black leather. It must have been fifty feet long when it was unraveled. I thought for a moment about what it would be like to unravel it, then allowed reality to kick in. She was out of my league. I’m strictly minor league—double-A, maybe triple-A if I stretch. Deirdre was playing in the majors.
A cadre of fifteen-year-olds circled her, sputtering about how she was pure poison, brilliant, vascular. She passed through them like they were gypsies asking for a handout and made her way to the bar, stopping right near me and Cortez. My stomach did a little somersault, the way it does when you’re near someone famous, which made me feel a little stupid, given that she was a chick who performed on two-by-fours in the park for handouts.
An older guy, kind of short, with shiny shoes that announced he was a rich guy stepping outside the gates to slum, handed Deirdre a plastic cup of the home brew they were serving before she could ask for one.
“She’s okay,” Cortez said, gesturing toward Deirdre. “Pays on time,” he held up his cup, “lets you party when you’re working for her as long as you don’t overdo it. She’s a little wild, but she’s okay.”
Deirdre was asking Mister Shiny Shoes if he had any blow. The guy answered that he didn’t, but he had cash if Deirdre had connections.
Cortez said something to me.
“Good, good,” I answered, trying to listen to Deirdre’s conversation. The guy said that he thought Deirdre was very sexy, and that he wanted to fuck her, and handed her his business card. She took it like it was a dead rat.
“She’s a good singer,” I said to Cortez. When your cognitive capacity is taken up by another task, the words that come out of your mouth tend to border on the inane. The guy was saying how he was good friends with Mayor Addams.
Deirdre ran her tongue along the inside of her cheek as if she was trying to dislodge something trapped between her back teeth, then suggested he go find the mayor and fuck him instead.
“Deirdre!” Cortez said as she broke off from the dumbfounded friend of the mayor. “I want you to meet my good friend Jasper. Jasper saved my ex-girlfriend from being raped by three war vets with rifles. Stabbed them to death with a kitchen knife.”
“Now, that’s interesting,” she said, looking me up and down languidly, hands on hips. “You don’t look like a killer. Is Cortez bullshitting me?”
“I wish he was,” I said. “I’m not particularly proud of it. And it wasn’t just me—there were five of us. And the vets with rifles had their pants around their ankles, and their rifles were leaned up against a china cabinet out of reach.”
“Were they? How brave of you.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Maybe I can work as a bodyguard at your shows, in case someone unconscious looks like they may eventually wake up and get out of hand.”
Deirdre burst out laughing. She looked straight into my eyes for a long moment, her eyes sort of sparkling. I struggled not to break eye contact, feeling like it was some sort of test. “I think I’m going to like you.”
My legs had turned to jelly. I was grinning like an idiot and couldn’t think of anything to say.
Music started up, heavy on bass. “Deirdre!” someone called.
“Stick around,” Deirdre said over her shoulder, “I’d like to hear more about you stabbing people.” With her back to us, it was safe to stare.
Cortez and I drank, and bonded, and drank more. Our eyes burned in the blue smoke of hand-rolled cigarettes.
“I should have looked you up before this,” I said. “Funny how you just lose touch with good friends.” “Good friends” was probably a stretch, but the drinks were making me feel all warm and nostalgic.
“Don’t worry about it,” Cortez said, “I could’ve looked you up too. We get caught up in things.”
“Hey! Cortez’s friend!” Deirdre shouted from across the room. “Come party with me!” She waved me over. Cortez gave me a shove in her direction. As soon as I reached her she slid her arm under mine. Suddenly I felt eleven feet tall.
“So what do you do?” Deirdre asked me.
“I manage a convenience store,” I said. It was sort of true.
“Did you keep stabbing the rapists until they were all dead, or did you stop once they couldn’t fight back?”
“They kept fighting back until they were dead. Although I guess at some point they switched from fighting for advantage to fighting not to die.”
Deirdre’s eyes narrowed. “I like that. Do you have a pen?”
“No, I don’t.”
A woman interrupted us. She was tall, with a way-short blue skirt and long, bright magenta hair.
“You know those rings I was telling you about?”
“Yeah?” Deirdre said, extracting her arm from mine.
“Chetty’s found a connection.”
“Oh really?”
Suddenly I was on the outside of the conversation looking in—an all-too-familiar situation for me. Evidently my moment in the sun had ended. I’d had enough booze that I was willing to take one last stab, though. I touched Deirdre’s shoulder. She turned.
“Do you have a phone?”
She nodded absently, pulled a business card out of an unseen pocket and handed it to me. It was a nice card, with an electronic window that scrolled photos of Deirdre performing. I waved an unseen goodbye and left her to her talk of rings, clutching the card tight.
“Can’t I just text her?” I asked.
“No,” Ange groaned. “
“Call her,” Jeannie agreed.
I’d spent an hour on my front porch composing and deleting text messages before Ange and Jeannie showed up. Now I wished I’d sent one of those messages before they got here. “But it’s awkward, and scary,” I said. “She’s a little scary.”
“That’s part of the reason you do it. Look,” Ange closed her book, craned her neck to look at me, “if a man doesn’t have the courage to walk up and ask me out without a lot of tap dancing, I know there’s no way it’s going to work. He’s got to have a backbone.”
“So it’s like a hoop I’m supposed to jump through,” I said, while mentally filing away what Ange had just said. Was that why she never let things escalate between us? Was I not confident enough for her?
“It’s a bar you have to be able to jump over,” Ange countered.
“Jasper, it sounds like she’s a pretty confident woman,” Jeannie said.
“Yes. She’s incredible,” I said. She was the most dynamic, cool, confident, ballsy, exciting woman I’d ever met; it made me dizzy to imagine being with her.
“Then you’ve got to call,” Jeannie said. “You know how much men like breasts? Women like confidence as much as men like breasts. Especially confident women.”
“Oh,” I said. I was clearly a little autistic when it came to the nuances of love and dating.
Out in the street, two twelve-or thirteen-year-old boys, one carrying a syringe filled with red fluid—blood, or more likely food dye—approached a third, younger boy in a mask playing in an abandoned truck.
“Hey, c’mere a minute,” the boy with the syringe said, leaning in the broken driver’s side window, “you got a dollar I can borrow?”
“Hey,” I yelled over. “Get lost, leave him alone.”
The kid pulled his head out of the window. All three of them looked my way. “What’s it to you?” Needle boy said.
I reached for a baseball bat propped by the door. They moved on.
“Thanks, mister,” the kid in the truck said when they were out of earshot.
“No problem,” I said, looking down at my phone.
“Do women like Deirdre even date?” I asked. “It’s hard to imagine walking her to the door and kissing her goodnight.”
“Only one way to find out, sweetie,”Ange said. She was back reading her book. How could this not bother
