King Dork

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Well, okay. Not that I didn’t love how she said “diminutive”: with great care and delicacy and solemnity and attention to detail, the way you lean two cards together on a new level of a card house.

But I still had to tell her my “story.” What was my story, exactly?

“I’m in a band,” I said.

“Yeah? What are you called and where are your gigs?”

“The Stoned Marmadukes,” I said, making a mental note to make sure to tell Sam Hellerman the new band name so our stories would be straight. Me on guitar, him on bass and paleontology, first album Right Lane Must Exit. Then, out loud and rather lamely, I said, “We’re working on some, um, on some . . .” Gigs. As if.

But Fiona had already lost interest in that topic. She was scanning the room to see if there might be anyone else around to liven up the conversation. There was no one, so she started talking, in a distant way, about something or other. But I was getting the feeling that she had started to realize what she was dealing with here and had reached the conclusion that my fitness as a participant in any future spooky telekinesis experiments was in serious question.

I sat there while she spoke, trying not to make it too obvious how intently I was examining her, which I totally just couldn’t help doing. She had some really tight jeans on, and black boots. Shiny boots of leather. She mentioned how she was making all the costumes for some play she was in. She always ended up doing the costumes, she said, because she was such a good seamstress.

“You mean seamster,” I said.

She paused, and said, as though talking to herself, “Mmm, that’s interesting.” Then she stared at me. The candlelight made her glasses glisten when she moved her head. At times 70

they looked almost like they were made of liquid. I suddenly noticed that she looked a little sad, or so it seemed to me, but maybe she was just stoned and sleepy. Maybe I was just imagining the sadness for my own purposes—I always think girls are prettier when they’re crying.

Now, Hillmont is known as Hellmont, or less commonly as Swillmont. And most of the people at the party went to CHS, so I’d have guessed they probably lived either in Clearview or Clearview Heights. Queerview. So that’s why Fiona said, “How are things in Hellmont?” And that’s why I said, in response, “Diabolical.”

She seemed to spring to life. A bit. I mean, she acted as though she thought that was pretty funny. I was sitting there in silence trying to decide whether she was being sarcastic or not. Well, she was at least a little stoned. But I gotta say, her giggling like that in response to my powerful vocabulary, THC-enhanced and sarcastic or not, was pretty fucking charming.

She was hitting my arm. I guess she had said something while I had been in my own world trying to psychoanalyze her, mesmerized by her belly, which her T-shirt had been designed to reveal, but maybe not quite as much as was being revealed now that she was all stretched out on the couch, and which I couldn’t stop staring at. I mean, it was almost physically impossible to pry my eyes away from it. I did, though, which made a ripping sound, like Velcro.

I went: “?”

“Getting a good look, hand-jive?”

I drew back, mortified. But she was just kidding around, still laughing and hitting my arm.

“Slut heaven,” she said. “Do slut heaven.”

Now I was really confused. I think I may have said,

“Um . . . ,” and half smiled so it would look like I knew what 71

was going on while I tried to figure out what was going on.

She grabbed my head on either side, put her face very close to mine, and said, slowly and deliberately, the way you talk to a retarded person or an ESL student:

“How. Are. Things. In. Slut. Heaven?”

It took me a beat, but I realized: she must be from Salthaven, or possibly Salthaven Vista, not Clearview Heights. Duh. I’d never heard that name for Salthaven, but it was a pretty good one, and this time my half-smile was at least semigenuine.

But she was still nudging me.

“Slut heaven, going once, going twice . . .”

“Um, concupiscent?” I said.

See, I was a little slow, but I guess we had established the foundations of a game where she asked how things were in a town, and I responded with the appropriate word from 30 Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary. She shrieked and clapped her hands theatrically and gave me this admiring sort of smile that I had never, ever seen anyone direct my way before. I swear to God, she did, and it didn’t even seem very sarcastic.

The beauty of this moment was slightly tarnished by the fact that in the back of my mind I was thinking of Mr.

Schtuppe and how he might mispronounce “concupiscent.” In fact, I’m not totally sure I didn’t mispronounce it. But I’ve got to say that I hadn’t previously grasped the true benefits of making words your slaves. Fiona was an unusual girl, though, not like any of the Hillmont High girls I’d observed. For one thing, what might cause an ordinary person to recoil, or at best make a mental note never to play Scrabble with you, seemed to make her horny. Well, that and all the beer and marijuana. I hadn’t realized I had one, but this was my kind of woman.

72

So now we come to the weirdest part. I swear to God this is exactly what happened.