Park Shitty
by Melissa Or
I never knew CD’s real name. I just knew that’s what they called him because his eyes flattened into thin CD-like slits when he was stoned. Perhaps if I were in the same grade as those guys, I would have heard teachers call CD by his legal name, but I was five years younger than they were. Thinking back now, I was much too young to be hanging around high school seniors. Especially those seniors.
It might sound strange that they tolerated a dorky middle schooler tagging along, but even guys like that, especially guys like that, needed something to believe in. You’re gonna be the one who gets out, they’d tell me again and again, as if repeating it would eventually will it into fruition. I think they needed to hear it more than I did. Especially CD. He was my older sister’s boyfriend, which is how I got to know those guys in the first place. He didn’t seem to give a shit about my sister, but he was invested in making sure that I did something with my life. It didn’t really matter what that something was, but everyone seemed to think it required getting out of Park City. Which was fine by me.
The thing with Park City was that if you happened to spot it on a map and see it nestled all cozy between the Great South Bay on Long Island’s southern shoreline and the swank star-studded Hamptons to the east, you’d surely mistake it for one of the island’s many quaint beach villages. You’d imagine this perfect little town where yuppies draped sweaters over their shoulders as they walked in and out of small expensive shops that all looked the same; and not only would you picture sidewalks, but you’d also line them with flowers and street lamps; and your mind would probably also build a charming brick schoolhouse with a flag that had never been defaced and a roof that had never leaked. But for some reason Park City, even the name of the town itself, never lived up to its potential. It had been established by an obscure signer of the Declaration of Independence who happened to settle there in 1770 with ambitions of creating an international port and commercial center. Sadly, the town never grew up to become the “city” its founder had envisioned. Nor did it ever contain an actual “park” unless you counted the area beside the landfill that had been fenced off to protect migrating birds who stopped in for quickies on their way to South America. We called that overgrown strip of land the Bird Brothel, and it sort of functioned more or less like a park because it was where a lot of kids went to try drugs or sex for the first time.
Later on, when I did get out, and I would tell people that I was from Long Island, I saw how their eyes would adorn with visions of Gatsby’s gilded Eggs, and although I knew I was misleading them, I didn’t want to explain that I had grown up in the only south shore town that never became a summer tourist destination for celebrity Manhattanites. Instead of multi-million dollar beach estates enclosed by behemoth hedges and electric fences, my home town was known for its abundance of Section Eight housing. Before I met him, CD spray-painted over Park City’s welcome sign in order to announce to anyone who exited the main road for a pit stop on their way to the Hamptons, that they were “Now Entering Park City Shitty.” The sign was replaced about a year later, but the name stuck. That’s the thing with identities, they just get lodged in people’s heads, and after a while there’s no way to extract them.
CD looked out for me in the only way he knew how, by creating an ever-expanding list of drugs that I was never, under any circumstance whatsoever, to even pretend to try. He wrote his list on one of those long shopping pads that had a refrigerator magnet on the back. He said these were drugs that could fuck a person up so badly that I had to swear on my grandmother’s grave to abstain from trying, no matter how tempted I might be. (You’d think since he was dating my sister, he would have known that all of my grandparents were still alive.) There were so many drugs on his list, and he seemed to add to it every time I came over, that I was sure some must have been repeated or made up. It was three pages deep and included a lot of substances that I had never heard of, and some that I had heard of but never thought of as intoxicants. I remember wondering what it was about those particular drugs that made them worse than others. After all, I had grown up in the Nancy Reagan era, when we were told that all illicit drugs were created with equal capacity to scramble a kid’s brain up like the egg in the commercial that aired during After School Specials.
CD used to hang out with these two other guys, Rod and Hoff. Rod was the first emancipated minor I ever knew. His father got so fucked up one night that he beat the shit out of Rod while he was sound asleep in his bed, so Rod got a lawyer to help him file for emancipation. This was the first time I heard the word “emancipation” used in a way that was not associated with slavery. It was also the first time I heard of anyone going to court to gain a right instead of having one taken away. A judge granted Rod’s request, and the government let him live in one of the subsidized apartments off the highway. He got a small studio above the Roy Rogers, which was convenient when we got the munchies. You see, CD said, lawyers make so much money that they can do cases like Rod’s for free. That’s what I’m talking about. What are you talking about, Rod asked? No one ever knows what he’s talking about, Hoff said. For the Nerd, CD said, referring to me. That’s what I’m talking about for the Nerd. For when she grows up and gets the fuck out of here. Attorney General Nerd or some shit like that. I looked up at the mention of my nickname, but my fingers were deep in Rod’s ashtray, fishing for roaches to take home with me, and Rod said, Yeah, that’s real lawyer material right there, and we all laughed.
Although Rod was a dealer, Hoff was the real thing. Pretty much everything about Hoff was next-level. He was particularly compulsive about things that really mattered to him, which meant that he had a ripped body, an impeccable car, and an endless series of tanned, toned girlfriends he met at the gym. Not to mention his lucrative drug business. He actually used to grow his own weed on the side of Sunrise Highway, up in the woods where no one would go except maybe for some animals. We used to joke about all the deer that must have been inadvertently getting high back there. Hoff really had it going on back then. At some point, his harvest was so plentiful that he had to hire a couple of those guys who stood on the side of the road by the exit ramps holding “Will Work for Food” signs. They were good workers, Hoff said, even if they couldn’t speak much English. He paid them in actual money and weed instead of just food, and he said they were priceless because they were too afraid of getting deported to report him. Hoff also dealt a lot of the drugs that were on CD’s no-no list. The list was for me, not for the guys.
Like Rod, Hoff had his own apartment, but not because he was emancipated. Because he was earning a ton of money and his parents didn’t seem to notice or care that he moved out. But there was no way Hoff would let us over to his place because he was a real clean freak. Everyone knew that he vacuumed his apartment every day just before he left, and that he was so obsessive-compulsive about the whole thing that the vacuum tracks had to be perfectly straight and parallel with the wall, and if they weren’t, he’d start over again. He was so nuts about those lines on his carpet that he would vacuum backwards, all the while edging towards the front door, where he would eventually leave the vacuum in order to avoid defiling the perfectly straight carpet lines. That’s why Hoff was late all the time, and everyone would poke fun at him for it, saying he was late because he was doing lines.
The last time I saw Hoff must have been about eight years ago in what used to be the Roy Rogers below Rod’s old apartment. At that time, it was a 7-11, and I was in a hurry to grab a coffee before catching the train back to Manhattan after visiting my folks. I brushed right past him without realizing who he was.
Jessica’s Sister, he said. Hey, Nerd! How are you?
I recognized his voice, but when I turned to face him, he looked nothing like the Hoff I knew from the old days, even though it had only been a few years since I had graduated from high school. Instead of the well-toned and manicured guy I used to know, the one whose artificial tan had accentuated a beaming white toothy smile, Hoff now appeared before me as an old, almost grotesque, stranger. Even his posture was different. He used to have the starchy upright stance of a weightlifter, but now he was sort of hunched and weathered, like a tarped Weber grill in winter. Several of his teeth had rotted out, and his T-shirt looked like it had been plucked from one of those Goodwill bins outside the Stop & Shop.
How’s your sister? How’s your family? How’s…He threw questions at me frenetically, but he was sweet and genuine, happy to see me. How’s the big city life treating you, he asked and then laughed for no reason, which made me self-conscious. I felt dozens of judgmental eyes peer straight through soda displays and Slurpee signs, and hone in on me as if to ask what a young woman dressed like President Clinton’s wife was doing chatting with a homeless meth head. Not that he was homeless. At least I don’t think he was. But those eyes went right through my pants suit, and I swear they saw me for who I really was.
Later, when I told my sister about running into Hoff, she said, And this used to be the guy who was so OCD that he vacuumed himself out of his house. Used to be— as though he was not the same guy. You know, she said, Hoff should have died a long time ago. And angry as that made me, I imagined this very scenario: Hoff disappearing in his prime, when he was still smiling like Knight Rider or oiling his abs like the guy in Baywatch, before our shitty little town dug its shitty little meth-rot teeth into him. Not to sound callous though, because dying too early, no matter how honorable the death, is no prize either, and I know this because that’s exactly what happened to CD’s little brother, Bruce.
Bruce was the same age as I was, but I never saw him at school because he was in special classes. Sometimes he would hang around with CD, but the guys never called him anything but his real name, even though he was an easy target for a nickname due to his cognitive impairment. CD wouldn’t tolerate so much as a joke made at Bruce’s expense. Their whole family was protective of him, actually. Their dad coached Bruce’s baseball team for the sole purpose of making sure that the other players wouldn’t make fun of him. CD told me that if I played on the team, his dad would look out for me too. You got brains, but you need a scholarship if you’re gonna actually go to college and be a lady lawyer, and there’s really no money in softball, CD said. I figured he was right, and I joined the team.
CD’s dad did look after me as best he could, but since I was the only girl in the league, I had to endure a surprising amount of shit-talking from the opposing players. The parents were the worst though. They’d actually yell things at me like, Girls can’t hit, you cunt! And, Put the bat down and pick up a spatula. A fucking spatula? That’s what they came up with to insult me? Grown adults telling a kid she was a cunt in need of a spatula? Even then, I knew I shouldn’t let that nonsense get in the way of my performance. After all, I was a better player than most of the guys in the league, and I was sure that only a few of them would have made the girls’ varsity softball team at school. Not that they would have wanted to try. It’s just that even though they weren’t much competition for me, it was their attitude about who I should be that posed the real challenge.
Admittedly, the harassment got to me more often than it should have. I didn’t have terribly high self-esteem to begin with. During one at-bat early in the season, a mom yelled, Join the God-damned Girl Scouts!, just as I swung and missed on a third strike. Everyone laughed, even my own teammates. The catcher chuckled and sorta snorted behind his mask, then he dropped the ball, so I booked it to first base. Apparently, I was the only nerd on the field who knew the rules. The other team’s coach screamed for the catcher to throw the ball. Throw it! Throw it, he shouted, it’s a freakin’ dropped-third-strike!
When I think about it now, I imagine the catcher must have been confused, but I don’t know for sure because I didn’t look back. I just ran down the line with all the rage of a girl who needed to prove her worth. The first baseman was standing right on the bag with his arm stretched stupidly over the baseline. His glove was wide open, and I could see his eyes as they followed the ball over my head toward his mitt. What an idiot, I thought as I ran through him. My body met his just as the ball reached his glove, and I stepped on the bag as he fell to the ground and the ball trickled toward the foul line. The umpire stretched his arms and yelled, Safe!, and my whole team cheered as though we won a championship game or something. Then two parents came out to walk the first baseman off the field. He was sniffling, trying not to cry. I stayed on the base like I owned it. I wanted to run to second because no one had actually called a time out and the ball was technically still in play, but I refrained.
I sort of knew that kid who played first. His name was Neil, and he was in my photography class. He didn’t have friends in the class because he constantly walked into the dark room when other people were in the middle of developing their film, and it would just fuck up everyone’s photos. He was that kind of kid, and I suspected he was told a hundred times not to stand on the baseline just as Mr. Fox, our art teacher, told him not to go in the darkroom when the red light was on. I felt bad that I knocked him down, but that was the rule– if a fielder is in the baseline, the runner still has the right of way. Yet, I felt sorry for Neil because a girl had taken him out, which was just about the most humiliating thing a girl could do to a guy, aside from laughing at his prick. But I didn’t feel too bad because the incident made my teammates actually like me. Even later in the season, they would still take turns imitating how I threw up my elbow just before ramming into Neil. That pussy deserved to get plowed by The Girl, they would say. They called me, The Girl. I liked that name better than Jessica’s Sister or Nerd.
One day I got to practice early, and only the Tommys were there. As I leaned my bike against the fence, I saw Tall Tommy shoving his fingers under Ugly Tommy’s nose, and Ugly Tommy said, Damn, that pussy smells sweet– I wouldn’t ever wash my hands if I was you. They didn’t stop talking about Jenna Passanti’s sweet smell on Tall Tommy’s fingers, even when they turned to see that it was The Girl who was walking toward them. I just sat on the bench and didn’t say anything. Tall Tommy passed me the joint they had been sharing, and I took a long hit, even though I was afraid I might catch an STD, being that it was only one degree removed from Jenna Passanti’s crotch.
About a month later, on the first day of tenth grade, Jenna Passanti was found in the woods just inside the Bird Brothel. She was partially naked and all beat up by her boyfriend, Pete Mason. Pete was one of those kids who wore Polo shirts and had a nice smile and who said all the right things, but who was really a fucking douchebag, my sister said. She said this before Pete beat up Jenna, so I guess it was sorta well-known that he was no good. Jenna was in my grade though, so she probably didn’t know that the older kids thought Pete was an asshole.
Channel 12 News, the Long Island TV station, was obsessed with the whole thing. It reported that Jenna had made fun of the way Pete performed sexually, and that was why Pete beat the living shit out of her and then sexually assaulted her. So then Mr. Pearl, the Health teacher, made us watch every video he could find on date rape. This was in addition to the usual scare-tactic videos he used to show us, including the documentary that featured real-life addicts shooting heroin into their eyeballs because there were no other viable places left on their bodies to inject needles. It was depressing. We all swore we’d never do heroin or let a guy beat us up, but we also knew that the odds were that some of us would. I hated high school, even though I got good grades, and I just wanted to cut and hang out with CD and Rod and Hoff, who had already graduated, but those guys wouldn’t tolerate me missing school. Eventually, we all just went our separate ways.
A year after I graduated from high school, and a few years before I ran into Hoff at the 7-11, CD’s brother, Bruce, got shit-faced at Mr. Lucky’s Pub. He decided to do the prudent thing and walk home, leaving his old Skylark on the graveled pathway behind the bar that served as Mr. Lucky’s parking lot. About half-way home, Bruce was struck by a drunk driver and killed instantly. He was left on the side of Sunrise Highway until the early morning when a cop happened to slow down to watch some deer grazing nearby and then noticed Bruce face-down in the grass.
I was so far removed from that whole scene by then that I probably wouldn’t have known about Bruce dying if I didn’t happen to be in Park City at the time on a break from college. I went to the wake. All the boys were there. CD, of course, and Rod and Hoff. The Tommys were also there, as were most of the other players from our team. The funeral home was packed, so most of us had to hang outside, which was fine with me because I did not want to see Bruce lying dead in a coffin at nineteen years old.
After the wake, a bunch of us went to the diner, and we sat at one of those round booths in the corner where they put large groups. CD shared a story about this one time when he went to the diner with Bruce and Hoff. Bruce had wanted to order one of the cakes in the display case. Not just a slice of it, but the whole cake for the three of them to share. This was after Bruce had gotten a job at the hardware store due to some government program that compensated local businesses for hiring people with disabilities. Bruce was so proud to get the job that he wanted to treat his older brother and his friend, and ordering a whole cake seemed like the best kind of celebration that a guy like Bruce could conjure up in his generous, childish head. CD said no, that they would have come across as being really high had they eaten the whole cake. But we are high, Bruce apparently pleaded. We all laughed because it was funny as hell, and it really captured Bruce’s personality. He would say shit like that all the time, and it would have us laughing really hard, even though Bruce wasn’t trying to be funny. The beautiful thing about Bruce was that he saw everything as it really was, and there really was nothing even a tiny bit funny about the way things actually happened to be.
The waitress came over to take our order, and CD said, We’ll take a whole cake from the display case. Without even looking up at us, the waitress said, The only cake that’s still whole is carrot. So then give us the whole fucking carrot cake, CD said, and she wrote it down on her pad as if it were something she could potentially forget. She walked away, and Tall Tommy said, I wonder if she wrote “whole carrot cake” or “the whole fucking carrot cake.” Then we all went outside into the back of Tall Tommy’s van to take bong hits.
Isn’t this the bong that your mom took, Rod asked, and Tall Tommy said that his mom actually didn’t confiscate his bong, that he must have just lost it because it recently resurfaced. How the fuck do you lose a bong, Ugly Tommy asked. And how the fuck does it just resurface, Rod added. Maybe your mom borrowed it, I said, and the guys all laughed pretty hard. Don’t hog it, CD said, pass it to the Nerd. Are you allowed to smoke weed at Columbia, Tall Tommy asked. Ugly Tommy said, It’s the biggest drug country in the world, of course she can smoke there. She’s at Columbia University, not Colombia the country, you dumbass, CD said, and we all laughed and Ugly Tommy had a huge coughing fit, which made us laugh even more.
We must have reeked when we went back inside the diner. The carrot cake was on the table already sliced and waiting for us along with a stack of plates and napkins. Oh, this is gonna be the best cake ever, Hoff said, and then he added, here’s to Bruce! To Bruce, we all said and for a moment we all felt sober, thinking of poor Bruce doing the right thing and walking home from Mr. Lucky’s. Then Hoff continued, you see where being responsible gets you– gets you dead, that’s where.
We recalled Hoff saying that a couple of years later when we went to the diner after his wake. Being irresponsible gets you dead too, CD said, and we all toasted to Hoff. Then Rod talked about the days when Hoff used to vacuum himself out of his apartment and we all fell silent as we scraped cake crumbs from our plates. What are you doing here, CD said, I thought you got out? You say that like Park City is a prison, I said. It is, they all said in unison. Hey, what are you studying anyway? Shouldn’t you be done with college already? I’m in law school now, I said. Jeez, Nerd!, they all said in unison. Are you going to be a prosecutor, Tall Tommy asked. No, I said, I don’t know, I mean I don’t really like law school. Then the Tommys got up and reenacted the time when I knocked Neil down at first base, and everyone hooted and hollered, and some gray-haired couple turned toward us, rolling their tired eyes passive-aggressively at our brief joyous moment. Seriously, Nerd, what the fuck are you doing here with us, CD pressed. I don’t know, I said. I’m just home on break and then Hoff died and now I’m here fucking around with you guys. How’s your sister, CD asked? She’s alright. She’s engaged to Phil. I always liked your sister, CD said. No you didn’t, I said, You thought she was pretty, maybe, but you didn’t like her. Yeah, she was hot, CD said, and then added, but soon she’s gonna be fat and pregnant with a bunch of little Phils. And they all laughed pretty hard. Really, you need to stop hanging out with us, CD said. Yeah, one day you might prosecute us, Rod said. And no one laughed even a little.
The next time I went back to Park City was for Jessica and Phil’s wedding. None of the guys were invited. My sister wasn’t friends with them anymore. But after the wedding, I met some of them at the diner. I’m not sure why. I was drunk from the wedding and over my head with stress from studying for the Bar Exam, and I didn’t have any other friends in the area. That’s like the hardest test on earth, Ugly Tommy said. She’ll pass, CD said. Then to me, he said, You gotta stop hanging out with us. Then the two of us went outside to where the cigarette machines used to be and did a few bumps of coke off our knuckles. You gotta promise me you’ll get the fuck out of here, he said. Park Shitty’s not that shitty, I said. He smiled and said, then why does it feel so shitty? He had this boyish smile, but this time when he laughed, I could tell his teeth were getting that meth-head rot, and it was sad but also not sad. It’s as though I saw him the way that his little brother Bruce would have seen him: just as he was. No more, no less.
CD suddenly stopped smiling and he looked straight at me and said, You gotta promise me you’ll get the fuck out, you have to make the promise. You always say that, but I already am out, I said. No, you still have a foot here in this shitty town. We left the diner without saying goodbye to the others, and we tip-toed into my parents’ house, into my childhood room, into my bed. We did a few lines of coke off of my Con Law textbook, which CD thought was hilarious. Come on, quote the Constitution he said, and then he deepened his voice and declared, Four score and seven years–
That’s not the fucking Constitution, I said. You must think I’m an idiot, he said and tossed the textbook from my lap, and then he got annoyed at how much coke was wasted on the floor. Don’t be an asshole, I said. He turned to me and pinned me down by my wrists. I told you to get the fuck out of here, he said. His eyes were like two huge holes. There was no emotion to them, but his voice was angry and jittery from the coke. Come on, tough girl, you’re supposed to be a badass. He pushed down hard on my wrists, and I said nothing, just stared at him, feeling his weight press me deeper into the bed, and I wanted to stay there pinned by my desires and my past for perpetuity.
He suddenly let go of my wrists and unzipped my jeans. He looked at me as if to ask if I was sure I wanted to keep going, but I just stared at him. He was not a good fuck, and I wasn’t either. Afterwards, we lay vacuously next to each other, and he said, your tits are hotter than your sister’s. That’s kinda gross to think about, I said. But it felt good to hear. He kissed my forehead with a tenderness that felt like a pat on the head and then he did two lines off my stomach. That was fucking awesome, he said, lifting his head from my belly and rubbing his nose with his fist, and I got the feeling that he was mimicking something he had seen in a movie. Wasn’t that fucking awesome, he said. What, I wanted to ask, but instead I said, The Constitution, Article I, Section 1: All legislative powers shall be granted to a Congress. It wasn’t an exact quote by any means, but it didn’t matter.
You gotta be fuckin’ kidding me, Nerd, he said with that decaying boyish smile, then he dipped down to lick some stray coke off my belly. I liked the way his tongue was warm and adoring, as though it felt lucky to be able to taste my skin. I can’t believe you exist and you chose to fuck me, he whispered, I mean, why the fuck did you fuck me? You know where I’m gonna end up, don’t you? Where, I asked? He just shook his head.
The next morning, my dad banged on my door and yelled at me to get up before my pancakes got cold. CD must have snuck out at some point after I fell asleep. He would have gotten a kick out of the way my dad folded the pancakes into mini chocolate-chip tacos.
The last I heard, when CD’s mom went to visit him in the hospital, she was taken aback by his painted fingernails. She saw the polished nails first, then the restraints which tightly bound his wrists to the bed rails, then the bruises on his eyes and chin. The innkeeper–or whatever you call him–found CD earlier that morning in a ground-floor room of the Park City Motel, dressed in drag, lying in his own piss and blood. Can you believe I dated that guy, my sister said. He’s such a loser, prostituting himself out for meth or God knows what.
It was Black Friday, and we were in my parents’ kitchen. Jessica was taking out the Thanksgiving leftovers to make sandwiches. She had separated from Phil, and she and her two girls had been staying with my parents for almost a year already. She knew where everything was kept, the bread, the mayonnaise, the cutting boards. I paced around the kitchen, thinking of the soft, deliberate, even delicate motion of CD’s tongue on my skin. Then I suddenly wondered what color his nails had been painted and whether he had painted them himself. CD was once the kind of person who would have laughed at a man who polished his nails and pimped himself out for drugs.
Oh my God, what a loser, Jessica kept saying, what a fucking loser. OK, damn it, I yelled. Jess, we get the picture. He’s a fucking loser. We got it loud and clear. A. God. Damned. Fucking. Loser. My sister’s youngest daughter was about three at the time, and she kind of looked like I did at her age, with two curly pig-tails on either side of her chubby face. She was sitting on the kitchen floor playing with some Tupperware, staring up at me with her mouth open, and when I looked down at her, she began to cry in that slow way that starts with a confused look, a quivering lip, then finally tears. Oh great, thanks a lot sis, Jessica said.
I took Jessica’s minivan and drove to the diner, but by then the diner had gone out of business and a Family Dollar had sprouted up in its place. When did that happen, I wondered. I smoked up in the parking lot and thought about the organizations that I could create to help people get back on their feet before they end up like CD. But I knew I wouldn’t actually do any such thing. I had already put in my dues at the firm and would be named partner by the end of the year if I continued to play my cards right, so there was no time for charitable work. Then suddenly I was startled by the rapping of knuckles on the passenger-side window.
I turned toward the noise, and a large, pale police officer peered at me through the condensation on the window pane. He made a circular motion with his fist, signaling for me to roll down the window. I did, and he asked, What are you doing? That’s when I realized the joint was still in my mouth, and I thought to myself, this is it, this is the end of everything. Forget partner, you’re fucked.
Dom Harris, one of the firm’s managing partners, told us associates that if we ever got into trouble, we shouldn’t lie. It’s the lie that gets you disbarred, not the indiscretion, he said. Then he added, but at home, to your spouse, you lie like a God-damned rug because the truth gets you fucked in the ass when it comes time for the divorce. However, this wasn’t a curbside blow job or whatever it was that Dom was into. This was weed, and although it’s not a big deal now, it certainly was then. And, I hate to say it, but I also happened to have some other drugs in my purse that would have made CD’s no-no list had he kept it up to date. I had to use every ounce of self-control I had left in my body to avoid glancing at the purse, which was right there on the passenger seat. If I allowed just one flutter of an eyelash to tilt over in its direction, I would have been doomed. Such a look would have been the sort of self-sabotaging giveaway that separates the successful people from the losers of the world. Instead, I concentrated on holding the cop’s gaze and trying not to shift my eyes in any direction whatsoever.
He shined his flashlight through the open window, ignoring the purse and focusing instead on me. I felt exposed for the phony I was. He stared at me long and hard, and he seemed to be thinking or recalling something from his past. Did he know me? He looked a little like everyone I had grown up with but no one person in particular.
What do you think you’re looking at, I wanted to say, but I knew what he was seeing. In the halo of his Maglite sat a displaced woman in designer business-casual clothing who happened to have a joint dangling from her lips. Wearing that sort of Saks get-up in Park City always made me feel like I was playing dress up, as if I were an imposter who would at any moment be discovered for the loser she always was. Finally, the moment was here, the gig was about to be up, and it felt, oddly enough, liberating. Free from having to be the Girl or the Nerd or the Lawyer, or Jessica’s Sister or the One Who Would Make it Out (Who Did Make it Out), I could just be another shitty loser in this shitty town. It felt like failure, and it was fucking invigorating.
I tilted my head back, inhaled as deeply as I could, and through a blissful swirl of exhaling smoke, I whispered so softly that the officer had to lean his head into the car and over my pill-packed purse to hear: Don’t you know, I said, I’m an undercover prosecutor.
He smiled, shaking his head at my calm audacity. Then he laughed out loud in a boyish way that reminded me of CD in the old days, before his teeth started to go bad. Get rid of the drugs, he said.
I opened the driver’s side window and dropped what was left of the joint into the parking lot. He laughed again, Undercover prosecutor, he said under his breath, that’s a good one. To him, the truth was funny. He didn’t see things the way they really were, not the way CD’s dead brother used to, not the way I was starting to.
Now get the hell out of here, he said.
I’m trying. I’m fucking trying.
BIO
Melissa Or crafts fiction that gives voice to the small, unspoken stories that exist beneath life’s many silences. Her characters both belong and do not belong. They are outsiders, whether in their own countries, their own families, or their own minds. She is writing a novel and a collection of short stories.
Artwork: Image by McZ
