One of Those Girls

This has been a crazy week. I graded, graded, graded. I ran, ran, ran. I tried to tie up all sorts of loose ends before the Boy From Work arrived in Maine on Friday with a suitcase full of sponge candy (orange, milk, and dark) and a new haircut--two things of many he would roll out over the weekend in order to make a strong case for us getting back together.

A lot of those things were sweet and serious--a book of short stories he'd written about me, for example--but some of them were of the more frivolous variety. The sponge candy (delicious). The new haircut (adorable). The trip to see the Portland Pirates (awesome).

While we were at the arena, I busied myself with my usual Jess at Hockey Game Fare: discussing how much I love watching men play sport on ice, discussing how I could listen to the song "I Want to Drive the Zamboni" every day for the rest of my life and be happy about it, dissecting my love for Ryan Miller, recounting the days in grad school when each Maverick home game was preceded by cheerleaders doing lifts on skates, and screaming things like Eeep! and Ack! and Jesus! and I will kill you if you don't score!

And even though I was pretty busy with all of that, I still managed to squeak in some time to be charmed by the girls sitting behind us.

The row directly behind us was filled with seven eleven year-old girls who were extremely excited to be at the Friday night hockey game. They were also extremely excited that they knew one of the boys who worked the ice--you know, cleaning up after Chuck-a-Puck, shoveling ice shavings off the lane by the boards, making sure the goalies had their water bottles safely stowed in the nets.

Every time that boy would make an appearance, the girls behind us would stand up and sing out, "Oooooooh, Robbie! Oh Robbie-Robbie-Robbie! Ooooooooooooh, Robbie! Hiiiiii, Robbie!"

And that boy on the ice--Robbie--would blush and shake his head and look at his toes. It was all very charming and sweet, and I felt like I wanted to turn around and tell those girls they were just about the cutest thing in the world.

This feeling only intensified in the second period, when those girls started talking about the boys they were in love with.

"Did you, like, see him the other day?" one would say.

"Oh my God!" another would squeal. "He's sooo cute!"

They were eleven year-olds with high pony-tails and sherbert-colored hoodies. They had hot pink nails and scrubby tennis shoes. They were sugary, jittery, giggly whirs that buzzed up and down the stairs to get snacks, to get Robbie, to get the camera man's attention. What they wanted more than anything was to get on the Jumbo-Tron, where they would dance and squeal and hug each other.

I understood them. I understood them a lot.

Sadly, though, the woman sitting next to me--the woman sipping light beer, leaning against her husband--did not.

In fact, at the end of the second period, this woman--who had, at the end of the first, turned to me and said, "Those girls need to have their mouths sewn shut!" before informing me that she didn't have kids and was never in a million years going to have any--whirled around, raised her voice, and started yelling.

"Listen!" she said, sounding like any number of the evil math teachers I've had over the years. "I paid money to come and watch this hockey game! I did NOT pay money to come here and listen to YOUR CONVERSATION! You girls need to be QUIET!"

Oh my God, I thought I was going to die. I nearly crawled into the Boy From Work's lap to get as far away as possible from that woman. I wanted those girls to be certain that I wasn't with her and that I didn't share her views. I'd paid my money to see the hockey game, sure, and I was sort of in love with the weird background conversation that was playing as a soundtrack to the sport playing out below. It was making me nostalgic. It was making me think back to the days I roamed Holland Speedway with Tammy, giggling and sipping Pepsis we'd gotten from the cute boy down at the beverage stand. We sat behind numerous families who'd paid their money to watch drunk farmers derby their cars around an asphalt oval, and they were getting us--and all of our, Oh my Gods! and He's so cutes! and Do you think he'll let me drive his race car when we get marrieds? No one said a single word to us. We were allowed to scale the tall steps of those bleachers and gallop back down whenever we pleased and with as much fanfare as we found necessary.

People didn't need to turn around and yell at girls like us. We weren't like the tough girls my mother turned around and yelled at when I was a little girl attending one of my first races. It was the late eighties, and those girls looked like something out of a Whitesnake video. They had tall hair and red lips and stacks of bracelets climbing their wrists. They were wearing tight acid-wash jeans and matching denim jackets. They were beautiful in the way that was just right for that moment in time, and they knew it. They were showing off. They were tough and they were pretty, and they were talking about their racer boyfriends and how those boys were going to kick the fucking shit out of that motherfucker and that asshole and that dickhead.

My mother couldn't take very much of that before she turned around and told those girls that there was a little girl sitting right next to her and they needed to watch their language because that wasn't the stuff a little girl needed to be hearing.

I was horrified. I felt uncool. Babyish. I couldn't believe my mother would do such a thing. And when one of the girls--embarrassed and horrified herself--leaned down to pat me on the shoulder and say, "Hey. Hey. I'm so sorry," I could have dissolved into a hot little pile of ash.

Those were the girls you yelled at--foul-mouthed filthy girls--but even they knew when they'd done something wrong and could apologize for it. But the girls behind me at the hockey rink? They probably had never been yelled at before. They were probably good girls who volunteered to work in the library and held elaborate fashion shows at sleepovers. They probably cut their crushes' pictures out of the yearbook at the end of the school year and pasted those pictures into their diaries. And all they were doing was being themselves and having a good time. But the woman next to me couldn't stand it. She hated the giggling and the talking and the frivolity. It made her clutch her armrests, her beer, her husband's arms. It made her turn and yell.

I felt so bad for the girls. I felt so angry with the woman next to me. I was half hoping that one of the girls' mothers would come down and tell the woman to mind her own business or get up and move seats if she couldn't handle a little girl talk. But that didn't happen. I just burrowed closer to the BFW and said, "Jesus. SOMEONE needs another six wine coolers to calm herself down."

But deep down I was hoping that I would never become one of those women--one of those women who hates kids, who thinks anyone who makes the decision to have kids has been ill-advised--because there are days I wake up thinking, My God. Will I ever feel ready or capable or prepared? I don't want years of that wondering panic to spin into bitterness, into black hatred for kids--something so strong it makes me turn around and tell them that they are not important, they are not part of the deal, and they need to shut the hell up. I'd rather stay one of those girls--pink and blushing and twitchy--forever, running up and running down, making my way as loud as humanly possible.

You're Doing It Wrong

On Tuesday at 5:00, right after I finish teaching the most out-of-control but utterly charming section of College Writing I have, I will start the ten hour drive back to Buffalo. I will get into town late at night, and I will have to catch up on my sleep quickly because the next five days are going to be a streak of liquor! food! shopping! disco! liquor! food!

I'm looking forward to all of that. And there's something else I'm looking forward to, too, and it's this: I am looking forward to seeing my friend Josh.

We're coming up on eight years of knowing each other, and in those eight years we've been through a lot of weird things together (for example: this, this, and #3), but it never seems like enough. When I realized that I was going back to Buffalo after grad school and not to some maple syrup-soaked New England location where I would be a professor of creative writing, I was pretty upset and I sulked for days, but then I realized there was a bright spot: I'd be around Josh an awful lot. That thought cheered me. It cheered me until Josh told me he'd been accepted to do a semester in Quebec and would be gone most of the year.

We have the unfortunate luck of never being in the same state at the same time, so we have to soak up time together whenever we can, and this week is one of those times.

Josh has had the unpleasant task of listening to me whine a lot lately, but when I'm done unloading my line of woe-is-me, he always give me a little something to cheer me up, a little something to make me laugh, a little something to put it all in perspective. Like this story:

Not that long ago Josh was out with his roommate/best friend, and they were sitting at the bar and talking to some of the other people around them. Eventually his roommate/best friend wandered off, and Josh was left by himself. Josh being the type of boy he is--socially bold--he struck up a conversation with this cute girl near him. The cute girl was sitting with a boy, and Josh could tell they weren't a couple, so he was thinking maybe it would be in his best interest to try to get the girl to make out with him because if there's one thing in the world Josh likes the best, it's making out. So he tried to lay down some lines. He tried his best come ons.

That's when the girl asked him if he was gay.

"What?" Josh said. "No, I'm not gay."

The girl gave him a look--a look that said Oh, come on.

"I'm not!" Josh said. He didn't mind being confused with a gay man because he found that offensive; it was just that he minded losing the possibility of making out with this girl because she assumed he was into boys.

The girl turned and whispered something to the boy she was with. They laughed together. Then the girl turned back to Josh. "Do you think he's cute?" she asked, jerking her finger in the boy's direction.

"I don't like guys," Josh said.

And so it went for some time. The girl kept insisting that Josh was gay, that he was secretly laying down his lines to get closer to the boy she was with, when, in reality, Josh was just trying to get into her pants.

Josh got frustrated by all this. He wasn't sure how to convince this girl--this cute girl he wanted to kiss--that he was honestly interested in her, that there was nothing he'd like to do more than take her into a dark corner or out into the alley and make out for a few hours. The situation had gotten out of hand. Now he was sitting in this bar and waiting for his roommate/best friend to come back, and he had to suffer through this girl's attempts to set him up with the boy she was sharing vodka-Red Bulls with.

Finally, Josh--frustrated, tired, bored--got up and wandered outside to wait for his best friend. He sat on a bench outside the bar and looked off in the direction she'd wandered. He waited and waited and waited. He waited some more. Then the bar's door swung open, slammed shut. The girl from inside was now sitting next to him on the bench.

"Hi," she said.

"Hi," he said.

"I was wondering if you'd like to make out with me," she said.

Those words are Josh's favorite words, and as soon as they were uttered, he completely forgot how frustrated this girl had made him when he was inside the bar. He perked right up.

"Yeah," he said. "Yeah, I want to make out with you."

And so they started. Josh leaned over and put his hands on the girl's cheeks. He gave her one of his best kisses.

She pushed away immediately. "You're doing it wrong,"she said.

No girl had ever told Josh he kissed wrong. No girl had ever complained about his style. He stared at this girl, dumbfounded.

"Again," the girl said, and leaned back into him. She demonstrated how she wanted Josh to kiss her, and so Josh started kissing her again. And apparently it went better this time because she had no complaints. Until he started to move to places other than her mouth. He'd begun to move on to spots that indicated he was interested in things more than kissing, but this girl stopped him. She put a hand on his chest. "You're doing that wrong, too," she said. She hitched her shoulders up to her ears, as if to itch his kisses off her neck and ears.

Josh waited. He waited for her to instruct him how to kiss her and where, and when she did, he paid very close attention and tried again, doing exactly what she wanted. This time, her reaction was exactly what he wanted. She curled close and sighed and kissed him back and back and back. And Josh went on thinking this was nice, this was great, but wasn't it a little bit strange how this whole night had started? An hour before this girl had been convinced he was gay, he wanted her friend at the bar, he was trying to get in good with her to get in good with the guy so they could go off and have some man-on-man action. He wasn't exactly sure what about that--and his subsequent exit--acted as an aphrodisiac. And he still wasn't exactly sure what he was doing wrong for her. But it looked like as long as he behaved and did what she said, things would work out just fine. Josh doesn't have sex--he did when he was younger, but he's over it now, and he's waiting for the right girl to come along--but he does do other things, and he was thinking that maybe, just maybe, if he played his cards right, he might get to see this girl naked. He'd like that.

The girl broke away, and Josh was concerned for a second that he'd done something wrong again, but this girl wasn't going to scold him this time. She smiled sweetly. "Do you want to have sex in my car?" she asked.

And, bless his heart, Josh actually thought about it. In that moment he considered going back to the parking lot with this girl, ducking into her car, crunching their bodies into tight angles to get things done. And he doesn't even have sex. At all. But this girl--this idiot girl who spent time trying to convince him he was gay when he wasn't, this idiot girl who had the audacity to announce he was kissing her wrong instead of getting that message across in the more subtle ways that girls all know--had made him think, Huh. Okay. Maybe?

If that had been me, if I'd been scolded more than once on my technique, I would've been out of there so fast, I would've been one hot streak of girl, glowing red with embarrassment, a tornado of horror that was spinning herself so far from that situation she'd never, ever, ever, ever have to think about it again.

Sometimes I am incredibly jealous of boys. So, so jealous.

A Letter to That Sucky TSA Lady at the JFK Airport

Dear Sucky TSA Lady at the JFK Airport,

Yesterday morning I woke up at 4:15 AM. I showered, dressed, zipped up my luggage and then, with the Boy From Work, had one last early-morning dance out on our ocean-facing balcony. I was leaving Mexico. I was leaving heaven, and I was sad about it. I might've cried a little bit. And then I got in a taxi and went to the Puerto Vallarta International Airport, where I was hustled through security checkpoints and onto a plane that would take me to Mexico City, then New York, then home. Over the course of the day, I would pass through multiple checkpoints, have my carry-on rifled through by all sorts of grim-faced people, and pass my bag through many X-ray machines.

And then I came to you. I'd made it through customs, successfully claiming my one substantial purchase: a small and glittery snow globe for Diana, who has a collection of snow globes. When I booked my trip to Mexico, she had only one request: I was to bring her back a snow globe. And I did. I sifted through the horrendously ugly (think: dolphins that looked suspiciously like they were humping as they were suspended there in the soupy, glittery liquid) and I sifted through the so-so (boring sombrero-ed figures having a siesta under slow-falling snow chunks) until I found a seashell-bedecked globe that was the right mix of cute and gaudy--just what a snow globe should be.

I purchased that snow globe and didn't think about it again until I was in line for security at JFK. Unbeknownst to me, I'd accidentally packed it in my carry-on because it was in the same bag as snacks I'd purchased for the trip home (M&Ms, Snickers, and other chocolate-y delights). I'd just thrown it in my carry-on so that the BFW and I would have something to eat on our five hour flight to our layover at JFK. We weren't sure if we were going to get food from Air Mexico because we hadn't gotten anything except a lousy glass of pop from our American Airlines flight on the way down to Mexico. Turns out Air Mexico rocks. They fed us a full lunch (with a cupcake for dessert!) and snacks a few hours later. Also, in the middle of the flight, the smartly-dressed stewardesses wheeled around a cart filled with free booze. And they gave us a movie to watch! It was an experience, let me just tell you. It was like flying Jet Blue, but even a little better. And now it seems so silly that I feared hunger. And it makes me all the more angry about what happened. If I hadn't anticipated pangs of hunger, I wouldn't have raided the gift store before I left the hotel. If I hadn't purchased all that chocolate, I wouldn't have thrown that gift shop bag into my carry-on. And, and, and, you and I would've never met.

After we arrived at JFK, we had to dance between terminals until we found where we needed to re-check our bags and go through our umpteenth security checkpoint of the day. And then, as I was scuffling through the metal detector, I saw my bag being tugged off the line. A lady--not you, not yet--told me I needed to follow her to the dreaded Rifle Through Your Things Corner. I went, and I watched as she pawed through my things. "Where is it? Where is it? Where is it?" she muttered to herself. She examined every inch of the bag before shrugging and sighing. "I need to run this again," she said. "I need to find it."

I wasn't sure what it was, but I didn't want to ask. I figured it might seem pushy or snarky or mouthy if I said something like, "If you tell me what you think you see, I'll tell you where it is."

The lady came back and went through the bag again. She went through every pocket and every bag and fingered my gift shop bag--stuffed with chocolate--one more time. It was then that I got a sinking feeling in my stomach. The snow globe. The SNOW GLOBE.

She found it, unwrapped it. "Nope," she said.

I wanted to vomit.

"What's wrong with the snow globe?" I asked. It was small and certainly under three ounces. I felt confident even though I had forgotten about it and neglected to put it in my quart-sized bag, I would still be okay because it met the carry-on requirements.

"Can't take it," she said.

"Why not?" I said.

"Just can't," she said. "No snow globes."

Now, listen. I've read the rules. I've made myself familiar with the picky TSA stuff you need to know before you travel. I know what I can take and what I can't. I know how to take it. Nothing I've ever seen posted has ever, ever, ever said anything about snow globes. Nowhere in the TSA rules does it say NO SNOW GLOBES.

I mentioned this to the lady. I said, "It doesn't say you can't take snow globes."

She shrugged, and that's when she motioned behind her to you. You were wearing a boxy, ill-fitting suit, and you looked angry. You had a walkie-talkie in your hand. You were glaring at me. "SARAH," you said to the first lady. "NO SNOW GLOBES, OKAY? NONE."

The first lady nodded. "I know," she said. She turned back to me. "You can try to maybe go back to the desk and check this in your luggage, or you can throw this out right here." And then she motioned to a box of abandoned items.

I wanted to cry. My luggage was so long-gone it wasn't even funny. It changed hands earlier, way back in our international wing. It wasn't even in this terminal. I knew there was no way a Delta employee was going to try to track down my luggage and pack a seashell snow globe away for me.

I tried to explain this to the woman holding my snow globe--the snow globe that was so close to becoming Diana's snow globe--but she had no sympathy. "Sorry," she said, but it was clear she wasn't. It had probably been a slow day. She probably hadn't had anyone violating the rules all day, and you could tell she felt a certain thrill at finally having the opportunity to tell someone NO.

By this time, the Boy From Work had sailed through the checkpoint and was standing past the barrier. He had the saddest look on his face. I knew he knew what was going on, and seeing him look so regretful made the tears that I was desperately blinking back double in quantity.

"Fine," I said angrily. "Just throw it out."

And with that, the lady tossed the snow globe into a shallow bin of other items that had to be left behind. It landed with a thunk, and I glared and brushed past her. You watched me go. You shifted from one foot to the next. Your ill-fitting pantsuit looked even more ill-fitting than I had originally thought. You were a mean, wicked woman.

Once I was outside the checkpoint, the Boy From Work put his arm around me. "I'm so sorry," he said, and that's when I lost it. I started crying for real. "Come on," he said. "Let's go talk to them."

But I saw you were watching me. I didn't want to give you the satisfaction of having made me cry. The whole thing was so ridiculous. I'd gotten three hours of sleep. I'd been on umpteen planes and moving walkways and escalators. I'd been patted down and X-rayed and questioned. And now--just when I was in the home stretch, with one more flight to go until I was back to Buffalo--you were going to make my day extra hellacious.

"Let's just go," I said to the BFW. "I don't want them to see me cry."

And so we walked away from you. But fifteen steps into our walk toward our gate, my sadness flipped into something else. It flipped into exquisite and irrational anger. I was pissed. I was consumed with rage. I turned on my heel and hustled back to the checkpoint, where I leaned over the barrier and tried to get your attention. "Excuse me, Ma'am?" I said, loud enough for you to hear me. You ignored me. I raised my voice. "MA'AM!" I said. "EXCUSE ME! MA'AM? MA'AM?"

Finally, you turned. You looked bored. You looked constipated. You looked like maybe your panties--no doubt some cotton affair that crawled halfway up your back until it ended in some bunched elastic--had ridden up into places that had never seen the light of day. It was clear you were not pleased about being flagged down, confronted.

"What?" you said.

"I was the girl just a second ago with the snow globe," I said. "I am a little confused. I've read the rules several times, and I know there is nothing in there that says anything about snow globes being a prohibited item."

You stared at me.

"It was clearly under three ounces," I offered. "I don't understand why it was taken away from me."

You sighed. "I have no way of knowing that was under three ounces," you said.

I blinked. Just by looking at it, the grossest, stupidest, most drool-y idiot in the world would've been able to see that it was under three ounces. Bottles in my zip-top bag contained more liquid than that sweet little seashelled snow globe.

"It's under three ounces," I said.

"No way of knowing that," you insisted. "If the manufacturer doesn't label the items with the liquid measurement, we have no way of knowing for sure, and we can't let them through."

I thought immediately of my cheap travel-size lip gloss and how it had absolutely no label or measurements on it, and how it had just passed through the scan without raising any eyebrows. I wanted to tell you about that, but then I figured you'd take away my lip gloss, too, and I wasn't about to lose two things to your gaping box of "prohibited" items.

"How can you not have a way to measure liquids?" the Boy From Work asked. He was standing behind me, rubbing my back.

You looked at him like you wanted to kill him. "Because I don't," she said.

"It's a simple thing to figure out," the BFW said. "You should have something to calculate it for you."

And then things started getting ugly. The two of you started tossing a few harsh snips back and forth, and I knew this was getting us nowhere. You wouldn't budge. You wouldn't. You didn't care how red my eyes were or how many tears were simmering behind my lids. You didn't care how evident it was that the snow globe met regulations. You didn't even care when I told you about all the other security checkpoints I went through that did not have a problem with the globe. You just told me my snow globe was staying put.

I cannot begin to explain how much I loathed you at that moment. And you know what? I came home yesterday and read the official regulations on the TSA website, and none of what you told me was listed there, so there would've been no way for me to know that I was not supposed to bring a snow globe whose liquid content had not been properly branded onto the underside of its base.

It must have been clear that the snow globe was a big deal. Important. But none of that mattered to you. You just rolled your eyes and spit nasty things at me in your Brooklyn accent and sent me on my way. And I bet--oh, I just bet--that later that night when you went home and walked into your tiny, dingy apartment you poured yourself a glass of cheap wine and listened to your messages--did anyone call? Who would call you?--before you walked over to your table and unwrapped a tiny globe from its packaging, gave it a mighty shake, and settled in to watch its glitter rain down on tiny shells from Puerto Vallarta.

Bitch.

Love,

Jess

Bye Bye, Big Head

"I've got a question," Keith says when he calls. "It's a tough one, okay?"

Keith is my ex-boyfriend. I've been fielding tough questions from him since I was seventeen years old, since our second date, where we sat in his truck at the bottom of the ski slopes at Kissing Bridge, watching the last runs of the evening come down the lighted hill.

"Okay," I say.

"What would a girl see in me?" he asks.

"Oh, please," I say. Except for his snoring--which is homicide-inspiring--I can't think of one thing a girl could ever say she hated about him. Keith is a nice guy. He is smart, funny, witty, and handy with a deck of cards. He is generous and sweet. In a certain mood, he'll even write poetry--silly, frivolous, rhyming things that start like this: My girl is a writer/she likes when I bite her. He is also a good drunk: the kind that will get up on a table, sing a song, do a hokey dance that is all elbows and awkward angles.

Sometimes he doesn't know when to quit, and sometimes he can be the world's biggest pain in the ass, but I only get that side of him now, years after our relationship ended. When we were together, he was attentive and sweet in his own casual, playful way. I imagine he's a different sort of boyfriend now--like I am a different sort of girlfriend--but I have known him for almost ten years, and I know he is a fundamentally good guy--one I have no problem endorsing to any girl who's thinking of taking a run at him.

So I tell him this.

"Okay," he says, but he doesn't sound convinced.

"What's your problem?" I ask.

He sighs. "There's this girl at work."

Ever since Keith started his new job, there have been plenty of reasons to talk about the girls at work. The girls at this place love him. They love that he will pass snarky notes with them during training sessions, that he will go to karaoke with them, that he will choose to sing Baby Got Back and let them push their butts up against him while he raps the words my Anaconda don't want none unless you've got buns, hun!

Keith is friends with every girl at work. And some of them have been giving him some good, hard looks, maybe considering him for themselves or for a friend of theirs. He's already been out with a friend of a girl at work because this work friend loved Keith, thought he could solve all her friend's problems.

All of this is good for Keith. Over the summer, in the midst of my being oh so subtly courted by the Boy From Work, Keith was being broken up with. He'd been with his girlfriend--the Big Head--for years, and they'd spent the months prior to the breakup scouring local jewelry stores for engagement rings. But suddenly the Big Head was no longer interested in an engagement ring. She told Keith he could hold off, it could wait. She said there was no rush, that they didn't need to be engaged right that second.

Keith was relieved. All that wedding talk had made him itchy, and he was more than happy to tap the breaks and slow things down. They were living together, after all. What was the big rush?

Still, that whole escapade made me suspicious. I didn't trust the Big Head's motivations or reasons, and I felt like maybe there was something else going on. After all, what kind of girl spearheads the search for her engagement ring--a search that takes months--and then decides to nix it completely?

I didn't trust the Big Head as far as I could throw her--and with a head as big as hers, I wouldn't have been able to give her an ample toss. In fact, I hadn't trusted or liked her for a long time. My feelings for her were similar to the feelings Keith had developed for the Wily Republican during my stay in Minnesota. Keith thought the Wily was no good for me. He thought the Wily was slowly sucking all the hope and goodness out of me, that he was going to stomp on my heart until I was just a broken girl gasping for air and reason. I felt similar things for the Big Head. I thought she was sly, tricky, mean. I thought she would smile and say sweet things to your face and then turn around and tell the whole world what a horrible human being you were.

The Big Head never liked me, and I never liked her. We met the first summer I came home from graduate school. I had taken up with the Wily that spring semester, which had upset Keith because there was a small arc of time where he hoped we would get back together. But that summer, after he'd seen how I was so, so lost in the Wily's world, he sort of gave up. That didn't stop us from running around together while I was home for a quick stay. During that stay he took me to the bar his step-mother and her friends liked to haunt. It was a crusty, stale bar populated with old men. It smelled a little like urine. There were peanuts in bowls, Genny on tap, and horse races on the television. Most importantly, there were bar-top video games in the corner.

That's where Keith and I ended up. We played round after round after round of Naked Lady Picture Find (traditionally known as Erotic Photo Hunt)--a game I'd gotten remarkably good at, thanks to my studies at grad school--and we laughed and told old stories.

The whole time we were doing this, I could feel a pair of eyes burning into my back. Those eyes belonged to the Big Head. She was the daughter of a friend of her father's, and she had a thing for Keith. He didn't know it back then, and I guess I didn't either, but I did know something wasn't right. She was suspicious about me, that much was clear. She kept an eye trained on me at all times. A few months later, Keith and the Big Head got together and that past summer night and the prickly heat of her glare made complete sense.

I think the Big Head disliked me because of that night. I think she saw us having fun and thought, Well, that could be trouble. But she didn't understand that the time for me and Keith to be trouble together was long past. We'd given it our go. We'd even dragged it through the muck after he left me for another girl and then came back. We had almost a two-year run, and then a second two-year run before I left for grad school. We exhausted all possibilities of it ever working.

But the damage was done, and the Big Head decided I was no good. And for the next few years, whenever we happened to be in the same room the Big Head took care to cut me down whenever she could. She made fun of me, of how I looked or what I said. She even made fun of my friends and their boyfriends. She went so far as to tell me that one of my friend's boyfriend was just so clearly unfaithful, that he was going to cheat and break her heart, that he was a no-good bastard--and she knew this in the first ten seconds after she met him. The Big Head did not know her place. The Big Head did not know when to shut up. On the nights when she talked like that, I wanted to pour beer on her or tell her she had ridiculous eyebrows--anything that would make her stop talking.

I liked her even less after the breakup. Turns out she was the one who was a cheat, the kind of girl who broke hearts, a no-good bitch. She'd suddenly decided she wanted to give it a go with her best friend, a guy who'd been sniffing around for years. She told Keith to pack up his things and get out of her house. Immediately.

I liked her even less after Keith told me what she was really like behind closed doors. She yelled. She screamed. She called him a pig, a fat loser. She told him he was never going to amount to anything. She told him he was a waste of space.

I'm glad I didn't find this out until after she was far removed from his life. I don't think I would've been able to hold myself back. I would have wanted to storm her house, rip through her rooms, destroy all the things she loved the best. I would have made her take it all back. And then I would have yanked out all the hair on her big, big head. No one talks like that about my friends. No one.

But the Big Head is now safely behind us. They had a few busy months disentangling their lives and sorting through all the things they shared (a gym membership, season tickets for the Bills), but all of that is over.

And now there is a girl at Keith's work, and that girl has been giving him The Eye. And that girl's friend has been telling Keith that the girl likes him and wishes he'd get on with it and ask her out.

And apparently that girl is quite attractive.

"Smokin' body," Keith says. "She's got a ridiculous body." Telling me this brings him around to his main point, his real reason for calling. He is concerned. He is nervous. He is unsure.

"About what?" I say. "It seems like she's giving you the green light."

"Well, that's the thing," Keith says. "I've never dated someone that hot."

I sigh. "Thanks," I say.

Keith realizes his mistake. "Come on now," he says. "I'm serious. SHE IS FUCKING HOT. What can she possibly see in me? I don't get it."

And so I go through it all again. I list his good qualities. I neglect to mention his snoring. I keep it positive.

"I don't know," he says. "I just don't know about any of this."

But I do. I know he will do well. I know he will smile and tell his stories, and she will tell hers, and the two of them will go just like they should, just like we all do during the first steps of something new. It pleases me to think that he will be stumbling into something fresh and good. Just as it pleases me to know that with every step he will be walking farther away from the Big Head and all the hurt she tried to press into him. If I ran into her on the street tomorrow, I wouldn't hesitate to tell her how she made all of our dreams come true when she told Keith to get out--because now he can get back to being the boy he is, the boy he was always meant to be. I would be delighted to say those things, to finally even the score, finally erase some of the hateful things she said about Keith, about me, about our friends. I would be delighted. It would be my pleasure to finally tell her the truth.