A Message from The Lady-Killer, 12:30 PM

We need sugar... I had to use powdered sugar in my Kool-Aid... it sucks.

TLK + Dumpster Full of Chips = My Brother?

Let me be frank: I love chips. Oh my God, I love chips. Here's how sick it is: The reason I love sandwiches so much (and I love sandwiches A LOT) is because I get to eat chips with them. If you try to give me a sandwich without chips, I am going to ask you what the hell is the point. This means that this is an apartment that is always stocked with chips. Especially now, because I live with a boy who would die for French Onion Sun Chips the same way I'd die for Doritos.

Knowing this makes you understand the crisis situation we are in right now: This apartment is chip-less. Or, to be precise, it was chip-less until late last night, when the TLK arrived home from a jaunt with one of his friends. This morning I got a look at the bounty he'd piled on the stove: bags and bags of Doritos, Ruffles, and Cheetos.

"That's a lot of chips," I said.

He looked proud. "Yup," he said.

"Where did you get them?"

"Well, I bet you don't know this," he said, "because I didn't either until last night, but there is a Frito-Lay warehouse just down the road in the industrial park."

"Really?"

"Yes."

"And so... what? They were getting rid of almost-expired chips or something?"

"Right."

"So they put them on sale and you stocked up?" I asked.

TLK smiled at me, the smile you save for a simpleton. "Something like that," he said.

I looked at him. He looked at me. I looked down at the chips.

"Did they have them in a bin out front or something?" I asked.

"Not exactly."

"Oh my God!" I said.

"They're fine!" he said.

"Oh my God!" I said. "You went dumpster diving for chips?"

"I wouldn't call it DIVING," he said. "It was just a giant dumpster full of chips. It's not like we had to pick through garbage for them or anything." He picked up one of the bags and turned it toward me. "See? It's just that today's its expiration date. No big deal." Then he realized there was a dark smudge on the bag, a crust of God-knows-what. He put it back down. "Doesn't matter," he said. "I'm still eating the chips. They're on the inside."

And that was the moment I realized TLK and my brother were the same person.

A Not Unpleasant Puke

The Lady-Killer is a pro at puking. (See also: Steph's wedding.) Well, he puked again last night, and this was a fact I did not learn until this morning, when we woke at 11:53 AM, which was long after he'd slipped into bed after getting home and kissed me several thousand times.

"Gross!" I said. "You VOMITED last night and then came home and made out with me?!"

"Hey," he said, "I brushed my teeth!"

That, at least, was true. The first thing he did when he came through the door was take off his clothes. TLK prefers nudity or almost-nudity whenever he is lounging around our apartment. If it were up to him, every day would be a no-pants party.

The second thing he did was teeter into the bathroom, where he commenced brushing his teeth vigorously (TLK is very serious about dental hygiene). He even gargled with Scope. When he got back to bed, he breathed his minty breath onto me.

"So," I said as the mint washed over my body, "you spent the night drinking peppermint Schnapps and now came home to wash it away with minty toothpaste? You're minted up."

Of course what he neglected to tell me was that he'd spent part of the night vomiting up the half bottle of peppermint Schnapps he drank (straight) before being driven back to our place, where he promptly tried to smooch me up.

"You're gross," I told him this morning.

"Well, let me tell you this," he said. "That was a not-unpleasant puke experience. Seriously! Peppermint schanpps is the way to go! It came up tasting just as minty as it went down! It's nothing like what I usually puke up."

"Ew."

"Jagermeister," he said, "usually comes up really sour. And that night at Steph's wedding? That was just a mishmash of drinks, so it was really gross. But peppermint schnapps? It's the ideal puke."

This, my friends, is handy information to have.

Ass Turned Toward Fire

That was hard.

That last semester and that Christmas vacation, both were excruciatingly hard. I won't bore you with the specifics because they bore even me. Let's just summarize: I worked my ass off; (most) of my students did not. It made me sad.

Then I packed my car, said goodbye to The Lady-Killer and Abbey, and I drove home for Christmas. I looked forward to the trip home. I'd been craving Buffalo for a while. I kept having dreams about pierogi.

At home, I thought, I could rest. Relax. Decompress. But what happened was this: I ran. I ran a lot. I had a billion things to do, a billion places to be. And I also had to meet and mingle with my father's new girlfriend.

And here's where I utter something that makes me extremely guilty: I spent the entire two weeks being really, really annoyed at my father.

I don't know what it was exactly, but I spent two weeks grouching my way around Western New York.

"WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME?" I asked the girls, who I was not grumpy at. (It's hard to be grumpy at people who keep me well-supplied with vodka and M&Ms and chicken wing dip.) "WHY AM I SO PISSED AT MY FATHER?"

Everything he did infuriated me. If he asked me where I'd been, if I'd had fun, if I'd seen this person or that person, I wanted to punch him. I kept thinking about that scene in My So-Called Life, the one where Angela admits that lately she can't even look at her mother without wanting to stab her. I just wanted to call up fifteen-year old Angela Chase and say, I feel you, sister.

My father wanted me to do this with his girlfriend, do that with his girlfriend, attend his girlfriend's family's party, go to a movie with his girlfriend, eat breakfast with his girlfriend... and every time he requested these things, I felt my shoulders involuntarily rising until my ears were crammed down into them, making permanent shell-like indentations in the skin.

"I can't do it," I told the girls. "I just can't do it. I'm exhausted. I'm just so tired. I don't have it in me. I don't think I can go to a party filled with strangers and answer questions about myself. And I don't want to ask them questions either."

The mere thought of that made my eyelids go heavy. And then I felt guilty because I was being a brat. I was being selfish. I was being a nasty thirteen year-old version of my self, but worse because I'd never been that nasty when I was thirteen years-old. So I spent the entirety of my Christmas break breast-stroking through vast oceans of exhaustion, tantrum, and guilt.

And then came the incident with the fire.

It was a morning after my father had spent the night with his new girlfriend. I had the house to myself, and I spent the morning lounging in bed. But my lounging was interrupted when my father called at 10:15. "Hey!" he said. "Come to breakfast. We'll be there at 10:30. Join us!"

That last phrase--join us!--made my fingers clench into fists. I wanted to chuck my phone across the room. Why? WHY? I do not fucking know.

I declined breakfast; after all, a lady cannot get ready in three minutes to make it to the restaurant in time. But my father and his girlfriend made an appearance at the house after breakfast. I puttered around in the living room while my father collected things he needed for their New Year's party. I talked to the girlfriend, who is--it must be noted--very nice. And in the middle of the small talk, my father breezed in and said to me, "Okay, well, we're ready to go. I just threw some logs on the fire. Do you know how to use the stove?"

Okay. Okay. Now let's be clear: I am twenty-nine years old. I lived for more than eighteen years in that house, and for all those years that house was heated by a wood stove. When I was young, I was taught to respect the fire--to stay away, to warm myself from a distance--and I took to that warming idea with much glee: there are many pictures of a young me with my bare ass turned toward the stove, the white moon shining in the glare from the orange flame.

Later, when I was old enough, my father took me aside and taught me how to build a fire, how to teepee the kindling and feed the building flames. He taught me how to use the flue. He taught me how hot the stove needed to get before I cut off the oxygen and let it do a slow burn to last through the day.

Let's be even clearer: I have been making and tending fires for, like, fifteen years.

My father knows this. And even if my father had fallen and hit his head and that fall had erased his prior knowledge of me--his only daughter, his firstborn!--and my fire-making abilities, it wouldn't matter because two days prior to his asking me if I knew how to use the stove, he arrived home just as I, who had also just arrived home, finished building a fire to warm the icy house. He even complimented me on my fire.

So when he stood at his girlfriend's side and asked me if I knew how to tend the fire and use the stove, I almost committed a murder. I wanted to run to the family picture albums, pluck out any of the pictures of me warming my butt near the wood stove. I wanted to shove it in his face and say, "DOES THIS LOOK LIKE THE BUTT OF SOMEONE WHO DOES NOT KNOW HOW TO USE A WOOD STOVE, MAN?!"

I don't know what happened to me. I don't know what split open in my brain and let all that rage leak into my bloodstream, but it was awful. And I feel guilty still--worse, actually, now that I've admitted it here, to you.

I need therapy.

Phony Balogna

It's another marathon grading weekend here at the small apartment in the woods. This means I've got a cat nesting on the desk next to me...


... and a freshly-baked loaf of chocolate chip banana bread at my disposal for when I lose all faith in my ability to teach writing, and thus stress eat to drown my sorrows.

It also means I've got the inevitable plagiarism to deal with. I always get a little angry when I catch my students plagiarizing--I take things too, too seriously, I know--but this time made me extra angry.

So, there I was sitting in front of the computer and grading my fifteenth essay of the day. I read the title. I read the first sentence. My brain went, Wait a second. I read the second sentence. My brain went, NO, SERIOUSLY. Then I finished up the whole first paragraph and my brain said, OH NO SHE DIDN'T.

What I was reading I had read before. I was sure of it. Not only was the topic old--it was an argument essay about the No on One campaign that had been defeated last fall--but the language and voice of the essay was sassy, specific, and something not easy to forget.

I was reading a paper one of my former students had turned in last fall. I knew it. I knew it.

So I started thinking about this student who'd just turned it in as her own. I wondered who she and I had in common. Who did she know that had taken one of my composition courses? Then I remembered her talking about her best friend, how they were going on vacation soon, how they were both super excited and positively ga-ga at the idea of getting out there on their own. And her best friend? She'd been my student last fall.

I closed my eyes and took a breath. Then I went back to the archive of last fall's Blackboard course--where all my students submit electronic copies of their essays--and simply looked up the best friend's paper.

It was the same paper. Exact same paper. EXACT. SAME. PAPER.

The only thing that was changed was the secondary essay, a mini self-reflection I require all students to write about the conscious choices they made as they wrote and what effect they hoped they would have. I ask them to talk about the strengths and weaknesses of the piece. I ask them to give me an honest opinion about their progress.

This student wrote her self-reflection as if she had actually written her paper. She made up all the things she hoped she'd done as she wrote the paper. She gave herself a fake little assessment.

It made me want to cry for one of two reasons. Either this student thought I was stupid enough not to catch the dishonesty or else it didn't even occur to her that I'd find them out. Whatever the reason, it was enough to make me want to give up for the night.

But then I remembered the chocolate chip banana bread and felt a little better, and then Abbey raised her head and yawned like she was bored, just oh-so-bored with all of this, and I said I felt her pain, and I gave that student a big fat F and moved on to the next essay.

There are 41 days until the semester is done.

Yowl

Last week, The Lady-Killer was spending the night at his best friend's place--a sweet bachelor pad on top of the best friend's grandmother's house, which is handy because Grammy occasionally wanders upstairs to leave cookies or cinnamon rolls she's just baked--and that meant Abbey and I were on our own. When TLK isn't home, Abbey takes up her old position, something I used to refer to as Substitute Boyfriend.

When Substitute Boyfriend Abbey realizes that, hey, that boy who lets her smell his breath--which is one of her favorite pastimes--isn't going to be in the bed with me overnight, she hops up on the bed and stands on the empty pillow until I raise the blankets. Then she goes under, turns around, and situates herself so that her head rests on the pillow, so that her body is spooned against mine. And then we go to sleep.

This is how it used to be, pre-TLK. I imagine Abbey gets very nostalgic for those days, since now that TLK is in her spot she sleeps in one of the less-awesome nests she has around the house (the blanket on my desk, the giant box full of fluff, the recliner).

Usually Abbey is a very good bed-mate. She's snuggly, warm, and she smells good (cotton candy, maple syrup, or oatmeal, depending on the day). Usually we can pass the whole night snuggling like that, but last week at 4:30 AM Abbey began to wheeze, and those wheezes woke me up. She's had colds before, and she has a generally squeaky nose, but this was different than all that. This was something that sounded painful.

So I made her an appointment at the vet's. As soon as I hung up the phone with the receptionist, I began the long process of dreading this appointment. After all, Abbey is not a cat who takes kindly to others. It's no secret that I raised her in strict Single Mother with Only Child style so that Abbey loves me, only me, and generally distrusts anyone who tries to show me attention. And if they try to show her attention? Forget it.

And it wasn't only that. The logistics of getting her there also stressed me out. Abbey has done many trips back to New York with me--and that's a 9 hour car drive--but apparently she's so over those because this summer, when I was headed off to New York, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, Abbey refused to get in the carrier. TLK and I did everything we could to make this happen, but Abbey thrashed, bit, clawed, and yowled until we gave up.

I figured I'd have a repeat of that when I tried to put her in the carrier to take her to the vet's. And I wasn't wrong.

I gave myself an extra twenty minutes to get her into the carrier before we needed to leave to make our appointment. They were the most exhausting twenty minutes of my life. I tried gentle coaxing. I tried treats. I tried wet food. I tried begging. Then I tried more forceful efforts. I tried putting her in frontward, backward, sideways. I tried to hold her above the carrier and lower her in.

Nothing worked. She made the most heartbreaking sounds. She stared up at me and cried-cried-cried. Those eyes were saying, Mama! How could you?!

I was fresh out of ideas. And by that time we were going to be late, and I was crying too. (YOU try listening to that gut-wrenching, you're-killing-me sound for 20 minutes without shedding a tear!) So I did the only thing I could. I got on the phone with the vet and asked if they had any tricks of the trade that would help me get her in the carrier.

"Oh, just put a little food in the back of the carrier, and she'll go right in," the receptionist said.

But Abbey's too smart for that. Abbey just sits in front of the carrier and is all like, "Do I look like an idiot?"

Besides, I'd already tried it, even though I knew it wouldn't work when I began the process.

"Well," the receptionist said, "is there an alternate mode of transportation?"

That's when it dawned on me: The Box.

The Box is Abbey's favorite nesting area. See?

It's a giant affair, left over from my move from the Old Apartment of Death. It's filled with fluff I purchased after Abbey developed the habit of kneading the batting she'd confiscated from the underside of my recliner. The Box is where Abbey goes while we're in the office. It's where she often sleeps at night.

I hated the thought of ruining one of her sanctuaries, but I had to get her to the doctor's office. I'd spent a terrifying half hour earlier that week Googling "cat with stuffy nose" and the results had been YOUR CAT'S LUNGS MAY BE FILLING WITH LIQUID AS WE SPEAK AND SHE IS GOING TO DROWN IMMEDIATELY. I was sufficiently terrified.

So I dragged the giant box into the living room and in my most chipper voice I said, "Abbey! Look! It's your box! I am going to put this dish of food in your box! How do you feel about that?"

Abbey felt swell about that, and she hopped right into the box and started eating her food. She didn't even mind when I started closing the top, as that's part of a game we play. She also didn't mind when I picked the box up and started walking toward the door with it. Abbey is a box fan, a box expert, a box aficionado, and hardly a day goes by where she isn't sitting in a shoebox waiting patiently to be picked up and carried around. She probably just thought that's what we were doing with this much bigger box.

When we got outside, however, Abbey could sense disaster brewing, and that's when she stopped eating her food and gave one cry.

"It's okay, Abbey!" I said. "I love you!" I looked like a jackass: I was a girl speaking to a giant box labeled BEDROOM/CLOTHES.

I put her in the car, and we started toward the vet's. Abbey tried once or twice to break out of the box--she pushed her head against it, her little pink nose the only thing visible from the tiny opening in the box folds--but we managed to make it unscathed. And then I walked into the lobby, where plenty of local pet owners were waiting with their normal pets who were lolling about on a leash or in a carrier. One cat was even sleeping on a sample cat house someone was selling.

My cat was crying and poking her pink nose through the opening in the box. In a few minutes' time she would get so stressed out in the exam room that she would release her anal glands and coat the good doctor in that liquid.

Still, she wasn't as bad as I thought she'd be. There was no biting. There was no swatting. In fact, Abbey, in her addled, over-taxed state, loved up on each of the nurses and doctor. She rubbed her body all over them, let them pet her--but she growled the whole time she sought their love. Maybe it was her attempt to say, "Hey! I'm cute! Look! I'm nice! Please don't kill me!" while simultaneously letting them know she was in the mood to cut a bitch.

In the end, there wasn't anything really wrong with Abbey. The doctor thought she might have a touch of a cold, and he prescribed her a low dose of medicine before sending us on our way. And on the way out, a woman who was coming into the office held the door for me. She looked confused as to why I was bumbling a giant box through the doorframe.

"It's okay," I said to the meowing box. And then, to the lady, I said, "It's a long story." Which, I think, is an understatement.

Mid-Semester

I have been staring at this screen for ten minutes, and I still don't know what to write. I feel like I have a lot to say; I feel like I have very little to say.

I could tell you that I am, right now, listening to Wilson Pickett sing "I'm Not Tired" or that this fall has been a big deal for Abbey because we've introduced her to the wonders of laser pointers. I could tell you I want a pair of red boots.

I could tell you that this is the busiest semester I've ever had, that I feel now more than ever the weight of a 5-5 load, that there have been times I've cried because I've realized just how much I have to do and think there's no way it's ever going to get done.

I could tell you The Lady-Killer and I went apple-picking and I've made apple crisp, apple muffins, apple-cheddar-squash soup, apple-caramel cake, and two batches of applesauce, and I still have an entire bag of apples to use.

I could tell you that I really, really love living with a boy. I could tell you how I used to think I'd be rotten at it, but I actually think I'm pretty okay.

I could tell you that these days I am watching an awful lot of "Four Weddings" on TLC--and that this a show where four brides attend each other's weddings and then rate them, the winner getting a luxurious honeymoon prize package--and that I violently love and hate the show at the same time. I could tell you I'm still shaking my fist at Don Draper for what he did in the Mad Men season finale.

I could tell you there's a part of me that's looking forward to snow, but it's not a very big part.

I could tell you that today I climbed into my shower and bleached the walls above the tub and scrubbed them until they were bright white. I could tell you I washed a blanket Abbey threw up on, one I avoided and let sit for a few weeks.

I could tell you one of my favorite things about The Lady-Killer is the way he says ow.

I could tell you I wish my mother would come over and make me dinner. I could tell you I wish my brother would come sit on the couch with me and watch reality television with me, make me laugh, make my mother laugh, make TLK laugh, make everyone in the world laugh.

I could tell you that today while I was cleaning my office I found a tiny yellow Post-It note that says nothing good can come from working with deli meat. I could tell you in my drawer I have a slim stack of blue Post-It notes, that these are the first notes TLK wrote me, and that one of them has his number and the words you know you want to on it.

It is mid-semester, and I am tired but I am happy.

You Know It's Fancy When It's Got Paragraphs

My creative writing classes are currently engaged in nonfiction workshop. This means the students bring in essays to share for whole class discussion. They also prepare a letter they hand back to the authors, and this letter is supposed to discuss the craft of the essays and what elements of that craft they found intriguing and strong.

This is one of the letters handed in tonight:

Dear Tim,

This is a really good story. I like how you told it in paragraphs.

Sincerely,

Beth

The First Week of School: A Review

DAY ONE:

I stock my snack drawer with Parmesan Goldfish, Kashi crackers, chocolate, and aspirin. I dust my picture frames. I eat celebratory back-to-school pizza. I put the magnet of Bucky the Badger I got on my trip to UW Madison this summer on the fridge. I point it out to my office-mate.

"Listen," I say, "Bucky doesn't take any shit. Look at him. When one of our students acts up, we can just point to Bucky and say, 'DON'T UPSET THE BADGER."

"Because that'll work," he says.

"Right," I say.

DAY TWO:

LOVELY!!!!!

DAY THREE:

The chair of our department bursts into my office.

"Did you hear what those girls were saying out there?" she asks.

"What girls?" I ask.

"The girls in the hall," she says.

I haven't heard anything. I've been in full-on nerd mode. I've been organizing the folders and sub-folders on my class's Blackboard site. I've been admiring the neat little nested list and how easy it is to find everything. My brain, otherwise engaged in this, its own version of porn, has blocked everything else out--especially the conversations happening feet outside my door.

"Oh, it's really good!" she says. "One of the girls asked the other girl who she had for English 101, and the second girl said, 'I've got The Girl.'"

"The Girl?" I ask.

"The Girl!" she says.

"Oh! Me?" I say. "The Girl is me? I'm The Girl?"

"Yes!"

I shrug. "You know what? I'm turning twenty-nine in two weeks. I'll take it," I say.

DAY FOUR:

The chair comes into my office. "I just got a weird phone call," she says.

This is never good news.

"All right," I say. "Let me hear."

Turns out, two students in my creative writing class were so appalled, horrified, and repulsed at one of the essays I had assigned for the first night of homework they decided not to come to me and discuss their concerns--which would, you know, be a reasonable reaction--but instead went straight to their adviser and demanded to know what's what.

The students swore I was making them read porn! Smut! Revolting trash that had no business being considered literature. It was crass! It was filthy! It was disgusting! They wouldn't read it! They wouldn't! And they wanted someone to tell them they didn't have to!

The adviser asked them to furnish a copy of the essay, and when they did he read it and agreed with them. So he called up the chair. He said it was crass! It was filthy! It was disgusting! It wasn't literature! Why was this trash being taught in a creative writing classroom?

"Oh Jesus," I say.

The chair rolls her eyes. I roll my eyes.

I go into class a few minutes later and--surprise, surprise--everyone who's present loves the essay. They love it so much we get carried away discussing it and before we know it, we've got to leave for the day because there's another class coming in and they're waiting in the hall.

Two people had been suspiciously absent from class, and--sure enough--when I check my e-mail there are two e-mails from them. They tell me how appalled and disgusted they are. They tell me they can't believe I'd post such trash. They tell me they're shocked at what this college is teaching. They don't believe such work is necessary in a creative writing classroom. They tell me they are dropping my class. This isn't a slam against you as a person, one of the e-mails says. Just so you know.

I roll my eyes some more. I roll my eyes a lot. But then I decide to leave it be because I don't teach on Fridays (which means I'm free for the weekend!) and I've got four days off coming up (hello, Labor Day!) and tomorrow afternoon I am sitting on the back porch with Emily and a pitcher of these babies, and that's all that really matters right now.

Lovely. LOVELY. LOVELY! LOVELY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Just as the first meeting of one of my creative writing classes was breaking up today, one of my male students approached me. He clutched a notebook in his hands.

"Uhm, hey," he said.

"Hi," I said.

"You like the word lovely," he said.

I examined him. He was skinny in strange places. He looked like a bird. He looked like he was about to peck my eyes out. "It's a nice word," I said.

"You said it a lot today," he said.

It was true. I had. I really, really, really like the word lovely, and sometimes--especially on first days--you just get into this zone and words sit in your teacher voice and get real comfortable in there, and they hang around and show off a little more than they normally would. In addition to lovely, I also used the word scoot and peek more than I wanted to. I think it has something to do with not using Teacher Voice for four months, and during the first week back Teacher Voice gets coupled with the part of my brain that is completely pleased to have eighteen people who are forced to sit in a room and listen to what I have to say about things. This is intoxicating after having four months of silence where I taught nothing and no one, unless you count The Lady-Killer and how to use the Downey ball.

So I nodded at the kid. "Yes," I said. "I love that word."

"Well, I hate it," he said.

I stared at him. "All right."

"I mean, I really hate it. Every time you said it I flinched."

I looked around. I wanted to see if anyone else was listening to this. I wanted to make desperate help me! eyes at someone I trusted. I tried to will one of my students from last semester, who had made the decision to go another round with me, to turn and look at me and give me a look like, "Oh sister, that one is completely bat-shit crazy. I'm so sorry."

But no one would turn around.

"That's pretty rough," I told him.

Then he turned his notebook toward me. He jabbed at it with his too-skinny finger.

The words at the top of the page said TIMES SAID LOVELY. Beneath it, there were three little ticks of the pen.

"Oh," I said.

"I'm going to keep track of this," he said. He was very serious. He nodded. "I'm going to keep track ALL SEMESTER LONG. And then I'm going to tell you how many times you said LOVELY."

Oh, I wished someone was listening! I wanted one of my former students to follow me back to my office and giggle in the corner with me. Maybe what I was really wishing for was Christine, who, last year, always followed me back to my office, and spent the next two hours giggling in the corner with me.

But no one was listening, and Christine was all moved on and preparing to go off to her fancy $40,000 a year college, so I had to go it alone. So I tried to squelch the laugh I felt brimming at the back of my throat. I made my face very serious.

"Well," I said, "I guess I'm going to have mind my Ps and Qs with you then."

And then he nodded and disappeared out the door and into the hallway, where he was swept away by a tide of students who were rushing for the door, ready to escape the semester that was less than forty-eight hours old.

The Cat Whisperer

"Watch this," The Lady Killer said to me the day I got home to Maine from The Everyone I Went to Grad School with Had a Baby Summer Tour of 2010.

He bent and scooped up Abbey. He held her close. He nuzzled her under his chin. He kissed her head once, twice, three times.

Abbey didn't make a single sound. She didn't growl, cry, or fuss. She simply submitted to his love. She even leaned into him.

"Holy shit," I said.

"I know!" he said.

Weeks before, their relationship was a bit more complicated: Abbey would give him a single minute's worth of affection, and then, just as he was getting into petting her, she would step back and snarl and hiss. She would bite him. She was saying, "Hey, Motherfucker. Back the fuck off."

This wasn't out of the ordinary, really. Abbey used to be a really sweet, really cuddly and kind cat--back when she was little. I have pictures of everyone holding her. My brother, my mother, the Possibly-Gay-Black-Belt, my mother's boyfriend, my father. She accepted love at every turn.

But then something happened.

It's impossible to know exactly when or why. This cat has never suffered any trauma. She simply was born, lived at my uncle's house with her mother until she was old enough to leave, and then she went with me to Maine, where she spent her kitten days doing everything a kitten loves: destroying things. My curtains. My bedspread. My office chair. A couple purses. A table cloth. My sleep schedule.

But even though I was frustrated by her kitten ways, and even though she was as bad as a newborn child, and even though whenever I turned my back she launched at the curtains and clawed her way up them until she was too high to get down--which meant she cried and cried and cried until I came back in the room and had to remove her claws one by one until she was no longer stuck to the curtains--I loved that cat more than anything. My love for her was obscene (I got excited on the drive home from school because I knew I was on my way home to her) and embarrassing (she has a Facebook fan page). When she had a bad reaction to her first round of shots, I cancelled a much-needed post-move massage and stayed in bed with her all day.

She has known nothing but love. But she knew it from me. We were, after all, mostly alone. For a long time, I didn't have many visitors to my apartment here in Maine. That's not true anymore--Abbey's got lots of people around her these days--but maybe she got a little strange, a little finicky, a little bitchy because of that. Maybe her aggression and bad attitude was her protecting me. Who knows? But I am certain of this: She hated everyone but me.

And Abbey did not make an exception to this rule for The Lady Killer. He could get down on his knees and stare soulfully into her eyes--he could roll out the glow he shines on for old waitresses and cute check-out girls--and he could say, "Abigail, all I want to do is love you!" and she would still hiss at him. And then he'd turn to me and say, "Dude, your cat is a BITCH."

And it was true. Until what I'll call The Miracle.

The Miracle started poorly, like so:

It was the day TLK and I were leaving for New York, to the Great Pink Torpedo Wedding of 2010, and the car was packed. All the suitcases and laptops and shoes and food was loaded up for the nine hour drive. All we had left to do was put Abbey in her carrier and take her down to the car.

Abbey has never really been a fan of her carrier, but I can always get her into it. When she was a kitten, it was simple. I just chucked an earplug into the carrier, and she skittered after it. Or, alternatively, I'd place a pile of treats in the back of the carrier and tell her to go at it. She wised up to that tactic pretty quick, though. Now when I try the food trick, she attempts to break into the carrier from the other end so she can steal the treats and go on her merry way without ever stepping foot into it. The last time I got her into the carrier--for the June trip to New York--I had to use a massive spoonful of Reddi-Whip to coax her inside, and she still put up quite the fuss.

But this time, she was having none of it. Reddi-Whip wouldn't do it. Treats or toys wouldn't do it. I even tried a bowl of heavy cream. She simply looked up at me with eyes that said, "Mama, do you think I'm an idiot?"

Thus began the struggle. I tried to place her in the carrier, but Abbey suddenly morphed into a flailing toddler and found a way to block the entrance to her carrier with a tangle of limbs. Nothing I could do could hold her down or fold her limbs under her so she slid inside. She cried.

I won't lie: I cried too. I imagine I was feeling a little something like what mothers feel when they have to send their babies off to daycare or school and the kids just don't want to go and they scream and cry until their voices are raw. I wanted to tell my cat I was just kidding, that we didn't have to go anywhere, and that we could spend the rest of the day in bed watching all the best episodes of The West Wing. But that wasn't true. We couldn't. We needed to get our asses in gear.

So then I had TLK hold the carrier and I tried to drop her down into it in one slick motion, but once again she turned into a wild, clawing thing. She sliced my pinkie open and TLK had to perform emergency first aid to stop the bleeding. And by that time it was clear: She was not getting in the carrier. She was crying. I was crying. TLK was trying to tell me it was okay, it would be fine, he could take care of her when he flew back to Maine after the wedding.

He'd be back in five days. The longest I'd ever left her with her extended feeders was four days, while I was in Washington. And when I came back from that trip, the cat vaulted at me and climbed up my leg and wouldn't let me go for two entire days. What would she be like after five days?

But there was no choice. We needed to get on the road, and we couldn't get the cat into the carrier, so I loaded up the feeders and we headed off to New York.

And while I was in Wisconsin and Minnesota, I got sporadic cat updates, but none of them were glowing. Abbey was mostly ignoring TLK. She was sleeping on top of the fridge and hissing whenever he came near her. If his friends came over, she was similarly unpleasant. But then, a few days before I came home, there was a shift. By the time I arrived back in Maine, Abbey was feeling more loving toward TLK, and she was following him around, letting him pet her, pick her up, kiss her. "Come here, kitten!" he'd call, and she'd come over and rub up on his leg. It was miraculous.

The good attitude has even applied to people beyond TLK and me. When TLK's best friend came over the other night, he called us into the living room and whispered, "I have been petting this cat for five minutes, and she hasn't hissed once!"

It was so clear: TLK cat-whispered Abbey into good behavior.

Then, this morning, the crowning glory: TLK came back home after an early meeting, and I was still in bed. Abbey had been under the covers with me, but she'd leapt out when she heard her boyfriend come through the door. She trotted out to meet him, and when he climbed under the covers with me, Abbey hopped up on the bed. It was the first time she'd even dared to step on the bed when he was in it with me.

We both held our breath. And then Abbey draped herself over his legs and snuggled in to sleep with us.

"Oh my God," I whispered. "My heart is full to bursting." And it wasn't an exaggeration.

King of the Nuggs

World, meet The Lady-Killer, who has a bad addiction to Burger King chicken nuggets, Arizona iced tea, and Monster energy drinks.

If you couldn't tell, he also likes to pose for ridiculous (read: fantastic) pictures. See?

Just the other day, on our way to the beach--you know, the time we almost died--he was craving McDonald's, so we did the drive-thru and he promptly set about eating his two McChickens and fries. TLK does not like to mix food groups. He eats all of one thing then moves on to the next thing. He started with the fries. He'd made me ask for extra ketchup--"I don't think that's enough," I had to tell the man at the drive-thru window when he dropped a few into the bag. "This guy REALLY likes his ketchup."--and he started with the fries. Instead of creating a ketchup puddle and dunking his fries into it, he opted instead to take this approach: He ripped open a tiny packet of ketchup and squeezed a gob into his mouth before jamming some fries in there.

This is also the boy who, as I was getting ready in the bathroom the other day, trudged by murmuring, "I'm fancy. I have fancy pants!"

Why? I have no idea.

So if you're wondering if I feel pretty lucky about the summer I'm having and about all the giggling I'm doing, the answer is yes.

If You're Keeping Track, This Is Near Death Experience #2

Yesterday I got up and checked the weather. I'd been craving beach--ocean beach--since I got back to Maine, and I was bound and determined to go. The weather report for Phippsburg, Maine--home to Popham Beach, one of my favorite places in the world--was simple. It said the highs would be in the 80s and there might be some fog. The tide was high at 1:00, and the tide would be at its lowest around dinner time.

Perfect.

We got to the beach at 3:00, when the tide was still receding. It had shrank back enough to unearth the craggy island that it swallows at high tide, and lots of people were out exploring the tide pools that had been left behind. So we set up our blanket, stripped down, and headed off.

The water was freezing. The water is always freezing. But it didn't matter because the weather was warm, and I was happy to be at the ocean, and The Lady-Killer was happy to be exploring the caves and fissures between the rocks.

"I'm Maine's answer to Steve Irwin!" he said after he had words with a seagull, chased a crab, and dug through the tide pools to snatch up a translucent (and tiny) crab skeleton that had been molted away.

When we'd walked out to the island, when we'd started our exploring, the weather had been clear enough. There'd been fog and mist, sure, but it hadn't been anything alarming. But over that hour and a half we were on the island, the fog really rolled in. Before I knew it, I was turning to look back at the beach and it wasn't there. I couldn't see a quarter mile into the distance.

This was no big deal. I knew the situation with the tides. It wasn't like we needed to worry about getting off the island and back to shore before high tide washed in; it had just been high tide. There were plenty of people around--tourists with cameras, fishermen casting off the rocks, children splashing through the coves--and everything was normal.

But eventually I got hungry, I got thinking about the peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches I had in my backpack, I got to thinking about that bag of Doritos I had, and TLK had explored himself right out, so we climbed down off the island and started back.

We were leisurely about it. TLK did a few brave dives into the waves as they peeled off the sandbars, and he came out shivering every time. But it was getting hard to see him each time he went running out into the water. It was getting hard to see anything.

I've been to Popham Beach about a bajillion times in my life, and I'm familiar with its layout. It's an interesting beach because it's cut in two by run-off from a river that gives the water, when it comes in, some interesting tug and tow, which makes it good for surfers. This pattern makes it a little more tricky than a standard straight-shot coastal beach. It also makes for some interesting mini sand spits--tiny little islands, really--when the water is coming and going. On a sunny day, all of that is as plain as day, and you can make your way to and from the island without so much as getting wet.

But when TLK and I were heading back, I started to get nervous. I was sure we were on the stretch of sand that led back to the beach, but as we walked through the thick fog--and by this point we couldn't see ten feet in front of us--I could see the land shrinking, narrowing.

"I don't get it," I said. "The tide's not supposed to be coming in. It's supposed to be going out. This doesn't make any sense."

And then suddenly there was no more beach, and we were standing ankle-deep in the freezing water.

"Baby," I said. "Baby, seriously. What's going on?"

"I don't know," he said. "It's okay. It probably comes back up there. Let's just keep walking a little bit."

I nodded and took his hand, but already there were bad things kicking around my head. I had a really awful feeling in the pit of my stomach. Something was not right.

Soon, we were up to our knees. I could feel the hungry lick of the current under the water, and I began to panic.

"I'm scared," I said. It was the first time I'd said it aloud, but I'd been feeling that for minutes now. "I'm really, really scared."

"No," TLK said. "No, it's okay. Don't be scared. It'll be fine. I mean, there are a ton of people back behind us. We can just walk back that way."

That didn't make me feel any better. I imagined the other people back on the island still exploring, still taking their pictures as the water rolled over the sand between us. We would be stuck. We would be trapped. And there was no way anyone could see that we were trapped.

Or, if not that, then this: We would walk back to the island, yes, and we would find everyone gone--or suddenly surprised at the turn of events, at the water that was filling in and cutting us off from the mainland, which we couldn't see, couldn't even begin to imagine anymore--and we would all climb to the very top, the very tip, which was the only part of the island that didn't get swallowed by the ocean during high tide.

Or if not that, then this: We would walk back to the island and it would be just me and TLK, and we would sit there, waiting to be rescued, waiting for the Coast Guard's chopper when the lifeguards were closing up shop and found an unclaimed beach setup. There we would be--clutching each other in the dark, in the cold, in the mist from the waves that slapped around us--and our teeth would be chattering, and we would be freezing, we would be dying, and they wouldn't get to us in time, and then for years we would become the cautionary tale every Maine mother told her children when she sent them off to the beach with friends.

Or if not that, then this: We would decide that we couldn't be too far off coast and that we could swim it. I'm not a very strong swimmer--Amy once had to save me when I choked on a wave and then, predictably, started drowning on a choppy day at Long Point, and I haven't been confident in my abilities since--and so I could see TLK having to calm me down, drag me along, pull me like a lifeguard pulling a child from the deep end. I would be too scared to help, and I would panic, and I would make us drown.

I was certain of one of those outcomes. It was going to happen. We were done for. We were toast.

So we turned around, and I held the TLK's hand tighter than I've ever held it, and I thought about his mother and how much she was going to hate me for killing her son.

TLK was very quiet. I was very quiet. We walked back to where the sand started and widened, where he'd been diving into the waves. We walked and walked and walked. We couldn't see anything. We couldn't hear anything.

But then, coming through the curtain of fog, was a woman and her son.

I was near tears, and I leaned into TLK. I wondered if she and her son were doomed, just like us. "Do you think I should ask her?" I said. "Maybe there's another way back to the beach."

And then I was turning to her, excusing myself, asking her if she knew how to get back to the beach. Then, delicately--because I didn't want to alarm her, her son--I said, "We thought we were headed back there, but when we got up ahead everything's flooded in."

She smiled. Oh, that smile! It was heaven! It was salvation! She wasn't going to smile at me if she was suddenly realizing that she and her son--and the two people standing in front of her, hands linked so tight their fingers were turning white--were minutes from certain death.

"Oh yes," she said. She turned and pointed into the fog behind her. "Keep going back this way," she said. "Eventually, you'll see a ribbon of sand to your right. That'll take you back to the beach. Right now you're on a little peninsula that extends out from it."

And she was right. Maybe twenty feet away from us, there was a meandering sand path back to the beach, which we had missed when TLK was going in-out-in-out of the water and I was laughing at the way he ran into it--wide-armed, spastically. When we cleared the thick hang of fog and could finally see our stuff, we walked to it quickly, collapsed on it. I had never been happier to see my beach bag.

We stayed that way--face down, shivering--on the blanket for a long time. We didn't even move to eat our sandwiches; we simply raised our heads enough to get them into our mouths. It's just that we were so happy to feel dry earth, to know we weren't about to be swallowed up by the sea, swallowed up by the call of the lighthouse fog horn, the last lonely sound we'd hear before we let the undertow take us.

My Own Little Boom Boom Pow

Last night I almost died.

At 10:05 PM I was sitting on the shore of one of Maine's many charming ponds--The Lady-Killer and I were spending time with his cousins at his family's camp--and the boys (TLK, two cousins, and his younger brother, who, for the majority of the day, spoke in the Old Gregg voice) were setting up fireworks the cousins had smuggled in from Massachusetts.

It had been a long day. I'd ridden on top of TLK's lap in a kayak made for one. I'd been chucked off a water trampoline with such vigor that my bathing suit readjusted itself inappropriately. I'd spent the rest of the time watching the water trampoline action from the safety of two noodles I propped under my head and feet so I could float in the 80 degree water without fear of exposing myself to wholesome New England boys. I'd played a rousing game of Uno that went on for over an hour, in which the boys shouted, "I fucking hate you, you motherfucker!" whenever someone used a draw four card or skip card on them. I'd been serenaded by these same boys as they, during quiet Uno moments, rapped, in unison and a capella, songs that talked about living large, spending money, loving pretty but sexually promiscuous women, and driving fast cars. I'd giggled and giggled and giggled when the four of them chanted, "I like it when you call me Big Poppa! Throw your hands in the air if you's a true player!"

But by 10:05 PM, I was ready to go home. I was feeling a little punchy, and--I won't lie--fireworks make me nervous. Once, when I was young, my father and uncle set off fireworks behind my uncle's house on the Fourth of July, and one of the fireworks had gone off wonky, had shot off into the woods, and my father and uncle took off sprinting and the women and children stood on the porch wondering if this was it, if the boys were going to burn the whole woods down with this stunt. And if there's anything I'm a pro at, it's worrying--and I had that skill down even as a child. I went to bed that night thinking there was a possibility that the firework was still sizzling underneath a pile of dry leaves, sparking and spitting and waiting to take the woods out with one hot breath.

This old fear was not helped last night by the fact that the boys handling the fireworks are not old enough to rent a car. It was not helped by the fact that boys took any chance they could find to toss firecrackers or spinning sunflowers at each other so that they exploded at their feet--or, in one case, on someone's back. It was not helped by the fact that when this happened, the boys would scream, "OUCH, YOU FUCKING MOTHERFUCKER!" and then they would laugh and say, "THAT WAS EPIC! THAT WAS AWESOME!"

From 9:00 to 10:30, I was ten seconds away from standing up, putting on Teacher Voice, and telling those boys to PUT THOSE FIREWORKS AWAY AND SIT DOWN AND BE STILL BEFORE SOMEONE LOSES A FINGER, FOR GOD'S SWEET SAKE.

I relaxed a little bit after the first few rounds of bigger fireworks, because those couldn't be thrown at people and because the boys had towed in a small barge that floated just off shore, and that's where they shot the impressive fireworks off from. After a few fountains, I realized the boys at least knew which way the fireworks needed to be pointed and that no one had burned an appendage off yet, so I took a few pictures. I ooohed and ahhhed.

But then one of TLK's cousins picked up a spent firework and placed it in the bonfire that was built mere feet from the bench where I was sitting. My whole body froze. I looked at the boy, looked at the other boys. I waited for someone to shout at the cousin, to tell him to stop being a fucking motherfucker, that you shouldn't put fireworks--spent or not--in a fire.

In that moment, I felt a transcendentally-projected version of my father sitting next to me on the bench. He put his arm around me, sighed, shook his head. "That," he said, "is not a smart idea."

"Oh Jesus," I murmured.

"That might not be a good idea," one of the boys finally said.

"Oh, it's FINE," another said.

And then I watched the fire get loaded with the carcasses of Roman candles and cherry bombs and cakes. At first the boys were careful about at least settling the fireworks face-down in the fire, but after a while they got a little caught up in their excitement about the next one about to go off, and they'd just toss the cases and let them fall whatever way they pleased.

Which means, of course, that it was inevitable. Of course it was.

And at 10:05 PM, just as TLK's thirteen year-old cousin settled next to me on the bench, one of the bigger fireworks erupted, and a lick of fire exploded out from the middle, headed right for the bench. All I saw was green flame, and I took off. I don't think I've ever moved so fast in my life. I had no control over my body; it simply went. I could hear the explosions crackling behind me, and then, after I turned when I thought I was a safe distance away, more came belching out from the fire, so I launched behind a beached kayak.

When TLK found me, after he and his cousins put out the towel and chair that had caught fire--"DUDE!" the thirteen year-old yelled. "THAT WAS MY FUCKING TOWEL, ASSHOLES!"--I was quivering and sitting on top of the kayak. I was holding everything I'd come with.

"You okay?" TLK asked. He petted the top of my head.

I was in the throes of a nervous breakdown because those boys were laughing and starting to set up the next round of fireworks.

"No," I said.

"Are you having an anxiety attack?" he asked.

"Yes," I said.

"I almost threw myself on you to save you," he said.

"ALMOST?"

"Well, you were out of there so fast I wouldn't have caught you," he said. He poked the bag I was cradling in my arms, the towel I had wrapped around my shoulders. "And look," he said. "You grabbed all your stuff when you ran."

I frowned.

"Want to go home?" he asked.

I didn't say anything. I just stared at him.

And that's when his cousin threw a firecracker at his feet, and it exploded inches from me.

Needless to say, we were hiking our way back to my car real quick after that. And later, while we were standing in the middle of a gas station mini-mart and trying to decide what to get to eat and drink, I felt very lucky, very grateful for the Mountain Dew, the Mike and Ikes, the Junior Mints we would buy and eat, and how much better they tasted than whatever they would've served up in the hospital, had I been transported there to recover from third degree burns. Right then and there, the melty taste of mint on my tongue was heaven.

I'm Betting The Family Pack of Condoms Is in This Box

My brother is the only twenty-three year-old guy I know who would label his moving boxes like this:





I can only imagine the multitudes of disgusting things in that box. You can bet I won't be touching it.

Your Love Is My Drug

A conversation with Diana, 10:30 PM:


Me: My friends Rachel and Dan had their baby.

Diana: What did they name it?

Me: Samuel Gray. His middle name is Gray for David Gray. Rachel and Dan went to a concert of his on their fist date, and when Dan proposed to Rachel, he learned their song on the piano and played and sang it for her.

Diana: And are you going to have babies with your boy?

Me: Ew! I don't know! Don't talk about it!

Diana: Because I'm wondering what your baby's middle name would be. Would it be Samuel Led Zeppelin? It would be, wouldn't it? Samuel Led Zeppelin?

Me: No, knowing my boy, it would probably be Samuel Ke$ha or Samuel Lady Gaga.

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.

What's Happenin', Cliffy?

When my father arrived home after the nine hour drive between Maine and Buffalo, he gave me a call to let me know he'd made it safely. He told me he'd had a real nice time over the weekend, that it was nice to spend so much time with his kids, that it was fun to have Adam captive for eighteen hours in the car.

"Ugh," I said. "I don't know if I'd be able to handle it. That kid is annoying."

"He's not annoying," my father said.

"He's gross! He's a know-it-all!" the world's biggest know-it-all said I said. "Dad, I mean, seriously. There were moments over these last few days where I looked at that kid's fuzzy head and thought, I am going to strangle him."

"Well, he certainly has his Cliff Clavin moments," my father said. "That's true."

I gasped. "I never ever thought of that comparison!" I said. "But it's so perfect!"

My brother is, if nothing else, a font of inane trivia, of probably-untrue-facts, of information that makes people think, Jesus, who gives a shit?

For example, after family dinners, my brother sometimes likes to trot out his Encyclopedia of Sauces and school us on the importance of clarified butter or a nutty roux. "You know what's some good shit?" he'll say. "Bearnaise. Bearnaise is some good shit."

And then he'll hold up the book in the way that all good elementary teachers do--turned out so the kids can see the illustrations--and he'll show off the perfect Bearnaise, fully expecting the rest of us, who are full of stir-fry or meatloaf or whatever, to be filled with the sudden urge to discuss the proper method of Bearnaise making, when none of us--least of all my brother--has ever made a Bearnaise sauce.

Now don't get me wrong. Ours is a family who talks about food. A lot. All the time. I don't mind the food talk. It's just the way the talk is presented. My brother, like Cliff Clavin, has a certain amount of bluster. He has a certain amount of pomposity. He's right, goddamnit, and you better listen to him in his rightness because--seriously!--no one else has ever been right about this, not ever, and he's going to set the world straight.

Over the course of his four day stay in Maine, my brother spouted off about ice cream, cold water lobsters, warm water lobsters, the proper trapping of cold water lobsters, crab cakes, TD Bank, poop, martinis, the proper technique for pouring a martini, boats, and the Lindt factory outlet. And this is just what I can remember off the top of my head.

(Also, it should be noted that he may or may not have burglarized a Portland lobster joint. We lunched along the water, and afterward my brother went to buy a T-shirt. On his way out, he snagged a plastic lobster figurine that had been sitting in a pail on a bench. He showed it to me as we headed back toward the shops so he could return to his hunt for the perfect gift for his girlfriend.

"Adam!" I said. "Those are the lobster lights the restaurant hangs in the window!"

"Well, they were in a bucket," he said.

"So?"

"Well, they looked free to me!" he said.)

Let's just face it: The kid is strange. He's a little bit Cliff Clavin, a little bit stand-up comic, a little bit insane. There are some times I think it wouldn't be a bad idea to con him into a large glass box I could wheel around the country, charging admission as I went, luring people in to see the World's Weirdest Kid. They certainly wouldn't leave feeling like they'd been swindled. I mean, here's how he acts during dinner:

Driving Miss Idiot

So, I'm learning to drive a standard.

This is something I've wanted to do for a long time--it's probably been in my head since I was seventeen and dating Keith, who had a truck with a manual transmission--but I've never managed to make it happen. My father said he would teach me, but we never had a vehicle. When my brother got his first truck, I begged him to teach me but he just looked at me like I was crazy. "No way," he said. "You'll probably friggin' break it." And then he went on to pet his steering wheel, which, like everything else in his truck, he'd decked out with bling and lights.

Keith did attempt to teach me, but it didn't go well. This was his method: He decided that he would drive, and when he decided he needed to shift, he'd turn and bark, "Second!" or "Third!" or whatever.

That didn't exactly work, for a number of reasons. First, it scared the crap out of me. It made the whole thing sound desperate and immediate. It made it seem like if I didn't shift that fucking second, the truck might blow up and that Keith and I might be shot into the sky as a shower of cinders.

Second, I didn't know where first, second, third, or whatever was.

"It's right there on the knob!" Keith would say, exasperated, and I would shrug my shoulders. I could see what the knob said, and I could see where things were supposed to be, but it was an entirely different thing when I tried to hunt around and get things where they were supposed to go.

Naturally, Keith gave up trying almost immediately.

But now it's ten years later, it's suddenly summer vacation, I've got lots of time on my hands, and I have a teacher who is enthusiastic about teaching me because, as he notes, it's totally hot when girls know how to do it.

Well then, if it's going to make me hotter, let's make this happen.

The other night, we went out for the first lesson.

"Just so you know," I said, "there might be a chance you are going to hate me when we're finished here."

"Doubtful," he said.

"Okay," I said (doubtfully).

We parked in the mostly-empty K-Mart parking lot, and I said, "Give me the basics."

He did. He gave me the basics. The basics took all of thirty seconds.

"That's it?" I asked. "That can't be it. I feel like I need to know a lot more."

"I think you need to try it," he said. "Let's switch."

So I walked around to the driver's side and looked down at my feet. I was wearing tall boots. I'd forgotten my sneakers.

"I can't wear these," I said.

"Want mine?" He pointed down at his sneakers.

"I'll just drive in my socks," I said. I unzipped my boots and stepped out of them, threw them in the back seat. "Okay," I said. "I'm ready."

I was very, very far from ready.

"Think of it this way," he said, as I settled behind the steering wheel. "Imagine a rope around a tree. If you give slack on one side, you get some on the other side. That's what it's like with the clutch and the gas."

"Okay."

"Okay."

"Okay," I said. I nodded. I looked at him expectantly.

"Okay, so go," he said.

"Go?"

"Drive."

"How?"

"In a straight line."

"Oh my God." I put my head on the wheel. "This is going to go badly. I just know it."

But I started. I tried. And--honestly--in those first few minutes in the K-Mart parking lot, I did reasonably okay, but, inevitably, the level of spazziness was high.

Fifteen minutes in, I paused for a check. "Okay," I said, "on a scale of 1-10, 1 being Very Un-Horrified and 10 being Drastically Horrified, how horrified are you at my general ineptitude?"

He cocked his head to the side, considering.

"Truth," I said. "Be honest."

"Six," he said.

"Fair enough," I said. "It could be worse."

And it could've been. And it was. Because just as soon as I started getting a hold of it, we decided to go to an even more empty parking lot, one where I could get up to higher speeds, and my brain went empty and nothing made sense anymore. And that's precisely when the shrieking began.

"What am I in right now?" I shrieked. "Second? Third?"

"Third," he said. "Put it into second."

I tried.

"That's fourth," he said.

And suddenly I was eighteen again, and I was sitting next to Keith, and I was trying to figure out where the gears were, even though I could clearly see where they were.

"Oh Jesus!" I shrieked.

"Jess," he said. "Jess, it's fine."

I stalled the car out. I put my head in my hands and fake-wept. "I hate this," I said. "I hate when I'm not good at things."

"It took me a while to learn," he said. "You aren't going to be good at it immediately."

"This is not a great moment for me." And that was true, although it wasn't any fault of his. He'd done well--probably better than expected, considering I'm a wretched student, considering I hate it when I feel like I look like an asshole, an idiot, a dunce. This is precisely the reason I refuse to go to a public yoga class. I don't want to be the girl in the room who's the worst at anything, the one who's behind, the one who needs more instruction than anyone else. I realize this is not an attractive quality. I realize, in fact, that it's very bad, and I try to work with it as best I can, but still, at all times my brain is whispering to me, You've got to be the best at this. You've got to be very good. Don't let people see you suck!

I wake up every morning wondering how I'm going to impress people today.

I'm a show-off.

I'm annoying.

So, forty minutes in, after things had disintegrated so badly that I could no longer shift--I couldn't even get the shifter to move right--I gave up.

"Please trade with me," I said. "I think my brain has given up on this for tonight. But... you know, good first lesson!"

"Well, it started good," he said as he eased himself out of the car and walked around the front, "but then things went downhill."

"Yeah," I said. "Figures."

And then I crawled over to the passenger seat so I didn't have to walk outside in my socks. I crammed my feet back into my boots and slumped in my seat. I closed my eyes. I tried not to be jealous as he started the car and drove us away from the mall parking lot with as much ease as anything.

8:30 PM. Thursday Night. Rite Aid.

I walked up to the counter to check out. My purchases were varied. I had a bottle of rum, a two liter of Coke, a roll of paper towels, and a box of Apple Jacks.

The check-out guy scanned and bagged. He took my money. And then he peered into the bag once more before handing it to me. He raised his eyebrows. He grinned.

"Behave tonight," he said.

"I'll try," I said, and then I hightailed it out of there with my booze, cereal, and paper towels--clearly the makings of sleazy, sleazy night.