Play Me Backwards (28 page)

Mrs. Smollet gave me an “I win” kind of smile from the back of the room. I wondered if maybe she could
tell
that Paige was pregnant and was already plotting out ways to get the placenta for her next batch of eternal youth potion.

Either way I didn't care much. We hadn't exactly won, but it was close enough for me if they didn't recall the whole thing and no one got suspended. Any fool could just unpeel the sticker if they felt like it and have themselves a Satanist-friendly yearbook. The message
was still there if you looked close enough. It would just be more hidden than ever, which is how Satanic messages are supposed to be, anyway. Maybe it was even better like this, in a way.

I didn't stay to help with the stickers. As far as I was concerned, my duties with the yearbook committee were finished. I followed the group of people in devil horns out into the hall. Paige followed me, and we hung around back behind the crowd a bit.

“Well,” she said, “are you proud of yourself?”

“Kind of,” I said.

“You tried, at least,” she said. “I guess I can respect that. But I am really, really mad at you for this. I might have to yell later.”

“I understand,” I said. “I was just thinking about how, if I'm going to be an adult, I have to stop sitting on my ass and stand up for myself every now and then. You know what I mean?”

When she didn't answer, I noticed that she had stopped walking a few steps ago, and I turned back towards her. She had a look on her face that was kind of a mix of shock and fear, like she'd just seen Mrs. Smollet naked or something.

“You okay?” I asked.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” she said. “Now.”

“Puking?”

She shook her head and ran. I ran after her and stood outside the girls' room for a couple of minutes until she yelled for me to come inside.

“It's a girls' room,” I said. “I'm not allowed.”

“There's no one else in here. Just come in.”

I stepped inside and she was standing in front of an open stall, buttoning her jeans.

“Well,” she said, “I'm not pregnant.”

“Seriously?”

“I just got my period,” she said. “I guess something just screwed up my cycle. Maybe it
was
the flu. Or food poisoning.”

“Oh, thank God,” I said.

I started to hug her, but she held up her hands and stopped me.

“Listen,” she said. “I didn't stab you for organizing a Satanist rally, but I have some thinking to do about us.”

“What's wrong?”

“The last few days I've had to picture living my whole life with you, and it scared the hell out of me. Because you're
not
the perfect guy for me. What you did today just proved it.”

“Nobody's perfect.”

“No, but I want the man I spend my life with to come closer. He should be imperfect in ways that complement the way
I'm
imperfect. And I don't know if you do. Even if one of my dad's friends gave you a job, you'd probably show up with your hair dyed green.”

“My dad had green hair for a while,” I said. “What's wrong with that?”

She shrugged. “Nothing, I guess. But it's just not . . . the kind of person who's right for me. Plus, we're graduating, there's going to be other guys and other girls at college. . . .” She let out a sort of rueful chuckle, then said, “Not to mention that I think there's a pretty good chance I'll end up going to Hell when I die if I stick with you.”

We just stood there for a second, then we both sat down on the tile floor with our backs to the wall, near the sinks. We stared at the stalls and toilets and didn't say anything for a few minutes.

“Sometimes I feel like I really love you,” she went on. “We have
so much fun sometimes. But sometimes . . . sometimes I just don't know.”

I nodded.

In quieter moments I'd sometimes wondered if she really loved me, or if she was just going through the motions of being in love. And I wondered the same thing about myself and how I felt about her. I cared about her, and I liked being with her, but I never felt like my whole soul was on fire when I was with her. I'd just told myself that wasn't really what love feels like in real life.

I didn't say this out loud, though. I just stared at the toilets.

“I've been single for exactly twenty-seven days since sixth grade,” she said. “I don't know. Maybe I just . . . I don't know.”

For a long time we both just sat there and felt like shit together. When she got up and walked out of the bathroom without saying anything, I felt a strange mix of relief and shock. I kept sitting there for quite a bit; it wasn't until Leslie came into the bathroom and I had to awkwardly creep out that it really hit me that I had basically been dumped. Not officially, but tentatively.

I was embarrassed, shocked, crushed, and sort of relieved (about the baby part, at least) all at once. In a weird way it even kind of sucked that she wasn't pregnant after all. I'd spent enough time trying to look at the positive side of things that a part of me was almost looking forward to being a dad. I was just starting to think I'd be okay at it. This was a loss, in a way.

Going back to a life where all I'd need was a couch to sit on, a six-pack to drink, and a remote control to smite my enemies didn't totally feel like something to celebrate.

I went to my car and drove to the Cave, where Stan was sitting
on the counter, as though he was waiting for me.

“Don't look so down, man,” he said. “You didn't really think the school would pass out a yearbook with a Satanic message in it, did you?”

I shrugged. “It's not that,” I said. “The whole thing was actually sort of awesome, and no one got expelled or anything, so we sort of won. But Paige sort of dumped me after the meeeting.”

Stan hopped off the counter, stood upright, and nodded.

“Let's go to the back,” he said.

We went to the back and he mixed me up a drink—one of his hot toddies or whatever you call them, and I melted into the couch and recounted the whole story of how Paige thought she was pregnant, but now that she knew she wasn't, she was probably going to take the chance to avoid any further risk of being stuck with me for life.

I let the drink just sit there in my hand, untouched. The way it was glowing was weirdly hypnotic, and I was focusing on it while I talked, like it was a crystal ball. I wanted something to focus on more than I wanted a drink.

Stan listened and nodded in the right places while I told the story, but at the end, he was smiling.

Then, when I finished, the son of a bitch laughed a long, slow, evil laugh.

“What are you laughing at?” I asked.

“It all happened because everyone got sick with the Montreal Flu. That's why the poem got overlooked when the proofs came in.”

“Right.”

“And I assume Paige found out she wasn't pregnant because she got her period, right?”

“Uh-huh.” I hadn't been that specific when I told the story, but how else do you find out right after school?

“And I suppose it happened while you guys were in the hallway, outside the yearbook room?”

“Yeah.”

“So it's just like I've been telling you,” Stan said. “There came a great plague, and the blood of the unbeliever flowed in the high school hallway.”

I groaned, then I stood up, dropped my drink on the cement floor, grabbed a handful of Reese's Pieces out of the barrel, and threw them at Stan.

“Fuck you!” I said. “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you!”

“What the fuck?” he asked, still grinning like a villain who'd just finished testing his doomsday device.

“Fuck you!”

I threw a few more handfuls of mix-ins at him, then threw a stack of plastic cups in his general direction as I made my way out of the break room. In the front a bunch of people from the rally were just coming in. I threw a handful of napkins around, and they fluttered to the ground like snow. I guess people thought I was throwing them like confetti, because there was actual cheering. Cheering.

Stan followed me as I stormed along.

“Did you ever finish
Moby-Dick
?” he asked.

“Christ!” I said. “We stopped listening after we found the Slushee, but I know how it ends. The whale kills everybody.”

“That's the lesson,” he said. “If you try to fight fate, you end up getting eaten by a big fucking whale. Go finish listening to it. Now.
Go. Don't show your face back here until you've listened to the end of it. Drive clear the Hell to Mexico if you have to.”

“Go to Hell,” I said.

But I decided to do what he told me. I didn't want to be in the Cave right then. I didn't want to be anywhere I'd ever been with Paige. Not even in the same city. I was going to drive as far away as I could.

I walked out the door just as Jenny was coming in. She tried to talk to me, but I walked right past like I didn't see her, got into my car, and headed for the interstate with the audiobook playing on the speakers.

I drove and drove and drove and drove, as though something was chasing me. Like some underachieving supervillain had announced his plans to blow up Des Moines and I wanted to be as far away from the fallout as I could when the bomb went off. I drove past the suburbs and into farm country, the rolling green hills of central Iowa. There were no traces of snow left. The corn had started to grow.

I tried, off and on, to pay attention to what Ishmael was saying about the ragtag band of scruffy misfits, the half-crazy sailors, going off to get killed, but mostly I hit pause and thought of Paige and everything else. I was probably never going to kiss her again. Never feel her skin against mine.

I missed the way her hair smelled already. All of a sudden the fact that I'd never smell that same aroma again without thinking of her hit me almost as hard as the pregnancy scare had.

I was pulling in for gas at a town that happened to be named Atlantic, like the ocean where the sailors were sailing, when she sent
a text saying, “Call me.” I knew what that meant, of course. I didn't call her back right away. I got back in the car and kept heading west.

I half suspected that she'd at least want me to still go to prom with her, because it was too much trouble to find someone else, and skipping prom just did not fit into her view of the way things ought to be.

I wasn't sure what I'd tell her.

I was almost to Nebraska, almost two hours from home, when I got to the part in the audiobook where Captain Ahab finally takes his shot at Moby Dick. Naturally, before he throws the harpoon, he goes into a monologue. That's pretty much how people function in that fucking book—whenever something happens to someone, something in their head goes, “Hey, you'd better make a big speech!”

If I ever look up the book in print, I'll bet the speech Ahab makes before he throws his harpoon goes on for a whole damned page. As usual, I couldn't imagine how Ishmael could have remembered the whole thing, except for the fact that it
was
a real beast of a speech. “Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale,” he says. “To the last I grapple with thee, from hell's heart I stab at thee, for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool!”

Damn.

He was wrong about the unconquering part though, because as soon as he finishes up the monologue, the fucker throws his harpoon, catches himself on the line, and gets yanked out of the boat. If I was picturing it right, he was tied up to the whale and dragged along to his doom. I thought maybe his corpse would be attached to Moby Dick forever, but then I figured that pretty soon his body
would rot away enough that even if he was wrapped up really tight, he'd slip out of the ropes and sink down to the bottom of the ocean.

Or maybe old Moby would notice a body being dragged along and eat it. Maybe trying to get the dead guy on the end of the rope into his mouth would be like playing one of those little games where you try to get a ball on some string into a cup. Ahab couldn't kill the whale, but maybe he'd at least frustrate him a little.

But then I played it back and got the impression that he wasn't tied to the line at the end of the harpoon at all. He just drowned, and Moby Dick probably took no notice of him at all.

I was crossing the big green bridge over the river that takes you out of Iowa and into Nebraska a few minutes later when the whale sinks the ship and everybody dies except Ishmael.

And the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.

That's the last thing Ishmael says before the epilogue.

I still say he was already long dead by then and spent the whole last half of the book as a ghost. Hell, in the epilogue, he says that the sharks swam by him as though they had padlocks on their mouths until another ship came up to save him. You don't get
that
lucky.

But according to him another ship picked him up, and that was the end.

I didn't learn a single damned lesson about myself from the whole thing.

And Ishmael, in a rare show of keeping his big yap shut, doesn't explain what anyone
should
have learned from the whole fucking thing, either.

I had finished the whole book, and I was broken, beaten, and
adrift in unfamiliar territory. Tired, lonely, and just about broke.

And in Omaha, no less.

I pulled a map up on my phone and found the nearest Captain Jack's. After I finished my hush puppies, I called Paige and let her break up with me officially.

She was right that I wasn't perfect for her, of course. She wasn't perfect for me, either.

But it still sucked.

I loved Paige. I was pretty sure of that. I was ready to go into real estate for her. I would have let her eat my hush puppies if she wanted them.