Gray - By Pete Wentz Page 0,32

Her. It’s a new day.

I press SEND, launch my reply out into the ether. I cannot control what happens next. If it finds Her, it was meant to be. Cosmic chance, divine fate, karma chameleon. Whatever you want to call it. After a few moments, my heart stops pounding and a strange calm fills my body. I am such a smug bastard that I think I’ve learned some sort of deep lesson from all this. I get out of my bunk and walk to the front lounge of the bus, feeling good about myself. A placid, Buddha-like smile slides across my face. I am enlightenment. I am Zen. I am not only the vase, I’m the space around the vase, and the space within the vase. You know, all that really deep stuff. I sit in the lounge and watch the towering storm clouds shower the flatlands and strip malls of Florida. Everyone else is asleep. I probably shouldn’t be feeling good about myself. It was only a goddamn fucking e-mail.

15

It’s a few weeks later. She’s started sending me love letters now. Love e-mails, perfumed and pink, coquettish. Always in lowercase. You know what I mean. The first one caught me off guard . . . it was just a normal e-mail about some dream she had, about how she was standing on this cliff, overlooking the great expanses of the West, and below Her, on another cliff, a guy in a rhinestone suit, a game-show host, was tossing elephants up to Her, and she had to try to catch them on the head of a pin while a studio audience watched intently—that was the point of the game show—and how the elephants would drop out of the sky like great, bouncy balloons, and she’d try to balance them on the pin, only she couldn’t do it, and they’d tumble down into a canyon and explode on the rocks below, in bright bursts of reds and blues, like cans of paint dropped off the roof of a building. Each time she’d let an elephant fall off the pin, the audience would boo a little louder, would hiss and inch a step closer to Her, until she was at the very edge of the cliff, looking down into the canyon, at the husks of elephants and the great, spattered rocks, and the game-show host would smile hideously, would pull a lever, and more elephants would start falling from the heavens, and the audience would lash out at Her, would tear Her clothing off and try to force Her onto the rocks, and how, just as the elephants began to rain down on Her, at the very moment Her heels were tipping back over the edge, Her roommate shook Her awake because she had been crying in Her sleep. Apparently, she had been having this dream ever since she was a child, though I’d never heard Her mention it before. Anyway, that’s what she was going on about, and I was reading along halfheartedly, my eyes skimming over the endless sea of lowercase letters and parentheses (she loved parentheses), until, at the very end, they got snagged on three words, i love you, which she had planted at the very end of the e-mail, like a strategically placed bit of C-4, packed on just out of sight, waiting to detonate.

Of course, I caught it. I saw what she was up to. We terrorists know all the tricks of the trade. The problem was, I didn’t do anything about it. I should’ve defused the bomb right then and there, should’ve cut the wires and tamped out the fuse, but I didn’t . . . maybe because I felt sorry for Her, for the way I had treated Her, for the way Her life had come off track. Or maybe I still loved Her too. Either way, I let the i love you go unchecked, and that emboldened Her. A day later, she wrote another e-mail, used i love you twice, and after that, it was too late. There was no turning back. The messages have started to come with alarming frequency now—sometimes two or three a day—and I can do nothing to stop them. For a few days, I tried ignoring Her, but that just leads to even more e-mails . . . panicked, frightened ones, sent at four in the morning, full of spelling errors and run-on sentences and lines like im sorry for being crazy. You know what I mean. I