Victims of lust

I couldn't go anywhere because I was injured. The injury had happened at my little cousin's birthday party. I'd stepped on a balloon and it hadn't popped and it threw me right on my back right there on the front walkway, and my back landed across the front concrete steps and I'd cracked a disc or something, I don't remember what, but the point was I couldn't go anywhere. I was 25 years old and I was living at my parents' house and most days I fell asleep on the couch and woke up at 3 or 4 in the morning with the TV blaring and went upstairs after that.

This was in March and one day I was looking at a calendar, really staring at it, like I was trying to figure out what it had against me and I realized that it was March 10 today and that it was Jay's birthday. Jay was my best friend from grades 1-10, and we remained friends in grades 11-12, though there was some reshuffling of social circles and we weren't really "best" friends anymore, but still "good" friends. I hadn't spoken to him in years, probably the summer after our first year in college, when all of us spent most of the summer together recovering from the trauma of flopping around and suffocating on the dock that is semi-adult world for the past nine months, though we didn't say anything like that, we just spent most of the time getting drunk. So it had been five and a half years?

Me and him and some other people used to go around spraypainting stop signs white, every one we came across, starting from the school and fanning our way out from there, so there'd be all these ghostly blank octagons everywhere. People still stopped at them though.

I figured I'd call him up, on his birthday. I tried his house, figuring I'd ask his parents what his new number was. He was living out in Portland I'd heard, doing who knows what -- that's where he'd gone to school, somewhere out in Portland or near Portland, and he'd just stayed there. But he answered so I wished him a happy birthday and he said he was just back in town for the week and was bored because no one else was around and asked if I wanted to go somewhere. I was still injured but I figured, fuck it, and told him yeah but he had to come pick me up because I couldn't drive because I was home alone with no car and I couldn't drive.

He picked me up at like 9 and we went to the bar in the center of town, which used to be called Pat's but was Old Church Grille now or something, but we still called it Pat's out of some dumb rebellion or nostalgia or something. I was worried we'd see someone we knew because it was a small town, but all the faces have changed -- it's all the same people, but they all go to different places now.

I brought along my painkillers and offered him some but he said no. I asked him how Portland was and he said he was in Seattle now. He bored me to tears just about explaining what he did and he asked me what I did and I told him the story about how I'd fallen on a balloon.

At some point we were drunk and he told me he'd been thinking about how it he was flying back out west tomorrow and he was hoping his plane would crash. I tried to get the bartender's attention so we could settle our tab. He said he and his girlfriend from high school whose name was Deirdre were having problems. I told him I never liked her, went off on a rant about her for a little bit. He said he was lost without her and wanted his plane to crash rather than face being without her. I said there were a million good reasons to want to die but Dierdre wasn't one of them. He got upset but didn't say anything. I looked down at the end of the bar and watched some 19-year-old girl try to work the bartender over for a beer, but the bartender kept telling him he knew how old she was because they went to the same church.

We left and I told Jay he was too drunk to drive so I was going to just walk home -- it wasn't far. He drove off and I was barely out of the parking lot before I remembered my back. I couldn't find my painkillers. I tried to tough it out for a while but I stopped halfway up that steep hill at the start of route 69 past Rock Road -- I'd barely made it anywhere, I could still see the bar. I slumped to the ground and curled up in a muddy pile of leaves. A car drove up and flashed its brights at me but I flipped it off without looking and it went on its way. In the morning I woke up to a bunch of kids gawking at me on their way to school. Someone beeped. My back hurt even worse than it had the night before.

I hobbled over to a car and knocked on the driver's side window. The kid practically pulled a muscle making sure his door was locked. I pounded harder and told him to let me in. I yanked on the back door and it popped open and I threw myself into the backseat. It was some skinny 17-year-old, probably -- he looked terrified. I shaded my eyes with the crook of my arm. The seat was kind of vibrating with the engine and it felt good.

I hadn't told him what to do, so he just drove to school, I guess, as fast as he could, passing people. He got there and parked and slammed the door and ran off into the building. I stayed there for a while. I think I'd been to the school maybe twice since graduation. I pulled myself up on the back of my seat and looked at it -- our school was flat and wide and rectangularly asymmetrical. Some girl walked past the car and looked in the window -- she was a middle schooler, maybe sixth grade. I got out in the opposite side and walked over to her and threw her up against the car and took her backpack. She crawled off into the woods. I opened her backpack up and found her schedule with her homeroom in it and I went to school, because I was late.