last girl I went home with before I met Oryn was busy in the nose department—the kind of girl James would say was best taken from behind. The lights were out, and she started making these sounds like she was having an asthma attack. I asked her if she was okay. She started all-out bawling.
“What’s wrong?” I said.
She heaved, and then her breath came out in jolts. “I don’t know what I (huh!) did wrong. I don’t know (huh!) why he left me.”
Her crying grew louder.
With the smell of our sex in the dark, with her crying, with that loneliness between us, I could only think of Shelly holding out to me the ring I’d given her, returning it.
The girl talked into her pillow. I think she said, “I love him so much. I can’t believe I love him this much.”
“Don’t cry, don’t cry.” I sat next to her. “You’ll get over it, you know? It takes some time.”
She cried louder into her pillow. I rubbed her naked back and she let her ass fall onto my leg. I lay next to her and continued rubbing her back, letting her soak her pillow until she settled down into a sniffle.
“We all get over these things,” I said.
After a while, the girl fell asleep. I put my clothes on and left. Naked, unabashedly crying, wiping snot on the sheets in front of strangers: shit like that brought me down.
Shelly had said whenever—come by whenever. There was a transfer at the Jamaica station. Thirty minutes later I was on the university’s commuter bus, churning toward the dormitory towers.
Shelly answered her door wearing pajamas. She let me in. Her hair was flat against her head from sleep.
I dropped my bags and hugged her.
She put her arms around me and patted my back. “Hey, what are you doing here?” She stepped away.
“You said come by whenever, right? I thought I’d come to see you.”
“Yeah?” She walked over to her bed and started fixing the covers.
“It was weird seeing you last night,” I said. “Penn Station of all places.”
“Yeah, I was so fucked up.”
“I know. You have the same comforter.”
“Listen, you can sit for a while if you want to.”
“Oh . . . I thought maybe we would catch up.”
She put her pillow down and faced me, and then with her arms at her sides, she held her palms out to me. “I’m so sorry, Jared. I should have told you to call first.”
“Well, I could wait here for you if you have to do something. We can hang out when you get back. I could use a nap anyway, you know? I don’t mind, really.”
“I’m going to kind of be in here,” she said with this sorry look on her face. “It’s my fault. I should’ve told you.” She’d had that same look when she broke up with me, where her head was held down and tilted to the side as if she were looking at my feet but still looking at my face, though at the point farthest away from my eyes.
“You know what? I’m tired of playing games.”
“Who’s playing games, Jared? I’m not playing any games. I just can’t break plans right now. I just can’t drop—”
“Stop it, Shelly. Fucking Christ.”
“I just can’t—” She looked up, blinking tears off her eyelids. “What can I do, Jared? I don’t know what you even want from me.”
“Why the fuck do you always cry?”
“Because I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Then why do you? Because I don’t have any money.”
“I never even said that. Where do you get that?”
“Yeah, you said you were too young—”
“I said—”
“—but I got your clue. We have no car and we have no money and you don’t buy me things bullshit, but you can’t say it because that would make you the shallow bitch you are, you fucking—”
“I wasn’t in love with you! All right?”
The room was quiet except for the sound of geese flying by and cars on the highway, noises that crept in from the outside world and seemed as far away as Shelly. A slate of clouds had blocked out the sun. She sat on her bed, looking at the floor. Once more, I slammed the door behind me.
On the train, I had a dream of Shelly, but she looked like Vanlisa, tall and sinewy. She was naked, facing away from me. I reached between her legs and cupped her genitalia in my hand. But she stepped away, and it came off in my grip. It was made of rubber.
The transfer was at Babylon. I stood on the station’s platform and waited for the train to Floyd Harbor. I had a notebook and a pen in hand. Before I dropped out of college, I had the idea that maybe I would be good at writing. I felt like I might want to write something now—not poems—but I didn’t know what to say.
A man with lips so wet I could see them shine from across the platform tried to start a conversation with some girl standing off by herself. The man looked maybe sixty, and he had a belly like a leaking sack full of mud, leaving a brown stain on the front of his shirt and pants. He held a dirty pizzeria cup. The girl saw him approaching and she turned and walked the other way with this tense expression on her face, her eyes widening.
Then he saw me.
When he talked to me, his spit hung like a loose thread between his parting lips, some of it dripping down and getting trapped in the grayish brown stubble on his face, some of it collecting in white foam in the corners of his mouth. He said, “You writing a book, buddy?” His breath smelled of whiskey.
“Brainstorming,” I said. The book was empty.
He responded with a blank stare.
“I’m just putting down a few ideas.”
“You want to see some ideas? Give me some paper.”
I tore a page out of my notebook and gave it to him.
He forced his pizzeria cup into my hand and grabbed my pen. “What’s your name?”
“Jared.”
“Okay, Joey. Watch this.” Then he wrote something down and handed me the paper and pen: women = cunts
He laughed loudly at this. “Do you like that?”
“Yeah, that’s really good,” I said, taking a step back as the breeze carried his scent to me.
“Watch this.” He grabbed the pen and paper out of my hand and,
