But I don’t. I get five pins down the first roll, and the other five on the second roll. The white stripes in my T-shirt glow under the ancient black lights, and Tall Jon stands and applauds me. For a few flickering seconds, I am the greatest version of myself, standing tall and radiating light. Mercy the Bowling Queen.
Really, I appreciate that Tall Jon doesn’t think I’m ridiculous. Because I sort of do. Like whenever Callie comes to mind, all I can do is shudder and hope that she doesn’t think too often about me. I let her kiss me, that night at Tall Jon’s house right after I broke up with Bill, and then I was kissing her and wondering how long I would know her. Would she ever see the mole on my right shoulder, or know about my extensive collection of pencil sharpeners, or ask me why the hell I like Marcel Duchamp?
“What’s your favorite movie?” I asked her, between kisses, as we were trying to get comfortable on the old recliner in Tall Jon’s bedroom.
“What?” Callie said. She was white, a redhead, and about Tall Jon’s age. She had perfect eyeliner, the top and bottom lines meeting in a sharp swoop.
“I just want to know,” I said.
“Um.” She fell against me, touching her nose to my neck. “I guess it’s But I’m a Cheerleader.”
She didn’t ask me what mine was, or ask if she was the first girl I’d ever kissed (maybe because I made it so obvious), but the next time I saw her, again at a Tall Jon shindig, she told me she’d like to hang out somewhere other than our vertically blessed pal’s apartment.
And I told her that, well, there was this friend.
Callie looked like she was trying to roll her eyes but couldn’t quite get the mechanics right. She said, “Let me guess, your best friend?”
“Actually, yeah.”
“Oh, drat.”
The major realization I had at this moment was not that Callie was imagining me ridiculous for having a crush on my best friend, but rather that she was the type of girl who had loads of signature swear-substitute expressions. “Oh, crabcakes” or the like. I would just say “Oh, shit,” but I get the appeal of those alternate sayings. I totally do.
“You’ll survive it,” Callie said, already beginning to move toward the kitchen and away from me. “You’ll come out on the other side a little more cynical, maybe with some awkwardness in your friendship, and a new understanding of heartbreak.”
“It doesn’t have to be like that,” I said.
“It’s inevitable.” A smile hit both ends of Callie’s wide mouth but never made it to the middle. “Have fun.”
Tall Jon pats me on the shoulder after beating me in two games. “Well, Moreno, you’re a worthy opponent. Consider your strategy for the next time we meet in the alley of battle.” We walk together across the parking lot, to where the Ford is parked next to Tall Jon’s Mazda coupe.
“That sounds like a good-bye. Do you have time for a smoke?”
He takes off his hat—a bowling hat, apparently—and tosses it into his car. “I’m supposed to text this girl and maybe meet up with her? Angelina. She works at the station with me.”
“Angelina ballerina,” I say, just to fill the space between our cars. “One smoke and one band won’t kill you. Come on, I’m symbolically orphaned right now.”
So we sit in Tall Jon’s car with all the windows rolled down and start filling the ashtray while Tall Jon sorts through some music he’s gotten in at the station. I don’t think I want to go to the University of South Florida, and I know I’d be a terrible college radio DJ, but Tall Jon sure runs across some mind-blowing music. I mean, some of it is mind-blowingly awful, but it fuels our running commentary all the same. Like this band he’s got playing right now, known as There’s Only Three People in This Town. They’re a wall of guitar noise, and not in the melodramatic, bombastic way I can sometimes get into. No, this sounds like these guys wanted to play in a band together, but nobody wanted to be the one who didn’t play the guitar.
My cigarette dies, as does my ability to come up with a fitting description for these dudes. “They sound like . . . a badger being hit by a sack of badgers.”
“Badgers?” Tall Jon snickers. “That’s all you’ve got?”
“Do you have a better animal-inspired metaphor?”
“Hmm. I would say they sound like a couple of musk oxes getting it on.”
“Wow. Okay. The plural is oxen, and they resent your judgment on their sex life.”
Tall Jon shakes his head at me. “Moreno, you weird butt.” He lights another cigarette for me, which is convenient because I was just about to ask him why he’s yet another person in my life who’s almost leaving. Talk about fucking metaphors: Tall Jon in the car, with the keys in, ready to go were it not for me occupying the passenger seat. In animal-inspired metaphors, he’d be an Arctic tern getting ready to migrate. Or a wildebeest traveling to a new grazing pasture. Angela and I used to watch a lot of Animal Planet before Mom shut off the cable.
“One more band,” I say.
“Fine. Ten minutes.” He’s texting, then cueing up the next song. “Tell me what you think of this one. They’re a new band from Alabama. They sound kind of rough, but I think they’re on their way. They’re called Firing Squad.”
It begins. It’s one of those slow-burn songs that starts with a single guitar chord and then calls the rest of the instruments to join in. And they do: drums, a saxophone, a bass, and something that sounds kind of like Angela’s upright piano. Each one brings its own hum, and then they join hands. The music throws itself at me through Tall Jon’s speakers. It wants to be loved, in the best of ways. It wants to be everything to me, and maybe I will let it. The piano bursts in like a mid-July rain shower. The guitar jumps and sways. Controlled chaos, as Tall Jon would say. This guitarist guy—I imagine him to be a tall, skinny white guy like my music criticism and smoking companion here, but with brighter and wilder hair—has obviously found the one thing on this planet that he can do with absolute transcendence.
I tell Tall Jon this.
“Anytime you start spouting off about transcendence, Moreno, I know it’s time for you to go.” He stops the music. He promises to send me the Firing Squad tracks. And he tosses the rest of his pack of cigarettes at me.
“Enabler,” I say.