The inside of my car was really, really cold.
I reached into my bag and, for the first time that night, pulled out my cell phone. The message light was flashing like a strobe and I flipped it open and saw that my text message box was full. I only recognized half of the names, but they almost all started this way: “OMG HEARD SONG CALL ME!!!!! LOL!!!!!” I didn’t even bother checking the voice mails.
But what I did do was scroll through my phone book and stop on one of the most familiar names in there. Evan Dennison. Although I hardly remembered any phone numbers besides my own, I knew all of his by heart. And then I wondered why I had never deleted him, why he was still taking up this space, why he was still everywhere.
I acted before I could stop myself. I dialed his cell phone number from memory, just to see if I could, and then I let it ring. My heart was in my ears and toes and everywhere except where it belonged, and after four rings, I braced for his message. I wondered if it was still the same, that low stoner laugh followed by the words “If you don’t know who you’ve reached, don’t leave a message. Otherwise, talk.”
But that cold animatronic voice came on: “The number you have reached is no longer in service.” And my hands were shaking and for some reason—or maybe for too many reasons—I wanted to cry.
So I did.
Afterwards, I drove myself home in silence past Halloween decorations and lit pumpkins and dried my face and checked my eyes in the rearview mirror before going inside. My parents were on the couch and Bendomolena was still in the exact same spot on the staircase. When I walked in, everyone except Bendy looked at me expectantly. “Well?” my dad said.
Oh Jesus, they had heard the song. They had heard the song and listened to the lyrics and then got totally paranoid and hacked into my email account and figured out that Evan and I had slept together, and now I was going to have to sit through some intervention where my parents talked about sperm and condoms and responsibility and teenage pregnancy statistics. And then they’d probably ship me off to one of those wilderness camps where they give you a name like Little Running Bear and make you scavenge for food to build up your self-esteem until you swear to be abstinent for the rest of your natural life.
I’ll tell you this right now: me and nature? Not so much.
“Um, yeah?” I said. I kept my coat on just in case there were two burly men waiting to drag me off to some nameless desert camp.
My dad held up a spoon expectantly. “Where’s the Coffee Dream?”
Oh. Ice cream.
Right.
4 “Making islands where no islands should go…”
—Death Cab for Cutie, “Transatlanticism”
I SPENT MOST OF SUNDAY not returning any phone calls, not writing emails or text messages, or on that note, doing any of my homework. Instead, I ate whole-wheat pancakes with my mom, sat in my room and cut up two magazines, then made a very explicit playlist and CD case for my “Suck It Up!” mix. A random sampling:
Track 3: No Doubt, “Just a Girl”—You can never have too much sarcastic girl anger too early in the morning.
Track 11: Jay-Z, “99 Problems”—Unlike Mr. Z, I only had one problem, not 99 of them. (But either way, it’s super awesome for driving.)
Track 8: Bob Marley & the Wailers, “Trenchtown Rock”—Because the opening lyrics are “One good thing about music / When it hits, you feel no pain.” I mean, c’mon. Do you really need me to explain further?
All of this took some time because my phone kept ringing every two minutes or so and of course I had to look at the caller ID. By the fifty-seventh ring, though, I realized that I barely recognized any of the numbers, so I turned it off. Victoria knew my parents’ number, so if something urgent happened, like if Sharon Eggleston lost all her hair in a tragic oil spill or if Evan got nominated for a Grammy, I knew Victoria would know how to find me.
Bendomolena waddled into my room later on and settled herself on top of a pile of magazines, suffocating the cover photo with her stomach. “Why couldn’t you do that to Evan?” I asked her. “You had plenty of opportunities.”
Bendomolena never liked Evan. That was my first inkling that things weren’t cool. My second inkling came during one of our marathon phone conversations. Actually, calling them “conversations” is generous. They were more like monologues by Evan, during which I said “yeah” and “uh-huh” and watched Steven’s Untitled Rock Show on Fuse with the sound off while Evan went on and on about why his drummer sucked.
Finally, one night, I got bored. And fed up. And annoyed. So I did a little Evan experiment. “Hey,” I said casually. “Bendomolena’s on fire.”
“Cool. So yeah, Jon wants to do a drum solo and we were just like, ‘Dude, no.’”
I looked across the room at Bendomolena who was, quite obviously, not on fire, and was instead lolling on her back. “Wow, she’s really flammable,” I said, and Bendomolena opened one eye. “Who knew something that little could burn up so furiously?”
“I know, right? So get this. He said—”
“Hey, Ev, I better go get the fire extinguisher. She’s toasty.”
“What? Fire extinguisher? What the hell are you talking about, Aud?”
I sighed and avoided the stony gaze of Bendomolena, who sensed she was a pawn in my game. “Nothing, I’m just kidding. But I gotta go, okay? My mom needs me for something.”
So of course I called Victoria right after we hung up. “I told him that my cat was on fire and he didn’t even hear me!” I cried. “On fire, Victoria! And he didn’t care!”