The screen door banged open then screeched shut like a dying seagull.
I looked up from our pissy couch towards the front door. It was pissy because months ago, Grant let his co-worker Jamie – currently between-homes – crash on our couch for what became the majority of our lease.
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Two months in, Jamie found an abandoned greyhound puppy tied up outside the lesbian bar she used as hunting grounds. It was after closing time, and the puppy was wet, shivering, wild-eyed with confusion and heartbreak. She saw herself in the skinny little thing – who she named "Arrow" – but was never home to train her or clean up after her. Arrow shit on the floor, pissed on the couch, and chewed the carpet in my bedroom to shreds while I was in class. Classic canine abandonment anxiety.
But all that was months ago. Jamie had since disappeared without a trace and taken Arrow with her, leaving only her one duffle bag of clothes and one Ziploc of toiletries. No one at the theater or the bar had any idea where she'd gone, but the piss smell lingered. There was no world where I'd be getting my security deposit back.
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Grant bolted the door and entered the kitchen, tossing his key-ring onto the tile counter. He was sweating through his 100% polyester movie theater uniform: black pants with a matching vest, a brass nameplate. Without taking another step, he stripped down to his boxers, kicked his pants into the corner where Arrow's bowl used to sit, and noticed me: the soft pink blob on the couch. Dark eyes judging me, face hardening, he went to the kitchen sink to splash cold water on his face.
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Grant and I met in English class junior year at our private high school. Our teacher was an alum who'd returned to live out his own Dead Poet's Society fantasies, coaxing impressionable minds to reach inside ourselves for "the sublime." At seventeen, I was a dissociated rhesus monkey in a suburban cage; writing stories were my only weapon to stab back the life being forced on me by family/school/society while feeling around blind for the boundaries of possible alternatives. I'd been writing my own stories, making up worlds since I was ten; I didn't need or want any hand-holding.
During our survey of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales (read aloud in Middle English to bring its fourteenth-century characters alive), our teacher assigned us to create our own pilgrim and write their tale. Bringing my full teen-emo to the assignment, my pilgrim was "The Cannibal" who followed Chaucer's traveling party at a safe distance until he could start picking them off one by one, making campfire stews of each until he could declare which was the tastiest.
The day I presented my story to our class, I freaked most of them out, found myself cornered afterwards by a football player who sat in the back of class. I knew his name was Grant, but we'd never spoken: a looming six-two mountain of shoulders and unblinking eyes, he was a jock but a weird one, also captain of our school's multi-year championship-winning Chess Team.
Before I enrolled in private school, I was in the Dade County Public School system. Getting cornered by a football player meant your ass gonna get stomped to remind you of your place in the social order. My nerves were jangling; I assumed my story had upset him or someone he liked. I was ready to defend myself or flee. Instead, he spoke in a soft, self-conscious voice:
GRANT: Hey, Dan. I really liked your story. In class. Actually, I like all the stories you've written for class. You're really, um, good.
ME [taken aback]: Oh. Uh, thanks... Grant.
GRANT: I also want to be a wr--
He sucked his words back inside before they escaped, ears and neck flushing red. Looking down at me with my bag lunch, I understood that he kinda looked up to me. At least to my writing.
ME [to the rescue]: Oh. You write stories too?
GRANT: NO. No... but I'm trying. I have a few that aren't finished, yet. I want to write novels like... you know the "metafiction" guys from the '70s? Gaddis, Pynchon, Barth, uh, Gardner, William H. Gass...?
I was only familiar with John Gardner; our class read his Grendel together at the beginning of that year, and I'd reread it twice since. It's still one of my favorites.
GRANT: Huh. I thought they'd be your guys. My father had a lot of their books around the house. Your stories remind me of that style a bit, that... self-awareness. Writing that feels like it knows it's a piece of writing.
Now it was my turn to blush. I didn't even know what to say. I felt seen.
Flattery picks the lock of the insecure heart.
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