Gray - By Pete Wentz Page 0,38

and clears our plates away, and I keep talking. She returns to refill our coffees, and I’m still talking. I talk and talk, until there’s nothing left to say, until I’m trailing off, ending sentences with “and you know . . .” and eyes into the distance. When I’m finished, John Miller is the only person alive who knows the entire story of Her and me. I’ve told it to no one else. I’m not sure why.

We sit there for a heavy minute, John Miller preparing his Skoal. He holds the can between his thumb and middle finger, flicks his wrist, thumps the can with his pointer finger, packing the tobacco in one fluid, blurry motion. He tilts the can toward me, nods his head, but I say no. Then he takes a massive wad and crams it into his bottom lip. It bulges just like his stomach. We sit there for another heavy minute, and I’m wondering if he was even listening to me. He spits into his coffee cup, leans waaaay back in the booth, eyes me with that country-mile stare, and finally, regally, speaks.

“Lissen, man. I’m gonna say it again. I may not know you all that well, but I understand whatcher goin’ through,” he drawls. “I been through it, my brothers’ been through it, everybody’s been through it. We all got a crisis, an’ somehow, there’s always a girl involved in the creation. There was this girl back in Jacksonville that I loved. Shit, I was gonna marry her. We didn’t have a care in the world, not one. An’ then one day, she finds out she’s pregnant. We’re gonna have a baby, an’ I jess lose it. I don’t know what happened. I wasn’t ready. I was terrified. So I left.”

He gets quiet, spits in his coffee cup. Someone plays a song on the jukebox in the corner. I wish they hadn’t.

“I left her an’ then she didn’t have the baby. She loss it, you know? Pretty early on, but long enough, y’know? The doctors said there was nothin’ she coulda done different. But I knew she loss that baby because of me. Because I left. She knew it too. We broke up an’ I haven’t talked to her since. This was jess about a year ago now, an’ since then I dropped out of school an’ got arrested a coupla times, because I was so mad at myself. I still am. I think about that baby all the time, and how it’s dead on account of me. Woulda been a boy. . . .

“So I been runnin’ ever since. I can’t run from me though. An’ that’s my crisis. I know I got to deal with it, I jess don’t know if I ever will.” He smiles slightly. “What you got is a crisis of confidence. With that girl, with yourself. An’ you gotta deal with it. Now, I jess met you and I don’t know how you do it, but you gotta. Or else it’ll eat you up an’ you’ll end up like me, with nothin’ and no place to go.”

John Miller spits again into his coffee cup. The manager thinks about saying something from behind the register, but he decides differently. The ghost of Fats Domino wafts along in the air like a sad, black balloon. There’s nothing left to say. We pay our check and walk back into the drizzly North Carolina rain. John Miller doesn’t talk much on the walk back, and I get the feeling that he’s never told anyone else about his crisis. By the time we get to the bus, our clothes are soaked. John Miller hasn’t had a dry minute since he got here. That night, after we’re done with our last song, I tell the audience that I love them. I don’t know why I did it. From the side of the stage, in a rumpled white T-shirt with a roller-skating waitress on the front, John Miller, Southern Sage, is smiling. Chicago looms large on the horizon, just weeks away now. For the first time in forever, its jagged, gray skyline doesn’t seem all that ominous.

16

John Miller is my new roommate. Right now, he and I are sharing twin beds in my old bedroom, but we’re moving out soon. When I showed up at my parents’ house with him in tow, my mom’s jaw about hit the floor. He had managed to make himself look extrapathetic by not showering for a week, so his hair