Bobby?” she asked, looking at Bobby, and I thought to myself, trying to beam the message to her like I’d beamed messages to Bandit just a few minutes ago in Dad’s office: Don’t look at the fat boy! Look at me! Look at me for the love of God!
“This is Joey,” Fat Bobby said.
Then she was looking at me, holding her hand out for me to shake; and I thought, trying to beam the messages at her: Oh God! I’m gonna melt! Please don’t look at me! Don’t look at me!
Taking her hand I felt my face getting hotter, and I wondered if my head exploded and I sprayed chunks of myself all over her and her pretty dress, would she still talk to me? Would she have pity on a headless freak and let me hear her voice again?
“Hi,” I said, lamely, and her hand in mine was like worlds colliding, stars going supernova, and all sorts of stuff that I could analogize now, but back then it was a pleasant tingle through my whole body. A lightness in my head and thoughts that I didn’t want to ever end.
Smelling something like strawberries, I knew it wasn’t me, and it definitely wasn’t fat boy next to me, and I realized it was her. It was the shampoo she used on her bouncy, galaxy spiral hair. Or a perfume she dabbed on her neck like I’d seen my mom and sister do. Or it was just the smell of her.
Tara, I thought. The smell of Tara.
I wanted to lean over and smell that hair. I wanted that smell in my head, in my mind, and I wanted to lock it away in there where I could always get to it.
“Hi,” she said back, smiling, and I found myself looking at that smile, those lips, and thinking of touching them. I was looking at her mouth, still holding her hand, pumping it up and down, and I thought that if the Makeup Lady came around a third time I could turn to her and say: See, I really am retarded, and it would be true, painfully true.
Turned retarded by way of a girl.
That’s got to be a medical condition. I should look it up someday.
I know other guys have felt the same way before. We could start a support group. Sit in a circle, share our stories and have a good cry.
Bandit walked over to her, tail slapping side to side like a feather duster, and she dropped my hand. I held it outstretched there for a moment or two longer, dumb with shock at the loss of the contact. I stared daggers at Bandit, tried to send him some more telepathy.
“Oh! There’s that cute dog! There’s that silly dog!” She knelt and cooed to him again, just as she had back in the break room. Her skirt swished as she knelt, a sound like a whisper, a whisper directed at me. I found myself looking at the curve of her backside, and then quickly looking away when she turned again to face me. “What’s his name?”
I told her.
She said some more nonsense to my dog, this time using his name, and I cried out in my mind for her to say my name. You know my name! Say my name!
Then she did, and my heart nearly stopped.
“I like your dog, Joey.”
“Thanks,” I said, though I didn’t really know if that was something to say “thanks” about, and I could have kicked myself.
“Mr. Hayworth, that’s your dad?” she asked, and her quick change of subject startled me as easily as everything else about her. I nodded, wanted to say something, but my mouth felt glued shut, and then I thought of what I’d said so far and maybe that was a blessing in disguise. “He’s a nice guy. He treats everyone here really well. I mean, I’ve only met him today and all, but some people you can just tell, you know?”
You got that right, I thought.
To her, I nodded.
Fat Bobby was shuffling about now, left out of the conversation, and I really didn’t care. Her words were for me; her eyes were for me. No one else.
“You like comics too?” she said, and I latched onto that single word, “too,” and what it implied, what it verified. That she liked comics, and that commonality between us was like some invisible bridge running from me to her, and I wanted for all I was worth to run across that bridge to her side of it.
“Yeah.” My voice trembled the slightest bit; I tried to consciously still it and, with my following words, it seemed to work. “I’ve been collecting them for years now. My dad got me into them. I have boxes and boxes of them. Some are really rare, that he gave to me from when he was a kid. I spend all my money on them. Books too, I love books. I love to read.”
Shut the hell up, you idiot, I told myself, and reapplied some of that glue to my jaws again, swearing I’d try not to speak anymore unless I absolutely had to. And even then to keep my responses to single words. Monosyllabic if possible.
“That’s cool,” she said.
She wore a laminated name tag around her neck, dangling from a cord, and I thought: That’s cool, that name. Tara. Tara. Tara. I stared at her name tag and repeated her name in my head like a mantra. After a time, I realized it might look like I was staring at her boobs and, thinking that, I actually did, my eyes drifting to the swells there, pushing out against the fabric of her dress like little mountains. I sent out another quick and urgent prayer to God, told Him I forgave Him for not answering my last prayer, swapping mine and Bandit’s bodies. This time what I wanted was a lot easier: just miniaturize me and give me some mountain climbing lessons.
By an enormous feat of determination and willpower, I turned my eyes back to her face, hoping she hadn’t noticed where my gaze had wavered to and, if she had, hopefully she was too polite to say anything. I hoped for the latter, but readied myself for a fist to the face or a can full of Mace to the eyes for being a perv.
She was still smiling, one side of her mouth turned upward, slightly crooked; something I decided right then and there was the cutest thing I’d ever seen. She kept talking without missing a beat, and for that I silently thanked her.
“Maybe someday I can take a look at your comics,” she said.
I shuffled from foot to foot again, hands in my pockets, wanting to stop, knowing I looked like some sort of gimp. My head turned this way and that as I looked everywhere, anywhere but at her, as if following the path of a kamikaze fly buzzing through the air.
“Sure,” I said.
When? is what I wanted to say.
Where do you live?
What’s your number?
You want mine?
All valid options I could have added, but I couldn’t. Literally, I couldn’t. It was as if those thoughts were stopped by some sort of brick wall, and the words lost in the ether like smoke in a breeze.
“Well,” she said, and the way she said it I knew our current encounter was winding down, and I cursed the universe for its cruelty, “I really should get back to work. I’m sure I’ll see you around, your dad working here and all.”
She made a little dance of a motion, like a pirouette, with a twirl of her skirt, and started to walk away. I wanted to reach out and snag her, pull her back to me like a planet pulling its moon. Down the aisle she glided, moving further away, taking my heart with her, and still I couldn’t say anything, not even when she gave a half turn in my direction and gave me a little wave and another one of her crooked little smiles. I tried to wave back, but my hands crammed in the bottomless pits of my pockets snagged there, me pulling frantically to free them.
In that torturous moment I thought she’d walk out of sight and I’d have to wait some unknowable span of time to see her again, but the fat boy saved me. The fat kid who’d been nearly naked in a stream that same day, crying pitifully as he was used for target practice by a bunch of assholes. He, whom I would forever remember as Fat Bobby, whom I would always remember with an uncertain mix of fondness and disgust, called out to the girl