Where We Left Off (Middle of Somewhere 3)

“Oh shit. Good point. Um….”

She looked at me for a while, and I could almost see the questions she wanted to ask running through her head. “How do you feel about puns?” she asked, finally, smiling slightly and narrowing her eyes at me.

Crap! Did she like them and I was supposed to say I loved them? Or did they annoy her and if I said I thought they were cool I wouldn’t get hired?

“I-I—well….”

“You’re totally trying to figure out what I want to hear right now, aren’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, you’re hired on a trial basis. Be here tomorrow at three for training.”

IT TURNED out to be no coincidence that Milton had known how to get on the roof the night we met. He made it his business to always know an escape route, a side effect of going to a snobby private school, he said, where immediate egress was sometimes the only thing that had stood between him and losing his mind.

We were sitting on the fire escape on the north side of the building where we had Psych. Milton had pulled me out a fire door after lecture unexpectedly, talking loudly about nothing, and then hustled me up two flights before flopping down onto the chilly metal.

“What are you doing? Where are we? Jesus, is this even safe? This doesn’t feel safe.” The metal was an open grid, so if I looked down, I could see the dumpsters five stories below.

“Oh, just hold on to the railing, we’re fine.”

“Soooo….”

Milton rubbed his temples. He looked thrown.

“Umm, just this guy. He’s a senior and he’s like the best actor. Seriously, he was on some TV show or something after high school, and he took a few years off to do it and then came back to school because he wanted to learn more about his craft, isn’t that cool?”

Milton sounded uncharacteristically swoony.

“And why are we outside on this deathtrap because you have a crush on the next….” I couldn’t think of a really famous theater actor, and Milton laughed at me. Then he muttered something.

“What was that?”

“I just saw him coming down the hallway and I panicked is all.”

“Oh my gosh, this is great!”

“Not from where I’m sitting.”

“Oh, sorry, no, not great for you. Definitely not. For me! Because if you can get all freaked and flustered over a guy, then it means I’m not such a total mess. Jeez, I just thought you were cool all the time, but this is way better.”

“Gee, thank you so much, Leo.”

“Sorry, sorry, but I mean, obviously this guy will like you. You’re so awesome. And you’re hot. And a great kisser. I’ll testify to it if this guy wants.” We could say things like this to one another now, since we’d firmly established that we were not ever going to hook up again. It felt nice. Intimate, in a friends kind of way. “What’s his name, anyway?”

“Jason,” Milton said, the word practically a sigh.

After a few moments where I thought he’d say more and he stared down at the dumpsters, Milton seemed to shake it off, and he hauled me up by the arm and hustled me back to our dorm saying we were running out of time to eat before movie night.

“Direct all your criticisms to Milton,” I told Thomas and Gretchen. “I had absolutely nothing to do with this decision.”

When Milton announced that for movie night tonight we’d be starting to watch Felicity, I thought he was kidding, until he pulled out a disturbingly pastel box set.

“Are those DVDs?” Thomas asked, the way you might ask “Is that a cockroach?” Milton clutched the box set to his chest and glared.

Gretchen narrowed her eyes and looked between me and the box set. “Ah, I get it,” she said with what I could’ve sworn was pity.

“I am not Felicity!”

“Oh, boo,” Milton said, shaking his head. “You really haven’t ever seen the show, have you?”

MY CULTURAL Foundations paper was due in twenty hours, and Charles was deep into one of his conspiracy theory rants, this one, as far as I could tell, something about the Denver International Airport being secretly designed by the Freemasons.

“—an entire network of subterranean tunnels that they claim were an automated baggage delivery system, but it never worked even though its installation cost millions of dollars,” Charles was saying, and I was only half listening, nodding at what seemed to be key phrases, like “bunker” and “shadow government” and “New World Order.” Usually, if I just kind of nodded along, Charles would eventually run down his own motor.

It had become my approach ever since the day he’d tried to explain the theories of the second gunman in the JFK assassination, complete with schematics of the grassy knoll, reedited versions of the Zapruder film, and heavily redacted scanned documents from the Warren Commission.