Stupid Fast - By Geoff Herbach Page 0,8

after Gus left for Venezuela, the lights went back on, and someone in there ordered the newspaper, which meant I had to deliver a paper to Gus’s house every day.

Aleah. But I didn’t know that yet.

So I wasn’t happy at all with this development. See, there’s nothing fun about visiting your friend’s house when he’s not home because he’s in Venezuela with his dying grandma and he sends emails about taco smells and says we’re losers and his house just reminds you of how great it would be to go down to the rec room and sit down on one of the giant bean bag chairs they have down there and watch some movies and eat chips and shoot the bull and exchange some serious laughs instead of having to visit that house at the butt crack of dawn just to dump a newspaper in the screen door and then bike away to another fifteen houses that don’t contain your friend, including a big house full of crazy old ladies who are really prison inmates.

Peter Yang’s house is on the route too, but it was clear things weren’t going well between us (although we hadn’t talked—I mean, that’s really it, we hadn’t talked). Plus, his house smells like fish, so I don’t like going in anyway.

The people who moved into Gus’s house for the summer redecorated it immediately, which I felt was a gesture meant to rub my nose in the fact of Gus’s absence.

The second morning I delivered the paper there, the curtains on the picture window were open, and I could see that all the photos that are usually above the couch had been replaced by a bunch of scary wood masks. Boo! I mean scary. Booo! So I stood out there gawking and terrified, thinking about all the pictures of the Venezuelan mountains that used to be there and what Gus must be seeing, which I wouldn’t know because he couldn’t get Skype to work on the computer he had in Caracas, and I already mentioned that his emails were so short at that time (they got longer by the time I didn’t want to read them)—when all of a sudden, the front door swung open and this black girl about my age was standing there in her white nightie or whatever, staring at me.

My jaw dropped. My eyeballs popped out of my head in total cartoon style. (Boing-oing-oing—that’s the sound of my eyeballs popping.)

Okay, all over town, there are a lot of people who aren’t exactly appropriately dressed when you’re opening doors at the butt crack of dawn. “Oh, good morning, Mr. Schroeder. I can see your wang.” Yeek. This girl, though, was much better to look at.

So when she opened the door? She and me, me and the black girl, we stared at each other, open-mouthed, silent: she at the door, me in the bushes in front of the picture window where I’d had my nose pressed to the glass; both of us poised to flee because I probably looked like a criminal and she was beautiful and not Gus. I couldn’t breathe. Finally, she said, all out of breath, “What do you want?”

“Paperboy,” I said.

“What?” she asked, standing straight, her fear receding.

“Paper,” I said, tossing the newspaper I had in my hand onto the step in front of her. I nodded at her. She looked down at the paper, then back up at me. I couldn’t breathe.

So I totally kicked it, quick twitch. I leapt to my bike and got the holy hell out of there. I looked over my shoulder as I pedaled away. She stood there staring at me, her mouth open.

God. Dork. And, oh, yes, I’d sprung like a hunted, retarded, highly athletic gazelle. Or donkey. Hee-haw! Idiot.

To show that I was not, even then, completely lacking an understanding of social appropriateness, I’ll say this: Immediately (immediately), my escape caused in me a feeling of deep humiliation and remorse. The humiliation was so deep, I felt sick—sick of myself. I kept repeating Idiot. Idiot. Idiot. in my head. “Why are you such an idiot?”

Have you ever noticed you can’t get away from yourself? There is no way to get away from oneself. You’re always there with you. And remember, I have a voice in my head that never shuts up. I delivered the papers to the rest of the houses hearing myself calling me an idiot in my head the whole way. Then I biked up to the nursing home hearing