I’ll spare you the playbyplay on stopping to get a copy of the DuhMoines Register out of the machine, order coffee and an éclair, and wander over to a booth in the back of the joint. Or not. I guess that sums it all up anyway. I did the crossword for a while.
MisterDonut had this unpublished policy. A good one which I in fact use to this day. Three strikes, and you’re out. Except that, in their case, it was three refills. Doughnutmisspelling motherfuckers.
It’s now 4.51AM. I know because, as I step out into the humid air, the deity strikes again: the bus downtown arrives at the stop at Fourth and Grand.
And I undecide my decision.
I don’t know what I was thinking, really. Maybe it was just habit. I’d been going to college for…well, I actually started when I was twelve, during the summers, when that bullshit junior high waste of time wasn’t getting in my way. By high school, I’d figured out the system, concluded that it was a timekiller for stupid people, and got Dad—a lawyer—to fix things for me, getting me away from the idiocy and into college…which was about the same; except that, being fifteen in 1986 with a collegiate ID was enough to get you tranqued in any pub. Though it may have helped that I was about six four and looked ten years older than I actually was. It may have further helped that the bartenders at the places I’d go tended to be thirtysomething chicks who’d grown tired of fat, balding burnouts. Could be anything; whatever the reasons, it worked for me.
So, here I am: seventeen, thin, not bald, but burned out. No wonder I looked halfway through my twenties. And, apparently out of pure habit, I’m getting on the bus to go downtown.
I do need to mention something hilarious real quick. Twelve hours ago, I grabbed a couple cartons of Camels. And I got carded. Either I look younger now than I did eighteen years ago, or the world is irrevocably fucked. Dwell on those choices all you like.
The ride downtown was uneventful, so we’ll teleport there within our story.
In fact, being downtown was a bit pointless, it being before six in the morning when I got there. So I wandered about, peoplewatching, waiting for the lounge at the Park Inn [now defunct; no pesky going in eighteen years later and whimpering that they’d been getting a kid drunk from the age of fifteen or so] to open. See, my card was still valid, even if I was taking a semester off. For all I know, it’s still valid today. I wish I still had it; I coulda scored my cigarettes twelve hours ago without trying to find my licence.
Here we have this problem, of course. Pubs tend not to open all that early in the morning. Even in 1988. You could get cocaine, but not beer. Figure that out.
So, I’ve got economysized oodles of time to kill. Even though I’ve been peoplewatching for a couple hours.
Zombielike, I shuffle off to school. Because it’s what I do.
School, of course, was open. Kinda. It was sevensomething. The cafeteria was open, at least. And they had coffee. And coffee is our friend.
So I got some coffee and turned toward the room at large. And it wasn’t that large. At least, it wasn’t large enough for everyone in it.
I’ve got this sort of thing. I don’t bug strangers. Unless writing books counts. But I don’t troll my way over to tables containing people I don’t know, just to blind them with my astounding presence. Like some idiots I could mention. See < GREGARIONS>, in NotS, for more on those fucking terrorists.
That said: there are no empty tables. Oddly, there was also no one I’d ever actually seen before, anywhere in the room.
I picked an occupied table almost at random. Meaning actually that I picked one with only this one chick sitting there. If you’re gonna gregariate, pick the smallest number of victims.
I did.
‘Hey.’
That’s me talking, see. Hence the quotes. It’s like a novel, or something.
Anyway: she didn’t look up from her book. The one she was reading. She wasn’t writing one, so far as I could tell. But then, I thought at the time, neither was I. It seems now that I was kinda wrong about that. Listen….
‘There are, erm, no empty tables, and…uh—’
Now she looks up. ‘What?’
‘Empty Table Deficit Syndrome Thing. There’s…okay if I sit here? I’ve just got coffee.’
Yeah. I actually mentioned that I just had coffee. It’s a symptom of hating people: on encountering the damned things, I stop making sense at all.
‘Oh. Yeah. Go ahead.’
So that was easy. I sat down. With my coffee. And this chick. And nothing else in the universe to do.
Here comes my final mistake. If you’re not into witnessing fuckups, abandon the book now.
Going…going…going….
You sure?
Okay then:
‘Good book?’ asks I.
‘Not really.’ And, as proof, she sets it aside and stares at me like I’m lunch to Nell Fucking Carter.
This is what we scientists call awkward.
Really. No one’s talking. Like, in the starsystem. Parsecs in all directions, communications have stopped. She’s staring at me. Nell Carter. Lunch. Fuck.
Being what you’d call a wordsmith, familiar with some four hundred thousand terms of varying syllability [including, it appears, that one], I emit rather a pithy ‘Oh.’
‘I’m Mary.’ That’s her talking. Since it’s a female name and all. Go figure.
So, there’s something about Mary. Five seven, 135 pounds, tits like Deimos and Phobos. Long curly hair, emoed over most of her face, nearly hiding these piercing green eyes. I think. Sidenote time, for the newcomers.
So, I’m colourblind. But it wasn’t always this way. Or, it kinda was; but it’s progressive. Initially, I just had problems with green and blue. Like, trafficsignals were red, yellow, and blue. These days, they’re bright and not bright, with stop on the top, go on the bottom, and mash the accelerator through the floor in the middle.
Back then, I still saw most colours. So, granting that blue and green could interchange on me, I’m calling her eyes green. Also, her licence said so, along with her height and weight. Deimos and Phobos weren’t mentioned. But: duh.
Her hair was brown. And emoed over her eye. Partly because it’s 1988. Mostly because she’s a crazychick. Guess what that means….
Since I happen to know the future here, I’ll just go ahead and tell you. Mary’s a paranoid schizophrenic, on Thorazine and Lithium at the same time. She wants to be dead. But she’s catholic. So she just cuts little slits into her arms, then wears long sleeves a lot.
Of course, knowing the future, I can also assure you that my days of going out with crazychicks was coming swiftly to a middle. I hate to repeat myself, but: if sane chicks do exist, I never get to encounter them; I’m pretty sure they’re out there somewhere, and they just don’t dig me.
But, Mary’s completely fucking bonkers, so she digs me. Like, instantly. Whoosh. Instant diggery. Lucky me.
Actually, that’s not all that sarcastic. Ever seen Jim Lee draw Polaris when she was in the XMen? That’s kinda what’s going on here. Without the green hair. As far as I can tell, being somewhat colourblind already. Take away the scars on her arms and the psychosis, and she coulda been a supermodel.
Sorry. Just take away the scars. Not sure what I was thinking there. Sane supermodels; way to fuck up the storytelling….
So. Long Story Less Long time again. She digs me. Great. She’s got a boyfriend. Less great. She’s starting college in ten minutes. Polaris all gone.
I guess I should explain that out a bit. It’s like this.
‘I’m Mary.’ She says. And I let her know who I am. Because: duh.
‘Just coffee?’
‘Oh. Yeah. Just. So far.’
‘How many sentences was that?’
‘I dunno. Three or four.’
‘Are you stupid or something?’
‘Is that a trick question?’
‘Oh. So you’re just cute.’
I am not, in fact, cute. Small dogs are cute. Or they’re roadkill. Also a trick question.
But, I let it go, because: duh. Polaris, in 3D.
I guess I’m shallow that way.
Enter the bit where she thinks out loud a bit about how she’s got this boyfriend, so it shouldn’t matter how cute I might be. So now I’m certain that it’s a trick question.
And, having just been graduated from high school that spring [she was, it turned out, three months older than I was], her first class in college began at eight in the morning, a few minutes from now.
So that sucks.
‘You’ve probably got class too, huh.’
‘Nope. I’m without class. I quit.’
‘You quit being classy.’
‘I quit school. I’m tired.’
‘Then why are you here?’
‘Because it’s what I do. I’ve been in college for six years now. I forget how to stop being here, I guess.’
‘So you are stupid?’
‘I started when I was twelve.’
‘Oh.’
‘Which was, thinking about it, probably stupid.’
‘It’s stupid to start college at twelve?’
‘I was majoring in computers back then. Anytime we go back to Fortran and Pascal, I’m all set.’
‘Oh. Yeah. Stupid.’
So: I win; I’m stupid. Polaris agrees
‘Wha’d you switch to? After Fortran.’
‘Everything else. I guess English is central, since it’s simple and I write stuff anyway.’
‘Like books?’
‘Sometimes. I just figured that one out though. Turns out a novel is just a short story with a bunch of sequels following it. So I started doing that last year.’
‘Anything I’ve read?’
‘Yeah; I publish under the name, uh….’ I grabbed the book she’d discarded and peered at the author’s name.
‘Cut it out; you were better than he was when you crammed three or four sentence fragments together.’
‘Big fan of Vonnegut.’
‘Kurt Vonnegut? Oh my god I love you.’
‘Boyfriend the jealous type?’
She grunted. Her boyfriend was a guy who wanted to be Salvador Dali when he grew up, but wasn’t likely to pull it off. I saw his stuff later: lots of cows floating a few metres above the ground. Which, for all I know, has made the guy trillions of dollars, to date.
And now, it’s nearly eight. Time for her first class. And then there’s me: the collegiate dropout. We have so much in common already….
‘Are you gonna be here when I get out?’
Here’s how my brain doesn’t work: that thought had never actually occurred to me. Ever. At all. Like I’d thought she’d go off to class and somehow one of us would slip into some alternate dimension, ever after segregated from the other. So I gave it my fullest consid—‘Of course.’
Because: duh.