For You(23)
Author: Mimi Strong

I clapped my hands and whistled, the way I imagined you were supposed to react when someone was stripping for you.

She gave me a withering look, and I dropped my hands to my sides.

“You don’t have to be a prick about it,” she said. “You know I did this for you.”

I was speechless. The idea that her needing to have liposuction had anything to do with me was preposterous. Right then, I should have realized that she and I did not share a similar belief system. We were barely even on the same planet. But… I’m a guy, and she took her skirt off, and once we were both naked, we didn’t seem so different after all.

Together, we made it through the long, dark nights of winter.

Spring came, and we talked a lot about “getting ahead.” I’d ask who it was we were supposed to be getting ahead of, and she’d say it wasn’t people, but bills. We’d get ahead of the bills, and once she was out of school and working, we’d buy a condo together.

I never did meet any of her teachers, even though I’d heard so much about them. She finished her schooling to be a Registered Massage Therapist, and she took some other guy with her to the graduation party. So I heard, through friends of friends. She broke up with me three weeks before her course finished, giving me some bullshit line about us having different destinies.

She had her destiny, with her new career and her shiny new boyfriend—I heard he was in law school—and what did I have?

A motorcycle. That’s what I went out and blew a stack of cash on.

By the time I met Aubrey, a year later, Janine seemed like someone who happened to another guy, like one of those urban legends guys tell each other as a warning. Like the story about a girl poking holes in a condom.

Here’s my urban legend: Girl gets liposuction, forgets about boy who supported her emotionally and financially through all but three weeks of school. Girl ditches idiot boy and upgrades to wealthier boyfriend. Girl gets engaged immediately. Girl shows off enormous diamond ring to ex-boyfriend’s mother at grocery store.

Be warned, guys. Be warned. If the tuition you’re paying isn’t for a course you’re taking, you might be getting played.

Yes, Janine really did show her engagement ring to my mother at the grocery store. When my mother told me, I couldn’t tell who she was more disappointed in.

The second thing I noticed about Aubrey was she didn’t wear a diamond. The first thing I noticed was her eyes. You know how you can hear the ocean when you hold a seashell up to your ear? Sure, it’s just the sound of your own blood rushing in your veins, but it’s a cool trick, all the same.

When I looked at Aubrey’s eyes, so gray and pure, I could feel the pull of the moon.

As I rode away from her that night, my body steering the bike on instinct without the help of my conscious thoughts, I could feel the moon pulling at me.

The moon teased me.

All my instincts were wrong, and I couldn’t trust my feelings. I’d tried to kiss her, but she’d pulled away, and I was so sure I’d ruined everything. Even if she wasn’t married, as I suspected, she probably thought even less of me after that.

I cursed myself for being such a f**king idiot, and I rolled through a stop sign. A truck honked as it bore down on me. I was already out in the middle of the road, and the best evasive maneuver was to gun it, but I hesitated. What scared me was my willingness to die, to be free of all the emotions and heartbreak of this world. What scared me was the tiny blossom of acceptance.

I hit the juice at the last possible minute and peeled out of the way. The truck couldn’t have rubbed my back tire. It couldn’t have come so close to killing me, then simply nudged my back tire enough to give the bike a wobble as I crossed the street, but it did.

To the right of me, on the sidewalk, two boys stood holding their bicycles, both of them with their mouths open, staring at me.

I came to a stop, my feet on the pavement, and yelled to them over the sound of the engine, “Did you see that?” Had they seen my near-transformation into an organ donor?

The boys looked at each other like they were about to get in trouble, jumped on their bikes, and pedaled away quickly.

I wondered, where were they off to in such a hurry? Did they also feel the pull of the moon, telling them to do things they knew they shouldn’t?

Chapter Eleven

AUBREY

I woke up Friday morning twisted up in my bedsheets. The alarm clock hadn’t gone off yet, but I could hear Bell up already, doing something. I crawled out of bed and found her, bottomless, dragging sheets off her bed.

Without a word, I opened the bi-fold door for the stacking washer and dryer that we were fortunate to have in the apartment. I flipped up the lid of the washer and started stuffing the sheets in, careful not to react to the stench of urine.

“I’m sorry, Mommy,” she said, pressing her face against my hip.

She’d never called me Mommy in private before, and I didn’t know how to react or what it meant.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ve got the plastic cover on your mattress. It just wipes right off and washes away, okay?”

“Taylor will know.”

“Your friend? She won’t know if we don’t tell her.”

This answer seemed to satisfy her, and she padded off to brush her teeth.

I couldn’t remember if I’d gotten her to pee one last time before bed the night before. After Natalie and Taylor left, I’d been on the phone with my grandmother, finding out what happened at the hospital. It had sounded a lot worse than it really was, and his fall had been minor. Apparently they’d mixed up my grandfather’s Parkinson’s medications, and the big yellow pill that actually helped the most was the one he hadn’t been taking.

“I’ve been having too much fun,” my grandmother had said over the phone. “With my darling granddaughters.”

“We’re a burden on you. I’ll ask Bruce to cut back my shifts. Maybe I can find something else that’s mornings or days only.”

“Don’t be silly,” she’d said. “You and Bell give me more comfort than you know. My family was broken for a long time, and now it’s finally whole again.”

I wondered if my grandmother had changed as she got older, or if she’d always been so loving. My mother had denied me knowing her when I was Bell’s age, and that made me so angry.

To think, I could have had my sweet grandmother in my life all those years.

I didn’t think I could hate my mother more.

On Friday at work, I kept staring at the entrance, expecting a certain regular to come in.

Maybe he was staying away on account of how we’d left things Thursday night. I worried he wouldn’t come in ever again, and Bruce’s feelings would be hurt.

A tall, muscular guy with dark hair came in and sat at Sawyer’s table, and I felt angry and sad that my mind kept playing tricks on me, making me think it was Sawyer when it wasn’t.