He pounded on the door again. “Open this door!”
“No! It’s all your fault! I told you!”
“What? It was your idea to go!”
“No, not that. When we were ten years old! I told you then! You promised me!”
“Are you doing lines of coke in there or something? What are you talking about?”
“The promise!” I bellowed at him. “When we were ten and I accidentally told Billy Harvey that I had a crush on him and he ran away screaming, I made you promise me to never let me think of ideas on my own ever again, and furthermore, if I did think of ideas on my own, you were never to let me act on them.”
“Oh, yeah,” he said. Then he chuckled. “I saved you on that one, though. It turns out Billy Harvey wasn’t that great of a fuck. He had a small penis. Even at sixteen, I knew the difference.”
I glared at the door. “You had sex with him? You do everyone! I can’t wait until it’s your birthday because I’m going to buy a sign for your front yard that says, ‘Sandy lives here and blows everything that moves.”
“If you open the door, I’ll blow you,” he promised.
“I don’t want your love,” I said dramatically. “Ha, I bet I’m the only person in the free world that’s ever said that to you.”
“Open this door!”
“Allllll by myyyyyyselllllf,” I sang forlornly. “Don’t wanna be, allllllll byyyyyy myyyy—”
Something slammed into the door. “Ow,” Sandy muttered. “When did you replace the doors with sheets of steel?”
I rolled my eyes. “They’re not. They’re oak. Maybe that’s like your kryptonite. Or maybe you’re just a tiny, tiny man.”
“Oak? So if I was a superhero, all anyone would have to do is bring a log of oak to a fight and I’d lose? That sounds supremely lame.”
“Or, like, what would happen if your arch-nemeses lured you into the middle of an oak forest in the middle of fall? He would stand above you cackling as the orange leaves fell from the trees and you writhed in pain on the forest floor.”
“What would my superhero name be? The Oak Diva? Got Wood? Lincoln Log?”
I considered. “Got Wood works, only because it’s kitschy. But you can’t be named after your weakness. It’d be too easy to kill you. Duh.”
“And what would my superpower be?”
That one was harder. “Insatiable dance moves,” I finally decided. “You can woo anyone with the magic roll of your hips.” I started getting excited at the idea, already picturing the superhero costume in my head, complete with bitchin’ thigh-high boots. “And then you could have a catch phrase that’d be all like—Wait a minute… you’re trying to distract me!”
He sounded bewildered. “‘Wait a minute you’re trying to distract me’ would be my catch-phrase? That sounds kind of dumb.”
“No, you bastard! You’re trying to distract me from the fact that you totally helped me fuck up everything!”
He snorted. “I didn’t do jack.”
“I knew this was a bad idea. I knew I should have never gotten involved with him in the first place. Stupid shit like this always happens. It’s fucking ridiculous.”
He groaned. “Are you really going to have an ‘I feel so bad for myself’ bitch fest? Really?”
“I’m allowed,” I said. “I think. While it was possibly the shortest relationship on record, it burned pretty brightly.”
“Who said it’s over?”
“You didn’t see the look on his face, Sandy,” I said quietly. “I don’t even really know why he got so mad, but he was. He didn’t want me there, he made that much clear.”
“That doesn’t mean you guys broke up,” he pointed out. “It could mean just what he said: that he didn’t want you there.”
“Yeah?” I sniffed.