Because we’re at Mindy Fale’s house and her parents are away, all we’ve done through the evening is feel each other up on the two-cushion couch in her living room. We’re in the dark, lit only by the computer that’s set up against the stairwell’s half-wall, and after a good hour of General Makeout Fest, well after Conan, I’m feeling sort of fluish, one shoe suddenly off, staring into the fruit-punch vortex on her monitor’s screensaver. Which makes General Makeout Fests way sadder and way more annoying than you would imagine.
“It’s just Necro,” I say. Her forehead is pressed into my cheek. “The Aurorist?”
She rolls over. “Bitter, Nate.”
Her living room is cramped as the inside of a music box, porcelain trinkets on heavy wooden shelves built into the walls.
My lips feel raw from kissing. She’s crushing my chest a little, so I squirm, and she props herself up on one elbow. “You need to get involved in something. Maybe church. It’d be good for you.”
“What does everybody always mean, good for me?”
I know I’m starting to depend on her more, because she has the kind of pity where it makes me want to shoot down her advice so I can get more pity. The screensaver changes to blue, to red, to yellow, and makes flickery shadows of the porcelain figurines on the shelves—a lumberjack, a swan, a newsboy, an archer. Each figurine stands next to a sign displaying a suit of a playing card.
“Something good has to come from your situation,” she goes.
“Well, it won’t,” I say.
She stands up and puts her hands on her hips.
“Whatever. You don’t care,” I say.
“If I didn’t care would I be—” she gestures broadly to the couch. “Never mind.”
Mindy Fale leads me up the stairs, which ascend more at the angle of a ladder than a staircase. Her bed is waist-high, bedspread woolly as cotton candy, dolls and teddy bears piled two or three deep on the bed and her dresser. She reaches forearm-deep into the pile of dolls, pulling out the smallest, most mangled one.
The doll has a green Girl Scouts-type dress, a picnic-tablecloth Raggedy Ann face, and loose hemming where its right arm meets her body.
“This is Patty,” she says. “I thought you should meet her.”
I lie down. She lies down. The sheets are clean and stiff, like they were broiled dry. Some cartilage pops in my chest when she lays on top of me. She turns off the reading light attached to the bed’s headboard.
“Could be worse,” she pauses, thinking, which is also annoying. “You could be in Ethiopia.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
She shakes her head. Her shoulders collapse and her brow crumples. “Well it seems like you’re trying to sad your way into bed with me,” she says, voice coming from some future where nothing is ever a joke. She’s taken her hand out of my hair, like how some girls can move themselves away from me without me noticing, in that way where they’re always smarter than me in all the ways that count.
So I say, with the last shreds of Happy Rolodex I can gather, Happy Rolodex’s Last Stand: “I don’t know. It’s different with every girl.”
“Different, like, with who, specifically?”
From her window, I see some light move. She knows I’m lying. “I—um, I, I—” Make something up. Give her a name she can’t track. “Crystal-Lynn Mauer.”
Who I hope doesn’t actually exist. Then I remember that Crystal-Lynn Mauer does, in fact, exist, because she worked at the Science Store in Eastview, where me and Necro asked if we could buy gravity.
“Don’t get freaked out,” Mindy Fale says. “I just feel bad for you. You just seem like the unhappiest person I’ve ever met.”
Which: unhappiest person? Tell that to my pants, when she rolls on top of me, pressing me halfway deep into the mattress, and sticks her hand through my fly, and it feels like she’s rummaging for a stray tissue in her purse, but it’s good enough, and I get into pushup position over her, and I don’t even think to say to myself, with no friends left to even say it to: Well this is it! Flight Deck of the Enterprise!
After that, the whole thing feels pretty much like I imagined. The pillowcase is halfway off my pillow. A steam bubble cools in my head. Some enormous part of my personality feels as if it’s been pulled out of me, like a bunch of tied-together handkerchiefs from a magician’s mouth. The sheets feel less papery. The bedspread covers my left thigh. My underwear is rolled up into the fold where the bed sheets tuck under the mattress. My brain feels like the Snoopy nightlight in her bedroom, hovering in the dark, tracers batting across my eyes when I blink.
“Playing anything good on finger drums?” she says.
Because I’ve, on total autopilot, been tapping out a drumbeat on her waist. “Oh, it was nothing.”
She rolls over and digs her chin into my chest. “Tell Mindy.”
My stomach catches some shine from the nightlight when I inhale. “Well, it started out as Phil Collins’s ‘Take Me Home.’” She rolls away and laughs into the headboard. “But only for a second, I swear! And then it redeemed itself, sort of, by turning into ‘Rikki Don’t Lose That Number!’”
She bolts out of bed and claps her hands to her face, standing now, brow tense with important things. Her paunch line and vagina just out there.
“I was just thinking—just thinking—that was the song you were playing,” she says, serious like she’s dug up a lost Bible chapter. “Like I was half-thinking it, and then you said it. My dad used to sing that song to me in the car and change Rikki to Mindy. I was literally raised on that song.”
I sit up and pull the covers over my crotch. She points to her eyes with her index and middle finger and then points to mine. “I’m very passionate about connections. We are buying that album first thing when we get an apartment!”
Even I wonder about this. Even I try to raise some doubt in her. “But what am I going to do for money?” I say.
“Dude. I make $26,000 a year.”
I fall back down with my arms spread out. She throws herself on the bed and I bounce upward slightly. She is this awesome naked linebacker of a woman; her whole body is marshmallowy, made for breastfeeding, this girl, who can whoop my ass in bed, who I can get weird and desperate with. I had no idea we were together.