Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self - By Danielle Evans Page 0,71
me which hotel, and I know if I end up at his apartment I’m not sleeping on the couch, but the thought of waking up next to him suddenly feels more terrifying than comforting, more like undoing something than fixing it.
“Stop,” I say. “Stop the car.”
“We’re on the highway,” he says.
“So get off the fucking highway, then,” I say. At first I think he’s going to ignore me, but he gets off at the next exit and pulls into the parking lot of a Waffle House just past the exit ramp.
“What’s wrong now?” he asks.
I don’t answer him, I just get out of the car and slam the door. It’s still Saturday night in the parking lot—more drunk strangers and other people’s problems than I can handle right now—so, after watching a girl vomit into the bushes and then go back to screaming at someone on her cell phone, I bang on the window until Brian leans over and opens the passenger-side door. I sit back in the seat and fasten my seat belt while he leans his forehead against the steering wheel. If I didn’t know him better, I might think he was praying. I turn away from him and look out the windshield, into the window of the Waffle House in front of us.
If you have ever been to a pancake house in the middle of the night, then you know how resolutely depressing it is—you live in one of the few cities where it is never actually the middle of the night. In a city like this one, the first hour or so after bar time may be upbeat, because people are still trying to get something from the night: joy or sex or gradual sobriety. At around five a.m. you’ll see the first waves of people beginning the new day or ending the night with sleepless exuberance. But between those hours, the pancake house is a dead zone for possibility. Everyone is there for lack of something: good and nourishing food, sufficient coordination to drive the rest of the way home, an appropriate person to love or fuck, a reason to get up the next morning.
I allow myself to say out loud that maybe it is simple lack, and not some unbreakable connection, that has kept Brian and me attached to each other all this time; that for a long time all I’ve been in his presence is the absence of better things. He stays quiet. Through the window, I watch a middle-aged man in a trucker hat stare at the back silhouette of a girl in ripped fishnets and a too-tight miniskirt, not exactly lecherously, but like she is a planet he has never been to, something so far out of this reality that he might as well look carefully.
“Just fucking go,” I say to Brian. “I’ll be fine if you just go.”
I can hear him breathing, and his arm is touching mine, but just barely.
“This is me,” he says. “I’m not going to leave you. And anyway, it’s your goddamn car, and I’m not walking home.”
“Fine, then. Stay,” I say.
I look away from the Waffle House window and back toward the highway. The traffic keeps going by, candy-painted SUVs, slick sports cars, an eighteen-wheeler.
“I should take you to your hotel,” Brian says quietly, but he doesn’t start the engine and he doesn’t get out of the car, and we sit there like that, waiting for something better to present itself.
Robert E. Lee Is Dead
For making honor roll you got these stupid Mylar balloons. They were silver on the back and red or blue or pink on the front, with CONGRATULATIONS written in big clashing letters. The balloons were supplied by the army recruiters who had an office across the street from our football field, and they always stuck a green and white U.S. Army sticker on the back. If you lived in Lakewood, then when you got a balloon your parents picked you up, or you drove yourself home with it in the backseat. Either way, when you got it home, you waited for your balloon to deflate slowly; and when it finally did, your mother smoothed out the wrinkles and put it on a wall, or in an album, or in a storage box somewhere, if you already had so many that another would be redundant. If you lived in Eastdale, then the stupid balloon got in your way the whole time you were walking home.