Part 14 - 5 Months After
"'You stare at me all strange,' She said. 'Are you hungry for more? 'I've had enough,' I said, 'Please leave me alone… Please... Go…'" The Cure, Wendy Time
“Are you a total fucking retard?” Andrea asked as I approached the table, staring directly into my eyes with a face full of disdain.
The bright smile I wore slowly evened to a flat line as I became utterly and totally confused. “Um… Hello to you, too, dear,” I said in reply as Mike got up and allowed me the window seat.
“Yo,” Greg interjected as I slid across the bench, “She ain’t your ‘Dear’.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, honey!” I said, reaching across the table and sliding my hands over his, clasping tightly. “I didn’t mean to make you jealous. You know you’re forever my girl.”
“Yo, get tha’ fuck off me, you homo faggot,” He screamed, flailing like he was swarmed by bees. “I ain’t like that, you sicko!”
“That’s not what you said last night,” Mike chimed in.
“Hey, that’s MY bitch you’re talking about,” I said in response.
“Yo, I ain’t nobody’s bitch!” Greg exclaimed.
“Oh, don’t be coy, honey,” I replied. “There’s no need to hide it from Andrea, she already knows.”
“What I DO know is that you’re an idiot,” She said with a scowl.
“Yeah, I know, but you love me anyway,” I said, smiling brightly. I didn’t even have to look at Greg to know that he was angrified by my little quip.
“Well, be that as it may,” Andrea replied as Greg shot a look her way which she casually ignored, “I’m NOT going to sit and listen to you cry your eyes out over her again, got me?”
“Uhh…” I managed to utter just as the pinstriped Waffle House waiter approached our table. He stretched over Mike and very swiftly placed a napkin in front of me, on top of which he placed a knife, fork and spoon. He drew back and looked at me in a manner which people usually reserve for those who cut them off in traffic.
“Whaddaya want?” He authoritatively asked.
“Um… Coffee, plea—“
“Cream?” he barked.
“Sure,” I replied to the back of his head as he spun quickly and nearly sprinted back to the kitchen. I opened my eyes wide and looked at Mike, who shrugged in response. “Well, he’s certainly… efficient,” I said as I turned back to Andrea. “And you’re certainly bitter,” I told her. “What, pray tell, has you all up in arms tonight?”
She looked away from me very deliberately, placing her eyes on Mike whom she expected to tell her story for her. Unfortunately, Mike’s not really that great at following visual cues.
“What?” he asked her.
“Tell him,” she replied.
“Tell him what?” he asked.
“You know what.”
“I do?” He asked, rapping his knuckles against the table.
“You do,” she answered.
“How do YOU know that I know?” he responded. “I may NOT know.”
“But you DO know,” she replied, “You’re the one who showed me.”
“Showed you what?”
She looked at him with a crooked frown. Scanning the table for something to throw, she located a syrup-covered fork which immediately went from resting on top of a half-eaten pecan waffle to lightly clinging from the sleeve of Mike’s North Face jacket.
“Hey now!” He exclaimed through his chuckles as the fork slid down his sleeve and landed on the table in front of him with a resounding clang. With a gigantic smile on his face, he grabbed the salt shaker from in front of his plate of hash browns and reared back, pretending he was going to lob it at her. Everyone at the table laughed lightly, knowing that Mike would never do anything of that nature – except Greg, whose neck grew red as the veins began to poke out of it.
“Yo’ muthafucka’, don’t be threatenin’ my woman,” he stammered.
Had there been judges at the table, the three of us would have earned perfect ‘10’s’ for flawlessly rolling our eyes and sighing at precisely the same moment. “Anyway… Since mister sub-zero-jacket-in-80-degree-weather here won’t tell you—“
“Yeah, I was wondering about that myself,” I interjected as I looked in his direction.
“What?” Mike chimed in. “I just got it today.”
“But it’s August, Mike,” I replied.
“Yeah.”
“In GEORGIA,” I added.
“So?” he asked.
“So, why the hell are you wearing it?”
“I wanted to test it out,” He answered.
I stared at him with a look of utter disbelief. “You wanted to test out a goose-down jacket… In August… In Georgia… At the Waffle House.”
“Yeah,” he answered very matter-of-factly. “And it’s a good thing I did, too, or else I’d have syrup all caked in my arm hair.”
One side of my mouth went crooked as I raised my eyebrows. “Well,” I answered, “Who can argue with THAT logic?”
Before anyone could, the expeditious pin-stripped waiter returned in a flurry, carrying a precariously-balanced saucer with a coffee mug on it in one hand and a fistful of individually-packaged creamer in the other. He bent over Mike again and dropped the saucer, mug and creamer all at once. The cup and saucer clattered against one another loudly as the little creamer packets bounced and rolled all over the table – yet despite the kinetic frenzy in which they came to the table, neither coffee nor cream spilled or splattered anywhere…. Not that the waiter even took the time to check, for as soon as his cargo was deployed, he turned on his heel while still hunched over, swooping over Andrea’s head and toward the kitchen, where he trotted back to the fifteen or so orders which were still waiting for him to deliver.
“Alrighty, so – how about we start over?” I asked the group as I reached for the sugar.
“Fine,” Andrea snapped. “You’re a retard.”
“Yes… Well… I didn’t think we needed to start that far back,” I replied as I bit into the bottom of a creamer packet and squeezed it’s contents into my cup o’ Joe. “But since we’re there… Why am I a retard?”
“You’ve been talking to Katherine again!” She answered.
“Uh... No?” I queried.
“Yes you have!” She demanded. “You’ve been trading letters!”
“No, not really,” I replied. “She’s written me a few, and I’ve written back. I haven’t written her in... God… Like, a month or something…”
“But you HAVE been writing her!” she answered, not listening to anything more than what she wanted to hear. “How COULD you! I thought you were over her!” She flung her hands in the air and sighed in exasperation.
“I AM over her,” I answered. “We’re pretty much friends.”
“Yeah… Friends. Whatever…” She stated. “Friends don’t write letters like this one,” and with that, she produced a piece of folded paper from her pocket and tossed it at me.
I caught the flimsy projectile and unfolded it, scanning it in disbelief – not from the content, but from the fact that I wasn’t the first to read a letter which was clearly addressed to me. I lightly read over the parts which explained how immature Katherine felt she’d been in her perceptions of our relationship and only barely read the parts where she explained her newfound awareness of just how special I was. I was in such a hurry to confront all involved about this flagrant violation of privacy that I barely noticed that, for the first time in months, she’d forewent the standard sincere regards and signed the letter with “Love”.
“What… Um… Who…” I stammered, looking back and forth between Andrea and Mike. “Who opened this?”
Before Mike could fully point his finger at Andrea, she’d answered, “I did.”
“Why!”
“Well, I… Uh… Well, you would have told me about it ANYWAY!” She snapped.
“SO?!?” I answered. “That doesn’t mean you had the right to go opening my mail!” I turned to Mike and continued, “And what the hell were YOU thinking, giving her this in the first place?!?”
“I didn’t GIVE it to her,” He responded. “I grabbed the mail on the way to meet you here and handed it to Andrea to hold while I drove!”
“It’s not his fault,” Andrea chimed in. “I saw it and opened it on my own. He told me not to… Even Greg said not to.”
I looked over at Greg, then back at her. “For the first time ever, the dipshit rapstar gives you good advice – And you didn’t follow it?!?” I quipped.
“What was I supposed to do!” She cried out. “I was only looking out for you.”
“Eh?” I replied in Canadian. “I think there’s probably more to it than that.” Her eyes narrowed and she bit her bottom lip in response to my unspoken accusation. I fixed my eyes on hers and continued. “You did something that not even your gangster boyfriend here would do, Andrea! How can you justify this?”
“I… I… I…” She stuttered.
“You - you - you what?” I said, rotating one hand over another encouraging her to continue forward.
“I was… Just… looking…”
“Looking out for me, yes, I know,” I said flatly. “You said that already. Next excuse please.”
“Look,” she answered with a newfound indignation, “You don’t have to be such a jerk about this, okay? I’m the one you’re going to end up crying to when she screws you over again, so I figured I had a right to know!”
“Crying?” Greg chimed in. “You cry?”
“Shut it, Greg,” I replied without removing my eyes from Andrea’s. “Don’t ruin a good thing. You’ve earned a few points with me today, don’t squander them so soon. And she didn’t screw me over, alright? If anything, I screwed myself over.”
Andrea sighed loudly. “Whatever! She sucks you in, and then pushes you away. You stay away, and then she sucks you in again. What would YOU call it?”
“I would call it ‘None of your business,’ that’s what!” I snapped. She gasped in response, but before she could answer my blazing contradiction with a dose of simple logic, I continued. “Besides, what do you care, anyway? I mean… why are you so worked up over this?”
“Because you’re my FRIEND,” She answered. “I don’t want to see you get hurt.”
“Mm-hmm,” I replied. “Mike’s my friend, and he doesn’t want to see me get hurt. But did he go and open my mail? Did he get as angry as you did?”
“What… What are you trying to say?” She asked.
“Oh, nothing. Nothing at all,” I replied. “In fact, let’s just drop the subject.”
“Fine by me!” she yelled as she reached down blindly to grab her fork. She failed to locate it immediately and looked down to see where it was; forgetting that she’d lobbed it at Mike earlier. He lightly pointed in the direction of the syrup-and-dust-covered fork lying just in front of him. She grumbled a little, grabbed a spoon, and began furiously carving away at the rest of her cold pecan waffle as I waved the waiter over for a fresh cup of coffee.
“Yeah, let’s change the subject,” Greg said without a single clue as to what the heck was going on. “Did I ever tell you niggas about the time I got shot at?”
The three of us ceased what we were doing and looked at him in disbelief.
“Um,” Mike said, “I know you’re stupid and everything, but… uh… We’re white.”
“So?” He replied with some sort of shoulder-shrugging, head-bobbing, hand-flinging… Thing.
“Touché,” Mike answered as the waiter approached to freshen my coffee and Greg proceeded with a story about the angry husband of a 35 year old woman who walked in on the two of them as they engaged in sexual relations when he was 12, and that story – believe it or not – ultimately became the catalyst of my getting nipple rings.
I wanted to sleep. I really, really did. But I couldn’t.
I could have easily blamed it on the twin fires burning on the surface of either of my pectorals as the blood in either of my nipples pounded against the steel hoops recently lodged in them. It’d been three days since I’d gotten them, and still, they hurt like the dickens. But being completely honest with myself, I had to admit that the physical pain I was feeling wasn’t the issue at all. I lifted myself off the bed once again to, you know… Grab a notebook. Or a sketchpad. Or maybe a glass of water. Or to stretch my legs…
Eh. Who was I kidding?
I plopped into my computer chair, wincing as the jewelry in my chest bounced in response. Slowly, I turned to face the keyboard to, once again, try to find a way to respond to the email I’d received from Katherine yesterday. I read it once again, thinking about what I’d write to her as she detailed her desire to reestablish communications and be friends again. She talked about how great life had been the past month or so; that she was dating someone now and she wanted to share all of these great occurrences with me. In a familiar motion, I picked up the crumbled letter that Andrea had flung at me a few days prior and contrasted its contents with those of the new email, wondering how it was that someone could simultaneously realize they loved someone in one letter and talk about how they’re dating someone new in another. I compared it to my current situation as I thought of the words my manager at my old job, Gary, had told me just a few months ago. The difference had finally made itself clear.
I realized that I'd been fooling myself for a long, long time - about a great many things.
I folded the letter up and tucked it into its envelope, tossing the pair into an open file drawer where almost all of my other correspondence with friends and loved ones lived. I then grabbed my mouse and positioned the cursor over the little “X” in the toolbar of Microsoft Outlook. With a sigh, I clicked it and the window which contained the email closed and the message disappeared from the list in my inbox. Slowly, I lifted myself out of the chair and made my way back over to my waterbed to finally get a little sleep.
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