Bus

I guess it’s not so bad, bowling with Mercedes. We’re at the same place I took Carrie and Ezra when they drove through Yuma, since it’s a big recreational center of sorts, and since everyone else is too busy at home to even consider going out for Christmas, the place is dead. I don’t hate Mercedes, but everyone else can die for all I care.

I have to give her this, though: she is kicking my ass.

“What’s that? Another strike?” she cheers, turning around on her slippery bowling shoes to face me, sitting on the bench. She points at me as if to con me into showing jealousy.

I just hold my ball in my right hand and grimace. “Yeah, yeah. I’m not that far behind.”

She takes a seat next to me right as I stand up. “Doug, sweetie, I’m twenty points ahead of you. This is the third game you are about to lose.”

I can tolerate trash-talking. I’ve put up with it for years from my peers, adults, and children as of being a bus driver. If she thinks she’s gonna get to me, there’s no way in hell…

I throw a gutter ball. To make matters worse, it’s the fifth gutter ball I’ve thrown in this game, and I won’t even talk about the countless ones I’ve had in total today.

Of course, Mercedes is laughing her ass off, her boisterous nature coming through, especially when she slaps her leg in a fit. She doesn’t even notice it when I turn around and glare at her, making my efforts a flop. She stops long enough to wipe her eyes, and then she stands back up and pats my back.

“Look,” she tells me, “how about I show you how to do it? Watching you lose is painful for me.”

I mutter, “I watch myself lose all the time,” under my breath, but she doesn’t catch it. “How do you show someone how to bowl? I don’t think it works like that.”

She wags a finger in my face. “You are speaking like a true novice.”

Mercedes tries to teach me how to hold the ball and let it go in a way that’ll make it go straight down the lane. I just can’t do it. Every time I throw the ball, it ends up either zooming right to the gutter or veering off in a path that only makes it hit a few pins before spiraling into oblivion. Even with her visual aid, showing me how to stand and how to roll, I still suck. Eventually we both get so frustrated with my failures that we call it a game and sit at the snack bar, sharing a plate of chili cheese fries.

Neither of us want to say goodbye and go back to our respective caves, but I don’t want to sound like a needy little leech and ask if she wants to do something else, so I keep my mouth shut. She’s quiet for a few minutes; every so often she’ll glance up at me and we’ll make eye contact and then she’ll go back to staring at the counter.

Then she pipes up again. “Hey, isn’t there an arcade here too?”

“Y-yeah,” I somewhat stutter, not understanding her aim at first.

As she chews on a fry, she raises her eyebrows at me. “Wanna head over there so I can beat you at even more games?”

“I’m bound to win at something today,” I say right back to her. “If nothing else, I could beat you in air hockey, at the least.”

“You are so on,” she smirks, narrowing her eyes.

I am a child of the 1980s. Naturally, I know a thing or two about arcade games, whether they’re racing, fighting, shooter, or just general prize-grabbing machines. Since the place is almost deserted, we don’t hesitate to blow twenty bucks each on games, acting like stupid little kids…on Christmas morning.

It’s kind of ironic, now that I think about it. I fucking hate children and their over-enthusiasm for stuff that seems so menial, and yet here I am, cussing at a damn video game as my first-place title is taken by another player. Mercedes laughs at my misfortune as she passes me, sitting at a neighboring racecar game that’s hooked up to mine, and since there are no kids here, I don’t hesitate to cuss her out, too.

She just laughs and honks her horn at me, reaching over to punch my shoulder.

I am thirty-two years old and I am actually having some sort of fun at an arcade. On top of that, I actually don’t want to strangle the human being in my company right now. If that’s not the weirdest pair of sentences you’ve read in this stupid memoir, well, then, you haven’t been paying attention. (Or you think Mikey is weirder. I wouldn’t argue with that logic, honestly.)

…I don’t know, it’s just nice.

By the time we’re done being idiots at the arcade, it’s six PM and we’re both starving and out of quarters, our hands full of stupid trinkets we got in exchange for the armfuls of tickets we accumulated. We eventually settle on going to some pancake house for our wonderful Christmas feast, and as the waiter brings us our food, the sun is setting in the vast Arizona desert in the distance.

I don’t know what it is, but we just won’t shut up. She keeps making fun of how bad I am at bowling, and I keep telling her to shut the hell up about it, and then we talk about how we both had arcades right near our houses when we were young. I tell her about how I’d take Carrie there on weekends and we’d play against each other, and she tells me about how her parents didn’t like her going to the arcade but she went anyway with her big sisters. We talk about our favorite games and then about what kind of game systems we owned growing up, which video game characters were burned into our heads, and then we talk about music and what kind of crap is on our SkyPods. I tell her about Yes and she asks if they’re a real band, and I say yes and then she gets confused, but then she tells me about how she wanted to marry Ricky Martin until she found out he was gay, and even then she still wanted to marry him. She asks me what my favorite TV show is and I tell her it’s that show about the teacher who makes meth, and that starts a whole other conversation about our theories and opinions of all of the characters, and I don’t know why, but it just feels so natural.

And I don’t know if it’s just her or the fact that I’m actually interacting with another human being, but I just find it so easy to speak today. I have to hold back my sarcasm sometimes along with the more asshole-natured remarks that come to mind, even though it’s worth it in the end.

It’s well past nine at night when we’re completely done with our conversation. Our plates have been picked up and the bill has been paid (she insisted on paying, since she was the one who invited me out). Yet, here we are, talking about nothing and everything, finding it so interesting.

My head is absolutely spinning. Even if it’s cold outside and I can’t feel my fingers or my cheeks, nothing about me feels numb.

~~~~

It has to be the coldest night of the year, and Mercedes knows it, since she blasts the heat all the way back to my apartment while we both shiver and complain about the cold, despite me being a Minnesota native. I’m all ready to step out of her car when she parks right by my building, whipping off my seatbelt and preparing a goodbye, but she takes off her seatbelt along with me and tells me, “I’ll walk to you to your room. Is that okay?”

I tilt my head. “Uh, sure.”

She smiles, we get out of her car, and then I lead the way as we walk through the freezing breeze to my humble abode, our hands digging into our pockets desperate for warmth.

When we get to my door, I turn around and look at her. “Well, today wasn’t nearly as boring as I anticipated it to be.”

Mercedes gives me this crooked half-smirk before it fades from her face. Then, not even having to account for our barely-there height difference, she leans over and plants a tiny kiss right on my cheek.

Of course I have to turn into a tomato. Of course I have to spew out a few fragmented syllables as a response. Of course all of the heat in my body rushes right to my face, defrosting my nose and reddening all of it.

And of course she’s laughing again.

“I – I – I just…” I start, trying to be articulate. Words fail me. It figures. I can complain about virtually anything and vocalize it clearly, and yet right now I can’t seem to find any sort of phrasing that would be an appropriate follow-up to what just happened.

So I decide to go with another one of my firsts for tonight. I’m not good at hugs, as Carrie has pointed out to me a thousand times. It doesn’t help that Carrie’s the only person I’ve hugged since anybody else in our family has had a pulse, and God knows I’m an awkward mess trying to wrap my arms around Mercedes in a way that wouldn’t make her want to shove me off and curb-stomp me.

She continues to smile and she even hugs me back, despite it all.

“S-sorry, uh,” I squeeze out. “I’m stupid. Not good at this.”

“You’re not stupid, Doug,” she replies. “I think you’re great. And you seemed happy today.”

The gears start turning in me. For some reason, something just clicks in my head. That was it. I was happy today. I can’t remember the last time I was actually happy, completely bloated with joy, no strings attached to anything, not even myself.

And I’m still not sure why anything even happened today, why she chose to invite me out so that we’d be alone together, but at this point, I can’t even find a reason to gripe about it.

She’s warm, and when I let go, I try to copy her and kiss her on her cheek, but I aim a little high and I think I catch the corner of her eye. I apologize and mentally kick myself for being such a dickhead but she doesn’t seem to care and instead she’s laughing again.

For the first time in years, I think I’ve had what normal people call a “perfect day.”

Even though I won’t let myself get my hopes up over it, I still can’t help but revel in it all. Things aren’t so bad right now. In fact, I think I might have found another human being who I enjoy the company of. I don’t know if that means anything to you. I know it means a fuck ton to me.