Just A Small Town Girl: A New Adult Romantic Comedy (7 page)

 "Look," I said. "If you don't want to go out just say so and we'll carry on like we did before."

 "Before?" she said, raising an eyebrow.

 "Yeah. Avoiding each other between make-out sessions in the back room. I don't know how that's working out for you but..."

 Lacie held up a hand. "Fine, okay. You've made your point. It's a date."

 I agreed to meet her at seven thirty and rushed home to change into something that didn't stink of wood stain. Unfortunately everything in my house now smelled of weed because Steve had appointed himself some kind of dealer-in-residence. There was a Harley parked outside the trailer and my blood ran cold; had Psycho Bob come to check in on his assets?

 I tried the door. It wouldn't open. "Steve?"

 "Um...hey. Just a second."

 Okay, what the fuck? "Steve, have you barricaded yourself in my house?"

 "Yeah - just...it's just a thing. Wait there."

 "I don't really have any choice," I said. It was that or get down on my back, scoot under the trailer and climb up through the goddamn floor. I didn't really want to do that.

 Steve opened the door. A great billow of smoke came out like something from a Cheech and Chong movie. His eyes were small and red. "What the fuck?" I said.

 "I'm sorry," he said, as I closed the door behind me. "It's good shit but it makes me really fucking paranoid."

 "What happened to that thing where dealers aren't supposed to use?" I asked. "That's what you said to me."

 "Okay, so maybe that didn't quite work out..."

 "Didn't quite work out? Understatement. You look like you've been pepper-sprayed. And your shirt's inside out. What the hell have you been doing?"

 "Nothing," he said, slapping my hand away from the label of his shirt. The living room curtain slid back and revealed a tall, leather-clad figure. For a second my heart skipped a beat but I looked up and saw it wasn't Psycho Bob at all. This biker was at least thirty years younger, and didn't have the dipped-in-piss-and-iron-filings look of an old school Angel. I stared at him for a moment trying to figure out exactly what it was that made him unusual - maybe the smoke was already fogging my brains - but then he smiled and it all made sense; he was stupidly, cartoonishly handsome.

 He looked like he should be wearing a pirate costume and adorning the cover of a bright pink book, probably with some kind of swooning maiden in his muscular arms. His hair was blacker than black and his eyes were bluer than blue. His smile revealed a dimple at the corner of his mouth and his chin was just the perfect kind of square.

 He was the kind of man that most men would agree was a douche, or would if he wasn't so fucking huge. He had to tilt his big-ass handsome head just to fit in the narrow hallway.

 "This is Trey," said Steve. "He's um...he's a..."

 "I'm Bob's nephew," said Trey, sticking out a hand the size of a side plate. I shook it with a grip that was nothing short of pathetic. "Sorry, but I have to split. Good to see everything's going well though, Steve."

 "Totally," said Steve. "Copacetic." He did some kind of embarrassing fist-bump thing that made my spine curl in on itself, and we watched as Trey swung one long leg over the side of his Harley and roared off through the trailer park.

 "His nephew?" I said, slowly. For a so-called criminal mastermind, Steve had suddenly taken a worrying turn for the dumb.

 "What?"

 "His fucking nephew? Do you know what this means, you moron? It means that Bob is sending his nephew to check up on us and now Bob probably knows that we're cutting the product with catnip. Oh, and also he knows where I fucking live, so thanks for that, asshole."

 "Okay," said Steve. "So just like chill, because it's not what you think."

 "It's not? Okay then. Tell me. What's going on here? Because from where I'm standing it looks like you're hanging around my house, smoking weed with enormous fucking bikers when you should be out selling the stuff. When do we gotta kick back to Psycho Bob, anyway?" 

 "I'm gonna stop you right there," said Steve. "Because you're being really judgmental. I have it on good authority that Bob is not psycho - he's just a little hypoglycemic sometimes; he's not good if he doesn't eat."

 "Right," I said. "So that time he broke a guy's kneecaps with a motorbike chain - he only did it because he was hungry?"

 "Well, I wouldn't put it exactly like..."

 "...so if we don't make him his money back he's not
actually
gonna punch our teeth so far down our throat we'll have to brush by sticking our toothbrushes up our assholes, just so long as we slip him a corndog or two?"

 "...Clayton, now you're just being unhelpful..."

 "...or does he have surprising tastes for a steel-capped, snag-bearded heavy metal lunatic and we should whip up a nice light caprese salad with arancini stuffed fucking peppers? They call him Psycho Bob, Steve. Not Hypoglycemic Bob. Not Hungry Bob. Not Gourmet Bob. Psycho Bob. Clue's in the name, bro."

 Steve sighed. "Look," he said. "Everything is going to be fine. Breathe. Chill. You're really beginning to worry me."

 "What? Me? Worry? Why should I worry? You've only turned my house into some kind of cannabis bodega and painted a big-ass YOU ARE HERE arrow to me on a map. And where the hell is Bog anyway?"

 "That is exactly why you shouldn't worry," said Steve, wandering back into the living area. "Bog is on top of the deals. He's handling it."

 I couldn't believe what I was hearing. "Steve, Bog has difficulty differentiating dreams from reality. He can barely keep on top of figuring out which part of his body itches when he needs to scratch. Are you seriously..." I realized it was hopeless. "You know what, fuck it. I knew this was a bad idea from the start. I do not have time for this. I have a date."

 Steve stuck a fresh joint in his mouth. "Really? Well, that's awesome."

 "Yeah. She is," I said. "And I'm going to be really fucking pissed off if I don't get to spend more time with this girl because I've been murdered by a bloodthirsty Hell's Angel and his goddamn handsome giant of a nephew."

 There was a long moment while Steve's fried brain tried to make sense of what I'd said. "Handsome?" he said. "You think handsome? Yeah - I guess he is. I'd never really thought about it before."

 "You should knock that shit off," I said. "Too much of that stuff kills brain cells. Look what happened to Bog."

 He'd made me late. I took the world's shortest and coldest shower, threw on a clean shirt and jeans and drove back into Westerwick. I met Lacie in the tiny town diner and knew at once I was under-dressed. She was wearing a dark blue polka-dot dress that nipped in at the waist, and had switched her usual braided thread wristbands for a pretty enameled bracelet. I don't know how long she'd been sitting there, but she didn't look up when I came in. There was a book open in front of her and a cup of coffee at her elbow.

 "What are you reading?" I asked.

 Her eyes didn't move from the page. "Words, words, words."

 "Hamlet," I said.

 She looked up over the rims of her reading glasses and I knew I was right. It was one of the few parts of Shakespeare I remembered from high school - the part where Polonius is trying to suck up to Hamlet and Hamlet's having none of his bullshit; it struck me as a pretty good comeback considering it had been written five hundred years ago.

 "So you
do
know Shakespeare," she said.

 "Some," I said. "I'm probably not as well-acquainted with the dick jokes as you are."

 She closed the book - something about the sea - and slipped it into her bag. "Actually Hamlet's more well known for the vagina joke," she said, taking off her glasses and putting them in their case.

 "Okay - they never taught me that in high school."

 Lacie grinned. "Yeah. There'd always be some hysteric who went running to the PTA if they taught that in high school. It's pretty filthy."

 "Right," I said. "Now I have to know."

 She leaned forward on her elbows. "It's when he's talking to Ophelia about laying his head in her lap. And about country matters."

 "I don't get it."

 "Yeah. He was better at dick jokes. It's a play on words -
count
ry matters."

 It took me a moment to get it. “You’re right,” I said. “That is pretty filthy.”

 "It's not exactly subtle," she said. "But when you're asking an audience to spend five acts in the company of an asshole like Hamlet I guess you've got to grab your cheap laughs where you can get them."

 A guy in an apron came over with an extra cup and coffee mug. His hair was gray but he was tall and broad in the shoulders.

 "Jerry, this is Clayton," Lacie said. "Clayton, Jerry."

 Jerry switched the coffee pot from his right hand to his left and shook my hand with a steely grip. "So you're the new fall guy over at Gus Jones, huh?"

 "Fall guy?" I said. "Should I be worried?"

 "Oops, sorry - I meant fall as in the season," said Jerry and turned a wide, white smile on Lacie. "Very cute, honey. I approve."

 She gave me a told-you-so look as Jerry reeled off the specials. "See?" she said, when he was out of sight. "It's like I have a Dad on every street corner, so you'd better treat me right."

 "What about your Mom?" I asked.

 She shook her head. "Dead."

 "I'm sorry."

 "Don't be. It was a long time ago."

 "You have any brothers or sisters?"

 She held up a finger, her nose in her coffee cup. "Brother," she said. "But he's dead too."

 "Wow." It was on the tip of my tongue to say I was sorry again, but she'd shrugged the last one off and I knew why. There were only so many times you could hear such a thing and it just became noise. I knew from experience that after a while it got irritating - death, loss, these things happened and you couldn't stay sorry forever. At some point you had to pick yourself up and move on.

 "What about you?" she asked.

 "Two brothers," I said. "One younger and one older."

 "Middle kid. Is that as bad as they say?"

 I shook my head. "Not really. Me and my older brother are twins, so we kind of came as a unit."

 "Then why do you say he's older?"

 "Because he is. By ten minutes. And he never let me forget it."

 She caught my smile and laughed. "Oh dear."

 "Yeah. It was like that. He always had to ride shotgun because he was the oldest, he always had to have the bigger piece of pie. But he's not all asshole. I remember when we had to go get our teeth filled - we did everything together, even getting cavities - and that sound. The drill, you know?"

 She winced in sympathy and bit the inside of her cheek.

 "So we were sitting in the dentist's waiting room listening to this unholy noise and thinking we were in for a world of pain, and the noise stops. They had the reception desk in the waiting room and this woman - probably the patient he'd been drilling on - came out to settle her bill, right? And holy shit - she looked terrible - all kinda drugged and puffy. She was trying to talk to the receptionist and her voice was coming out all wrong because of the anesthetic..."

 Lacie laughed.

 "It was bad," I said. "And she took this wad of cotton out of the side of her mouth so she could talk better and there was all this blood. At this point my brother's white as a fucking sheet and I'm probably the same color. So the dentist comes out, looks at me and Bryan and says 'I'm seeing double,' – like ha ha, never heard that one before - and then he says 'Which one of you is going first?'"

 "Did he chicken out?" she asked.

 I shook my head. "He did not. He got down off the chair and said 'Me. I'm the oldest. I'll go first.'"

 "Some brother," she said. "What does he do now?"

 "Military. Or was. He's a vet. Afghanistan. Baby brother Brad is a certified genius - he's on a full ride scholarship at MIT."

 "Wow."

 "Yeah. Maybe I did suffer for being the middle kid - squished between the war hero and the future nerd overlord. I'm kind of the family fuck-up."

 "I don't know," she said. "You could be a lot worse. You could be whoring yourself out for meth and living from one dumpster dive to another."

 "I guess," I said. Or I could be dealing quantities of weed that were felonious even by Vermont's relatively relaxed standards, or contemplating my imminent demise at the hands of a psychotic, hypoglycemic Hell's Angel named Bob. On reflection I was lurching into full on black-sheep territory.

 She ordered apple pie and I had a grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup. I kind of regretted not asking her if she wanted to go anywhere fancier but I couldn't think of anywhere in town. I wanted to continue the conversation but there was nowhere to go on the subject of family, at least not without picking at old wounds. There was no casual way to ask "So how did your Mom and brother die?” so I didn't.

 It seemed the longer we sat quiet the bigger the silence swelled between us. I swear I saw her eyes dart to the spine of the book in her bag, as if she was thinking of cracking it open and shutting me out. I wished we were back behind the counter, because at least then we had a way of communicating, even if it was just an elaborate form of dry humping. 

 This isn't you, I wanted to shout, and then realized I had no idea what was her. I didn't even know her birthday.

 "So when were you born?" I don't know where that question came from. It just fell out of my mouth. Oh God.

 She was looking at me with a kind of smug amusement, like I'd proved her point about us being awkward and weird with one another. "That's a very David Copperfield kind of a question," she said.

 "Huh? Magical?"

 "No, not the magician. The book. Dickens. That's how
David Copperfield
starts - I am born."

 "Oh," I said. "Right. I've never read that. You like magic though?"

 She scrunched up her nose. "Not really. I'm sorry - I've spent so many years reading books that sometimes it feels like my only frame of reference."

 "Did you ever think about what you wanted to do after college?" I asked.