And it won first fucking place.
So many things were different about my life during the Food Poisoning #1 days. All the members of my family were in their expected places: Mom and Angela here in Sarasota, Abuela in her little apartment in San Juan, Dad and his girlfriend still unsure if they were going to leave Naples, Florida, for Columbus, Ohio.
I was sixteen. It was a cool, rainy fall. I was still having sex with Bill Stafford.
I didn’t think about Victoria the way I do now.
None of these things can be reversed right now. I can’t do a single thing to bring my life back to the way it was then.
I scrape at Food Poisoning #2, freeing a few crumbs of yellow paint from having to exist in the picture. Maybe there’s one unchanged strand of my life I can grab onto. One simple, comforting thing.
Maybe the one relationship from back then that hasn’t changed a bit. The one person who’s always been good for a night of cigarettes and nonpiano music. I pick up my phone and give Tall Jon a call.
“Moreno!” he yells over background noise that’s louder than Angela’s piano. “I can’t believe you called. I just had a revelation about you earlier today.”
“I need to escape for a while,” I tell him. “Where are you?”
I’ve just mixed a few shades of purple, as if I could recapture that one thing about the first piece. But what am I going to do—repaint Food Poisoning #1 on a different canvas?
“It’s league night. We’re three frames away from the end.”
Tall Jon is responsible for my understanding bowling-speak. So I’m off to the bowling alley, to hear about a revelation.
three
TALL JON IS ready for me: a lane set up with TJ and Mercy on the screen, pizza and fries and Cokes on the table. He has even hunted down the six-pound purple ball for me to use.
“Nah, you can play my frames for me,” I tell him.
The other guys on his league team are stowing their bowling gear in bags tall enough for a set of golf clubs. Tall Jon is the youngest guy on the team by at least twenty years. It’s his dad’s old team—Tall Jon took his dad’s place last year when the older-but-shorter Jon’s AA sponsor advised him to quit bowling. This was, conveniently, around the same time that Tall Jon graduated from SCHS, and so he turned into a college freshman who spends half of his free time in a bowling alley.
“I’m not bowling as ‘Mercy,’” Tall Jon says, “because I have none.”
“Oh, fine,” I say, “but let me have some pizza and a revelation first.”
“The revelation rests on the idea that you still have, ah, feelings for that best friend of yours.”
“Sure, yes.” My face burns a little. “Idea confirmed.”
“Okay, then.” Tall Jon waves good-bye to the league guys, and we’re alone at this end of the alley. The lights flicker—every time I wind up here, it’s right around when the black lights and lasers make their appearance.
Tall Jon grins at the darkening bowling alley, as if he timed this transformation with his revelation. “Well, I was thinking about the way Bill told you he liked you. And we both know he’s kind of an oaf, but he was pretty brilliant about getting his feelings out there. And I thought—damn, if Mercedes, or even the awesome but reluctant bowler named Mercy, did something like that for her friend Victoria, I bet little pink hearts would be floating up from their love nest in no time.”
“Okay. I’m going to bowl now.” I grab the six-pound ball and line up my feet and roll it down the lane and do a follow-through flourish like Tall Jon taught me the last time we were here, and of course the ball rolls into the gutter before it gets even halfway to the pins. I whirl around to Tall Jon. “Wait, did you bring me here as some sort of elaborate metaphor where my gutter balls represent my love life?”
“What? Oh my God, I didn’t even think of that.” He laughs and his hat falls off. “Sorry, Moreno.”
My ball is coughed up from the machine, and I roll again. This time, it grazes the pin on the far left enough to tip it over.
“The thing about Vic,” I say, sitting back down by the food, “is that she is so far away from me sometimes. And this—this whole situation—is one of those times. Think about what she knows. She knows I made out with that girl Callie at your party. She knows I went out with Keema that one time. Of course all this was after I broke up with Bill, when I told her, hey, I liked Bill, but I like girls, too. And we’ve left it there, just sort of sitting there between us.”
“Like this pizza,” Tall Jon offers.
“Exactly. So there would need to be, you know, the interim steps of dough rolling and baking and slicing before I could do anything about it. But I’m not, so it doesn’t matter.”
“And you thought I was the one making elaborate metaphors,” Tall Jon says.
He gets up and bowls a strike. I swear he stood in the same place I did and rolled the ball with exactly the same motion, but his pins fell down as though they weighed nothing.
“Why do you do this?” He flops back into the seat and replaces his hat, or as he calls it, his “jaunty cap.”
“Do what?”
“Lock yourself up.” He clicks his tongue and sticks his thumb through his fist. “Click, click.”
“I do it to see you make stupid gestures like that.”
“Ah, Moreno, if I wasn’t so nice, I’d call her up and tell her myself.”
“You can’t right now. She’s at dance.”
“Still?”
“Yup. Tuesday’s one of her late nights. And anyway, she’d probably think you were joking. That’s how far apart we are on this.”
As recently as a year ago, I thought I was broken. I envisioned the part of me that liked girls as being separate, an imaginary friend who would sometimes sit next to me and poke me in the thigh. Hey, M., look at Victoria. She’s hot, isn’t she? I thought I could ignore her, that imaginary friend, and for a while, I tried. But it was such a brilliant relief when I realized that this was part of me, internal and real, as vital as anything else.
Tall Jon points a fry at me. “What’s the worst that could happen?”
“I could lose my best friend.” I shrug. “Isn’t that obvious? And I know you’re gonna ask, is that worse than not having her know how I really feel about her? Yes, yes, that is much worse. Okay, end of discussion, let me go roll some more gutter balls.”