Period 8 - By Chris Crutcher Page 0,10
into her flip-flops, doesn’t bother to tell her parents where she’s going, or that she’s going, and walks to her car.
“Can I come in?” Hannah stands on Logs’s porch, staring at him in the doorway. He’s dressed almost exactly as she is.
“Hannah. Of course. What are you doing out at this hour?”
She sits on the couch, kicks off the flip-flops, and curls her feet under.
Logs says, “Something to drink?”
“What I want to drink, you’d get fired for giving me.”
Logs sits in his recliner, hits Mute on the remote. “Talk to me.”
“I’ve got a rule,” she says. “I just don’t put up with that shit.”
“It’s a good rule.”
“So why do I feel so bad?”
“You guys seemed to be a pretty good match.”
“You know who the chick was?” she asks.
Logs shakes his head. “Couldn’t tell you if I did.”
She points a finger at him. “Wouldn’t tell me if you did. Man code, right?”
“Human code,” Logs says back. “It would be the same if it were you instead of him.”
“Man, I will find her and I will kick her ass,” Hannah says.
“Girl code?”
“I hate this whole dating thing, or boy-girl thing or whatever you want to call it. You’re never safe. I mean, if Paulie Bomb is a player, who is there? And why—”
“You know,” Logs interrupts, “as much as it might sound like bull, Justin Chenier had a point today. I don’t think Paulie’s a player, but biology is a powerful thing. We have to learn to outthink it, I guess. If I ran the zoo, people would wait on sex, but I don’t run the zoo and sex happens when it happens. I settle for good decisions about birth and STD control. Since I can’t change God’s faulty mind-body engineering, I might lobby for a different standard for ‘cheating.’ ”
Hannah is visibly irritated. “Meaning?”
“Meaning sex and love go together sometimes and sometimes they don’t. I get that you guys made a promise to each other and Paulie broke it. I’m not letting him off the hook, but something he said makes me believe there are extenuating circumstances. If I felt the pull as strongly as you seem to feel it, I’d make sure I knew everything before going zero tolerance.”
Hannah stares at her lap. “No offense, Mr. Logs, but that sounds like manspeak, which sounds exactly the same as horseshit.”
“Hey,” Logs says, “if this relationship stuff were easy, more people would do it right.” He sighs. “And by the way, almost nobody gets it right the first time.”
Hannah touches her chest. “It’s this hurt,” she says. “If I could just . . .” She snaps back. “There are certain things I can’t have in my life, and my boyfriend screwing other chicks is one of them. How could Paulie not get that? My god, look at his parents.”
Logs sighs again. “Tell me what I can do for you, Hannah.”
She starts to speak, hesitates. “Listen to me bitch, I guess.”
“That I can do.”
“And keep your mouth shut. You can’t tell Paulie I was here and you can’t tell him I give a shit.”
“You get the same confidentiality he gets,” Logs says. “Just let me know when you want advice.”
“I want advice! Jesus, Mr. Logs. Quit treating me like I’m some kind of grown-up. Why do I have to pretend like my brain’s developed any more than those jerkoffs? AAUGH!”
Logs smiles. “Look, you don’t have to sleep with Paulie to find out if you can still be friends. Start working out with us again. It’s always better to swim with a boat and not have to look for the shore all the time. You said it’ll be three or four weeks before your new scull is ready. By then maybe this will look different.”
“If I went with you guys now, I’d hit him on the head with an oar.”
“This doesn’t sound like some guy who waited for his girlfriend to go out of town so he could try someone new. Something is unusual about this.”
“Yeah, right. Some—”
“Let it sit, Hannah. Most things look different with time and distance.”
On the porch, Hannah says, “Thanks, Mr. Logs. I’ll bet a bunch of girls had a hard time hating your guts back in your time.”
“Not as hard as you might think,” Logs says. “Paulie is twice the man I was.”
“Yeah, well, we’ll see.” She starts down the stairs.
“Hey, one other thing.”
Hannah stops.
“You know anything about Mary Wells?”
“The Virgin Mary?”
Logs sighs. “Yeah. Mary Wells.”
“Not much. I mean, what’s to know? You couldn’t be much more obscure than