I hate Jim Nabring.

            I hate him with the depth of my soul, with the bile in my spleen, and the two plane tickets on my charge card that were supposed to be taking us to Florida for spring break.

            “Hispañola, man, that’s where we want to be,” he tells me, his fat hands on my shoulders.

            “Don’t call me man.” His room is cold, and it smells mannish, a combination of cologne and bologna. Pamela Anderson and Sigmund Freud stare down at me disapprovingly.

            “Everyone goes to Florida for spring break.” He explains it slowly, looking at me the entire time like I was strapped into a chair, a drool cup at my chin. “Right?” He stares at me for a few seconds, before repeating his question, louder, as if I were deaf, too. “Ri-g-g-h-t?”

            I shrug. I’m not saying a damn thing. Jim doesn’t understand the concept of the rhetorical question.

            “Anyway, we’re not like every other coed jack-off, prancing around in our Abercrombie trunks and bikinis and whatever.” He moves behind me again, rubbing his thumb on the base of my neck. “Right?”

            “The only reason you don’t wear Abercrombie is because they don’t make it in your size.” When in doubt, insult.

            “Well, then, that makes two of us.” He throws himself on his bed like a pouty porn star. “Any-fucking-way,” he continues with a barn-dog sneer, “that’s why we need to go to Hispañola. No one goes there. We get the whole island to ourselves.”

            “Jimmy, what do you even know about Hispañola?” I lay down on my back, the mottled brown tile of his floor burning into my bare shoulders. “Not a God damned thing. There’s probably natives. Did you think about the natives? They’d kick your ass, I’m sure. Who’s going to save me from the fucking natives?”

            “What the hell are you talking about?” He cranes his neck toward me, eliminating two of his chins. If he walked around like that all the time he would look at least fifty pounds lighter, although the physical strain of pushing your chin that far forward all the time would certainly get to him. Not to mention the fact that he looks like a baby struggling to be born. “There are no natives in Hispañola. There are old people. And Japanese tourists.”

            “How do you know?”

            “Jesus, what’s up your ass tonight?” He turns toward the wall.

            “I want to go to Florida.” I creep toward the bed, hearing my nylon pants crinkle underneath me. “Our tickets are for Florida. We probably wouldn’t even have time to get new ones, we—”

            “See, that’s the thing, that’s the thing!” he tells me, rolling toward me again. “There’s a cruise to Hispañola. From Miami. All we have to do is cancel the hotel and put that money toward the cruise.”

            “Toward the cruise?” Our faces are level now, and I can see a trio of blackheads nesting between his thick black eyebrows. “How much more is the cruise?”

            He rolls his eyes and exhales testily. “Never mind. We’ll just go to Florida.”

            “Well, come on.” Our noses are almost touching, and I can feel my eyes crossing. I don’t know how they do this in the movies. Actresses must have excellent eye-nose coordination. I smile gamely. “It can’t be too much more. Right?”

            “No!” He nods his head quickly, bumping it on the low overhanging bar of the bunk above his. “Just, like, six hundred more.”

            “Six hundred? Apiece?” I sink back on my knees, toying with a piece of gray fluff under the bed.

            His smile fades. “Yeah. Yeah.”

            “Jimmy, I don’t have another six hundred dollars. I barely had the four hundred dollars for the tickets and the hotel and whatever.”

            A silence more awkward than most pervades the room, and I expect the fuzz to grow and change shape, becoming a gray lint tumbleweed. Finally: “Oh.”

            “I’m sorry. We’ll still have fun in Florida. Even though all the Abercrombie boys will be there.”

            “Yeah. Yeah. About that,” he says, rubbing the back of his hammy neck.

            “What? You don’t want to go now?”

            He sits up, leaning forward to avoid the bar. His feet swing out next to me, grazing my knees lightly. “Oh, yeah. Yeah. Of course I do. But.”

            The dangling ‘but.’ No question mark at the end, no pause, just an unspoken evil, such as I met a girl who was willing to give me a handjob on the plane, and I offered her your ticket, or I need some extra room for my luggage, so you’ll have to ride in the cargo hold.

            “But.” I repeat it back to him with the same intonation, knowing that no matter what he said I would be upstairs crying in my own dorm room in five minutes.

            “But I kind of already bought my ticket for the cruise.”

            “You did not.”

            “Why would I lie about something dumb like that?” He stands up, his mouth hanging open in disbelief at my utter stupidity. With his eyes on me I feel the drool cup pressing firmly against my chin again.

            “Why didn’t you ask me first?”

            “I thought you’d want to go!”

            “You just think I want to go wherever the fuck you want to go.” And the sad thing is, it’s true. But he doesn’t know that. Or maybe he does, anyway, it doesn’t matter, because I don’t have six hundred dollars just lying around, stuffed into a hollowed out Teddy Ruxpin on my bed.

            “So you’re not going, then.”

            “Jimmy, I can’t! Are you buying? You want to buy me a cruise to fucking Hispañola?” He bares his teeth at me. I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean, but whatever, it’s unappetizing. “No? No. I didn’t think so. Huh. So what. How are you going to get to Florida now, without your ticket?”
            “What are you talking about, the ticket? We ordered tickets like three months ago.”

            “On my credit card. And I’m not going to Florida by myself while you shoot the shit in Hispañola with the God damned natives.”

            “Oh, shut up! There are no natives in Hispañola. It’s like Haiti and the Dominican Republic. It’s like Sammy Sosa.”

            “Anyway, the tickets are on my credit card. So pay me for the stupid ticket or whatever, you’re on your own.”

            “This is just great, do you know it?” He brushes past me, knocking me back on one knee. “How much.”

            Jim doesn’t use question marks, if he can help it. He thinks it makes him seem smarter. “Two hundred. Four hundred if you want me to keep the hotel reservations.”

            “Why.” He scribbles out his name and two hundred of his hard earned (read: provided by his mother in a weekly fifty dollar allowance) dollars onto a Betty Boop check and thrusts it at me as if the ink were made from pig waste.

            “Why do you still use these checks?”

            “I told you, my mom ordered them by mistake. I wanted the golf ones.”

            “You don’t even fucking golf.”

            “Are you leaving now, or what?”

            Four minutes have passed. I still have one more before I have to commence weeping like a lonely orphan in my room. “Have fun in Hispañola,” I tell him, letting the tilde romp on my tongue.

            He presses his stomach against my side gently, bringing my face parallel with his shoulder. “Look. Okay. Are you sure you don’t want to go.”

            “I can’t.” He nods. “I really can’t. We could still go to Florida. You could get a refund.”

            He shakes his head. “I can’t, man. Hispañola. You know.” My eyes are watering, shining, probably. I hope he sees it. He probably just thinks shining eyes equal incredible sexual desire.

            “Yeah.”

            “I’ll bring you back something.”

            “Whatever.”

            “Are you mad?”

            “Yes.”

            He shrugs, and I want to jump up on his shoulders and strangle him, army commando style. “Okay. I’m sorry.”

            “Yeah. I’ll see you.”

            He walks me to the stairs and puts his arm around me awkwardly as I move to go. We don’t kiss. We never do.

            Upstairs, I start to cry before my friends can even ask what’s wrong. “You just need to fucking dump him, Carly,” my roommate, Megan, says.

            “She’s not even really going out with him.” Erica-Know-It-All. The Ruiner. My whole face begins to leak, unseemly liquids dripping from every available orifice.

            “Shut up, would you?” Megan says. We go into the room, leaving Erica to her evil, and I hurl myself onto the bed, using the already mascara and drool stained pillowcase as a tissue. She hands me a box of Kleenex and I honk my nose loudly into one unfortunate ply. “What are you going to do now?” she asks me.

            Oh, don’t I just know. What else is there to do? I have to go home.

 

Two days before I graduated from high school an eighth grader hung himself. The family said it was an accident. The police called it a suicide. More specifically, they called it auto-erotic asphyxiation. What a way to end thirteen years of education.

            His sister was in my class, a fat but strangely popular girl who smoked Virginia Slims and wore clothes two sizes too small. She accepted her diploma with a mascara-stained face and held it above her head like it was the ear of an infidel or something, and bellowed, “this is for you, Johnny.” And two days later, when her bloated face ran on the front page of the Aurora Advocate alongside a school picture of her late brother, found dangling from his own belt naked from the waist down in the garage, I knew I had to get the fuck out of Dodge.

            The first few weeks of college were the hardest for me. A million questions in the world people could ask me, and all the other freshmen at Ashland University could think of was “so, where are you from?” And I would tell them, and they would say, “Sea World,” as if the whole town was comprised of two killer whales and a sea lion who could stand on his back flippers and catch a basketball. I wanted to ask them if anyone in their towns had ever hanged himself to get his rocks off, but I figured the odds were slim. That was an Aurora event if I ever saw one.

            Even now, three years later, people are fascinated by Sea World. Like what do we do with Shamu when it gets cold? We, like this is a town responsibility, whale-sitting. I honestly don’t know what they do with him when winter comes. But I like the image of him sitting in a wading pool in the mayor’s living room, with a bunch of men from town council pointing hair dryers at him to keep him warm.

            That was one of my many ploys to win the heart of Jim Nabring, free tickets to Sea World. Everyone in Aurora gets them. It’s the city’s way of saying “hey, thanks for putting up with the fact that our streets are so clogged with tourists that you can’t leave your homes from nine AM to two PM every summer weekend.” When I offered the tickets to Jimmy he looked at me with heat ray eyes and told me that when he wanted to see animals being mistreated, he would just kick his dog and save the gas money.

            The park is empty now, a thin layer of old snow just broken enough to be ugly glazing everything, the entrance sign, the statue of Shamu, our savior and chief moneymaker. I always planned to bring my boyfriend there one day and climb on Shamu’s back, my legs curled under his white belly, looking oh-so-cute and adorable, the Crackerjack prize in some lucky man’s life. I can see even from the road, though, that someone has egged him, again. Shells litter the ground around him, as if a dozen chicks had been born at his flippers and wandered into the park, where they would probably be recruited to work elephant ear stands and dive for pearls.

            Sea World is the ten minute mark. Ten more minutes. Then I’ll be home. And then 12,960 minutes until I can leave again. 10,080 if I leave at one on Sunday, instead of three.

            Jimmy came up at two to help me load my car and say goodbye. It was sick. I thought for sure he would wait until I was getting ready to get into the driver’s seat, or maybe even after I pulled out of the parking space, chasing me down, waving one flapping arm, and yell “wait! I changed my mind! Only social rejects and mouth breathers go to Hispañola! We’ll go to Florida together and commune with nature, with each other, we’ll discover what it’s like to be truly alive!”

            Instead, he just asked me for twenty bucks.

            “I need it,” he said. “For sun block. Come on. I bought you dinner last week.”

            “Jim, you’re my boyfriend.” His eyes shifted. “You pay for the damn food, it’s like in your contract or something.”

            “Please?” He stooped so that we would be at eye level, put his hand on my lower thigh. I pulled my leg the rest of the way into the car and started the engine, leaving him fingering the cinna-berry air freshener dangling from the turn signal lever.

            “What do you need twenty dollars worth of sun block for?”

            He frowned. “I’m a big guy.”

            Self deprecation is Jimmy’s way of winning. How can you say something mean to a person after they’ve just drawn attention to their weight? “I needed to get some gas on the way home, Jim, I can’t.”

            He stands up, wiping his hands on the shiny rayon of his running pants. He wears them because he likes the stripes that run down the sides of the legs, not because he likes to run. “Oh, all right. That’s fine.”

            His willingness to give up so easily caught me off-guard. “Can’t you just get some sun block at home, before you go to the airport?” He only lives forty-five minutes away from the campus, and his mom would probably come to Hispañola with him and stand over him with an umbrella to keep the sun off, if necessary.

            “It doesn’t matter. I’ll be in the cabin by myself most of the time, anyway. I’ll just go to the library and pick up some books.”

            Jesus Christ. I dug into my purse and pulled out two tens, leaving me with five dollars to get me back to Aurora. “Here.” I put the money in his palm and closed his fingers around it. He didn’t even look at it.

            “Thanks,” he said, bringing his face close to mine. I opened my mouth a little, as I had been trained by my friends in countless practice sessions. One must be in a constant state of readiness for tongue action. Instead he tweaked my nose and winked, pocketing the tens as he walked away. I knew then that I had just bought my own souvenir from Hispañola.

 

            I pull into my driveway where my sister waits with her shirt up over her head, “Welcome Home Carly” written across her stomach in black magic marker in intricate letters, with a picture of someone who was unmistakably me underneath, her perfect inny navel forming my puckered mouth. This is excellent.

            “Hey!” She trots up to the car, shirt still up in a bunch around her bra, her stomach swinging. She’s gotten fat. So I’d better not hear anything about the ten pounds I gained since I started dating Jim. She must have gone back to red meat, although Red Meat Is The Fruit of Satan. “You like my sign?”

            “Nice work, nice. You’re going to give the neighbors a heart attack, put your shirt down.” Our neighbors are very old and nosy, and Bob’s prone to have a stroke if someone told him they were taking “Andy Capp” off the comics page, let alone that there was a half-naked girl in the next driveway.

            “You show my painting to your professor?”

            Oh, crap. The stupid painting. The brilliant painting, according to Dr. Fell. He wanted to buy it. My sister makes me want to vomit, but even if I did she’d probably just collect the chunks, throw them on a canvas, and sell it for millions to the Louvre.

            “Yeah.” She swings my book bag onto her shoulder with like a coal miner hoisting sacks of his precious black bounty, and still looks like a damn ballerina doing it. “Last week I did. I forgot to bring it home.”

            “Doesn’t matter. What did he say?”

            “Eh.”

            “Eh? What eh, what does that mean?” She leaps puppyishly around me, her breasts wagging. “Did he like it, or what?”

            “He thought it was okay.” I struggled to come up with a lie that would sound plausible. “He said the lines weren’t clean. Other than that, he said it was great.”

            “The lines weren’t clean?” She frowns, her lower lip jutting ledgelike from her flat face. “Huh.”

            “Other than that it was fine, I’m sure. Could you grab my laundry?”

            She pulled the basket of roughly folded clothes from the back seat and balances them on her knee as she shuts the door with her ass. “I don’t really remember. I thought I did better on that one. I know Mr. Major said it was less fuzzy. I thought it was the best one.”

            “I’m sure it was.” My stomach twists a little from the lie, but it’s good for her. Let her stew over her lines next time she’s dashing paint on a canvas in her little studio. Better art for her, peace of mind for me. “Are Mom and Dad home yet?”

            “No.” She swings the book bag onto her other shoulder, pulling it tight against her back. “Want to go bowling with me tonight?”

            “No.”

            “Let me rephrase that. Want to take me and my friends bowling tonight?”

            “Don’t you have some sort of coffee house you should be sitting in with them? I think the bowling alley might be too well lit for your friends. Might cause them to turn to dust. You know.” I once had a bad experience with Grace’s friends, at a Cappuccino’s in Solon, where they thoroughly and publicly humiliated me for not being able to identify the aesthetics of Lichtenstein’s early work.

            “Whatever.” She unlocks the garage door, still balancing the laundry between her knee and her right breast. “Are you not going to take us, then, or what?”

            “I guess.” I don’t have anything better to do. I hate you, Jimmy Nabring, I hate you, hate you, hate you.

            Three cats, one of which wasn’t ours, came bolting from the garage as soon as the sun flooded in, and were drawn, as if by a powerful fur magnet, to the rose bushes next door.

            “Those cats are going to shit in Mr. Pelcin’s yard,” I tell my sister, who shrugs in a decidedly Jimmyesque fashion.

            “I’m not going after them. They won’t come to me, anyway. I got my hands all inky making your sign. They don’t like the smell.”

            I shrugged. “We’ll just pretend we didn’t see them, right?”

            “God damned cats!” Mr. Pelcin emerges, stooped and undoubtedly mothball fresh, from his house, his sleeveless white undershirt insinuating too clearly the fist-sized blur that was his old man areola. He spit the word cats as if it were a synonym for Nazi or pedophile. Using his Squint of Evil, he spies us in the garage. Grace punches the button for the door with her elbow, missing twice before making contact. “You get them out of those flowers, or—”

            “I had a fine time at college, Mr. Pelcin, thank you for asking.” I wave to him from behind the rapidly sinking door.

            “I didn’t say anything about your college, I said come get your damn cats!”

            We pack everything up to my room and peer out the window down at Mr. Pelcin, who is waiting in our driveway with a shovel. He’ll stand there until sundown if he has to, ready to thrust the shit-caked instrument at me. It would be easier if he just shoveled it himself, but somehow he finds something more rewarding in ambushing me.

“Fucking trapped,” I say.

“I don’t understand why he doesn’t just die,” Grace says offhandedly, toying with the yellowed edge of a New Kids on the Block poster I hung on my closet door in 1986. I tried to remove it once, and half the door’s front came avalanching down.

“That’s real nice.”

“Oh, you’ve thought it yourself, don’t even lie.”

“Why does he only do that to me?” I ask Grace, who spins around in a circle, tossing the book bag onto the bed like it was a twenty pound hammer and she was an Olympian. “The thing with the shovel? It’s disturbing.”

            “He’s just an old man, cut him some slack.”

            My bed it tightly made and fresh-smelling, and I untuck it with a liberal yank. My mother has a fetish for hospital corners that the average person would find sadistic. “I can’t believe I’m wasting my spring break at home.”

            “What’s so bad about home?” Her voice falters on home slightly, offended, maybe.

            “It’s home.” I fling the covers over my legs and begin digging in my book bag. “I should be on a plane to Florida right now. I should be on my way to fucking Hispañola.”

            “You shouldn’t swear so much,” she scolds. I guess I never really noticed it. Jimmy does it all the time.

            “Whatever.”

            “It’s not so bad here, though, huh?” She sits on the edge of the bed, running her nails over the silky edge of my pink blanket. Everything in this room is pink, varying, mismatched shades of pink. I asked if I could remodel it my senior year of high school, just repaint it, maybe rearrange the furniture, but my parents never got around to okaying the project. They were too busy helping Grace paint her room a uniform black.

            “I guess.” I open The Female Quixote and pretend to be interested, hoping she’ll leave me alone.

            “Well.”

            “Well.” I’m flipping the pages too rapidly. Maybe she won’t notice.

            “I mean, your friends are here,” she says, drumming out a melody on her stomach, which pokes out from the bottom of her short shirt.

            “Like who?” All my friends are gone and she knows it. All my friends have lives. They have lives and money and tickets to Florida. “Wendy’s not even coming home for summer. I’m thinking of staying on campus. At least I know people down there.”

            “What about Mark Faulhaber?”

            “Mark Faulhaber is not my friend.” I set the book down on my breasts, making a little tent over the valley. “Besides, he’s not here, either. He’s at Dennison.”

            “He used to be your friend, though, huh?”

            “Like a zillion years ago. He’s a speed freak now. I’m sure he fits in great at Dennison.” She continues to fondle the edge of the blanket, not looking up. “Why would you even ask about Mark Faulhaber?”

            “No reason. I just knew he was home.”

            “No, he’s not. Dennison’s spring break isn’t for two more weeks.”

            “Well, his car’s home, anyway. And Mom says she saw him at Heinen’s the other day.” She looks out the window, over where Mr. Pelcin is still standing in our driveway with the shovel like a Beefeater, to the house two doors down. “Anyway, you could do stuff with him. It’s not like you’re the only person it town. Home is only bad because you make it bad.”

            “Okay, Mom.”

            She turned toward me again, her hair trailing her like a brown sparkler. She has Pantene hair, it makes me sick. “All I’m saying is, it’s really not so bad. You come home and sit in bed and pout because your dumb friend wants to go on spring break without you, sure, then it’s going to be crap. I just don’t see how college could be so great with crappy friends like that.”

            “He’s my boyfriend, not my friend.” My sister thinks I’m a huge lesbian because I didn’t date in high school. Well, I don’t see the boys all over her, all covered in oil-paint and reeking of self-satisfaction.

            “Oh, yeah, that makes it even better.”

            “Look, don’t you have homework to do? Before the bowling alley?”

            She looks wounded, her lips puckering into an absurdly simian pout. “I’ll just go work on my painting, then.”

            “Clean up the lines,” I advise with a maestro’s wave of the hand, not taking my eyes off my schoolbook.

            She leaves without saying goodbye, her shoulders slumped into her chest. I get out of bed and shut the door behind her, wedging the scuffed brown dining room chair that has long been my security system under the doorknob of my unlockable door. Nothing to lock out, really, but I feel more comfortable knowing that no one can get in. Outside, Mr. Pelcin still stands with the shovel, although his shoulders are beginning to sag under the weight of his waste-laden scepter. I hope my mom gets home soon. Usually a few honks from the car horn will scare him off. Old people are easily deterred.

            My room is tragically high school. The whole room screams it, from the trophies (Advanced Composition Student of the Year! Attendance!) to the ubiquitous appearance of the Greenman’s head, a sorry excuse for a mascot, a green and angry dwarf. A set of pompoms hangs from a nail on the wall and I can hear

Who rocks the HOUSE?

The GREENmen rock the HOUSE

and when the GREENmen rock the HOUSE

they rock it ALL the WAY DOWN

not that I was ever a cheerleader. No. I was in the band. But my dad bought me some pompoms at the Greenman hut. And aren’t I lucky, they’re still here, hanging in my room!

            Except for three boxes of Christmas stuff my parents never saw fit to put back in the attic, perhaps lest Grace reveal herself to be the second coming of Jesus himself, my room looks exactly the same. This will have to be remedied.

A picture of Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird hangs over my bed, and two more decorate the wall above my desk, hiding holes gouged in the paint by pictures of Corey Haim I had once glued to the wall. I used to be totally obsessed with Gregory Peck, it wasn’t even funny. When I realized that he was born in 1917, I kind of lost interest. I used to pretend that he and his wife were my grandparents after that—I could see myself in their house in La Jolla, with its tan couches and bay window overlooking the ocean. I used to dream about it all the time, but I could never see their faces. I have trouble seeing faces in my dreams, just bodies. So I had to imagine what his wife would look like. Veronique. Probably about seventy now, but she used to be a makeup artist, so she probably still looks all right. They were good grandparents. I spent a lot of time with them.

Jimmy hates Gregory Peck. I don’t know how we even started talking about it. But he called him a “Lurch-like hack.”

“He won an Oscar.” Our legs were tangled at the end of the bed, the soft bald spot of his inner calf rubbing against my freshly shaven legs.

“So? Millions of people have won that fucking Oscar. I could win one.”

“No, you couldn’t.” I disengaged my legs, pulling them up to my chin. “You couldn’t do anything like Gregory Peck. You’re nothing like Gregory Peck.”

“Jesus, what’s your deal?” He let his fingers dance at the edge of the frayed afghan his mother had made for him. “You don’t even know him. He’s like nobody.”

“How could you not love him in To Kill a Mockingbird?”

“My dad says he used to be a Communist.”

I could feel myself coming to tears and I didn’t even know why. Or I did know why. But how can you tell someone that you care about Gregory Peck because you pretended that he was family? That he loved you? How could you tell someone like Jimmy Nabring? So I found myself lamely defending him, playing Atticus Finch to Atticus Finch.

“A lot of people did, in the forties.”

He got out of bed and ground his fists into his eyes. “Whatever. I don’t get you at all. Do you think he’s hot or something?”

“He’s like eighty years old.” I came up behind him, on tiptoe, and pressed my nose against his neck. It was warm and wet, tropical in the folds, and thick with the scent of old cologne. “I don’t have the hots for eighty year old men. Just you.”

“You have the hots for everything that moves.”

I’m almost asleep, the beginnings of a welcome home party beginning at Greg and Veronique’s enfolding me, when I hear the garage door open a floor below me, and the honking of a high pitched car horn. My mother’s car has the most womanish horn in the world, but it seems to deter Mr. Pelcin. Maybe it sounds like his dead wife.