The bartender is starting to hover like she thinks she might need to save me, this indie rocker with an undercut and a pierced lip and one of those tank tops with tasteful sideboob, and I don’t blame her, because she’s probably saved a hundred girls in my position. Still, it’s irritating that she should have to, when I’d been so almost hopeful. 

I, 15 and pudgy with acne-prone cheeks, clutch a Tupperware container to my chest. Inside are gigantic chocolate chip cookies.

I want to hate Craig for screwing me in the backseat of a car. I want to hate the ache deep inside that makes me clench my thighs together and press against my hand when I remember how his hot breath tickled against my neck as he exhaled out my name. I hate that I want. 

My wife’s in a coma, but we’d both be better off if she’d just die already.

It’s been twenty-three weeks since the accident. I was at work when it happened. Might’ve been on my lunch break eating at the Ruby Tuesday buffet, but my exact whereabouts isn’t really that important. What is important is I came home and she was lying on her back next to the china cabinet, a pool of congealed blood on the floor, the whites of her eyes beaming out like spaceships.

Sometime during the fourth week, I brought another woman home. To be honest, I’m not sure if she was a hooker or not, but after hearing the whole sob story about my wife in a coma and me just needing some company, she didn’t bother charging me. She even stayed the whole night and let me hold her. I stroked her strawberry blonde hair and called her Suzie. When she left, she didn’t offer her number. I didn’t ask for it. 

The football players entered first, bursting through a paper hoop and taking a celebratory lap around the gym. Next came the cheerleaders, slinking across the lacquered floor in a fleshy phalanx, assaulting us with a battery of claps and jiggles. Amid all this aggressive gaiety, the hippie art teacher slouched out and mournfully announced the cancellation of his decades-old comedy routine.  Apparently, someone on the school board had rented Up In Smoke and decided that Cheech and Chong references were no longer appropriate at pep rallies.

James Jay Mitchell, candidate for president, had been smugly silent during the entire rally. I wondered what grandiose illusions were flickering through his mind. Was he standing at a congressional lectern, addressing his esteemed colleagues? Settling into the Governor’s mansion?   Bloviating on Meet the Press? Possibly he was at his own inauguration ceremony, before a throng of jubilant citizens, ascending to the country’s highest office.  This high school election was merely his first step toward national supremacy. And I was his right-hand man. 

You can no longer deny the fact that you are the kind of person who could do something like this. That’s not the biggest surprise, though you wish it were. The biggest surprise is how easily you did it. How easy it was to meet one stranger, one cute, accessible, smart stranger and find that you had the same interests. How you were just going through the motions of your day, helping mostly incompetent people with their technology problems, and it wasn’t until you got back to your desk that you realized how cute that last guy was. Wasn’t he? You don’t look again. You go back to your work.

Tom killed a man with his Chrysler.

Then he stood on the icy road, looking at the twisted body.

They were both frozen in place, staring. The dead man gazed up from the asphalt with bloody eyes. Tom stared down hoping his stare could raise the dead. Nope.