The Seniors

When I was in high school, the seniors were huge. They were tall, yes, but they were also wise and larger than life. I remember them being really something remarkable. After all, when we first arrived in the high school--this being before they built the addition and gave everyone lockers that you could open without using the combination but by using, instead, a well-aimed punch--they had their own section of the school that anyone who was not a senior or a senior's significant other could not go into.

The year my class--the class of '99--arrived in our high school, the senior's lockers were solid. They were probably the same lockers they'd put in when they built the school, which means they were made of actual substantial things like metal and more metal. Whatever the new lockers were, they weren't anything special, and they certainly weren't set off by themselves in a glorious elevated alcove like the seniors' were. My freshman self sighed dreamily every time she passed that alcove and had to look up to see the seniors who seemed so tall and world-weary. They'd seen some shit, you could tell, and they had been rewarded with those lockers and late arrival privileges.

It seemed like the only way to live.

I was thinking about this tonight as I sat in the gymnasium of a rural Maine high school--the one the TLK attended--watching a basketball game The Lady-Killer's brother was playing in. It was a weird experience. I was sitting in the middle of a hundred sixteen year-olds and watching a bunch of varsity high schoolers play ball and all I could keep thinking was, Who the fuck are these people? These are the seniors? They're children! They're babies! They're skinny, sickly-looking little things!

They were nothing like my seniors. I went to a whole bunch of basketball games when I was in high school, especially as a freshman because that was the year we had an exchange student from Australia and, while he was only cute from certain angles, he had a voice like buttah and he could dunk. Back then, basketball games were a spectacle, and those boys were ten feet tall. They also could grow facial hair and had feet so big it looked like they could share shoes with Ronald McDonald. I should know. Once, in gym class one of the senior basketball players stepped on my sneaker during a game of speedball and it left a permanent black mark that could not be scrubbed away no matter what I tried.

This particular boy, whose name was Mike, was probably well over six feet tall, or at least it seemed that way at the time. He was a bit chubby and slow-moving. He was the super tall guy every basketball team employs to loaf around under the basket at all times, in the hopes that he will simply half-raise his arm and tip a basket in. One of my friends was desperately in love with him, and she spent the entirety of our ninth period gym class following him around the floor during speedball or mat ball or whatever ball we were playing that week. This was fine with me because I was in love with the Australian, who was Mike's best friend. While my friend panted after Mike and actually worked up a sweat during gym by looking like she was participating smartly, I spent the period dodging the speedballs the boys flung deliberately at the girls' heads, and I went to my safe place: an elaborately-concocted future where my friend and I married Mike and the Australian, and we lived happily ever after as next-door neighbors.

But at the high school game tonight I couldn't get over it. I really had no idea what I was watching. These boys looked like what I remembered middle school boys looking like. Even the ones who weren't playing but were clearly at the game to hang out and look cool and were thus not exposing their pale-Maine-wainter-chicken-legs to the entire gym looked like babies. And that's when I realized it: These days, the boys look younger than they did when I was in school and the girls look older.

One of the girls sitting behind me, who was draping herself around one of TLK's best friend's shoulders to piss off her ex-boyfriend who was somewhere in the crowd, had makeup that looked like it had been shellacked on by some makeup artist, pre-Golden Globes. Her eyeliner--which I still cannot manage--was impeccable. She didn't have a hair out of place. Her outfit was skin-tight and stolen from the pages of Seventeen.

I hated her. I couldn't help it. I thought nasty, shitty things about her in my head. And then I realized I was insane and made myself smile at her to make it seem that I wasn't some cranky old broad that had accidentally wandered into the student section and would leave shortly, after she'd soiled her diaper and needed to be changed.

After I smiled and turned back around I said this prayer: Dear God, thank you for letting me go to high school in the 90s. Thank you for letting me grow up in a decade where we did not look like that.

I've never been one to look back on my high school years with rage or despair; I've never walked back into the school after graduating and uttered, "Man, this place fucking sucks!" I know now and knew then how lucky I was: I went to a good school. I did not get caught up in anything bad or illicit. I had a sweet, smart group of friends. We were good girls. Yes, there were shitty times and days when I absolutely refused to get out of bed and go to school because high school was hard, but it was not bad. Not bad at all.

I grew up riding out the wave of grunge. I wore my father's jeans and old sweaters to school. We rolled the sleeves of our t-shirts up and permed our hair. We had ratty old flannel shirts ala Angela Chase. We wrote notes and then folded them elaborately. We sat in the bleachers and watched our big, tough seniors dunk basketballs and then, later, watched from the parking lot as they threw their duffle bags into the backseats of their cars and drove home. We waited for our parents to picks us up.

It was a gorgeous life, and looking back on it now, I think it was extremely romantic. It was a real Time. It was a time unlike this one, maybe, because it was the last of something, things were about to change, people were already getting a little kooked off the impending 2000s, and nothing was going to be much the same anymore after that. We felt it. The class below us always argued they were better because they were the class of 2000. They were the first of the century! But this is what we thought of that: So what? That's not something to boast. The first of something can almost always be improved upon; the last of something usually goes out with a bang.

I don't mean to generalize and use the old things were just simpler back then argument. In some ways they were, and some ways they weren't. But I am glad for a lot of the more simpler things: the notes written in study hall and passed between classes instead of the instant gossip grapevine of text messaging; the absence of social networks; the clothes that didn't cling to our body; the boys who looked grown-up and gallant; sleepovers where we had fashion shows and played Girl Talk or Mall Madness.

If anything, I think it was a quieter time, where kids were forced more to hack it out on their own. I spent a lot of alone time in my room, figuring things out about myself. Do kids do that anymore? Do they sit in their room, without looking at a computer, a television, a cell phone, an iPod? Do they have time to sit still and listen and think, This is me, right now. This is me and no one else.

I'm sure some do, but not many and not often. And when I sat amongst those high schoolers or recently-graduated high schoolers at the game, I was filled with a certain kind of panic as I imagined myself in their world, in their school at that moment. What would I love? Who would I love? Who would I be?

But I didn't want to know. I wasn't jealous of them and their slick 2011 lives. I was overwhelmed with gratitude for my life, when and where I came from. And, also, as one of the boys on the court broke away with the ball and galloped toward the basket, I was seeing the Australian exchange student, his overly-gelled red hair, his long legs scissoring toward the key. I saw him lift, hover, float in the air above that basket before descending upon it and shoving the ball through the hoop as the entire gymnasium of our high school erupted in screams and everyone--not a single person glancing at a cell phone or iPod--leapt into the air because they knew they had just been the part of something holy.

Honey

Yesterday was the anniversary of the seven months that the The Lady-Killer and I have been together, and to celebrate this, I am going to tell embarrassing but endlessly charming stories about him.

The day before I left for my Buffalo Christmas vacation, The Lady-Killer and I attended a family Christmas party. His father's large family had crammed into a cozy kitchen and living room to eat and engage in a large-scale Yankee Swap.

Before the swapping began, I was talking to his mother in the kitchen. We both had plates full of cookies and we were watching TLK and his brother needle each other across the room.

"You know," I said, "anytime you feel like hauling out old embarrassing pictures of TLK, I would absolutely love to look at them."

She told me that was easily done--that there was embarrassing video, too... plenty of it!--but until we could get to all that, she could tell me a few stories. Both of them had to do with TLK's father's influence on him.

"My husband," she said, "has a very dirty mouth."

We both looked across the room at TLK's dad, who was at that moment hefting a giant meatball into his mouth.

"And I kept telling him he needed to watch what he said in front of TLK because he was going to start mimicking him eventually. And then one day we were all in the car, and TLK started shouting from the backseat, 'Daddy! Fuck! Fuck, Daddy! Fuck! Fuck!' I turned to TLK's father and said, 'See? See what you've done?'"

But it turns out TLK wasn't exactly talking like a sailor for the fun of it or even because he'd heard his father say that word so many times. At that moment, a truck was passing the car, and TLK was trying to tell his parents that he was really, really excited, that he was just super psyched to see a truck--a fuck! a fuck!--cruising along next to them.

"That's adorable," I said. But it wasn't the cutest thing. The cutest thing she told me about came later that afternoon, as we were standing out in the heated garage, watching the kids try to hack apart the annual homemade Christmas pinata.

TLK had one of his little cousins in his arms, and he was holding her out at an endearingly awkward angle so she could wail on the pinata she wasn't tall enough to reach. That was cute already, but then his mother leaned over and told me a story about TLK in pre-school.

One morning, all the children were sitting around for some circle time, and the teacher was asking them questions about their lives. The first question was what are your parents' names?

One by one, each child spoke up and gave his or her parents' names. When it was TLK's turn he sat up straight and said, "My daddy's name is Tony, and my mommy's name is Honey."

His mother loved that story. "He heard his father call me that so many times he just assumed it was my name!" she laughed.

We looked at him then, and the cute little cousin he was holding out made contact with the pinata and her turn was up, so he brought her back to him, snuggled her into his chest, and I loved him so much then I thought my heart was going to burst.

Pink Lady

Last Wednesday The Lady-Killer called me up while I was at school and said, "Hey. How do you feel about going to New Hampshire?"

As a general rule, I feel pretty good about going to New Hampshire. It has no sales tax! It has liquor outlets! Its state motto is Live Free or Die! What else could possibly be needed to coax a person into a state?

So I told TLK I felt swell about going to New Hampshire. "And just what are we going to New Hampshire for?" I asked, hoping the answer was to buy liquor and shout the badass state motto at passers-by.

"To buy a car," he said.

Turns out the hours TLK spends skulking in the CARS AND TRUCKS section on Craigslist paid off. He'd found a car he was in love with. And it was a pretty serious love. When he showed me the ad, I could see hearts and rainbows and unicorns swimming in his big eyes.

"This car," he told me, "is fast."

"Yeah?"

"I mean FAST-FAST," he said.

"I don't doubt it," I said.

TLK loves fast. When his last car could no longer pass inspection because it was rotting, he and his friends tore everything "unnecessary" out, hollowing it out to be a rally car.

One day he and I went to his house, picked up his brother, and together we drove down to an old railroad bed that was now a rough gravel road that extended God knows where. TLK pointed his car toward the God knows where and asked which of us wanted the first ride.

His brother went first. And when they came back, the brother's face was flushed and excited. "I screamed!" he said. "Also, we were air-born!"

Then it was my turn. "Listen," I said as I buckled myself in, "if you kill me, my father is going to be very disappointed in you."

TLK nodded gravely and then, in the next second, he had us roaring down the road and we were transformed into nothing more than a spout of dust. And then we went air-born as TLK launched us over a bump.

I don't know what the appropriate reaction to a thing like that is, but the reaction my brain chose at that moment (and most moments since) was laughter. I squealed and I giggled and I buried my head in my heads.

When we got back to where we'd left his brother standing, TLK cracked a grin my way. "Just imagine if this was turbo," he said.

So it didn't surprise me at all last week that he decided in order to properly grieve for the loss of his beloved car (the one now turned in a hollowed-out shell of its former self), in order to properly process the loss, in order to move past the heartbreak, he needed to buy a car that would smoke his old car.

So I told him, yeah, okay, let's go to New Hampshire. Sure. Why not?

And so we did, and TLK inspected his car and then forked over the money for it and said, "I'll follow you home."

When we got home a few hours later, I parked my car and TLK pulled up behind me. I grabbed my purse and stepped out of my car. And then he gave me a gesture--a simple nod--that almost made my heart explode out of my chest. Here was a boy who was so pleased with himself, so happy, and he wanted to take me for a ride in his fast car, so he was giving me a nod, telling me, "Hey, Baby. Jump in." It was the world's most perfect nod, born of beautiful old films where the men wore leather jackets and white t-shirts and tight jeans, where they smoked cigarettes and slung a sun-tanned arm out the window of whatever smooth machine they were driving. It was American Graffiti meets a Bruce Springsteen video.

I went around, opened the passenger door. I slid into the seats--which were not normal seats but seats you'd find in a racecar--and strapped myself down.

One minute later, after TLK had driven us down the long road that circles the small airport around the corner from my apartment, we were sideways. The car was roaring, I was screaming, TLK was smiling as much as I'd ever seen him smile. We tore into a curve and the car slid through it gracefully, as if over ice.

It was then that I realized something very important about myself: I have always wanted to be this girl. I am the girl Milner gets stuck riding with in American Graffiti. I am a Pink Lady. I am, at all times, hoping to star in my own version of Grease. This would explain why I consistently disappointed my friend Greg in grad school when I chose rough-tough-working boys instead of, say, poets, which was who he thought I should be with. I said I wanted a man who could discuss literature with me, who would write poetry about the way my hair smelled or the way I looked coming out of the shower, but, really, honestly, deep down I wanted nothing to do with them and everything to do with someone who could get his hands dirty in a way most darling MFA boys will not.

If I'm completely honest with myself, I am certain this has something to do with the types of men I grew up around--my grandfather, my uncle, my brother, my father. My father, of course, isn't a rough-tough-dirty-man in the way that some of the others on that list are, but he grew up around cars. He grew up loving cars. He's the type of man who can identify the make, model, and year of any old car when it passes on the street. He's the type of man who, when I smile and ask him sweetly, will change my brakes for me.

So maybe I've always been looking for what I'm used to. And while I was in the sideways car, shrieking and giggling and saying, "Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!" I realized that, hey, look at this. I've found something I've always been secretly looking for, and in finding it, I have managed to transform myself into the girls I always wanted to be, the girls I always identified with: the ones who would run down the stairs and into the car of a boy who's wanting to take them out, show them some fun, drive them fast along the dark country roads where no one else is around and all that's there is the long squeal of a tire and a quick flash of light in the place where, just seconds ago, a car had been.

In the Closet

It was all very Sex and the City in my apartment on Saturday morning. I was cleaning out my closet, shoving things this way and that, and trying to find room that really wasn't there. There was good reason for this: I was trying to find a small corner of space for The Lady-Killer's clothes, which were belching out of a series of suitcases and backpacks on my bedroom floor.

And here's the interesting part: I wasn't annoyed by the pile of clothes. I wasn't distressed or antsy or whipped into a frenzy by some Virgo desire to seize those clothes and fold them--every last one--into a tight square of fabric. His clothes have been in a corner of my room for a few months now, and I've simply cleaned and vacuumed around them. TLK has a streak of OCD--he seriously loves seeing things arranged in crisp right angles--and he is, as a general rule, tidy. His clothes are contained and never spread about. There is never a trail of his socks and underwear, his jeans, his t-shirts, strewn about the apartment. He does not shed things as he comes through the door at night. Instead, he goes into my bedroom and removes his clothes, leaves them in a neat little pile under one of the windows.

So I wasn't moved to find closet space for him because his clothes were driving me crazy or cramping my style; instead, I was trying to find him closet space because I felt sort of bad for him, the boy who's been living out of suitcases and backpacks since May.

In the beginning, TLK was careful and unobtrusive about his things. When he came over, he usually had a single small backpack, which he would take into my office and store there, between my floor lamp and the giant box of batting Abbey likes to sleep in. I don't know if he knew he had to be gentle with me, that he had to ease me into the idea of an increased intimacy or what, but TLK did it just right. Eventually, the backpack migrated from the office into my bedroom, and now, after two weeks of his housesitting, the backpack has multiplied to several and a suitcase. For three months, TLK has been a perpetual sleepover guest. And on Saturday I felt like it was time to give him a little room of his own.

After all, I'd already suffered the shock of opening my medicine cabinet on my return to Maine and seeing the empty space I'd left filled with his things: deodorant, contacts, saline solution, packets of Vitamin D for his new tattoos.

Because the cabinet was full of those things, there was no room for my makeup bag, my brush, my lotions, my perfume. And for a second I panicked. Where would my things go? I was just one girl, and I had lived in this apartment for a year and a half, and it was already pushing capacity in a way that has me storing my vacuum in my bedroom closet, and it's such a tight fit that you can hear its handle scrape the door every time you open or shut it.

But then I took a deep breath and realized I was insane, that there was plenty of room, that I just needed to get creative. And I did, and it only took all of fifteen minutes of rearranging. So I figured I could extend the creativity to the closet, which, yes, was more difficult, but we got it done. TLK managed to line up a few piles of pants, shirts, and socks on one of my shelves.

And when we were done I felt pretty good. I felt pretty accomplished. It seemed like a big deal because, as should be pretty evident by now, I am completely insane and have unreasonable expectations about pretty much everything, including how things need to go and be in my apartment.

It's a miracle anyone even wants to spend time here.

And later, when I called Amy, I told her when I stepped back and surveyed the finished work, I had a few Sex and the City flashbacks, that I was thinking of that episode where Big gives Carrie the pink brush head to his toothbrush. Carrie, of course, thought it was a big deal. That pink toothbrush must mean something! It must be a demonstration of his feelings for her (it wasn't) or a promise of things to come (negative) or a declaration of his intent to change (forget it). It was just a tooth brush head he wasn't using.

But this felt more important than all that. It seemed like something more. That I wasn't panicking, that I wasn't spiraling into a frightened corner of my mind was a testament to something--whether it was him or me or the two of us together. Something is different in me these days--there's less insanity, less struggle for control and perfection, less need to have everything in my life be perfectly planned and considered--and it's liberating.

We don't really "live together" right now, but the arrangement is pretty close. And when I used to think about how it would be to live with a boy, I thought it would be terrifying. Frightening. Horrible. Awful. I thought I'd hate it, that I wouldn't really be capable of it, that I'd fail, that I'd drive the boy crazy. But here's what I know right now: This weekend I cleared out a section of my closet for all the right reasons--not because I was getting frustrated by his things but because I wanted him to feel like he was valued, that he was someone who didn't need to constantly run a backpack of clothes between his house and mine. And I'm not terrified, frightened, or horrified. I'm just here, and he is too.

The Exes

Admittedly, I have a weird perspective when it comes to ex-girlfriends. I don't mind them. I don't mind hearing about them, and I don't mind seeing pictures of them.

I got to thinking about this last night, when Amy and I were hunched over the computer, looking at pictures of The Lady-Killer's ex-girlfriends. One of the exes is a girl I kind of know in a roundabout way, and I've always liked her. I've always thought she was pretty and funny and nice. So when Amy said, "Don't you just hate her?" I said, "No! Not at all!"

Amy stared at me, disbelieving.

"I'm serious," I said. "She's a nice girl."

"You are strange," Amy said. "I'd hate her if I were you."

And I know that's the way a lot of girls would feel, but I rarely have that gut reaction. It used to be that I thought my tolerance of ex-girlfriends was a thing unique to my relationship with the Boy From Work because when he told the stories from his past, I thought, Oh my God, that's so cute. I thought, These are the girls who have, in a way, made him who he is today.

I was thankful for that, for them. I was grateful for the ways they shaped the boy I now knew. After all, I didn't have the luxury of knowing him back then, and, even if they were awful, even if they were mean, they must have had even a tiny part of making him who he was now, and--obviously--I liked who that person was.

But today I kept thinking about that, kept thinking about if this was a new thing, if I'd only recently started having benevolent feelings for the exes. But I realized it wasn't anything new, not at all. I liked one of Keith's ex-girlfriends so much that the three of us went out to lunch a few times together, and we even went to her wedding, which--bonus!--had really dynamite food.

The only person whose ex-girlfriends drove me crazy--just the thought of them, just the idea of them--and that was the Wily Republican, but maybe that's to be expected. Everything about my relationship with the WR was like sand slowly falling through my fingers. He was impossible to contain. From the first moment, from our very first kiss, he was slipping away. And anything that reminded me that he was so tenuous--and the girlfriends did exactly that--made me panicked, more panicked than I could explain.

But, beyond him and his passel of exes, I have a tremendous amount of empathy for these girls who share something in common with me. It's not that I want to have them over for a dinner party, it's not that I want to sip cocktails with them or nibble at finger foods, but I do understand a little something about them, and I understand they have played a role in bringing my boy to me, and I guess I can't find anything to hate in that.

How to Become a Girlfriend

I cannot even begin to describe the differences between last summer and this summer.

Last summer I was committed to my writing. I'd set a deadline for myself. I wanted my story manuscript to be done by the end of May. So, for that first glorious month off, I wrote and wrote and wrote. I also did a lot of yoga, walking, and eating of All Bran products.

At lunch, I stopped writing and paused for egg salad (or tuna or bologna or turkey) sandwiches and to watch a little West Wing. I'd try to write again in the afternoon, and at 4:30, I was starving and spending many minutes telling myself it was insane to get hungry at 4:30 PM, that no one but 85 year-olds get hungry for dinner at 4:30 PM, that surely getting hungry at 4:30 PM meant I was a freak--a depressed little freak--and that I needed something other than food to occupy my mind.

Occasionally, I'd meet Emily in Portland for drinks or force my office-mate to fill large water bottles with white wine so we could stand in the never-ending ocean mist of Summer 2009 and watch the tide come in.

It was a quiet summer.

This summer, however, is not quiet.

This summer I'm staying up late and sleeping in late and eating at strange hours and saying yes to everything. Do I want to drink martinis and play Dance, Dance Revolution? Yes! Do I want to drive to the top of the parking ramp downtown and take pictures? Yes! Do I want to have some drinks and then go make fun of the bad screenwriting in the new Robin Hood movie? Yes! Do I want to learn how to drive a manual transmission, even though I am confident I will suck at it? Yes! Do I want to drink more Jagermeister than I've drunk in my entire life? Yes! Do I want to go sit in a tiny room and see a tattoo being etched into someone's skin? Yes!

And this--the tattoo-watching--brings me to my point: I am now someone's girlfriend.

This may not have been the point you thought you were going to get out of the tattoo story, but, well, it is.

It started like this:

On Friday night, at 10:30 PM, I was standing in my kitchen, in front of a steaming wok, and I was making stir-fry. Normally, 10:30 would be way past my dinner time, but my entire sense of time has been skewed in the last month because there's this boy here now, and we stay up late, and we sleep in even later, and we sometimes forget to eat, and when we do remember to eat, it's usually at awkward times. I'm skipping breakfast and eating lunch at 4:30 in the afternoon.

And Friday was really no different. We'd been running around all day, and finally, after we got back to my apartment, we were starving. So I was doing my thing--I was chopping onion and mushroom and peppers--when the boy came and leaned next to me.

"So," he said, "I'm trying to figure out how to introduce you tomorrow."

Saturday was going to be a big day for him. We had to wake up early in the morning so that the boy could get his second tattoo. And I would guess that normally, in a regular ol' tattoo shop, no one would bat an eye if a guy brought a girl in the door with him. They'd just assume that the girl was the guy's woman, his old lady. But we weren't going to a tattoo shop for this tattoo. We were going to the house of a guy the boy used to work with. He did tattoos in a space off his living room, and he would probably be mildly interested in the girl who was sitting in the corner with her nose buried deep into Aryn Kyle's Boys and Girls Like You and Me. I would have to be acknowledged somehow.

"I think it's really sweet that you're thinking about this," I said.

"I want to introduce you as my girlfriend," he said. He flashed a smile at me--and that's when things started going a little crooked in my head. This boy has a smile with wattage that does some serious damage when it's aimed directly at you. This, among other things, is the reason he has quite the following of girls, a verifiable harem. Wherever he goes, women of all ages fall down around him. His aura is constructed completely of charm. And when that charm is directed at me, I'm useless. Absolutely useless.

He is, if nothing else, a lady-killer.

And The Lady-Killer had recently begun trying to convince me that I should be his girlfriend. At the beginning, I wasn't too keen on the idea, but a few weeks into things I was lying in bed and listing for him all the things that could go disastrously wrong if we really got into a relationship together, which clearly meant I was considering it. Here's how we would fail, I said. Here's what you would hate about me. Here's how I'd drive you absolutely fucking crazy.

But TLK didn't care about any of that. He just kissed me and told me he knew what he wanted.

And on Friday night, he was telling me again he really wished I was his honest-to-God girlfriend, that he could introduce me that way.

"So introduce me that way," I said.

"But it's not true," he said. "I don't want to say something that's not true." And then he smiled again, opening his eyes--also beautiful, also lethal--wide.

And looking at him--that smile, those eyes--I couldn't help myself. I heard all the lists I'd been making, the ones that had been clattering around inside my skull, suddenly go quiet. Then I heard only one thing, and that thing was telling me to stop being a pussy and just do it.

"Well, maybe it should be true," I said.

He stared at me. This wasn't exactly the response he'd been expecting.

I stirred the wok and set the spoon aside. "It could be true," I said. "I mean, you wear me down about everything else. You always get what you want."

"Oh!" he said. "I see! You don't really want to! You'd just do it to get me to shut up!"

I stood on my tiptoes and matched our foreheads together. "That's not what I mean at all," I said, "and you know it. I'm saying you're very persuasive, and this is what I want, but I've been scared. It's going to happen eventually, so why not now?"

"Really?" he asked.

"Yes," I said.

"No, really?" he asked.

I told him yes, really, really, really. It was true. I was his girlfriend now. And why? Because he'd needed to know how exactly to introduce me to the guy who would spend a few hours inking his skin the next morning. But it was more than that, of course. It was because I was happy, that I was delirious, that I was breathless from a month of being with him. It was because I knew I was going to give in eventually, that I wanted what he wanted, that I always had.

And the next morning I spent four hours in a chair holding his legs because the room was too small and the chair was too small for him to stay on his side without help. I held his legs and flipped through my book, through his magazine, through my magazine. I made small talk with a tattoo artist with a bald head and a kilt, and I told jokes and watched as first the outline then the blue went onto his skin. And outside, just beyond the door, summertime reruns were playing on the television and just-born puppies were yowling. I sat very, very still and thought how strange everything was, but how nice, too. I couldn't stop thinking about how, just before falling asleep the night before, he'd said, "Goodnight, Girlfriend" and I'd said, "Goodnight, Boyfriend" and that was the only thing in my head--that and nothing, nothing else. I didn't hear my lists and my reasons why we shouldn't. I didn't hear panic. I didn't hear what everyone else was going to say. I heard nothing but him, nothing but me, and that was almost as good as a miracle.

Man Pole

You'd think penis would be sufficient. Or cock or dick or wang. But it's not. Not for my brother, at least. When my brother wants to gross me out--when he really wants to get me going, to get me shrieking and fake-puking and saying, Adam! Stop it! Stop it! You're disgusting! You're a freak! Ew!--he will roll out other words for penis.

I know this because he and my father were here for the last four days, and for those four days my brother taunted me incessantly. And my father wasn't exactly any great help. After all, he thinks my brother's just oh-so-funny, and whenever my brother rolled out another gross phrase, my father would double over and laugh-laugh-laugh.

I should've known things would devolve into this just as soon as my brother got in my car on the first night. He lifted one butt cheek and rattled out a fart that smelled like death.

"What the hell?!" I said. I fanned my hands in front of my nose. "Adam! JESUS!"

He laughed. "It's from what I ate last night," he said. "Fried peppers." And then he farted again.

Then, hours later, the boy got to riffing on penises. "Want to talk about man poles?" he asked me. He leaned over and punched me in the arm. "Want to talk about zipper snakes?"

I narrowed my eyes at him.

"How about purple-headed yogurt slingers? No? Don't want to talk about those? How about balls? Want to talk about nubs? Nubbers? Want to talk about hairy balls?"

This went on for days. And it didn't get any better after he'd met my friend Christine, who is tall and curly-haired and very pretty. In short, she's right up my brother's alley.

We had ice cream with Christine right before we headed down to Portland so that Adam could spend hours combing through tourist traps, looking for the perfect souvenir for his girlfriend. He'd already gotten her a shirt and a hat and a mug (he gets her a shirt, a hat, and a mug everywhere he goes, so she's positively laden with shirts and hats and mugs, and when they finally get their own place together, they're going to have to devote an entire room to the shirts and hats and mugs they've amassed over their relationship) but he wanted to get her something else too, something with pizazz. But we couldn't do that before we had a snack, and ice cream it was.

Driving away from the ice cream stand, Adam blew a gust of air between his lips. "That Christine," he said. "She sure is cute."

She'd won him over in the first five minutes, probably when she told him there was a place in state that made lobster ice cream--actual lobster ice cream, not just the kind he was eating (Lobster Tracks, which featured red-tinted chocolate swirls)--and he decided that if there was a woman who could enable his lobster fix by giving him a way to eat it in dessert too, well, she was really special.

"Yes, she's adorable," I said. "There's no doubt about it."

"Do you think she'd like to talk about man poles?" he asked. "Do you think there'd ever be a day when she'd touch my man pole?"

I plugged my ears. He started to sing a little song about man poles, about purple-headed yogurt slingers, and my dad almost drove off the road.

~~~

I figured it might be more vivid if I showed it to you in cartoon format, so here you go. And, yes, I made us British.

How I Lost the Last Seven Dollars I Had in My Pocket on St. Patrick's Day

So, there was this bartender.

He was cute. He looked exactly like a more Irish version of the Wily Republican, which, I suppose, was fitting, since I saw him when we were out in Buffalo for St. Patrick's Day.

After ten minutes of watching this boy work behind the bar, I decided I was in love with him and that I wanted him to set aside the bottle of Jameson that was perpetually clutched in his hand so that we could duck out into the alley and kiss.

What I settled for was pushing my way to the bar and ordering a drink for Becky. She wanted a Bailey's and milk.

"A Bailey's and milk?" the bartender asked. He wrinkled his nose.

"Hey, it isn't for me," I said. "My friend requested it. I don't know."

"I'm not even entirely sure we have milk back here," he said. "Let me see what I can find."

He ducked down and rummaged in a cooler. And then another cooler. And then a final cooler--way back, under a row of dusty glasses. He pulled a gallon of milk from the cooler and hoisted it up so I could see. He unscrewed the top and cautiously sniffed. Then he gave me a thumbs-up.

"Great!" I shouted. "I really appreciate it!"

"Anytime, sweetie," he said, and then he got to work mixing the drink.

Later, after I had decided I was super in love with him, I went back up to the bar. There was a lull in the action, and there was some space up there because a large group of people--including a girl who spent a whole lot of time fingering a guy's ass for all to see--had left for the night. So I slid up to the bar and my bartender came right over.

"Can I tell you something?" I asked.

"Of course," he said.

"You look exactly like my ex-boyfriend."

"Really?" he said.

Do I even need to admit here that I'd had a lot to drink by this point in the night? There was, after all, a good reason the cute bartender always had the bottle of Jameson in his hand: Everyone was drinking it, and the boys who'd parked themselves at the bar early in the night--the ones who were getting their asses fingered by slutty drunk girls--bought us several shots.

"Yes," I said. "You look exactly like him. And I was thinking that maybe later I would bring my camera over here and take your picture so I can show him he has a twin in Buffalo."

The bartender tipped his head to the side. "Is that all we're going to do?" he asked. He grinned.

I had to restrain myself, lest I leap over the bar. "Honey," I said, "I'll do whatever you want, but first we need to take that picture."

And I did eventually get that picture. It was busy again, and the bartenders looked like they were seconds from losing their minds, but still the cute bartender came over to me--we were leaving then to get tacos; we wanted Crunchwrap Supremes more than anything in the world at that point in the morning--and I needed to get the picture that second.

And, luckily, he humored me. He leaned over the bar and let me snap a picture with him. And then I pulled whatever money I had left in my pocket--which amounted to seven dollars--and I shoved it at him.

"Here!" I said.

"You don't have a tab," he said, shaking his head.

"No," I said. "It's for you. For being cute!"

And ten minutes later, since I'd given the last of my money to the bartender just because he looked like the 24 year-old version of Wily, Amy's boyfriend had to buy me a taco because I was officially poor, poor, poor.

A Love Letter to Evan Lysacek and the Winter Olympics

Hello, pretty boy.


We've been here before, you and I. During the last winter games, I had to work very hard to keep myself from flopping to the floor in an epileptic fit every time you showed up on the television. It's just that you have really nice hair. And dimples. And legs. And hands.

I felt you were robbed at the last Olympics, but I felt pretty certain that things would be okay in another four years, when you were older and wiser and--I hoped--hotter. My hoping was not in vain. You are hotter. Ridiculously so. Bonus: You're now an appropriate age for me, and I feel less skeevy about having a crush on you.

Last night as I watched you kick some serious ass, your legs looking a million miles long, I couldn't help myself from thinking, I'd pay some serious money to see his abs. But it's not my fault. Between skaters, they kept cutting to footage of you working out and doing crunches. And I turned to the cat and said, "Abbey, I might die if I don't get to make out with this kid."

And thank God for all of that, because I've been pretty muddy in the head lately, and if it weren't for this glorious two-week stretch of Olympics (which, I've got to say, is featuring the most attractive bunch of Olympians ever... if you discount the creepy mustachioed Polish skiers) I don't exactly know how I'd be handling things. I'm awfully sulky. But when I get home from school each day I know I have hockey games DVRed and I can watch those with dinner, and when I get done with the hockey games, it's already time to turn on the nightly coverage of whatever's going on. Luge. Speed skating. Slalom. Snowboarding. Figure skating. All of those things take up space in my head, and that's exactly what I need right now: Less available space for thinking.

And I'll even get into the sports I could care less about. Last Sunday, after I got back from a girls' night out in Boothbay, where we drank at a bar called--I swear on everything holy--McSeagulls (oh, Maine!)--I crashed onto the couch, rolled up in an afghan with the cat, and we watched the entire biathlon. I cannot accurately express how little I care about the biathlon, but last Sunday it was the best thing in the world to just stare at a television screen for sixty minutes and watch tall men skate in circles and shoot things.

But you know what's even better than that? Figure skating. Specifically, men's figure skating. Specifically, you. You look like you're seven feet tall on the ice, and that's enough to undo me, enough to turn me into a shrieking mess.

And I wasn't the only one. One of my girl neighbors had some friends over last night, and you should've heard the explosion of screaming that was going on over there, and this screaming corresponded with every time you appeared on the screen, so I think it's safe to assume you were undoing lots of women last night. You were turning us into sixteen year-old versions of ourselves, turning us into teenagers who want to tattoo your name onto our palms with red pen.

Be my belated Valentine, Evan. Come over and I'll make you a celebratory meatloaf. One fit for an Olympic champion.

What I Know Best

I feel like running.

When I get upset, when I get sad, when I feel like everything is fucked up and there's nothing I can do to fix it, I want to run away. I want to get in my car and go. North, South, East, West, whatever. Wherever it is, it is gone, and that is all that matters.

Of course, I never go. I never run.

What I crave is gone-gone, not just vacated. I don't want anything to do with personal days, slips of yellow paper signed by the chair of the department. I want new. I want gone. I want to feel like until I wanted them to, no one could find me.

This is my way of thinking I can outrun sadness, that I can trick it, fool it, leave a false trail and force it off into the woods when I've taken to the sea.

But I'm an idiot. You can't outrun sadness. You can't trick failed hope. It clings to you, dead weight, and makes you feel like you are filled with nothing but sand and rock and other heavy things.

*

Let me tell you a story: There was this boy.

This should be starting to sound familiar. We've been here before. Since I've come to Maine, I've taken on a new role: Girl Grieving Over That Which She Almost Had.

First there was the boy who woke one morning feeling suddenly truthful and told me, yes, well, this has been swell, but we should really probably stop doing this because I am getting back together with my ex-girlfriend.

Then there was the boy with the perfect name, the one who stayed up late with me to talk about God and the world and how he wanted to change things, be better, make things better. He disappeared the week of my birthday, and I had to cry with my face buried deep into two pillows so my father, who was visiting and sleeping in the next room, wouldn't hear me.

Now there's a third. And I swear to God--I mean, really, I swear on everything--I wasn't even interested in getting messed up in something new. When I went home I was a pile of busted limbs. The semester and the last boy had left me mangled. I was having trouble speaking in complete sentences. If you had asked me then what I wanted most, I would've told you silence. I wanted to remember what it felt like to think without hating myself so loudly in my head.

But then there was this phone call, and on the other end was a friend, and she said, "So, listen. I think you should have a fling when you're home for Christmas. There's this boy, and he's going home to Buffalo. You're going home to Buffalo. I can make it happen."

I said no. I did! Really! The first words out of my mouth were forget it.

"It'll make you feel better," she said. "Maybe you two could just make out or something."

You can guess what happened next.

Before I knew it, there were a few nights and then a New Year's and then a few more nights, and then there was the last day, and I had to force myself to get up out of a bed that wasn't my own because we were leaving, both of us, the next day, and we had to stop, stop, stop what we were doing and do other things, crucial things, things like packing and saying goodbye to our parents.

Before we got out of that bed, though, the boy told me I'd made it so he could breathe again. He'd had a bad semester, too, and he was sick of himself in the same ways I was sick of myself. But those two weeks over Christmas were new and better. For me, too.

"God I was a mess," I told him. "You put me back together."

And then we kissed and went back to our own corners of the world.

*

Here's what should have happened: It should've stopped there. There. That second.

When we said goodbye and I stepped outside into another ski country snow, that should have been it.

But it wasn't. And things went on and on. There were long phone calls. Late night phone calls. There were nights I went to bed at 6:00 AM just to get up and teach a few hours later. I was half-asleep but happy. Delirious. Suddenly there was a new something in my life, and that something was possibility. Hope. It was far away and far off, but there was something to look forward to, and after a semester like I had last fall, something to look forward to was the most foreign and beautiful idea in the world.

*

About the weather: Usually when I am home for Christmas break I end up getting caught in at least one awful snow storm, lake effect so bad that I have to turn off the radio and concentrate on my breathing. Usually this happens on the roads I know best, so, really, it's not so bad. I know the curves or I have memorized the bends or I know where the exits are.

But driving south to this boy's house was new for me. I had to take back roads I hadn't traveled since I was sixteen, back when my best friends and I would sneak off to Franklinville to go to the teen dance club there. But now I was driving past even that, driving into towns I knew nothing about, and then, eventually, out into the country where the snow drifted so badly I couldn't tell where road turned to ditch. I drove there in weather I should not have. I did that more than once. I did that because I really, really wanted to.

On the first night, after we came home from a bar where we had compared notes about the people we had in common, we sat in my car in the driveway and he said, "Do you want to come in?"

I looked out the windshield. The snow coming down was the best kind. It was huge and weightless, the kind that would drench you without your knowing it. Stand under it for even a few seconds and then, once you walk into heat, you'd realize how much you'd collected in your hair, your eyelashes, the folds of your jacket. If it kept up like that, the drive home would be horrible.

I should've gone home. I should've waved goodbye and wished him a good semester. But, instead, we got out of the car, and we stood in the driveway under all that snow.

"Wait," he said. He looked up into the sky and watched the snow come down. "Listen," he said.

I tipped my head up too, and closed my eyes. I was thinking Oh God oh God oh God. I didn't know what I was doing. But I let the snow cover me. And then we went inside.

Later that week, the morning after New Year's, he and I were leaving a diner after breakfast, and it was snowing again. It was the same type of snow--impossible and perfect, a postcard. I had my hand on my car door, and I closed my eyes, felt the snow brush against my cheeks.

"It always snows the most beautiful snow when we're together," I said.

Later that week we would be in bed, half-asleep, and he'd quote that line back to me, and I'd hide my face in the pillow, embarrassed. "Oh God," I said. "You remember that?"

"Yes," he said. "I liked it. No one ever notices those things. No one ever says anything like that to me."

And then I wondered if that meant something, if all that snow and beauty really meant something, but of course it didn't. It really meant nothing at all.

*

I wrote recently about being happy. The last paragraph I wrote was about superstition, about how I hoped I wasn't tempting fate by admitting to my happiness out loud.

Would you like to know how much time it took after I said the words out loud, after I admitted it, for everything to fall apart? Six days. I didn't even get one last full week of feeling that way.

Listen, let me be honest: I don't know if I really wanted to be with that boy--after all, what did I know about him? I knew as much as a girl can learn over two weeks of seeing someone in person and then a few more weeks of long phone conversations. But already I was addicted to certain things. I was addicted to an idea of a maybe and the way I felt when I heard his voice. I liked having someone to tell me goodnight, sleep well.

I had vague ideas about what was happening between us, and all of it seemed okay, right up until the moment he said, "I guess I should tell you about this girl I've been seeing out here."

There was a hangnail of silence between that and what I said next--which was something like, "Yes, that sounds like very important information for me to know."--and in that moment of silence everything went black. No, that's not right. Nothing went black; it was already black. I was standing in front of the desk in my office, and after he spoke I lifted my eyes, I looked out into dark of night, saw the shapes of the pine trees outside my window, and I thought of course. Two words. Of course. I thought of Keith, of the Wily Republican, of the Boys of Maine, of everyone who chose someone else over me. I thought, This is what you know best.

I walked back into the living room and sat down on the couch. Then I got up. "I think I am going to pour myself a very large glass of wine," I said, "and you can tell me whatever you need to tell me."

And so he did.

*

After this boy and I got off the phone the first time--we would finish discussing things later--I called the Wily Republican. I did this not because he's my closest confidant but because I wanted to yell at someone.

And so when he answered I cried and I yelled and I told him this was all his fault. He'd made me this way. He'd made me hurt and crazy and fucked up about men, and I kept wandering into crazy and fucked up things with men.

He listened to all this and then, finally, said, "Well, what does this guy want to do now?"

What the boy wanted to do was anything he wanted. That's what he told me. He said, "I just want to do whatever I want to do for the rest of the time I'm here in Minnesota, and then, later, like this summer, when we're both home, we can worry about whatever we're doing."

And I said, "So you just want to fuck around as much as possible for the next five months?"

And he said, "Yes."

When I told the Wily Republican all of this, he wanted to know how I'd handled it, what I'd said and done.

"I told him that didn't seem very fair to me. It just didn't seem fair to say, 'Hey, I think I'll want to be with you eventually, so let's keep things like they've been--let's keep talking for long hours and everything--and maybe I'll get around to wanting to be with you.'"

"Okay," the WR said. "What else?"

"I said it was simple," I told Wily. "I told him I'd done something like that all through grad school. With you. And I wasn't going to ever do that to myself again. So I said I couldn't keep letting myself get attached, so we would need to stop talking. Completely."

"He'll come back," the WR said. "He will. He'll realize."

"Don't tell me shit like that," I said. "It doesn't happen. It never does."

And then I cried because that was right: No one ever chose me, and no one ever came back. I was once again passed over, left behind, just some girl this boy used to know for a little bit.

It is what I know best.

Perv.

This week I read an article about some high school teacher/coach who called a girl into his office before laying a hundred dollar bill on the desk in front of him and saying, "I'll give you that if you take your clothes off slowly."

My first thought was ew, and then my second thought was wait a second. That sounds familiar.

Back in high school, one of our history teachers was a notorious pervert. He'd been around for a while. In fact, he'd also been my mother's history teacher back when she was in high school. In her old yearbooks, there he is, a younger version of himself with wet-looking hair and a thick mustache. The look he is giving the camera makes it seem as if he's counting the minutes until he can go home, slip into his smoking jacket, light a cigar, and put on some Burt Bacharach. In short, he looks like a big, fat pervert.

"Oh, he was a big, fat pervert," my mother told me when she found out I'd be having him for a teacher. "He wasn't even sneaky about it. He announced at the beginning of the semester that he was going to put all the most attractive girls in the front row. The so-so girls went in the middle, and then the guys got stuck in the back of the room."

"Oh my God!" I said. "That's disgusting!" Then I paused. "Okay, where were you?"

My mother? She was in the front row.

I was fairly certain Mr. Hardy wouldn't still have such a blatant ranking policy anymore--tenure or not, that was the type of thing to get a man fired from teaching honors history in the 90s--but that didn't stop me from spreading the gossip to my friends, and we all laughed when Mr. Hardy organized the seating chart so that the class outcast and one of the smartest boys got placed directly in front of him.

"Maybe Mr. Hardy's tastes have changed over the years," we joked.

But, really, they hadn't.

One afternoon I dropped by his classroom during a planning period to hand in a short essay extra credit assignment he'd circulated to the class.

"I'll read this while you're right here," he said. "We'll take care of the grade right now."

I stood behind his desk, next to him. I read my words over his shoulder. It was a dynamite little essay, and I was proud of it. I waited patiently for him to finish it and praise me.

And when he finished, he took up his pen and he hovered it right above the paper. "This was good," he said.

"Thank you," I said. I watched his pen very closely. I was waiting to see the good grade he was going to trace on the paper. But the pen just hung in the midair.

"I'll tell you what," he said. "I'll give you a choice."

I turned my eyes from the pen to his face. His hair and mustache were the same as they'd been in my mother's yearbook, but they were gray now. He still looked like he couldn't wait for a patterned silk jacket, a cigar in his fist. He looked like the type of old man who would say to a girl, "Hi there, Kitten. Why don't you come sit on my lap?"

"A choice?" I said. "What do you mean?"

"Well, I could give you a hundred points," he said, "or I could give you a hundred dollars because you're wearing that skirt."

I looked down at my outfit. I was wearing one of those numbers that was popular in the early 90s: plaid school girl skirt, navy knee-highs, chunky Mary Janes. It was my favorite outfit, and I always felt pretty good about myself when I wore it. The boys on the bus--the only boys who had crushes on me--went crazy for that outfit.

"Uhm, I'll take the points," I said.

"Okay." Mr. Hardy laughed and finally put his pen to the paper. He scratched a 100 at the top of my essay and handed it back. He made a notation in his grade book. "You're all set," he said. "I'll see you in class."

I wanted to tell him, "Listen, buddy, you're disgusting." I wanted to say, "Get a grip, pervert." But there was another part of me that wanted to thank him. I was not a pretty girl. I wasn't like the popular girls in our grade, the ones with high, perfect pony-tails and mega-watt smiles. I'd just recently stopped perming my hair, and I had a wardrobe filled with crocheted sweater vests. My nickname was "Chassie," short for "Chastity." The boy I loved most dated the skinniest cheerleaders at school, and I would eventually join the squad for two months in an effort to make him look at me. He never did. It would be years before I got my shit together.

Beyond my parents, not many people stopped me to tell me I looked nice, looked good, looked pretty. And I knew having a fifty-something history teacher tell me I was pretty wasn't going to solve any of my problems, and I knew there was something really disgusting about what he was doing, but for just a few seconds that day I let myself feel a little bit less like I was doomed to be a girl on the periphery forever. And then, minutes later, I hated myself for thinking like that because a teacher had just vaguely hit on me. I knew I should be more scandalized than I was, but at fourteen I was looking for anything to hang my hopes on, and I needed to take whatever I got. And what I got was Mr. Hardy, who never again said anything inappropriate to me. We made it through the rest of the year discussing world history, and I got my good grades, and I sat in the second row, and I tried not to think about what a horrible pervert was standing at the front of the room, smoothing his mustache and looking out at the girls in his class and thinking, Yes, yes. If only.

Damn You, Make Me Babies.Com!

So, the other day I was on Facebook, and over in my news feed an odd little picture popped up, and what it was was this: it was a picture of a baby that had been generated when my friend's picture had been combined with another friend's picture.

As soon as I saw that, I knew I had to have my own composite baby. Which meant I followed the link on that picture to the website that made it. Which meant I spent a good chunk of time uploading pictures of all the guys I know so I could plug those pictures in with mine.

In my defense, this was in the name of science. I wanted to know which of my friends (or exes or imaginary lovers) would produce the best looking child. Here are some of the results:

Reaction:Fair enough. I was wrong. If Ryan Miller and I do ever manage to fall in love--which we so should--our offspring wouldn't look as hideously long-faced as previously thought. I think I'd finally be able to tell Keith to suck it; after all, he was the person who said that if Ryan Miller and I ever had a baby, it would come out looking like the Scream mask.

Reaction: Sad. You can totally tell this girl is going to grow up to have a uni-brow. My genes and Ryan's genes should just never meet.

Reaction: Apparently New Boy and I (remember him? Oh, who could forget?) would have very rosy-cheeked babies. Rosy-cheeked babies that look like they might grow up to become Jonathan Tucker. I'm not against that.)

Reaction: Hey, look at that. If I'd ever had a baby with the Boy From Work, she would've been cute. And a fan of daisies, apparently.

Reaction: I have the feeling that Josh would never allow one of his children to dress up as a duck. I'm fairly certain that when Josh does have kids, he'll dress them up for Halloween as members of Bone Thugs-n-Harmony.

Reaction: See that baby right there? That baby's got the look of a very precocious literary superstar. That's what happens when you combine the genes of a fiction writer and a poet.

Reaction: This one freaks me out. It is eerie in its accuracy. If someone else had combined these pictures and then shown me the result without telling me who the parents were, I'd be able to take one look at that and say, "Holy God, that's the Wily Republican's baby, isn't it? That's what the baby would look like if he and I had had kids?" That kid looks so much like him it's ridiculous.

Reaction: I saved the best (funniest? most disturbing?) for last. Keith and I? Yeah, Keith and I would've had fat, fat babies.

Family Pack

Worrying about offloading Myrtle the Turtle via Craiglist isn't the only thing on my brother's mind these days. He's also thinking about sex. He's thinking about sex a lot.

That's probably not that shocking. After all, he's a 22 year old boy, and 22 year old boys love sex. They love thinking about it, watching it, engaging it, or trying to engage in it.

But what is shocking about this is how he goes about preparing for sex. He and his girlfriend--a tough Buffalo girl who has a freckled Irish face that at times bears resemblance to the pink-nosed dwarf rabbits the two of them were plotting to buy before they got Myrtle--well, my brother and his girlfriend aren't very sneaky about keeping their sexual habits under wraps.

My brother's girlfriend routinely comes over to my mother's house and slaps her things on the counter. She doesn't always carry a purse, and if she doesn't, the important stuff just gets toted around in her hands and then eventually deposited onto my mother's kitchen counter. Keys, lip gloss, and birth control. That's what's usually waiting to greet my mother when she comes through the door.

"It makes me want to vomit," she says.

But she doesn't have the worst of it. The worst of it belongs to my father, who once made the mistake of giving his BJ's card to my brother when Adam asked for it. Then my father made an even graver mistake when he asked Adam, who was then returning the card, what he'd needed so desperately to buy in large quantities from BJ's.

"Condoms," my brother said. He waggled his eyebrows. "I need a few family packs."

That's bad enough, but it's not the end of the story. It's not the real problem. The real problem is that he keeps coming back for that card over and over and over. And by "over and over and over" I mean "often." I mean "too often." I mean "disgustingly often." I mean "gross."

"How many packs of condoms does he need?" my father asked me. "Really! How many?"

I wasn't exactly sure how to answer that, but I was sure about one thing: I was sure that if we kept track, we'd all be more nauseous than we'd been in years.

A Whole New Girl

I knew. Of course I knew.

I knew it would end like everything else ends.

So when I tell you I didn't know, that I wouldn't have even guessed, that I never saw it coming, you should know that's not really the whole truth.

*

Last night I was going over several chapters in Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty because my creative writing class is reading part of it in our nonfiction unit. Early on in the book, Patchett, a Catholic girl who was schooled by a stern set of nuns, talked about how she could no longer pray for her best friend--a girl swallowed whole by loneliness. Instead, she needed to transform her prayers into good works and deeds for her friend. After all, Patchett says, it's the work that fixes things. It's the work that helps. It's not prayer. Because what is prayer but another way to worry?

*

A few weeks ago, just a few days before my birthday, I woke up in a tiny room flooded with sun. The shades weren't drawn, and I could see out into the trees, where everything was green and gold and beautiful.

My body was curled around a boy, and my hand rested in the center of his chest. His hand was closed tightly around mine.

In that moment everything in my life made sense. I could feel things in my body, in my head, slide into alignment. This was good. This was what I'd been waiting for. This was what I'd been asking for. I'd never before dated someone who was a lot of the things I thought would be good for me. Keith and the Wily Republican were my opposites. The handful of boys in between were either closeted gays or country boys or wild. For years I'd dated boys who got into the habit of rolling their eyes at or making fun of the things I loved, the things that mattered to me--most notably writing and reading. This boy, though, didn't roll his eyes.

The first time we went out, we sat over coffee and talked. I would talk about something I loved, and it turned out that he loved it too. He would talk about something he loved, and it turned out that I loved it too. With every minute that ticked by I was thinking, You have got to be kidding me! You have GOT TO BE KIDDING ME!

When it became clear that it was time to go, that we should go, because we'd already lingered too long over coffee--several hours--I realized I didn't want to leave. I could've stayed in that coffee shop until it closed, until I was forcibly removed.

While I was driving home, I called Diana.

"Yes?" she said when she answered. "Yes? Tell me about it. How was it? What's he like?"

"Oh," I said. "Dreamy. That boy is dreamy."

A few minutes later, he called me. "I was wondering," he said, "if maybe you wanted to come hang out with me and my brother and some of our friends for a bit?"

And I did, so I went.

Several weeks later, I was waking up next to him and thinking how nice this could turn out to be. It could be good. It could be exactly what I needed. So I closed my eyes and leaned my head against his shoulder. Dear God, I prayed, I think I could be good for this boy. I think he could be good for me. Please let me try this. Please let this stay around for a while.

At the time, I thought I was being thankful. I thought I was saying, I see what you're doing, and I appreciate it. But I wasn't. Somewhere deep inside I must have already known what would happen. Because what is prayer if not another way to worry?

*

"Dreamy" was right on the money. To describe him as such was the only way to be accurate. He was something out of a dream. It was like someone had plucked him out of my daydreams--the elaborate ones I muck around in when at a particularly boring meeting or when I'm driving long distances or when I'm reading a student essay that's so beyond help that my brain flips a switch and sends me to a much nicer place.

There's a line in an episode of Will & Grace where Grace is trying to explain the perfectness of Leo--her new love--to her friends, so she says, "His worst quality is that he's a Jewish doctor!" And that's how I felt about this boy. Everything about him was fantastic. He loved music. He sang. He played multiple instruments. He was hugely liberal. He was even a little bit of a hippie. He loved to write--in fact, he was in college studying writing--and he loved to read. He loved his mother. He worked with the mentally handicapped. At a party he and his friends threw one night, a boy cornered him and looked at him for a long moment before saying, "Can I just tell you something? You are probably the nicest person I have ever met."

And you should've seen him. He was really something else. Perfect height, perfect hair, perfect eyes, perfect body. It was like I had made him, designed him myself, said, "This is what I want my future boyfriend to look like." He was quintessentially Maine-y: bearded, tall, athletic, rugged. He even had a really good name. ("Extra bonus points for that name!" I said when I filled people in on the situation. "It's perfect!")

It was eerie looking at something you'd always wanted but had sort of figured didn't really exist.

*

What's so hard about this is I tried to be careful. I was careful about everything. Even that first night, when I decided that, okay, I would go over to his house and meet his brother and his friends, I made sure four separate people knew where I was. One of those people--Katy--requested I notify her of my status every thirty minutes or so--just so she could be certain I wasn't being hacked to pieces deep in the woods of Maine.

So, dutifully, I took my cell phone out now and again and typed things like STILL ALIVE! and DO NOT PANIC! and THE BASEMENT IS WALLPAPERED WITH BOB MARLEY AND BEATLES POSTERS. NO ONE HERE IS GOING TO KILL ME.

I was careful in other ways, too. For example, I was careful not to go too fast.

"No kissing for at least three more dates!" Diana said the morning after our first date, when I called to tell her how it had been going over to his house.

"THREE MORE DATES?!" I said. "That's ludicrous! That's insanity!"

"Three more dates!" she said. "I mean it, Jessica! You want him to take you seriously! Don't you? Don't you want him to take you seriously?"

"Fine," I sighed. "Fine. Three more dates. No kissing. Got it."

And later, after the kissing had been done, there were other things to worry about. I was careful about those, too, which means I did not sleep with him. But I thought about it and wanted to. Often and a lot.

But I was careful. I'm not a fool. I know how much harder it would've been for me had that happened. So I tried to be careful with my heart. I tried to hold myself at a distance. I tried to keep the word "maybe" in my vocabulary at all times. If someone said, "It sounds so promising!" I would say, "Maybe." If someone said, "We can meet him when we come to visit!" I would say, "Maybe." I didn't want to start writing the future in my head because that's when I get into trouble. After all, I'm a writer. I can build a pretty good future. A specific future. One I can really see. One I can fall in love with. And because of that, I didn't want to get too far ahead of myself.

*

If you had seen me at the end of August or the beginning of September, I would've seemed like a whole new girl. I was in tall red heels and wandering the streets of Portland at night, boy at my side. I was sharing a bottle of wine and leaning across the table to talk about writing. I was tucked underneath a blanket and a boy's arm while we searched the sky for constellations. I was staying up late with him just so we could talk about God.

It was really something. It was nothing I'd ever had before.

*

And so came the morning I woke up happy, the morning when I prayed. What happened next is what I can't make sense of.

The boy woke up. He asked if I'd slept well, and I said I had. He asked if I was hungry. I said I was.

"Then I," he said, "am going to make you some breakfast."

And then there were eggs and toast and orange juice, and after I finished my plate I tied my hair--which was still bed-wild and tangled--back in a ponytail.

"It was delicious," I said. "That was some fantastic toast."

And then I, making sure I didn't overstay my welcome, said I'd duck out, that I'd get out of his hair so he and his friends--several of whom were strewn across couches in both the living room and basement, still recovering from the previous night--could do whatever they needed or wanted to do for the rest of the day.

He walked me to my car. Outside, one of his roommate's fathers--a temporary roommate himself--was sitting on the edge of a dew-drenched patio chair and strumming his guitar.

Once we got to my car, I realized I'd forgotten something inside, and the boy dashed back in to get it. While he was gone, the father--long-haired and hippie-ish himself--readjusted his guitar, looked up into the sky--blue, perfectly blue, and clear--and started playing "Here Comes the Sun."

When the door swung open again and the boy reappeared, he was grinning.

"Hey," he said. "Here's a good song." And then, at the chorus, he began to sing. The whole world was green and gold, the whole world was sun and sky, and a boy was coming down the stairs toward me, and he was singing.

And then he kissed me. He kissed me once, twice, three times, and he tipped my head up to the sun and kept me there, kept me close while he said goodbye.

That was the last time we spoke. I never heard from again.

*

I can say it as much as I want. I can say I would've never guessed it, that there was nothing about that day that would've made me think it was going to be over quickly, succinctly, that I would never hear from him again, that he would never return the phone call I made to invite him over for dinner a few days later, but of course I could have guessed it. It was everything I was afraid of when I decided to start dating again. It was the nightmare scenario. It was getting to see everything I wanted and then having it taken as quickly as it had been given.

*

It's helped to write this. It's helped to see the words on the screen. I am less heavy now, less full with the desire to shape this into a narrative. I've been writing it in my head for weeks now. I've been examining things and trying to see how they fit together, how they make sense. And now that it's written, now that it's here, I don't have to worry about it anymore. This is simply what it was: For a brief time I was happy.

But now that happiness is only a string of events, a few hundred moments when I wondered if maybe I'd happened into something good.

Now that it's out, it will be easier. My head will be less busy. I won't need to spend much time trying to give this shape and sense.

There is no shape. There is no sense.

And that is all.

Dating Advice from Josh

"Jessica!" Josh says. "If you get nervous, here's what you do: you just go to the store, buy a six pack, and slam that thing. If your date says, 'Are you drunk?' just tell him, 'Hey. I was a little nervous before I came, so I slammed a six pack.' And that's the end of the story."

Cliff Diving

If I'm completely honest with myself, I'm dangerously close to that cliff all single women will eventually fall off. All my friends are either married (or will be within the year) or shopping for engagement rings. And that in itself isn't bad--I am notorious for loving weddings and wedding planning--but the real problem is I'm still rotten at this whole dating and love business, that I'm still man-less, that I'm a little bit of a mess in these days when everyone else has put themselves together brick by brick by brick and built themselves up out of their own messy pre-settled existence.

And I still suck at love. I mean it. I suck. There is apparently something about my relationships that turns grossly unappealing after a year because that's about how long they last before burning up and out. Seriously. One year. After that, the guys grow tired and drift away--Keith, for example, went off with another girl; the Boy From Work found it difficult to call me every day after we'd been together a year.

I'll be even more honest: I've done myself a disservice in the past by dating or falling for or following around some idiot men, the most notorious, of course, being the Wily Republican, who made me a mess for three years of grad school. And all the good attention in the world--from sweet boys, from the very beautiful New Boy or, later, BFW--couldn't really fix the things the WR had rearranged and tossed into the ugly corners of my heart and brain. Some of those things are going to rattle around in there forever because there's nothing anyone can do to fix them, find them, right them.

There are times when I wake up feeling like I'm always going to be this way, that I'm always going to be defective. And the worst part of this all is I know I'm becoming boring to my friends.

Everyone is on their way to the next stage in their life--they're off to be wives and mothers. They're certain and settled. Some of them are even trying to have babies. It seems like overnight they forgot how things used to be when we were younger, when we didn't understand what we were doing, when we were getting messed up in relationships that we had no business being in. When I tell a story now, a story about my screwed up relationships or the current tactics I'm taking to find a good man so I, too, can start settling down, start moving on to the next stage--because, let's face it; I'm tired, I'm sad, I'm ready to meet a good man who's ready to stick it out--my friends seem bored, half-interested, like they're on the verge of telling me, "Oh, Jess, when are you going to grow up?"

I'm not saying they're being mean. I'm not saying they aren't supportive. I'm not saying they're rolling their eyes in my face and saying, "You're too old for this." I am saying--and maybe no one else has realized it yet--that they're starting to look at me and think, "Jesus. I'm so happy that's not me anymore."

I think we're at the point in our life--not by age, maybe, but by stage, since everyone else is moving on and I'm not--where single girls are scary. They are they Other. They are the Used to Be. They are the God, Do You Remember When?

And let's face it: being single is exhausting. After the BFW informed me, during our attempt to get back together, that he had lost interest in moving up to Maine and had gained interest in making out with some girl from work, I went to bed and slept. A lot. I would wake up in the morning wanting to go directly back to sleep. I was tired all the time from thinking about starting over again. Starting over is awful. It's awkward, it's ridiculous, it's a lot of trial and error, it's facing all your neuroses from square one. Again.

And my friends have had to do this with me often. It seems like I'm always starting over, that I can't quite get anything right. And I'm doing it again, now. Again. Again. Again.

I'm on the edge of the cliff. All my friends are sitting on a porch somewhere, sipping lemonade and talking about wedding dresses and engagement rings and houses, and some of them are talking about what positions they're trying while they're trying to get pregnant, they're talking about what's working and what's not, and there I am, the last one, the only one still hooking my toes over the edge of that cliff and praying I don't fall. I'm now Single Friend, and it's only a matter of time before I start making people seriously uncomfortable.

When I was home last month, we were discussing weddings and wedding planning with the girls who are getting married this year, and, for the sake of comparison, I brought up the cost of the Wily Republican's wedding--which he said was going to be obscene--and at the mention of the Wily Republican one of my friends said, "Oh, not THIS again!"

In that second, I found it hard to breathe. It felt like I was a little girl again, that I was stretched out across the length of my sled, and I was speeding down the hill down my house, unable to get control and then slamming into a tree. I'd never been so scared in my life. The crash had knocked all the air out of me, and no matter what I did I couldn't make my lungs work. That's how I felt when those four words came out of my friend's mouth. Oh, not THIS again! Just the mention of my ex--and not even in an oh woe is me... he broke my heart! kind of way, just a hey, listen to what this idiot is spending on his wedding way--elicited that kind of reaction. Those four words meant, Jesus, I am bored with this. They meant, Oh, get OVER it already.

That was the first time it really hit me. I'm so different from these girls now, and it just about breaks my heart.

Ejected with an Englishman (and Josh)

Here's what I can tell you about today: it started with me thinking I was going to go to lunch with Josh and his friend Felix, who had just flown in from England for a month-long vacation, before they left for a road trip to Wisconsin.  In reality, I ended up sitting in the holding pen at the Canadian border for several hours before the country demanded I turn around and get the hell out.   

Here we go:

11:50 PM 

Josh calls. 

"Hey," he says.

"Hey," I say.

 "How do you feel about going to Canada today?" he asks.  "Felix wants to see the Falls."

 "Uh..."

 "Actually, he wants to ride the Maid of the Mist.  He saw it in Bruce Almighty, and it's all he wants to do."

 "Uhm, okay," I say. 

 "Okay.  How quick can you get here?"

 I am sweaty from my early morning walk, and I look disgusting.

 "Uhm, I can probably be there by 1:00?"

 "Okay," Josh says.  "Great."

  

1:00

 I arrive at Josh's.  He and Felix, who is tall and has a stellar accent, are throwing darts.

 "Hello," I say.  "Nice to meet you.  I need deodorant.  I was rushing, and I forgot to put it on."

 "Well, I'll be goddamned," Josh says.

 "Do you think Kristen will mind if I borrow some of hers?" I ask.

 "No," Josh says.

 "And I need some gum, too," I say.  "Do you have any?"

 "Gum?" Felix says.  "Gum? I've got some gum."

 He fishes some gum out of his bag and hands it to me.  It looks like a thin Chiclet and it tastes like Luden's cherry cough drops.

"English gum!" Josh says.  He puts a piece in his mouth.  "Well, I'll be goddamned," he says.  "This is weird."

 

1:15

We are in the car.  I am driving because Josh's car is sketchy about being put in reverse.  We are running a few errands before we head for the border.  Josh needs to go talk to his supervisor for a bit, and then he needs to go to the community center where he works.

As we are driving toward the first location, Josh spots his supervisor walking down the street.

"Pull the car over!" he says.  "I'll run her down!"

He goes to find her, and I turn the car around and wait for him.  

Felix and I, who met mere moments ago, are now alone in the car and forced to make conversation that is not initiated by Josh.  Naturally, this means we start talking about masturbation.

Since he and Josh worked with special needs children at the summer camp in Wisconsin, I figured he would appreciate some of the stories I hear from my teacher friends who preside over special needs classrooms, so I lead with the story about my best friend and the boy in her classroom who has a penchant for masturbating during nap time, which, as you can imagine, is pretty uncomfortable for my best friend and her aides.

He has a few thoughts about the masturbators from camp, and we have just finished comparing masturbating stories when Josh comes back to the car.

1:30

At the next stop, Josh dashes into the community center where he works.  Felix and I are alone again, but we have exhausted our witty masturbation stories.

Across the street, a game of basketball has started on the community center's court.

"I love basketball," I say.  "I used to love playing.  I was pretty okay, too.  I could throw a mean shot from far away.  In middle school gym class, I was like a secret weapon for my team."

"Basketball," Felix says.  He makes a face.  "It's not very popular in England."

"No?"

"No.  I think you Americans like to make up sports or make adjustments to the rules of sports just so you can say you're the best at the world in them."

"We are assholes," I say.

1:45

We are on the highway, headed toward Niagara Falls.  We are just about to pass through the toll to get on Grand Island when Josh gasps.  When I glance over at him, I see there is horror in his eyes.

"Oh my God," he says.  "I forgot my passport."

1:46

We turn around to go retrieve the passport.

1:50

We are back on the road, and now everyone has their passports--even Josh, the boy who grilled me about my passport as soon as I walked in the door.

 

2:15

We are on the Rainbow Bridge, sitting in the line and waiting our turn to go through customs.

"Do you have any Beyonce?" Josh asks.  

"Yes."

"Single Ladies?" he asks.  "Can we listen to Single Ladies?"

 

2:16

We are on the Raindbow Bridge, sitting in the line and waiting our turn to go through customs, and we are listening to Beyonce sing about putting a ring on it, and Josh looks about as happy as I've ever seen him.

We can see the Falls--sort of--to our left, beyond the bridge.  It's as close as we'll get to them all day.

“I need to pee,” Josh says.

“Me too,” I say.

 

2:20

At customs, we answer the standard questions about nationality and how everyone in the car knows each other.  The agent writes out a yellow slip and hands it to me.

"You're going to need to pull in over there," he says.  "That guy needs to get his passport stamped."

He is not specific about which guy needs to get his passport stamped, but we all assume it's the foreign guy sitting in the car, the one who has already said bollocks (which made me want to clap I was so excited by it).

We park and go inside the holding center, which I have been in once before when my mother’s boyfriend swore that a parent did not need to bring a proof of citizenship for his child while trying to cross the border.  We told him that things had changed, and while that sort of lax nonsense had been allowed before 9/11, it certainly wasn’t allowed now.  He got huffy about it, so we shut up but then at the border we were pulled over because—aha!—you need to provide birth certificates for minor children when passing into Canada—yes, even when you’re a citizen of New York, and, yes, even when you’ve lived in Buffalo all your life and crossed the border a million times without issue.  We sat there for a long time being investigated for possible child abduction and smuggling, thus delaying our trip to the Niagara Falls Butterfly Conservatory.

This time at the center, we are a little less sure about why we were there.  The sentence That guy needs to get his passport stamped isn’t terribly informative—after all, we aren’t sure which guy or why the passport needs to be stamped.  Still, we are directed to a line and we wait.

Josh is not a good wait-er.  He gets antsy.  He gets irritable.  He gets annoyed at the delay in plans, in the deviation from the way things were supposed to be.  Further annoying him is the fact that there are three agents sitting at the desk our line is diverted to, and only one of those agents is actually calling people forward.  The other two are busy on their computers.

“Oh, you know they’re probably on Facebook right now,” Josh says.  “They’re two inches from your face, checking their walls, and you will never know.”

There are several groups of travelers in front of us.  There are some Latinos, some Asians, and a few Europeans.  Behind us are more Asians, a cute couple that looked to be honeymooning, and a bunch of tiny Asian nuns that are dressed entirely in white.  White habits, white headdresses, white stockings, white shoes.  Two of the nuns are wearing nondescript shoes, but the third is wearing a strappy white sandal with a little heel.  I like her gumption.

 

2:50

The few groups in front of us take forever.  It is unclear what the problem is, really, but part of the problem might be that no one speaks English very well.

“Do you think there’s a bathroom in here?” Josh asks.

“There’s got to be,” I say, although I can’t see any English/French signs that direct the way.  There is a water fountain in the corner, but that’s about it.  “You’d think they’d have to have a bathroom in here,” I say.  “I mean, this is a long wait, and some of those people in the chairs along the walls have been here since before we got here.”

Josh starts shifting his weight from one foot to the next.

“Assholes,” he says. 

 

3:05

It is our turn.  Another agent has come out from the back room—where seized contraband is stored; I can see locked cabinets labeled with bold print: LOADED WEAPONS.  NARCOTICS.  ILLEGAL WEAPONS.—and she seats herself at another computer.  She calls us forward.

Felix hands her his passport—again, because we thought the problem was him, the guy from England, and the border guard said the “he” was supposed to be the one in line to get a stamp in his passport.

The woman gestures to Josh and me.  “I need all three passports,” she says.

This is a surprise, but we dig ours out and hand them over.  She arranges them in front of her and starts typing on the computer.

“Okay,” she says.  “Has anyone here ever been denied entry to Canada before?”

“No,” I say.

"No,” Felix says.

“No,” Josh says.

“Oh really?” she asks.

This doesn’t sound good.  She narrows her eyes at Josh.

“Well, back when I studied abroad in Quebec there was some trouble with my student visa,” Josh says.

“So the answer is yes,” the agent says. 

“But they let me in,” Josh says.

“The answer is yes,” the woman says, clearly disgusted.  She motions to the chairs.  “Go sit down,” she says.  “Wait.”

 

3:30

“I really wanted one of those ponchos from The Maid of the Mist,” Felix says.

We are sitting along the wall, far from the original line we’d been in.  The place is filling up.  The seats directly across from the area we were sitting are full of people are also having a tough time getting access to Canada.  We are now closer to the front door.  The woman has told us nothing about our status, about what she is doing with our passports, about what she is trying to find out on the computer.  She has just commanded we wait. 

“I am going to piss myself,” Josh says.  He looks pale and sick.  He looks like he might just piss in his pants. 

 

3:35

There is some shouting from the other end of the room, and it sounds like one of the agents—maybe ours—is shouting.  It almost sounds like someone is shouting, “JESSICA!”

I lean over and listen.  “JESSICA!” someone shouts.

“Do you think they mean me?” I ask.  There are a lot of people in the room, and the chance that someone is shouting “JESSICA” and assuming only one person will step forward seems odd.

Then I hear my whole name being shouted, so I launch out of the chair and head back around the curve to where our agent is tapping my passport on the edge of the desk.  She is impatient.  She is annoyed.  She thinks I am pretty stupid.

“Yes?” I say.

“Jessica,” she says, “what’s your social security number?”  I give it to her.  “And how much money do you have on your person right now?” she asks.

“Uhm, well, I don’t know exactly.  Probably only twenty dollars,” I say.  “But I’ve got my debit card and my credit card.”

She nods and then narrows her eyes.  “Let me ask you this,” she says.  “Have you ever been convicted of a crime?”

This is a laughable question.  I am, after all, the girl who was so nervous about being caught aiding and abetting the boys who were climbing the fence of the town pool to take a dip on a warm summer night that I cowered in the parking lot of the church down the road until the boys were ready to go.  Still, I do not laugh.  Nothing is funny about this agent and the way she is looking at me.  This woman hates me.

“No,” I say.

“And have you ever been called upon to stand before a judge in this or any foreign country?”

“No.”

“Fine,” she says.  “Go sit down and wait.”

“Okay.”

I turn and walk back to the boys. 

“What did she want?” Josh asks.

“She wanted to know if I was a criminal and how much money I had in my pocket,” I say.

 

3:45

The boys are called up in turn.

When Josh is up there, I tell Felix it’s okay, this will all work out, we’ll go get a beer afterward and some lunch—we are starving—and after lunch we’ll get on that boat, and we’ll go for the ride up to the falls, and he can put on his poncho and be happy that he got to do the thing they showed in Bruce Almighty.

When Felix is up there, I tell Josh it’s okay, this will all work out, see? See? Felix is smiling at the lady! It must be okay! It must be working out! It’s looking good! Why would he be smiling if it isn’t working out?

“Oh boy,” Josh says.  “This doesn’t look good.”

In fact, that’s about the time Felix flashes the woman a big, fake smile and a hearty thumbs-up.  He storms away and back to us.

“This,” he says, “is ridiculous.”

Apparently, she’d been insisting he had a felony on his record, and, while, yes, he did have a scrape with the law when he was in the U.S. doing volunteer work at the camp with Josh, it was no such thing.  It was not a felony, and in court it had been dropped down to a mere violation.

Still, the woman behind the desk was sure, was certain, was definite about one thing: the Englishman was a convicted felon, and he was not getting in the country.

“I told her I just wanted to get my passport back then so we could go,” Felix says.  “She told me to sit down and wait for the paperwork to be done.”  He sighs.  “She told me that I could never come here.  Never.  And she said that if I came back in the next ten days, they were going to throw me in jail and keep me there for a few days.”

Josh slumps down in his chair.  “I really need to go to the bathroom,” he says.

4:00

“I can’t take it anymore,” Josh says.  He stands and walks over to the agents attending the desk in front of us.  He asks if he can use the bathroom.  There isn’t one visible to us, so it must be in the back.

“Did your agent say you could go to the bathroom?” the new agent asks.

“She hasn’t told us anything,” Josh says.

“Well, I don’t know your situation, so you’ll need to go ask your agent permission.”

Josh sighs and slouches over to the other side of the room, and we can’t see him asking—begging—to go to the bathroom, but when he comes back he is not pleased.

“She said no,” he says.  “She told me I couldn’t.  She told me to sit down and wait.  I told her it was an emergency, and that I might just go in my pants, but she told me to just sit down.”  His eyes roll back into his head.  “I might do it.  I might piss in my pants.”

  

4:15

We can see our agent puttering around in the back.  She has a stack of papers in her hands.  She gestures at us, but it’s an unclear gesture, and she’s walking in circles behind the desk.  It’s unclear what she wants.

“Does she want us?” I ask.

“Are we supposed to leave?” Felix says.

“Did she mean we need to go over by the door?” Josh asks.

We have no idea, just like we have had no idea all day long.  We have had no idea what the problem is, what our status is, what we are supposed to do, and what is going to happen to us.

The agent leaves through the door, and we look at each other.  We shrug.  We decide to go after her.

She is waiting for us outside.  She shoves a piece of paper in my hands and is walking away, speaking to us but pointing her head in the other direction.

“Excuse me?” I say.  I have no idea what she has said to me, although it seems fairly critical.

She turns and heaves a sigh in my direction.  “Drive over there,” she says, and then turns and speaks the rest of the sentence into the wind.

"Could you say that again, please?” I say.

“THE GATE!” she says.  “DRIVE TO THE GATE.”

I don’t really know where the gate is, but I know I can’t ask any more questions, so I nod and the boys and I get into the car. 

I drive around the building until I find the gate, and the gate is a gate to the US.  We are being turned around and kicked right out of Canada.  It is the first time we’ve been told this.  Actually, we aren’t being told even then.  We are just being handed our passports.

“Give these to the agent over there,” the guard says. 

And that’s it.  That’s our explanation.  That’s our status.

“Can I ask a question?” Josh asks.  “Can I ask you what happened? Why aren’t we being let in?”

She points at him.  “You don’t have enough money,” she says.  “You need to have at least twenty dollars in cash to cross the border.”  Josh looks horrified.  I'm sure I look horrified.  I have never, ever, ever heard that rule.  Next, she points at Felix.  “You need special FBI clearance or else you’ll go to jail if ever you come back here.”

“I’m not coming back,” Felix says.  “Ever.  Trust me on that.”

“And what about me?” I ask.  “Does this affect me?”

“No,” she says, and then she waves us on our way.

And then, a few minutes later, we are safely back in the U.S., and we make the decision that that has been just about enough excitement for the day—Felix doesn’t even want to attempt to see the Falls from the American side—and so we decide to go back into the city and drink until we are a little less annoyed.

And Josh? We stop at the first gas station we see, but the gas station doesn’t have a bathroom for its patrons, and while I pay for the coffee Josh is desperate about getting, he dashes around the corner of the building and finally gets to do his business—which seems about just the right note on which to end our little adventure.

“Weird stuff always happens to me when I’m with you,” I tell him as he gets back in the car.

“I know,” he says, “but this is really weird.  I mean, even for me.  It’s just really weird.”