“I kind of like him. Eric.”
“I kind of like him too, he’s my fucking best friend!”
Fuck not being able to sleep, now I have powers. I have eye-beams that fire pure rage. I have a black internal-combustion heart that never stops exploding. I have a red jealous streak that runs diagonally left-to-right across my chest and like Superman’s crest it strikes fear into the hearts of certain people but in this case it’s those who do not hold up their end of relationships. I am a meteor headed to Earth that was once a part of a planet made entirely of fuck-off.
I need to see Eric and have him tell me this whole thing was a hallucinatory mix-up, that he thought my girlfriend was an extraterrestrial queen he had to make out with in his fantasyland and he didn’t know what he was really doing, just like when he slugged her. I’m out the door and halfway down the driveway, Christine running behind me.
“Aren’t you going to lock your front door?” she asks.
“I don’t,” I say.
“Where are you going?”
“Eric’s,” I say.
“Do you want a ride?”
I wheel on her and if I really had those eye-beams I think I would use them. I end up letting out a half-sob, which is embarrassing, because fuck her, she doesn’t get to see me cry. Besides, I’m not crying. For all she knows I’m going over to Eric’s to bash his head in, even though I’m not, I’m going over to have him tell me what I need to hear so I don’t have to bash his head in.
“I’m sorry,” Christine says, but I’m halfway to the bus stop by then.
“I’m sorry,” Eric says.
“Well, she thinks… she thinks you guys are going to be boyfriend and girlfriend or something.” I laugh. Dudes. We can talk about this stuff. Eric doesn’t speak, though.
“Uhm,” he says.
“Fuck,” I say.
“I…”
“FUCK!” I say.
“I really regret that it had to happen like this,” he says.
“It HAD to happen? Nothing fucking had to happen!”
“I like her too! And she likes me! No one’s ever liked me before!”
“No one had ever liked me before her either, hardly!”
“Right! So… so you know how it feels.”
“I can’t fucking believe this.”
“You said it yourself, in a weird way, I’ve been alive twice as long as you, and in all that time no one’s ever liked me, or wanted to have any sort of contact with me at all. When is it my turn?”
“So you would throw away our friendship and fuck me over for ‘your turn.’”
“I’m not throwing away our friendship!”
“If you think we’re still friends after this you’re stupid. For all your books and interests and ‘films’ you’re an idiot if you think we’re anything except enemies after this.”
Eric looks out his bedroom window. We’re there, where it happened, the crash site.
“I’m really tired,” Eric says.
“Boo hoo,” I say.
I don’t know every detail of what happened with Christine and Eric in Eric’s room. But you can sure imagine a hell of a lot if you have an imagination that’s used to getting inside of mechs and robots and thinking up political systems for other galaxies not yet discovered and how spiders would organize an army if they had to, and you turn it on something that’s really small and you already know both of the people involved, know them really well, and know the things they could say and do that would hurt you the most and imagine them doing it in the most elaborate detail. You can flesh out the connection they have that you thought you had with both of them but I guess it turns out you didn’t have with either of them. You know what their beds look like and you’ve seen them both with their shirts off. And as much as you don’t want to be imagining it, that only makes you imagine it more, in sharper detail. You think, maybe when Eric and I were trying to imagine all this shit for our stupid fucking comic or whatever, maybe what we should’ve been doing is trying NOT to imagine anything. Because what this is teaching me is, when you try NOT to imagine something, that’s when it really comes pouring out. If all along we would’ve just tried to stop ourselves from thinking of anything, we’d have been done in a night. A single sleepless furious night.
It instantly becomes epic-length. It doesn’t stay just the one event. You’ve had it out of both of their mouths that they have every intention of doing it again sometime. So you get to imagine it live as it probably happens across town, again. It goes from a short film to a movie to a series of movies and comic books and an interactive online game.
And you can also imagine horrible shit that makes you feel a little better. You can imagine borrowing your dad’s SUV and figuring out how to drive just enough to run them both down. You can imagine hiring your brother and his wacko friends to hunt them down and wild out
In the next couple of weeks I step back into a world with just me in it. Christmas break comes up. My dad likes to take us somewhere because my mom sometimes just shows up unannounced on Christmas if we’re home. We drive to San Diego and stay in a hotel on the beach. My brother pushes me in the freezing ocean and calls me “fucking creepy” when I stay in a minute too long. For presents we all get each other Best Buy gift certificates.
On the drive back from San Diego with billboards for strip clubs and Sonic drive-thrus speeding by, we are listening to smooth Christmas jazz on a Southern California radio station, except my brother is listening to something hard and scream-y on headphones, and I’m not really listening, I am convincing myself that when I get home I will have an e-mailed apology/take-me-back notice from Christine waiting for me. I will splash my fingers across the keys, my user name, and splash my fingers again, password, and hit enter, and the little world will spin and there in my in-box surrounded by messages from casino porn robots will be an e-mail from “christines_cliche_email_address” that says she was really 100 percent wrong and wants to take it all back and my company, my boyfriend-ness, is better than all the experimental theater pieces in the world laid end to end. San Diego turns into desert, and we stop at a Sunoco to pee and gas up and so my brother can buy a thirty-two-ounce energy drink to give him the energy he needs to like, sit there and listen to really awful punk, then the California station fades out and my dad switches to classic rock as desert turns into our subdivision.
Right as we’re about to get off the highway, in sight of familiar configurations of fast-food and hotel signs, something big and brown darts onto the road and into our headlights. My dad slams on the brakes but it’s too late, we hit whatever it is, a dog or a deer. We come to a full stop and my dad pulls over to the shoulder.
“Fucking shit,” my brother says.
Whatever it was is already gone from the roadway.
“Jesus,” my dad says, and puts the car in gear.
When the SUV hits the end of our driveway the classic rock on the radio changes briefly, mysteriously, to mariachi then back into classic rock and the car is barely parked before I’m out of it and in the house running upstairs to check my e-mail.
There is no way I won’t be getting an apology and take-me-back notice from Christine, by the way. All the mental work I have done composing exactly what it’s going to say, all the heart I have put into wanting it, there is just no way it’s not going to be there. It’s like when I was nine or ten years old and this video-game magazine I had a subscription to was giving away a Street Fighter II arcade machine. I filled out the application blank and sent it out and as the contest came closer to being over I became more and more absolutely convinced I was going to win. I don’t know when me really, really wanting to win became “I already won,” and my mom did her best to manage my out-of-control hope. The fact that I did not end up winning the Street Fighter II arcade machine doesn’t matter here. Willing one piece of electronic information to be in a place that doesn’t even really exist is without a doubt way easier than willing an arcade game to show up in a crate on your front lawn through sheer force of want, and I’m older now. My powers of imagination and wanting are way more powerful, and add to that they’re less focused on things like video games and more focused on grown-up mature things like winning back the girl who took my
