Professor Feelgood (Page 45)

Feeling the pressure, I stare at my blank document and will some words to come.

Okay, the day I met Jake. Easy. Just close your eyes and remember. All my memories have been pushed into the dark for so long, letting them see daylight again isn’t easy. I have the hazy outline of what happened, but that’s no good for a descriptive paragraph. I have to remember details, smells, colors, feelings.

Gingerly, I crack open the door in my mental basement and head down the stairs.

_______________

“Time.”

When Jake’s voice cuts through my concentration, my fingers are flying over the keys, and the sudden distraction causes me to hit all the wrong letters. If my writing flow were traffic, Jake just caused a ten-car pileup.

“Just a sec,” I say, backtracking so I can fix the slew of typos. There’s no way I’m giving him an opening to criticize my grammar.

I finish up correcting the paragraph and then exhale. “Okay, done.”

I look up at him and hold out my hand. “Show me what you’ve got.”

He shakes his head. “Oh, no. Ladies first. I insist.”

He gets up and comes to sit beside me before pulling my computer onto his lap and scrolling up to the top of the page. He starts to read it out loud, but I hold up my hand.

“God, no. Too weird. Silent reading, please.”

He nods and turns back to the screen. I feel too embarrassed to watch his reaction, so instead I scan the words again, just to make sure I caught all the mistakes.

The first time I laid eyes on Jacob Stone, he was peeing on my mother’s favorite rose bush. There was a chain-link fence that separated our broken-down row houses, and when I came out onto our lopsided porch, there he was, tackle out, squinting as he gave mom’s favorite Arctic White a good watering. He was three with dark, unruly hair, and even darker eyes. He stared at the rose bush as he relieved himself, and the intensity of his expression made it seem as if he was angry with the world.

When he’d finished, he fixed himself up and then looked over to examine me with a combination of curiosity and wariness. It was the same way I studied insects in my bug catcher, always trying to figure out if they were harmless or harboring hidden stingers. In nature, as in life, there’s a fine line between friends and foes.

I was fascinated by the depth of his dark eyes, but his intensity made me nervous. I remember saying a silent prayer that he would like me.

After a few moments of frowning scrutiny, Jacob seemed to come to a decision. He stepped forward, tipped his chin at me, and in a clear, strong voice said, ‘Hey’.

That was it. No introduction. No smile. Just, “Hey.”

That’s all it took for us to be friends.

I guess Jake and I read at the same pace, because as I finish, so does he. He pushes the computer back over to me, weird tension in his shoulders.

“So, that’s how you remember it?”

“Yes, because that’s how it was.”

He nods, but the way he grips his hands together tells me he doesn’t agree.

“Not bad. Decent word count. A solid seven out of ten.”

It feels so odd that he’s the one giving writing feedback and not the other way around.

“Okay, then, Dostoyevsky,” I say. “Hand over your brilliance.”

“Sure.” He hands me the notebook. I look down at what he’s written.

Wow. He’s filled an entire page.

Dear Malevolent Overseer,

Right now, I’m writing mindlessly, because I can feel you watching, and there’s no goddamn way I’m going to sit here and admit that even direct competition with you isn’t opening my wordy floodgates. You’ll probably chew my ears off for engaging in this Theater of Deception, but fuck it. I can’t give you silk if all I have is sawdust.

As for you, this challenge seems to have lit a fire under your ass. You’re typing a mile a minute, and you’re doing that thing you always did when you were concentrating on something super hard. I call it ‘thinking tongue.’ You plant your tongue in the corner of your mouth so a little bit pokes out, and if you’re really focusing, you kind of chew on it a bit. It looks ridiculous, by the way. It always did. Still, you seem to be getting a decent number of words down, so the tongue thing must be working for you. Maybe I should try it.

Honestly, sitting here trying to give my story any sort of coherent beginning is torturous. Did it start when the woman I loved left me? Or is that when it ended? Have all the words I’ve written since served as the eulogy for a dead relationship? And at what point does the bitterness and loss that I bleed onto these pages enable me to just let it the fuck go?

If you could answer any and all of these questions, then you might earn some semblance of gratitude from me. Until then, you need to figure out how the hell to make the clusterfuck of my life into something people want to read, because I sure as hell can’t.

Anyway, time is almost up, and yet again, I have nothing valid to say. I blame you. It’s probably not your fault, but I blame you anyway. That’s what you get for being the boss.

I think the best course of action right now is for us to go eat. I haven’t had breakfast, and I’m starving. You want words? Feed my brain. I’m thinking the 10th Street deli and that you’re buying.

Let’s go.

I close my eyes and sigh. “Jake …”

He grabs my computer and shoves it into my bag then hands me my coat and heads toward the door.

“You can yell at me on the way to the deli. I’ll have a foot-long sub with everything and a Diet Coke. Got to watch my carbs.”

I’d bother arguing if I thought it would do any good, but it’s clear this morning’s writing session is a bust. Also, with all this talk of food, I have a wicked hankering for a roast beef bagel.

“Fine. I’m letting you do this, but right after lunch, we start afresh.”

He pulls the apartment door closed behind us and leads me down the stairs. “Yeah, yeah. Whatever you say, boss lady.”

FIFTEEN

____________________

A Tax on Hope

JAKE PUSHES AWAY HIS plate and wipes his mouth with a napkin. He ended up eating a foot-long plus a cheeseburger, then topped it all off with a piece of apple pie and ice cream. If I ate that much, this restaurant would look like the chest-bursting scene out of Alien. As it is, I barely made it through half of my bagel before I unfurled the white flag.

Jake gestures to what’s left on my plate. “You going to finish that?”

I roll my eyes and push it across to him, then roll them again when he attacks it like he’s been on a month-long hunger strike.

“Where the hell do all those calories go?” I ask, incredulous. “How does a gluttonous pig such as yourself have three percent body fat?”

He smiles around a mouthful of food. “Self-loathing burns a lot of energy.”

I cross my arms and mutter, “Tell that to my thighs. I’ve loathed them for years.”

He swallows and wipes his mouth. “Don’t do that.”

“What?”

“Be the girl with the perfect body who trashes herself so others will contradict her.”

I almost laugh. “I’ve never had a perfect body. That honor went to Eden.”

He stares at me. “You’re joking now, aren’t you? It’s hard to tell, but you must be.” He takes another bite of food. “Fucking ridiculous statement.”

On the table, both of our phones buzz at almost the same time. We pick them up to check the screens, then look at each other.