“It’s okay, Reggie.” Snake reached into his pocket, and before I even saw it, I knew he was after a Twizzler. “Let’s see,” he said, tapping the licorice to his chin. “I moved here this past year from Westbrook, just south of Flashburn. I’m sure you know where that is. And I lived in a two-story Victorian. And I had a racecar bed. And we went to Cedar Point every summer. And I got bedtime stories read to me about the Lorax. And they were always still there when I woke up the next morning. So, if that sounds difficult to you, then, yeah. I guess I had it pretty hard.” He took a bite.
My mother glared at my dad for reinforcement, but what could he do? Snake had just answered an invasive question the best way he knew how. Couldn’t fault him for that. And besides, when it came to fight or flight, my dad was a first-class pilot. He would have been much better off in the basement, stitching the skin of a dead squirrel.
Another uncomfortable silence oozed into the room. I knew if I didn’t get out of there fast, Karen would find a way to make the unembarrassable Snake feel embarrassed.
I grabbed his arm and pulled him through the door. As he was stepping onto the porch, he leaned his head back inside and said, “It’s Matthew, in case you were wondering.”
“What?” my dad asked.
“My birth name is Matthew.”
Then he shut the door behind him.
He parked the Prius at the end of a cul-de-sac in a dingy neighborhood downtown. I didn’t go downtown much, but I liked it. Everyone walked slowly, like they were dying, and even the sun that was beginning to set over the hills couldn’t brighten anyone’s day. Misery with no end in sight. These were my people.
“You didn’t seem keen on coming out with me tonight,” Snake said as he yanked the key out of the ignition.
“Was it the insults or the blatant no that gave you that impression?”
“It might have been the attempted assault. That was pretty telling.”
“Would you be keen on going out with you?”
He leaned closer. His dull blue eyes judged me beneath his hair. “I’m going to reverse that question. Would you be keen on going out with you?”
“I wasn’t the one who begged for a date. If you think you’re doing me some favor, you can do me another and take me home.”
He grinned and spun his keys around his finger. “It’s not me who’s doing the favor.” He reached into the back seat and grabbed something, then bumped my face with cardboard as he pulled it to the front. “Sorry.” He laughed, touching my forehead. The cardboard was a pizza box. “I know you hate most things, but I’m assuming you like pizza.”
“It’s all right.”
I love pizza.
“Well, this pizza is two days old. And it’s cold. And we are going to eat it over there.” He pointed to a dumpsite beyond a barbed-wire fence, stacked with garbage bags taller than the houses. “You may want to know why, or you don’t care. Either way, I want us to dig into a cold pizza and whine about how lonely and depressed we are while sitting on top of a heaping pile of rot. An anti-date. Is that terrible enough for you?”
He opened the car door and popped the trunk, retrieving a bulky black video camera that probably cost more than my house. I wondered how he could afford it.
“What are you doing with that?” I asked as we headed toward the fence.
“I’m a filmmaker. Aspiring filmmaker, actually. I like to document moments so I can watch them back and mourn the sheer uselessness of our condition.”
“You just film things for the heck of it?”
“I enter contests on occasion.”
“You ever win?”
“Winning is such an abstract term—”
“You’ve never won.”
“Yeah, no.” He smiled. “But I’ve been runner-up. Like, a lot.”
I kicked a pebble and it whizzed across the lot. “So what’s the subject tonight?”
“Tonight.” He shrugged. “I just want to capture the sheer uselessness of our condition.”
He led me to the waste site. The fence was conveniently torn where the metal met the dirt, just round enough for us to crawl through. The camera was a challenge, but once Snake scuttled under, he dug a spot in the ground to give it room to slide. We climbed up a ladder on the side of a green disposal bin, me with a pizza box under my arm and Snake with a camera tied around his back. When we reached the top, we were at least fifteen feet in the air, the romantic aroma of spoiled food and dirty diapers stinging our nostrils from below. I sat down beside Snake on the edge of the bin, and he offered me a slice of cold pizza.
“You don’t know how pitiful Flashburn is until you see it from above,” I said.
“Right? Up here there’s a great view of the black hole sucking inhabitants into the void. It’s between suburbia and the pond.” He unhooked the camera from where he had fastened it like a backpack and flipped a switch that triggered a flashing red button. “Landscape shots,” he said, as images of the dilapidated houses reflected in the lens.
“It must be nice to have a talent.”
“Not exactly.” He turned the camera off and placed it beside him. “It’s painful to have a passion. You care so much it hurts.” He looked at me. “I’m sure that you’ve experienced too much caring, or you wouldn’t be so depressed.”
I hadn’t cared much about anything the past few months. My therapist said it was because I overanalyzed simplicities, that life wasn’t so complex that I couldn’t take the good for what it was and accept it. But that didn’t seem like an applicable observation. More like something I could find in a self-help book (see: feel-good bullshit).
“My therapist makes me write,” I told him.
“What kind of stuff does she make you write?”
“Journal entries. Self-evaluations. My own eulogy.”
His eyes bulged behind his camera. “No way.”
“Okay, the last part was a lie. But she might as well. She’s basically forcing me to find a passion.”
“Well, do you like writing?” he asked.
“Kind of. But it doesn’t really matter if I do or don’t.”
“Why?”
“It just doesn’t. We’re the smart ones, remember? Caring about life and dreaming that you can change the world in any significant way . . .” I almost laughed at the idea. “It’s . . . I don’t know . . . it’s kind of . . .”
“Like searching for a pebble in the sand?” he finished.
I had never thought if it that way, but it was true. Like digging for a needle in a haystack. “Yeah. Exactly like that.”
He grabbed the camera and turned it on himself, the red light flashing in his eyes. “I am but a pebble in the sand,” he said into the lens. “I am sitting on a pile of garbage eating pizza that tastes like paper with a girl who hates me almost as much as she hates herself, and I am but a pebble in the sand.” He turned the camera off. “Can I tell you a story?”
“No.”