when Cole starts talking with his hands and lowering his voice to make himself sound disingenuously sincere and self-important like a lot of news anchors sound, I have to bite the inside of my bottom lip to keep myself from giggling too much.
“And now on Sports Center … The funeral of Holden St. James saw an incredible 437 mourners this afternoon, that’s 78 more than what was projected for those of you who bet the over-under. No one saw it coming, but the empty casket was exponentially outdone in ridiculousness with its 2 dozen pallbearers. Flowers were in the range of an atrocious bazillion, we counted 16 well-executed and solidly caught basket tosses from the very perky varsity cheerleaders, who incidentally had to manage their rousing performance without their captain, as she was part of the aforementioned 437 gathered mourners, and not surprisingly, the musical score composed by the dead boy’s high school douche music director produced a house full of dry eyes with a rather somber 93 tears in the negative.
“I mean ‘Candle in the Wind’? The fuck was that about, you know? He was a twenty-year-old, somewhat privileged, barely mediocre student going to college on an athletic scholarship who was of German and Irish decent and couldn’t hold a tan for shit by the way, so add completely and totally white to the list, and he had a total of like eleven minutes of televised starting game time under his jockstrap, but he has one too many Rockstars before hitting the practice field and his heart goes kaput. All of that rules him out of being a homeboy from the projects who was cut down after persevering through racial bias and prejudice to fulfill his dreams of becoming an American leader, he wasn’t a fucking depressed and drugged out supermodel who might’ve been having an affair with one of the country’s most beloved presidents, and he wasn’t a member of English fucking royalty!”
I tip my head back to stare at him and then raise my eyebrows in amusement when he looks down at me.
“What? Too soon? Or did I go too far? I went too far, huh?” he asks rhetorically and with a chuckle, shoving my hip gently off his lap at the same time so that he can stand up and stretch his back, which makes some sort of worrisome cracking and popping sounds when he twists from side to side. He catches me wincing at him but blows it off by saying, “See, this is the shit that happens when I try to console a crying girl and not look up her towel at the same time.”
I roll my eyes again and then still when I realize he’s walked over to the box of Holden’s things intending to open it. I can’t even seem to crack a fake smile when Cole puts his hands to his head in a sort of mock-anxious manner and impersonates Brad Pitt in the movie Seven when he whines, “What’s in the booox ?”
“It’s, um…mostly just some clothes, I think. His MacBook and some of his school books are in there too, though. His parents thought you might be able to use them sometime I guess,” I answer and then clear the lump that suddenly and painfully rises in my throat when he carefully and almost reverently starts pulling out some of Holden’s clothes and his computer, “Uh, you know…I think I should go to bed. Do you have anything except booze to drink, though? I should probably have something non-alcoholic to take my anti-freak-out meds with.”
“Huh?” he asks, looking to have traveled a million light years away just by simply opening the computer to stare at the login screen. “I’m sorry, what’d you say?”
“Do you have some water or juice or something so I can have sweet and um, medicated dreams? You know, so that neither of us are woken up by something resembling a screaming banshee.”
“Oh, yeah…check the fridge. There’s probably some bottled water or an unopened beer in there,” he tells me, and I’m not sure if he was joking around or if he considers beer to be a form of juice, but he goes back to time
“And now on Sports Center … The funeral of Holden St. James saw an incredible 437 mourners this afternoon, that’s 78 more than what was projected for those of you who bet the over-under. No one saw it coming, but the empty casket was exponentially outdone in ridiculousness with its 2 dozen pallbearers. Flowers were in the range of an atrocious bazillion, we counted 16 well-executed and solidly caught basket tosses from the very perky varsity cheerleaders, who incidentally had to manage their rousing performance without their captain, as she was part of the aforementioned 437 gathered mourners, and not surprisingly, the musical score composed by the dead boy’s high school douche music director produced a house full of dry eyes with a rather somber 93 tears in the negative.
“I mean ‘Candle in the Wind’? The fuck was that about, you know? He was a twenty-year-old, somewhat privileged, barely mediocre student going to college on an athletic scholarship who was of German and Irish decent and couldn’t hold a tan for shit by the way, so add completely and totally white to the list, and he had a total of like eleven minutes of televised starting game time under his jockstrap, but he has one too many Rockstars before hitting the practice field and his heart goes kaput. All of that rules him out of being a homeboy from the projects who was cut down after persevering through racial bias and prejudice to fulfill his dreams of becoming an American leader, he wasn’t a fucking depressed and drugged out supermodel who might’ve been having an affair with one of the country’s most beloved presidents, and he wasn’t a member of English fucking royalty!”
I tip my head back to stare at him and then raise my eyebrows in amusement when he looks down at me.
“What? Too soon? Or did I go too far? I went too far, huh?” he asks rhetorically and with a chuckle, shoving my hip gently off his lap at the same time so that he can stand up and stretch his back, which makes some sort of worrisome cracking and popping sounds when he twists from side to side. He catches me wincing at him but blows it off by saying, “See, this is the shit that happens when I try to console a crying girl and not look up her towel at the same time.”
I roll my eyes again and then still when I realize he’s walked over to the box of Holden’s things intending to open it. I can’t even seem to crack a fake smile when Cole puts his hands to his head in a sort of mock-anxious manner and impersonates Brad Pitt in the movie Seven when he whines, “What’s in the booox ?”
“It’s, um…mostly just some clothes, I think. His MacBook and some of his school books are in there too, though. His parents thought you might be able to use them sometime I guess,” I answer and then clear the lump that suddenly and painfully rises in my throat when he carefully and almost reverently starts pulling out some of Holden’s clothes and his computer, “Uh, you know…I think I should go to bed. Do you have anything except booze to drink, though? I should probably have something non-alcoholic to take my anti-freak-out meds with.”
“Huh?” he asks, looking to have traveled a million light years away just by simply opening the computer to stare at the login screen. “I’m sorry, what’d you say?”
“Do you have some water or juice or something so I can have sweet and um, medicated dreams? You know, so that neither of us are woken up by something resembling a screaming banshee.”
“Oh, yeah…check the fridge. There’s probably some bottled water or an unopened beer in there,” he tells me, and I’m not sure if he was joking around or if he considers beer to be a form of juice, but he goes back to time
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