Read Online The Girl who Couldn't Come by Joey Comeau - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Joey Comeau
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chest hair is soft and I rest my head on him. The dirt and twigs are digging into the skin of my hip. My pants are still around my ankles. This is so quiet and would be such a perfect time to say, “I love you.” But you can’t say something like that just because the moment is right. It’s too seductive, having the moment be perfect. I would worry that I said it just because it seemed like the right time. The stars keep falling.
“It makes me nervous,” I tell him. One after another after another the streaks of light appear and vanish. “It goes on forever.” I sound stupid. Chunks of burning rock from God knows where, raining down on us. Rocks that are older than our whole solar system. And when our sun explodes and we are all destroyed, we’ll be rocks and chunks of I am not sure what. Maybe we’ll rain down on somewhere else.
On the bike ride home, we keep making wide slow turns from one side of the road to the other in the dark. We talk about Halloween, which is soon. I say maybe tomorrow night we should go climbing trees in the neighbourhoods we grew up in and Clay says maybe we could learn how to fight with our bare hands.
Everyone should be able to kill a man with just their thumb. We could be ready for anything. There are whole martial arts devoted to just disarming someone. Just disabling them and getting away, Clay tells me. He knows just what I want to hear. My lips are raw and they taste a bit like blood and dirt and this is a perfect birthday.
calculator
At fifteen, I was caught with half a carton of rotten eggs in the woods. They knew it was me right away. I wasn’t wearing a mask. Halloween was about being horrible, not just pretending.
The police never pressed charges. The man who arrested me knew my father from downtown. He sat down beside me in the back seat of the cruiser and rested his thin hand on my leg and said, “This is no way for a kid to behave.”
At home, my mother took me upstairs to my room and laid into me with a wooden spoon. “You think you’re too old for this?” And then I waited in the dark for hours. I waited until they were asleep and then I opened my bedroom window and I dropped from the second floor to the ground.
I landed on my ankle funny and limped to the garage for a weapon. A tire iron. There’s a special way that a tire iron feels in your hand when you know what it’s for. And I knew exactly what a tire iron was for. I broke sixteen car windows before dawn.
My hands were cold and shaking when I put the tire iron back and snuck back inside. At breakfast, I acted as surprised as my mother that the ankle was broken.
My father offered to pay for law school, if and when I got to be law school aged. I studied math instead, worked weekends. I kept breaking glass because I liked breaking glass. Baseball bats and wine bottles in the woods.
A sales clerk caught me with my hand down the front of my pants in the personal finance section of an office supply store. She turned bright red and I almost dropped the calculator I was holding. It had two lines of display, and a multi-level undo function.
I pressed the buttons on the calculator in sequence, exploring its functions, admiring the second display line, the speed of its calculations and the utility of its error control functions. I lost track of my surroundings. I slid my hand down the waist of my jeans and a fifty year old woman in a bright red vest was suddenly at the end of the aisle snorting at me.
Tuesday night in an office supply store, fingering myself. The woman spun and marched off. I wanted to run, but I wanted that calculator, too. I needed it. I wanted to take it home with me. Anyway, there were no cameras on the calculators. The cameras all pointed to laptops and ink cartridges. There was no evidence. It was her word against mine.
The only evidence was easily handled. I set the calculator on the shelf carefully and turned and walked through the bright, clean aisles
“It makes me nervous,” I tell him. One after another after another the streaks of light appear and vanish. “It goes on forever.” I sound stupid. Chunks of burning rock from God knows where, raining down on us. Rocks that are older than our whole solar system. And when our sun explodes and we are all destroyed, we’ll be rocks and chunks of I am not sure what. Maybe we’ll rain down on somewhere else.
On the bike ride home, we keep making wide slow turns from one side of the road to the other in the dark. We talk about Halloween, which is soon. I say maybe tomorrow night we should go climbing trees in the neighbourhoods we grew up in and Clay says maybe we could learn how to fight with our bare hands.
Everyone should be able to kill a man with just their thumb. We could be ready for anything. There are whole martial arts devoted to just disarming someone. Just disabling them and getting away, Clay tells me. He knows just what I want to hear. My lips are raw and they taste a bit like blood and dirt and this is a perfect birthday.
calculator
At fifteen, I was caught with half a carton of rotten eggs in the woods. They knew it was me right away. I wasn’t wearing a mask. Halloween was about being horrible, not just pretending.
The police never pressed charges. The man who arrested me knew my father from downtown. He sat down beside me in the back seat of the cruiser and rested his thin hand on my leg and said, “This is no way for a kid to behave.”
At home, my mother took me upstairs to my room and laid into me with a wooden spoon. “You think you’re too old for this?” And then I waited in the dark for hours. I waited until they were asleep and then I opened my bedroom window and I dropped from the second floor to the ground.
I landed on my ankle funny and limped to the garage for a weapon. A tire iron. There’s a special way that a tire iron feels in your hand when you know what it’s for. And I knew exactly what a tire iron was for. I broke sixteen car windows before dawn.
My hands were cold and shaking when I put the tire iron back and snuck back inside. At breakfast, I acted as surprised as my mother that the ankle was broken.
My father offered to pay for law school, if and when I got to be law school aged. I studied math instead, worked weekends. I kept breaking glass because I liked breaking glass. Baseball bats and wine bottles in the woods.
A sales clerk caught me with my hand down the front of my pants in the personal finance section of an office supply store. She turned bright red and I almost dropped the calculator I was holding. It had two lines of display, and a multi-level undo function.
I pressed the buttons on the calculator in sequence, exploring its functions, admiring the second display line, the speed of its calculations and the utility of its error control functions. I lost track of my surroundings. I slid my hand down the waist of my jeans and a fifty year old woman in a bright red vest was suddenly at the end of the aisle snorting at me.
Tuesday night in an office supply store, fingering myself. The woman spun and marched off. I wanted to run, but I wanted that calculator, too. I needed it. I wanted to take it home with me. Anyway, there were no cameras on the calculators. The cameras all pointed to laptops and ink cartridges. There was no evidence. It was her word against mine.
The only evidence was easily handled. I set the calculator on the shelf carefully and turned and walked through the bright, clean aisles
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