“William Butler Yeats,” he muttered to himself, elbowing a big oafy guy out of the way. He was close enough to reach out and tap her on the shoulder, but that seemed like a childish way to get her attention for such a monumental encounter. He sidestepped so that he was facing the railing and attempted to insert himself into her field of view. Then he realized that he’d just popped into the middle of a conversation she was having with a stranger. The guy was wearing a Tulane hat. His shaggy hair was the color of a golden retriever and stuck out from under the brim in little snarls. He was shorter than Daniel but had the stocky build of a lacrosse player. Daniel’s vision locked on to the way the guy’s hair escaped his hat with spot-on scruffiness, and a word popped into his head from some literary criticism he’d read for AP English.
“Your hair’s the synecdoche for your soul,” he said. Tulane Hat turned to him while Melissa opened her mouth in astonishment. “It’s the part that represents you as a whole”—thinking soul/whole, solid rhyme, Eat it, Yeats—“so when I go back to my friends and tell them about the guy Melissa was talking to, I can just say the word ‘hair’ and that’ll be you. It’s the well from which your entire persona springs. And that’s okay! Because we’re all constantly becoming.”
“Dude.” Tulane Hat blinked. “What?”
Melissa grabbed Daniel’s arm and he realized how close he was to Tulane Hat’s face. He let himself be eased back. She stepped between them. “Maybe it’s time to chill with the drinking,” she said.
“I only had two beers,” he said. Then he grinned and nodded at Tulane Hat. “I thought he’d be a coxswain, not a goalie.”
Melissa looked into his eyes and seemed puzzled by what she saw. “I think it’s time to go.”
Tulane Hat put on a churlish face that Daniel found hilarious. “What did you just call me?”
Daniel laughed. This whole sequence was comedy gold. His script got it right on the first try. The edges were crisp and well-defined. He raised an eyebrow at Melissa. “Am I the only one who knows anything about the positions on a crew team?” He turned to Tulane Hat. “I called you a goalie.”
“Daniel!” Melissa tried her best to obstruct his view. She waved a hand in his face. “Your nose is bleeding!”
Tulane Hat put his arms out to the side. “I play midfield, bro. The fuck’s your problem? Do I know you from somewhere?”
Daniel made his eyes flash like Kalodyn Zero, a skill he didn’t know he possessed until this moment. The band’s feverish crescendo abruptly cut out. Daniel screamed into the void of stunned, exalted silence.
“My problem is that you’re not listening to me!”
He slipped away from Melissa with a deft side step as the crowd burst into riotous applause. He registered the fear in Tulane Hat’s eyes and made his own eyes laugh in reply. The scene played out perfectly. Daniel’s hands found the guy’s throat and pressed him back against the railing, which turned out to be kind of rickety, to inject the moment with a little more tension.
Would the railing give way? Would they tumble over the edge while dancers scatter, screaming, and the horns blow raspberries in dismay?
There was a sharp pain in his kidney. He lost his grip on Tulane Hat. The guy’s friends were swarming. A monster with a beer gut and huge flabby arms like a shot-putter who’d let himself go was pummeling Daniel in the side with his meaty fist. Daniel recalled that too many kidney shots made you piss blood. He spun away from Tulane Hat, lowered his shoulder, and drove all his weight into the shot-putter, churning his legs to drive the massive body back into a bistro table stacked with glasses and plates of crawfish.
Daniel came down on top of the shot-putter in a blizzard of cracked shells, tiny claws, and antennae. It looked as if a million bright red cockroaches had just exploded in his face. His right arm wrenched back in its socket, and he was very satisfied with the cinematic nature of the brawl so far. He drove his elbow into the nose of Tulane Hat, who was attempting to pull him away from the shot-putter, and when the impact elicited a crack from Tulane Hat’s face (the sound design here was top-notch), he drove the closed fist of his other hand into the shot-putter’s ear.
The band rolled into a lively number, an appropriate soundtrack. Balcony dancers gave way. Newly exposed floorboards glittered with broken glass. The shot-putter’s fist came at Daniel’s face from the side. White flares stole his vision. He blinked away the bright light, and then he was on his back. His ribs were absorbing kicks, and he was curling into a ball, tucking in his arms and legs like a cowering crawfish, when a new figure disturbed the mist above him. An arm lashed out, and the kicks ceased, leaving behind the dull, insistent pain of internal bruising. He discovered that his hand was being clasped and he was being pulled to his feet. He stood on wobbly legs. William bear-hugged him and shifted them both away from the epicenter of the fight.
William screamed in his ear, “Can you walk?”
“I’m fine!”
William recoiled as blood stippled his face. Daniel wiped his mouth and smeared his hand red.
“We gotta get out of here,” William said, glancing over his shoulder. A barrage of taunts hit them in the back as they made for the stairs.
“Story of my life,” Daniel said, but his words were lost in a mouthful of blood and spit.
In Christina’s internal ranking system, titled The #AutonomousRoadTrip Fuckup Olympics, Daniel Benson had just come out of nowhere to
