“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
I take a long, deep breath. “That’s terrible. I’m not into her, Tiny.”
He rolls his eyes. “And you think I’m crazy? She’s adorable. I just totally made your life!”
I realize this is not, like, boyish. I realize that properly speaking guys should only think about sex and the acquisition of it, and that they should run crotch-first toward every girl who likes them and etc. But: The part I enjoy most is not the doing, but the noticing. Noticing the way she smells like oversugared coffee, and the difference between her smile and her photographed smile, and the way she bites her lower lip, and the pale skin of her back. I just want the pleasure of noticing these things at a safe distance—I don’t want to have to acknowledge that I am noticing. I don’t want to talk about it or do stuff about it.
I did think about it while we were there with unconscious, snot-crying Tiny below us. I thought about stepping over the fallen giant and kissing her and my hand on her face and her improbably warm breath, and having a girlfriend who gets mad at me for being so quiet and then only getting quieter because the thing I liked was one smile with a sleeping leviathan between us, and then I feel like crap for a while until finally we break up, at which point I reaffirm my vow to live by the rules.
I could do that.
Or I could just live by the rules.
“Trust me,” I tell him. “You are not improving my life. Just stop interfering, okay?”
He answers with a shrug that I take for a nod. “So, listen,” Tiny says. “About Nick. The thing is that he and Gary were together for a really long time and, like, they only broke up yesterday, but there’s a real spark.”
“Supremely bad idea,” I say.
“But they broke up,” says Tiny.
“Right, but what would happen if someone broke up with you and then the next day was flirting with one of your friends?”
“I’ll think about it,” says Tiny, but I know he can’t possibly restrain himself from having another brief and failed romance. “Oh, hey.” Tiny perks up. “You should go with us to the Storage Room on Friday. Nick and I are going to see this band, the uh—the Maybe Dead Cats. Intellectual pop punk. Dead Milkmen-ey, but less funny ha-ha.”
“Thanks for inviting me before,” I say, elbowing Tiny in the side. He pushes me back playfully, and I almost fall down the stairs. It’s like being best friends with a fairy-tale giant: Tiny Cooper can’t help but hurt you.
“I just figured you wouldn’t want to come, after the disaster last week.”
“Oh, wait, I can’t. The Storage Room is over-twenty-one.”
Tiny Cooper, walking ahead of me, reaches the door. He throws his hips against the metal bar, and the door flings open. Outside. The weekend. The brisk bare light of Chicago. The cold air floods over me, and the light rushes in, and Tiny Cooper is backlit by the sinking sun, so I can barely see him when he turns back around to me and pulls out his phone.
“Who are you calling?” I ask, but Tiny doesn’t answer. He just holds the phone in his gigantic meaty hand and then he says, “Hey, Jane,” and my eyes get wide, and I do the slit-the-throat motion, and Tiny smiles and says, “Listen, so Grayson wants to come with us to the Maybe Dead Cats on Friday. Maybe get some dinner first?”
“. . .”
“Well, the only problem is that he doesn’t have an ID, and don’t you know some guy?”
“. . .”
“You aren’t home yet, are you? So just come back and pick his skinny ass up.” Tiny hangs up and says to me, “She’s on her way,” and then I’m left standing in the doorway as Tiny races down the steps and starts skipping—yeah, skipping—toward the junior parking lot. “Tiny!” I shout, but he doesn’t turn around; he just keeps skipping. I don’t start to skip after his crazy ass or anything, but I do kinda smile. He may be a malevolent sorcerer, but Tiny Cooper is his own goddamned man, and if he wants to be a gigantic skipper, then that’s his right as a huge American.
I figure I can’t ditch Jane, so I’m sitting on the front steps when she shows up two minutes later behind the wheel of an ancient, hand-painted orange Volvo. I’ve seen the car before in the parking lot—you can’t miss it—but I’ve never attached it to Jane. She seems quieter than the car implies. I walk down the steps, open the passenger door, and climb in, my feet landing in a pile of fast-food wrappers.
“Sorry. I realize it’s disgusting.”
“Don’t worry,” I say. This would be an excellent time to make a joke, but I’m thinking shut up shut up shut up. After a while the silence feels too weird, so I say, “Do you know this band, the uh, Maybe Dead Cats?”
“Yeah. They’re not bad. They’re sort of a poor man’s early Mr. T Experience, but they’ve got one song I like—it’s like fifty-five seconds long and it’s called ‘Annus Miribalis,’ and it basically explains Einstein’s theory of relativity.”
“Cool,” I say. She smiles, shifts into drive, and we jolt off toward the city.
Maybe a minute later, we come to a stop sign and Jane pulls over to the side of the road and looks at me. “I’m quite shy,” she says.
“Huh?”
“I’m quite shy, so I understand. But don’t hide behind Tiny.”
“I’m not,” I say.
And then she ducks beneath her seat belt and I’m wondering why she’s doing that, and then she leans across the gearbox, and I realize what’s happening, and she closes her eyes and tilts her head and I turn away, staring down at the fast-food bags on the floor of her car. She opens her eyes and jolts backward. Then I start talking to fill the silence. “I’m not really, uh, I think you’re awesome and pretty but I’m not, like, I’m not, like, I guess I don’t, um, really want a relationship right now.”
After a second, very quietly, she says, “I think I might have gotten some unreliable information.”
“Possible,” I say.
“I’m really sorry.”
“Me too. I mean, you really are—”
“No no no stop, that only makes it worse. Okay. Okay. Look at me.” I look at her. “I can totally forget that ever happened if, and only if, you can totally forget it ever happened.”