Another Sentimental Argument

While we were drinking our coffee earlier in the day, I asked Billie how the band was going. I asked out of simple curiosity but I got a sweet treat in return when I saw how his eyes lit up at the topic. He rambled to me (not that I minded, not that I would ever mind) about Green Day for at least ten minutes until he put his coffee cup on the table and said to me, "Wanna come to a show tonight?"

Now here I am, in the back of a dingy bar with bad lighting standing behind Billie like a scared child while he does what he does best.

"Hey, man! How are you?" He is greeting people endlessly. I peer around his shoulder to see a tall guy with a scruffy beard and a tough looking mowhawk. On his arm, there is a pretty girl with short blonde hair slicked charmingly back behind her ears. She catches me looking at her while the guys engage in a brief hug (more like a bumping of chests) and she smiles knowingly at me.

"This your girl?" I hear the guy ask Billie before I feel his eyes land on me. I look up into the stranger's eyes and give my best smile because I damn sure can't think of anything to say.

Billie looks over his shoulder at me and kind of tilts his head as if he's not sure what species I am. He quickly responds with, "Logan." He grabs a hold of me and pushes me in front of him. "This is Logan." He then gives me a pat on the back as if that's any type of assurance.

The bearded guy gives Billie a wink and drops the subject. "Hi, Logan. I'm Dusty and this is my girlfriend, Cherry."

"Nice to meet the both of you." I smile and shake both of their hands. They nod their heads in unison and go out the side door to the main part of the club. I think to myself briefly that they must have been together for a long time. I take this chance to turn to Billie before someone else he knows comes up to talk to him.

"Thanks for just shoving me in front of you like that!" I slap his arm and he is not fazed at all. He only smiles and turns to walk toward the rough looking couch that is next to the back door, that is wide open while people run in and out with equipment. "Billie!"

He pulls on my wrist and brings me down with him. "Oh hush," he says calmly as he stretches out ont he couch. "It ain't like I sacrificed you for battle or anything." He doesn't look at me while he speaks but he does have his arm flopped over my shoulder.

I sigh because I have nothing to say to him.

"Quit your sighing, too." His lips press against my cheek and I smell faint alcohol against his lips. It's hard to even pretend to be flustered at Billie when he kisses me so I blush and return a kiss back to his cheek.

A few minutes pass until I hear my name being screamed in different accents by a green haired boy coming in through the back door. "Logan!" He shouts when he sees me. He snatches me up from the couch and picks me up into one of those spinny hug type things. I laugh against him until he sets me down. "I haven't seen you in a while." He juts his bottom lip out as far as possible while he waited for me to explain.

"I'm sorry, dearest." I say and hope that's enough for him. Because I don't really know if it's polite to say I haven't been over much because Billie and I (or at least one of us) are too stupid/stubborn/probably stupid to be friends, or be more than friends. Because when you're friends, you visit each other. And when you're more than friends, you visit each other often. But since Billie and I are neither, we either never see each other (the past two years) or see each other in very weird, random circumstances (the past few weeks.)

Tre brings his cartoon-like sad eyes to peer over at Billie, who in the short amount of time I had been talking to Tre, got a joint in his hands. I watched as he put it in between his lips and inhaled with his eyes closed. I was mesmerized.

"Huh?" He says in a huskier-than-usual voice followed by a little cough.

Tre's attention span is fickle and he is already plopping himself on the arm of the couch next to Billie with his hand opened. Billie hands the joint over to him and then gets up from the couch himself.

I watch quietly, still a little mesmerized because there's nothing really beautiful about smoking, but seeing Billie smoke is something different to me. It always has been. I feel my eyes suddenly glaze over with memories—the time I watched Billie from across the high school parking lot as the smoke from his cigarette swirled around him and traveled into the gray sky and the time I was leaving that party that one night when I was certain that Billie was with another girl only to find him alone leaning against a car with the cigarette's fire lighting up his features in the dark—the memories I thought of when I missed him the most. When I needed a night light in my dark mind, there those memories were.

Sometimes I go blind when I think of Billie. Really blind because all of a sudden Tre is standing in front of me blowing smoke in my face. It takes a second before I comprehend and when I do, "Shit, Tre! What the hell are you doing?" My hopes of that sentence to sound intimidating fail when I start coughing uncontrollably.

Tre laughed lazily, but stopped nonetheless. He walks away while hitting me on the back in a friendly manner for good measure. Even though I think he forgot that I'm a girl and him slapping me on the back doesn't feel the same as when he does it to a guy. Therefore, I mutter "ow" under my breath when I finally catch it.

"Marijuana kills brain cells." Billie is suddenly at my side. "But Tre never had many to begin with." I look over at Billie with his cloudy eyes and watch as he gives me the you'll-have-to-excuse-him-smile that a mother would give a passerby if her baby was wailing uncontrollably in public.

I want to kiss Billie, then. Not that I don't want to to kiss him all the time but I really wanted to kiss him then. The way he is blinking slower than usual and the way he is pressing the brown bottle of beer to his lips so tenderly makes me go crazy. And what weird things to go crazy over. But like always, I don't do what I want and I don't even mention it. Instead I sit back on the couch and watch the people go by, back and forth, in and out, but never staying in one place.

An hour later, Billie is sweaty and loud and overall obnoxious. But from my little spot, leaning against the stone wall, I can't help but smile as I watch the band perform. When he is playing, I don't hear my own thoughts or anyone else's words around me. It is all Billie Joe's lyrics and the music with it. Nothing else surfs my brain waves but that. That is when I am most at ease. Not having to analyze everything Billie says, not having to scold myself for everything I (don't) say, not having to get dazed by Billie's lips moving when he talks and afterward having to say "huh?" because I hadn't heard a word he just said—I don't know, everything is easy when there is music between us.

After Green Day's set, the boys all come past me. Mike pulls me into a quick, almost painful side hug before sweeping down the few steps toward the couch. Tre gives me a knowing smirk (which I roll my eyes at, because I don't know what he's acting all high and mighty and all knowing about.) And then comes Billie slumping down the steps with such happy exhaustion, he is practically glowing the way the moon does at midnight. He is in the middle of the sky; he is where he was always meant to be. He clutches my hand in his for a brief moment as he walks by but all too soon, he lets go and leaves me alone.

I feel like I don't exist anymore. In this room with everyone buzzing about how great the band sounded (of course they were great) and how bad ass their new song was and how many hot chicks were in the audience, I feel like a transparent ghost wearing a frown. All these people are filling the distance between Billie and I and I'm getting scared. I don't like watching all these people come between us.

I sit on the arm of the couch next to a girl with lavender hair (that I'm actually really jealous of) and just sit and wait until Billie comes over to save me from myself. Just like I always have waited for him ever since the first time I saw him at the party with his...

"Billie, your eyes are so bloodshot." I couldn't help but laugh as I remembered the first time I saw him.

He smiles on one side of his mouth and gives me a clumsy wink before tipping a brand new brown bottle to his lips. By his halfway smile, I almost get the hunch that he knows what I'm remembering in my mind when I say his eyes are bloodshot. I am wondering if his memory is going back to the same night—when he was desperately wasted, begging for my name before I left the party. I wonder if he ever thinks about it. And in the three seconds that is almost takes me to convince myself he doesn't remember it, I feel my world close in and open up the same time when he says:

"Please, just tell me your name. Your name. Please."

And without a second thought in sight, I said in a small voice, one I was sure only he could hear: "Logan Marie Stuart."

Another swig of the beer bottle and all I see are his eyes, before he says: "All right, Logan Marie Stewart. You're pretty."

And at this point, I remembered what I said next. Of course I remembered what I said next. But saying it out loud in our sick, painful, playful reenactment seemed like too much to bear. Too heavy. But I almost let it slip through my lips, and it might just have escaped the surface of my tongue before a guy comes up to Billie and slaps him on the back.

A chorus of 'Hey Man''s ensue and they are grunting and laughing and punching until they turn their bodies to me and the big guy that isn't Billie says, "This your girl, man?"

I stiffen for the second time that night, but Billie seems to be as limber as ever. He swivels on the heel of his foot and has his arm wrapped around my shoulder in no time. I feel him looking down at me but I don't look up because—well, I don't know why.

"I dunno, man!" He laughs loudly, even throwing his head back for affect. I start to feel sick to my stomach. The guy laughs loudly along with Billie until I think I might go deaf from it all. "You try to make things serious with her, and she's running for the door!"

I have to swallow hard this time not to throw up right then and there.

My pulse quickens and I feel red. My whole body feels red. Whatever feeling red means, I don't know. But I feel it.

They're both laughing. And laughing. And just having a grand fucking ole time and all I can think of is the only thing that's going to be laughable is Billie's IQ once I pound my fist against his face for seven hours straight.

Before I know it, the stranger guy asking too many questions is gone and it's just Billie and I. I hear him hum drunkenly beside me as if he's actually content with his life in that moment, and that's when I decide to throw his arm off of me and completely lose my mind.

"Why the hell did you say that!" I press sweaty palms against his chest and push him against the wall, although he wasn't very far from it to begin with.

Instead of yelling in my face, instead of giving me a run for my money, he brings the beer up to his mouth using tortuously long seconds. Green eyes glare at me over the rim. He brings it back down and there a tight-lipped smile is there ready to meet me.

He doesn't say anything. "Why aren't you saying anything?" Half shouting this, I kick the edge of his Converse like a child, (like the child I am.) "Fucking say something!" I kick him in the shin. Not as hard as I could/should have, but I do it nonetheless.

"You're asking for something you don't want to hear." That's all he says. Is that all he has to say?

"What the fuck does that even mean! Tell me why you said that about me!" I feel so small and it's exhausting trying to act big. "Why would you say something like that about me?"

My hands reach for his shoulders as if I'm going to push him again, although he has nowhere to go. I try not to bow my head in front of him, but it has become so heavy with thoughts I thought it might fall off and go rolling around the room in that very moment. Of course I knew what he said was the truth. If I ever knew anything in my life, I knew that what he said was the truth. I wanted to know why he would say it. Right there, to a guy who has never met me. Right there, in front of me.

Three gulps of beer. I count them. But he still has nothing to say. I still feel red.

We have a staring contest. A battle. And my troops are no comparison to the glaring green army of his.

"What now?" He breathes deeply four times. I count. "Gonna tell me what a beautiful, fucked up boy I am?"

My world stops spinning.

He sees I'm out of ammunition. Out of breath. Out of everything.

He chucks the empty brown bottle past me—I feel the soft whip of it against the top of my ear—and we keep our eyes locked onto each other's as we listen to it shatter all over the cement floor. "Call me a piece of trash? Because that's what I am?" He knocks my hands away from his shoulders and reverses our position; pushes me against the wall with sweaty palms bearing death grips on both arms. "Huh, Logan?" His grip doesn't loosen up. "C'mon, Logan. Tell me. Hell, tell everyone!" One of his hands lifts away from me and he waves it around in the air, as if trying to get everyone's attention. Although that was highly unnecessary because they were already tuned in to the Meltdown Channel.

It is too much.

I throw him off of me and run away. He doesn't wait until I'm gone before he shouts: "Out the door, like she always is!" He starts laughing again, but no one joins him.