restaurant. Lakshmi’s words reverberated in my brain: Lady Boner. I felt a buzzing in my chest and took a deep breath.
“Can I ask you something?” he said.
Oh shit.
“Okay.”
He took a deep breath. “The other day you said you knew Sparks from before? And that’s been bugging me because I never asked you about that.”
My face went red, but I’m sure he couldn’t see it in the dim light. “Oh.”
“What?”
“I thought you were gonna ask me something else.”
No one said anything for a moment.
“I just thought,” he said, “since I told you my story with him that maybe… he had done something similar to you. And I was going to add that to the reasons I wanted to destroy him. For you.”
“No, it’s not like that,” I managed. “Um… He’s basically the reason my dad is in prison.”
Elijah snagged a cheese stick off the table and dipped it in the marinara sauce. “Holy shit, what happened? And if they killed somebody, you don’t have to tell me.”
So this is basically the story of How My Dad Goes to Prison.
“I don’t know if this happened concurrently with his reign at Eaganville, but Joey Sparks was a motivational speaker. He used to do these bullshit self-help seminars—basically telling people that the reason they failed was because they didn’t believe in themselves. Real basic stuff. But you know, he’s magnetic, and with the right headset, lighting, and PowerPoint presentation, he’s capable of bilking a bunch of midlife-crisis sufferers out of their money.
“My dad had a private financial consulting business. He used to work for a bank or something but then went into business for himself when I was real little. Which was great, because he worked out of the house, and I could hang out in his office. I used to read in there for hours; I would drag stacks of books onto the shaggy white rug on his floor. I lay on that rug for hours, imagining I had been shrunk to the size of an ant and was now on the surface of some huge furry dog. Or an explorer on an alien planet. He used to play his music on his computer loud when he wasn’t on the phone—and when things were slow, he’d get down on the floor and read to me. And things were slow a lot. It was a really good life.
“I guess a good life for me meant bad business for him, though. I didn’t know that, obviously, but it was one of the reasons my parents fought all the time. There was never enough money. Or my dad was always lying about the amount of money coming in. My dad was great at bullshit.”
“The apple has not fallen far from the tree,” said Elijah, munching on another cheese stick.
“Probably truth.” I smiled. “So this goes on for years—things get worse and worse until Sparks comes along. Sparks is teaching this ‘course’ to professionals about maximizing their potential. Dad spends, I don’t know, like three hundred dollars to do like six classes with Sparks, who knows jack shit about financial consulting, by the way.”
“Shocking.”
“My dad took me to one once. I think I must’ve been twelve. And it’s like… just imagine Sparks and these like animated graphics on his PowerPoint talking nonsense about cultivating your winning aura, and receiving energy from the universe, and basically lying your ass off to get what you want. The ends justify the means. Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing. Fail, fail again, fail better, fail less. I mean—I was twelve and I basically wanted to stick my hand in a blender to get out of there.
“But my dad is transfixed by this bullshit. I mean, I’m watching him, he’s staring at Sparks like Jesus himself has smashed through the roof and is giving a sermon about buying an expensive watch. It is fucked up. And afterward he changes everything he’s doing. He moved his office out of the house—he got new clothes, he started acting like he had a ton of money. He had a money clip, got a Porsche. All smoke and mirrors shit to try to land high-flying clients. That was the plan, land a few rich clients by pretending you’re a rich person, and then you pay off all the money. Of course he was lying to my mom during all of this; every time he bought something new, he was borrowing money from somewhere.
“Basically my dad’s entire business was like Wile E. Coyote when he runs off the cliff. As long as he keeps running on air and not looking down, it works. He took out loans to pay his other loans. He did a whole bunch of shady shit; tax fraud, insurance fraud, forging documents—I mean, it was madness. Fake donations to fake charities; I don’t know half of what he did. I just know that he got in deeper and deeper and kept digging.”
Elijah nodded. “Seems like kind of a stretch to blame Sparks for that, though.”
“Dad was a loser before Sparks. He was a criminal after.”
“I guess.”
“You know how he is. People change when they meet him. The kids on the team, everybody. He ruins people.”
Elijah reached his hand across the table. I stretched to take it. “I’m sorry about that,” he said, his eyes meeting mine.
“Thanks.”
Our fingers stayed together a moment too long. A chill ran down the back of my neck. His index finger lightly brushed against the side of my index finger. Then it did it again.
Maybe it was time to figure out what the hell was going on?
“So,” I said, letting my fingers slide back, “why are you really coming to hang out at the mall?”
He pulled his hands back, running them over the leopard-print table. “I didn’t have anything else to do?”
“Oh, really? You don’t seem like a let’s-go-hang-out-at-the-mall kind of guy.”
“A guy can’t just drive to the mall for no reason? Maybe I’m a mystery.”
I snorted. “Maybe you’re a dork.”
“That, too.” He smiled and looked down again. “Um…” He looked up, his blue eyes looking black. I met his gaze.
“Yeah?” The air hummed between us.
OOH! OOH! OOH! The animatronic gorilla right behind me started roaring and pounding its chest, nearly knocking me out of my chair.
“This place is super romantic,” he said.
“Are we supposed to be someplace romantic?” I asked.
“I don’t know. We’re just two friends—in a romantic jungle setting with… robot monkeys and cheese sticks… who are a part of a conspiracy. Nothing to see here.”
“All right, look,” I said. “Um… I mean… this is probably stupid and wrong, but Lakshmi and I were talking the other day, and she seems to think that you… like me in a certain non-friendly way, which is probably ridiculous because you are obviously in love with her, but this whole thing where you just come and hang out and be charming and cute or whatever is kind of messing with me right now, so if you could clarify that situation, that would be much appreciated.”
Elijah looked like he’d been caught robbing a liquor store. “Uh…”
“Spit it out before some other animal starts yelling at us.”
“Okay, I’m just really bad at this,” he started. “I was never going to ask Lakshmi to the Snow Ball.”
“What?”
“She’s like my sister.”
“You like worship her.”
“She’s like my really cool sister. I was gonna ask you. At the assembly. I wanted it to be a surprise. That’s why I made it seem like I was going to ask Lakshmi—it was kind of a… misdirection. Then afterward you said you wanted to go and it became like a group thing. Then you said you had sworn off love and wanted to be a priestly nun. So I shut my mouth.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I guess I just didn’t want to be the latest in a string of assholes. I was worried I would screw it up, and then I wouldn’t be able to talk to you anymore. And I love talking to you.” He stretched his hand across the table.
I slid my hand across the table and managed to touch his warm fingers.
“Jesus, this table is wide,” I said.
“You know, in Europe couples sit side by side, not across from each other. That’s what I’ve heard at least. If we were… you know… couple-inclined.”
“Well, get your ass over here, then,” I said.
The next thing I knew he was sitting by my side, and we were making out like a couple of Europeans.