Read Online Creamy Bullets by Kevin Sampsell - Free Book Online

I’m going to take the rest of the day off,” she said. “This is fun.” I waited for her to elaborate, but she didn’t say anything for about three minutes. “I need some new shoes,” she finally said. “Let’s go to the mall.”
    I couldn’t handle Kristi’s mood swings. When we first started going out she’d try to hide them from me. But about four months in, she finally burst. She said it was PMS. All the women in her family had it bad, apparently. Her older sister couldn’t keep a job or a boyfriend and her mother had been divorced three times before she even had kids. I said I would try to help her but I wasn’t up to the task. I often felt verbally abused and we’d break up almost every month for three days. “We have to talk,” she’d say, and my heart would turn to steel. She’d eventually let me know she was better by pinching my butt at work. Or she would walk up to me and simply say, “I suck.”
    One time at work, we went to my car and made out for twenty minutes. It was about three in the morning; the sky was totally black and draped in humidity. Somehow I was able to bend over enough to put my mouth between her legs. She braced herself against the dash, with her sweats just below her knees, listening for anyone who might walk across the gravel toward us. I tasted her blood and she started to cry. It just made me want her more.
    When we went back inside to work I could swear that we stank. But I knew the other people there were not as happy as we were at that moment. They would look out into the sky as it changed color and they wouldn’t see what we saw. They wouldn’t feel what we felt. Patty Loveless played on the radio and everything was good and comfortable as we slipped the coupons in, just after the box scores and before the obituaries, our eyes looking up and connecting every few moments until the vans pulled up to the docks.
    Walking in the mall with Maureen didn’t make me feel less self-conscious about being with her. I remembered the days when I actually used to hang out in the mall. Back then, who you walked around with was a sign of your status. If I were seen with one of the popular girls, the other guys would be jealous and maybe give me some respect for a few weeks. But if I was caught shopping with my mom, or some girl from marching band, it was like it went on my permanent shame record.
    “I’ll make this quick,” Maureen said, steering me into a store full of sneakers. She had grabbed my arm for a couple seconds when she said this and it made me think, automatically and uncomfortably, about what it would be like if we were ever a couple. I fell deep and troublingly into this cloudy thought and didn’t say a word the whole time we were in the shoe store. It was like I was with a different person all of a sudden. Instead of a person running a merry-go-round, eating French fries, and talking about her favorite Jackie Chan movie, she was just another girl dying for a new pair of shoes. She must have sensed my uneasiness. She settled for a pair of brown suede Converse One Stars. She changed into them once we got out of the store, sitting on a stone bench amid the people passing by. I noticed for the first time that she had nice feet. She flexed her toes and looked at me. “I just wanted some good supportive shoes,” she said. “You want me to buy you some shoes?”
    “No, it’s okay,” I said, my voice dry and cracking. She smiled and started to slip the second shoe on. “Wait,” I said. I touched the heel of her foot and wondered if she was ticklish. Inside my head, I was still thinking too much, internalizing and overanalyzing, but touching her foot, at least for the moment, made me aware of my hand. “Oh,” she said. “That feels good.” She closed her eyes. I closed my eyes too. “I’m glad we’re friends,” she said.
    Kristi spent every Wednesday morning with her mom, running errands and sometimes drinking Bloody Marys. We had Wednesdays off together