What is the point of anything? Well, you could die. I can die right now, swerving my car too far over. I try it, twisting the wheel hard to the left. The car swerves, I right it, and I don�t die. I think I am too much of a chicken.
The car arrives where it ought, at some glaringly enormous electronics store. I buy a large Gateway laptop with a good-looking keyboard and lots of memory. Novels take up a lot of space, I�ve learned. I pay for it with a credit card, which I loathe but needed to get to buy catalogue-only parchment But soon the void inside me relaxes: I will be able to write more on this thing. It isn�t too bad.
I am lugging it up the stairs to my room when I come across Nina on the top of the stairs, staring at me and laughing.
�Wireless internet?� she asks.
I respond with the most official-sounding �maybe� the world has ever seen. Nina uses the computer at her mother�s house. She used them in college. She examines the box. �No, you have to get a modem. I�ll show you how.�
We go on a trip, oddly enough. She sits in the passenger�s seat and I swear at one point she rests her hand on my knee, lightly like a spider or something. I imagine not flinching. I visualize maybe even rubbing my knee lightly into her palm, to let her know that I appreciate such unwarranted shows of affection.
I twitch, with a horrible spasmodic motion that jolts her pretty hand five, easily six inches into the air. She moves her hand back and I curse myself silently for the rest of the way to Radio Shack, like a middle-schooler who accidentally told his girlfriend that he thinks she is fat, and now she won�t let him kiss her cheek.
Of course, Oprah says that middle-school kids don�t kiss on the cheek anymore: fellatio is the new demure. I don�t believe it, but if it must be true I hang onto the hope that there are some poor middle-schoolers who are excited about holding hands somewhere. Somewhere.
Nina is excited about my modem, and I am very happy for her. I sit in the car, slowly gathering a black mood around me like a thick parka. She picks out the best one, and I slip her my credit card. I am terrified for the bill.
She gets back in the car and I am beginning to shift in my seat so I can pull out when she kisses me.
She kisses me.
She hasn�t kissed me in a long time.
We are in a secluded area, and she has kissed me. I see the logical conclusion to this situation and jump to it.
We are angry and beautiful people, struggling to kill and not kill one another here, in my ugly little car, behind a Radio Shack on a small incline in a dark parking lot. Things haven�t been like this is some time.
The drive home transports me back to my freshman year of college, and her probably to junior year of high school. We do the awkward eyes that ask, painfully: �Are you still there?� and feel blood stir in our cheeks. I keep pausing in my driving to realize that I�ve been hit with that blooming feeling around my spine, like a flower is listing against my cheek in a strong breeze. She curls up in her seat like a unique kind of lizard. Her bare foot grazes me, and I am flustered like a dorky boy with the lab glasses who discovers porn at the same time that he discovers that he likes porn.
We pull into the driveway and sit staring at the side of the house for a moment before going inside, her brandishing the modem and me following gamely. The computer seems to set itself up, and she makes me Email King with some clever little name that I will forget. Somehow, this internet is connected to her cell phone�I didn�t know she even had a cell phone. She says that her mother gave it to her and it�s been sitting in her closet for way too long.
After a while, she leaves me alone with the computer and I stare at its peculiar screen. What on earth do I write?
She comes in, around an hour later, and I am making myself blush by trying to write about today. Laughing, she pulls me down to her room and I close down the computer, saving all of this for tomorrow.