I tap my cell phone screen.
“Are you playing Candy Crush?” Jennifer asks.
“No.”
“Who are you texting?”
“I’m not texting.”
“Who are you calling?”
“Audrey.”
“Why?”
“To let her know you’re here.”
For a second, I think Jennifer is going to slap my phone out of my hand. (Or at least try. I have a firm grip.) But she doesn’t.
The phone rings a few times then goes to voicemail.
“She didn’t answer?” asks Jennifer.
“No.”
“She must not care about you.”
“She’s riding a bike.”
“So?”
“She might not have noticed that I called. Or she did notice but didn’t want to stop to answer because she’s on her way over here and will see me soon anyway.”
“She can’t talk and ride a bike?”
“She can’t ride a bike and take her cell phone out of her pocket and answer it, no.”
“She sounds unskilled.”
“Please don’t insult my girlfriend.”
“I apologize.”
“You could make it up to me by telling the truth about Blake.”
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“What’s going on?”
Guess who said that? Correct!
“Oh, hi,” Jennifer says to Audrey. “Do you know Rod, Audrey?”
Audrey gets off her bicycle and lets it fall onto my lawn. “Yes, I do.”
“She knows you know me,” I say. “We were literally just talking about you being my girlfriend.”
“I have no idea what he’s talking about,” says Jennifer. I’m kind of relieved that she’s lying right to my face. I now know for certain that she’s helping Blake and that I wasn’t simply being rude to a girl who wanted to get to know the lead singer of a punk rock band on the rise.
“Did Blake send you?” Audrey asks.
“Blake who?”
“She knows who Blake is,” I say.
“Did Blake send you?” Audrey asks again.
“Blake Lively? Blake Shelton? William Blake?”
“William Blake has been dead for two hundred years.” (Audrey says this. She knows more than I do about the life and death of English poets and visual artists of the Romantic Age who lived during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.)
“I meant a different William Blake.”
“I’m talking about Blake Montgomery,” Audrey clarifies.
“Don’t know him,” says Jennifer.
“Rod’s cousin.”
“Still don’t know him.”
“I have pictures of you talking to him.”
“No, you don’t.”
Wouldn’t it have been great if this made Jennifer break down and confess? We could’ve wrapped this book up a few chapters earlier.
Audrey steps up onto the porch.
“Anyway,” says Jennifer, “I can see that there’s about to be a spat, so I’m going to head home. If you two work it out, great, but if not, Rod, you know where to find me.”
Jennifer walks away. I hope that Audrey’s angry expression is meant for her, that maybe she’s trying to decide whether or not to leap on her back and tackle her to the ground, but I quickly discover that the expression is all mine.
“So let’s analyze this,” I say. “This is the fifth or sixth similar incident today. That’s already defying credibility. And even if Jennifer wanted to get to know me better for real, she wouldn’t show up at my house unannounced.”
“I don’t know why she was here,” says Audrey, “and I don’t know if she was announced or not.”
“I told you to come over! It was my idea! Why would I invite you over if I knew Jennifer was on her way?”
“To make it easier to break up with me?”
“What?”
“I ride over here, see you with her, scream a little, slap you, and say I never want to see you again. It lets you off the hook.”
“Okay,” I say, “I can’t be in a relationship if we’re not even going to pretend to be on the same plane of reality.”
“I know you say it was all Blake’s doing, and it probably was. But maybe he was just speeding up the process.”
“What are you talking about?”
“How long do you really think we were going to be together?”
“Longer than this!”
“It was never going to work out. You want to tour with a band, and I want to be an astronaut. We’d never see each other.”
I’m so flabbergasted that I want to drop to the floor and roll around in circles and scream, “Gaaahhhhh!” But that’s not how I want Audrey to remember me.
“I…can’t…I…don’t…I…can’t…I…huh?” I say with maximum eloquence.
“I can’t handle this dynamic anymore. Not for a relationship that was doomed from the first moment we met, when I asked if you knew where the gym was.”
“But I did know where the gym was! And I’ll always give you directions to the gym.”
“I’m sorry, Rod.”
“No. I do not accept this. If we’re destined to break up, I don’t want Blake to get the credit.”
Audrey gives me a hug. Then she wipes a tear from her eye and walks away.
No.
Nooo.
Noooooooooooooooooo!
“I thought we were going to defeat him together!” I shout.
She picks up her bicycle and rides away.
I stand there in shock for…I dunno, three minutes or so? I’m in too much shock to say for certain.
He did it. That wormy little weasel successfully nuked my relationship with Audrey. All I can say is that he’d better not bring home a bowling ball because his nose will be the headpin and I’m ready to bowl a strike.
That would make a great song lyric.
Your nose is the headpin, and I’m gonna bowl a—
No, that’s an awful lyric. I can’t even write songs anymore.
I resist the urge to cry. If I start bawling or even let a single manly tear trickle down my cheek, Blake will pick that moment to come home.
I wanna shed some tears, but I can’t let you see me shedding.
Argh! My lyric-writing days are over! Over!
A car pulls up in front of my house, and Blake gets out. The car has tinted windows, so I can’t see the driver. Maybe it’s somebody I know. Maybe it’s a crime lord. Or maybe it’s an Uber driver.
Blake looks at my scowling face and grins. “How was your day? I guess we have a lot to talk about, huh?”
20.
I said that I was going to have a flashback to how Audrey and I met. It’s too painful for me to do it
