Gray - By Pete Wentz Page 0,30

I can’t help but laugh. Lines like that are showstoppers, and I definitely heard the record skip in my brain. Finally, I’m compelled to ask this crazy kid what his name is, and he tells me it’s John. John Miller. It’s sort of a letdown. He deserved a better name than that, something like Talon or Falcon or Buck, something befitting a wild-haired feral child, the kind that crawls out of the jungle once every fifty years. The kind of name suitable for a big-game tracker, or a roughneck on an oil derrick, or a drunken, dusty gunslinger. Instead, he got stuck with John Miller. It makes him sound like a chiropractor. His parents really fucked him over.

“Well, John Miller,” I said, eyelids drooping like some cartoony drunk’s, “your name fucking sucks.”

“Yeah, I know it,” John Miller winced, finishing his umpteenth tallboy of the night (or morning). “My parents really fucked me over.”

Great minds. Kismet. All that bullshit. I love this kid.

“I think we should hang out more,” I told him, leaning on the railing of the balcony for support. “You should give me your e-mail address, and the next time we’re in here we should hang.”

“Yeah, definitely, I love doin’ dumb shit,” John Miller said, then staggered inside to get a pen or throw up or something. The Animal and I stare out at the quickly brightening beach. We should be going soon.

“That kid is great.” I laugh.

“Eh, he’s okay,” the Animal snorts. He’s a man of few words.

We go back to staring at the Atlantic. There’s really nothing else to say. The sun clears the horizon, making the surface of the ocean shimmer like a tray of diamonds, and from the other side of the motel comes the sound of the first trucks of the day, downshifting on their way out of town. We should’ve been back on the bus by now. People are probably starting to worry.

Then there’s another crash behind us, and we whirl around to see John Miller standing there, holding a sheet of paper in his hand. On it, he’s scrawled his e-mail address: [email protected]. It’s strangely perfect.

“Nobody ever calls me John,” he said, handing the sheet to me.

“Yeah, I can kind of see why.” I laugh.

And then, the Animal and I are in the lobby of the motel, calling our tour manager from a courtesy telephone. He asks where we are and says he’ll send a cab to get us. He hangs up in a huff. I think we woke him up. We sit out on the curb and watch the trucks rumble by, off to who knows where, back who knows when. You can feel the heat rising from the ground already. Finally, the cab comes to get us, one of those old bangers with the velvety interior that always smells like cigarettes, the kind they have in every city that’s not New York, and we have the driver take us back to whatever the arena was called. I roll down my window, lean my head back on the velvet, and close my eyes. The last thing I see is the cabdriver checking me out in the rearview. He looks like the kind of guy they’d cast to play a Vietnam vet in some movie.

It’s not important. Like I said, after a while, you don’t remember the days, just the events. I’ll remember this day because there were two of them. The first was meeting the Disaster. The second happened when I got back to the bus, climbed into my bunk (the good-luck one), and checked my e-mail before I passed out. Only one new message was in my in-box. Sent at 3:47 a.m. From Her. I stare at it as the bus engine purrs to life, as we slip out of (I think) Daytona Beach. I can feel my heart pounding, and I’m pretty sure I know why. I should probably just delete it, go on with my life, but I don’t. The computer takes forever opening it, as if God or Steve Jobs were asking me, “You sure you really wanna do this?” But then, there they are: Her words, filling my screen, and there’s no turning back. I make it as far as the first line before I feel my heart burst in my chest.

I miss you.

14

I’m drunk and I probably shouldn’t be writing this. But I really miss you tonight. I know I’m not supposed to—everyone tells me that—but I have for a while now, and it’s not