Peach won’t miss it and I have no choice but to shove it down my pants and tuck it into my boxers. I take pictures of the pictures before I tuck them away into their little Beck box and I smile.
When I calm down and clean up I head downstairs and find you both on the terrace. Everything looks different now and it’s a problem. Peach is in love with you and you’re mine and life is never going to be easy with her playing sick, playing victim, playing taken, playing anything to get your attention. And I’m different too now, afraid to look at you with the pictures so fresh in my mind. Peach is drunk and babbling about being stalked. I sit down on the arm of a chair the way a detective might sit and hold my chin in my hand. “If I may, Peach. I notice that you’ve run a lot of marathons. Do you run every day?”
“Why?” she snipes. She wishes I were dead. It’s not because I didn’t go to college. It’s because of the way you look at me.
“Well,” I begin. “If you run every day, it’s very easy for some creep to figure that out and stalk you.”
You wave your hands and the shawl falls onto your lap. “Omigod omigod Joe! Peach runs every day before daybreak through the park.”
“Not every day.” Peach corrects you, but she lowers the volume on Elton, all the better to hear you sing her praise.
“Yes you do, Peach. You’re amazing, fearless, I mean you run in the woods.”
Peach shrugs but you can see her committing those words to memory: amazing, fearless.
“That’s not safe,” I say.
“Well, I live outside of the box, Joseph,” says Peach. “That’s just who I am.”
You pick up the list of men you girls have been working on and I can’t listen because of the slide show in my head of you and you and you and you.
“Peach,” you say. “Can you think of anyone else? Some guy you dated?”
She shrugs. “Maybe that Jasper guy. We had lunch the other day and I could see that I dented his heart. Who knows? Maybe I broke it and didn’t realize.”
It’s a fucking lie but I have to be strong. “This Jasper guy, did he lose his shit?”
If I said the sky were navy blue, Peach would correct me and call it midnight blue, so of course, she objects. “In my experience, men like Jasper handle rejection quite well, actually. Men like Jasper have such rich lives that they don’t tend to be overly emotional about their personal lives.”
“So, you have a lot of ex-boyfriends?” I say and I know I should step off.
“We’re all still friends,” she snaps. “We’re not seventh graders, there’s no drama.”
“Good for you,” I say and I want to choke her. “I’m not friends with any of my exes, too much passion. I can’t just toss that passion aside and go out to lunch.”
She doesn’t have a comeback and I lean over to kiss you. “Be safe,” I say.
“Oh Joe,” you say and you don’t need to be so dramatic. “Thank you for understanding. I do need to stay here.”
Look at all the love in your heart. You are loyal, sweet, and you rise up to walk me to the door and thank me again for being so understanding. We kiss good night as Elton John sings louder, sitting like a princess perched in her electric chair. I tell you to go back to your friend. You do.
20
A 2008 study in Germany did pretty much prove that a “runner’s high” is an actual medical condition. Unfortunately, for me, I must be only part human because I have been tracking Peach for eight days now and I have yet to experience the “runner’s high” that she talks about incessantly. It’s been almost two weeks with you staying at her house, just in case the bogeyman stalker returns. Ha. I’ve only seen you twice.
The first time, seven days ago: You invited me over because you’d gone back to your apartment to gather your things. You packed and asked me about my Thanksgiving plans. I told you I eat with Mr. Mooney and his family and you believed me. You said you are staying with Peach’s family because Peach gets depressed when they’re around.
We started to fool around and you stopped me and rubbed your hand on your forehead. I thought my life was over but you put your hand on me.
“This is my shit, Joe,” you said. “I get weird around the holidays because of my dad. It’s not the same since he died.”
I told you I understood and I did and then we watched Pitch Perfect and you hit pause when Peach called and you took the call and apologized to me and sent me home.
I hid outside your window and lucky for me, you put the phone on speaker. The small talk ended and Peach sighed. “So my mom had lunch with Benji’s mom.”
“Uh-huh,” you said.
“Well, don’t you want to know what she said?”
“Benji is a brat,” you said, in the calm way that means you don’t like him anymore. “And obviously, he’s kind of a druggie.”
Peach went for an override: “Well, a lot of artists are weak that way, Beck.”
You weren’t having it and you told her, “By now, he’s probably in China full of top-shelf heroin and drowning in Chinese pussy. I mean he’s definitely on something. His tweets are lame.”
No, Beck. My Benji tweets are not lame. They’re disarming. They’re dark.
And you just kept talking about him. “Honestly, Peach, the last thing I’m gonna do is worry about Benji,” you declared. “Did he worry about me?”
“Down, girl.”
“Sorry, I’m just packing and it’s never easy, packing.”
“I have nightgowns you can borrow. You can wear all my stuff.”
Man, she wants you and you said you had to go and then you wrote to me to apologize for the abrupt ending and I wrote back to you and told you not to worry and then you went to town on one of your pillows and I listened. And I liked it.
Then again, three days ago: You and me and Peach met at Serenfuckingdipity because their chocolate is the only chocolate that she can eat and she really needed chocolate what with all the drama over the stalker. We sat at a table meant for children or people who have children and I watched Peach inhale an oversized bowl of frozen hot chocolate and I know from reading about interstitial cystitis that you can’t do that if you have that condition (not disease, Peach, condition), and she talked more than both of us combined and when I tried to hold your hand under the table you patted my leg, no. Then afterward we kissed good-bye on the street and your lips were pursed so tight, they were puckered.
It has not been a happy Thanksgiving. The holiday comes like it always does. Peach’s family comes home and you are busy with them and I am not your boyfriend right now and you do not invite me to eat turkey with her family. Curtis wants extra days off and I work all the time. The first time I run, it’s because I might fucking kill Peach. I go for walks when everyone else is busy with their family and I find myself drawn to her building because you’re there. I run because Peach comes smashing out the door and almost sees me. And if she saw me hanging out around her building, she’d go all nuts and start thinking that I’m a stalker. So yes, for a second there, I ran as fast as I could into the woods after her because I was going to grab her by the neck and make her stop running once and for all.
And I kept running the next day and the day after that because I was disgusted by the fact that I couldn’t fucking keep up with her. It’s cold in the morning and my thrift store high-tops don’t cut it and I bought special running sneakers at a sporting goods store (shoot me, please), and now my feet are covered in blood just like Peach’s and by the time I get to the shop every day, I am beat. Whoever said running in the morning gives you energy never had a day job that involves customer service.