ARRvol34 master reduced - Flipbook - Page 103
didn’t seem alarmed, or even surprised. She was still breathing
heavily from shouting, and not wearing a bra. She may have said, if
I’d asked, that she loved me too.
When a nineteen- or twenty-year-old poet tells you he loves you,
he is lying. Not really to you, but he (or she) is still lying. Don’t have
sex with your roommate’s girlfriend on your roommate’s bed when
your other roommate is his best friend and sleeps on the couch
in the next room. Don’t do it, because your roommate’s girlfriend
might be smarter than you give her credit for being.
“I know,” she said. “I’d leave if I could.” Lovely greenish eyes looked
at my shoes and she took a shot of Jameson. The gleam of the porch
light off of the bottle and into her eyes looked like a poison dart
frog.
A week later was the night when I gave in to what I thought was
nobility. “Don’t ever get involved in their fights,” is what I remember
Brian telling me for a second time. But when you’re telling yourself
you’re the hero, clearly you have to get involved. That night Ashley
and Bobby had another fight. It was sparked by Brian’s sister, Katie,
and it shouldn’t have been especially interesting, by miserable
virtue of being repetitive, but Ashley decided that it was the ideal
occasion.
“They’ve been doing this since I met them. They fight for a few
months, break up, and waste everyone’s time. Don’t worry,” Brian
said, “just stay out of it. This month hasn’t been that bad, by their
standards.”
Bobby, God bless him, wanted to have sex with Katie, but loyalty
to Ashley meant she had to be in on it. Everyone was drunk, Bobby,
Katie, and Ashley inside, between the couch and the bedroom door,
huddled together like the first lazy scene in a porn three-way, saying dumb random drunken nonsense as the means of negotiation.
95
