Everything is Fiction: Another old story

The second Sunday in July. The heat, the heat! And four of us sandwiched into Caty’s bucket of a swimming pool, an above-ground we’d filled using the garden hose. A puddle, really.

We were guzzling cans of cheap beer, all of us too broke to divvy up for something better. The tinny taste of the brew, warm long before the last dregs, was a poor compliment to that murky bath water.





I was sun burnt.

Dave poked at my red arm, leaving white splotches where he’d applied pressure; he traced a large “D” across my back. “Make yourself useful,” I said and passed him a bottle of sunscreen. He smeared on the lotion obligingly. His hands were polite. I stayed quite still, conscious of the cliché.





Dave and I took the subway home together. Caty and Andrew had dropped us off at the station. We both knew they wanted to be rid of us so they could go fuck. That’s the trouble with couples: they always want you to leave so they can fuck.

“I’m sun burnt,” I said.

“Yes,” Dave replied.

The train trembled and groaned, pitched to a stop. A group of teenaged girls got on. I think they were wearing Catholic School uniforms, bobby socks with short plaid skirts. But I must be mistaken since school was out a month ago, in June. And anyhow, it was a Sunday.

The girls sat down. I looked at them. They looked at Dave.

I was tired and a little bit drunk and I didn’t feel much like chatting. But I began to worry that if I didn’t say something soon, Dave would think me very dull company, indeed. He was, after all, a fairly new friend, and I worried that I still needed to make a favourable impression. Try me on for size, Dave. Am I a good fit?


So I pulled out the old stalwart: the job. “How’s work going, Dave?”, “Have you been making good tips lately?”, and so on.

Then an anecdote:

“I used to bartend too, in university. I liked it. Got to smoke, drink on the job. A good ego boost, drunk guys always telling me I’m beautiful.”

“I would think that’d be annoying, having creepy men hitting on you all night,” Dave said.

“No, I liked it. No one ever tells me I’m beautiful in my real life.”

“Is this your real life?”

“Yes.”

Silence.

Dave leans in close. He smells like sunscreen and cigarettes.

I realize I am blushing.



He gestures over my shoulder to the Catholic School girls. “They’re talking about auto-erotic asphyxiation.”

“What’s that?” I ask.

“It’s when you strangle yourself while masturbating.”

A meditative pause as I let this digest.

I am about to speak when the train shudders to a halt. Dave’s stop is here. He hoists his backpack onto his shoulders and with a mock salute, stalks towards the door.

He stops. He turns.

“Lynne, you’re not that innocent.”

And before I can laugh it away, he’s gone.