Punk Love

We got to my house. I unclipped my seatbelt. It was nighttime. My dog was barking up a storm. I was thinking of what lie I was going to feed my parents about where I’d been, because somehow I didn’t think ‘some seventeen-year-old alcoholic’s basement’ was going to fly.

Alex still hadn’t kissed me. He said he wouldn’t, and dammit, he wasn’t lying.

Out of all the assholes in the universe, I had to go for the one who actually stayed true to his word. Didn’t he know principles were so nineties?

“Okay.” I sighed.

“Okay,” he echoed flatly.

“I would say thanks for today, but all you did was drag me to a store, then crush my self-esteem by telling me I could never be a drummer.”

Alex poked at his lower lip. “I’m not taking it back. You can never be a drummer. If it were up to me, I would honestly never put you in a room with a musical instrument ever again. But if it makes you feel any better, your lack of talent is impressive in itself. So, you know, it’s not that I wasn’t mesmerized. I was. Just not in a good way.”

“Kind words.”

He shrugged. “I’m a straight shooter.”

“No need to aim for the heart, though.”

He smiled. He was about to say something, but I didn’t want him to be the one to kick me out of his car. As noted: ego the size of Iowa and all.

“So. Bye.” I got out of his Volvo abruptly, making a beeline to my house.

I wanted him to roll the window down, to call out for me, to stop me.

None of those things happened, though. I walked, opened, and closed the gate while feeling his eyes on my back, and wondered for the millionth time why did I have a taste for weird, unattainable guys?

That evening, I stayed the heck away from ICQ. I couldn’t run the risk of Alex seeing that I had no life and was waiting for him to message me. You have to understand, this was pre-smart phones. We had Blackberries, but we didn’t have any social media on our phones.

If you were online on Friday night, that meant you were home on Friday night, and that meant you were friendless and probably crying into your cereal bowl while watching Clueless reruns.

I made myself vegan cocoa, dove under the blankets, and—you guessed it! Ding, ding, ding—watched Clueless. Then I read The Promise by Danielle Steel, just to get the dose of romance that had been missing from my date.

It was, as with all of Danielle Steel’s work, a fantastic book and great escapism.

I was particularly exhilarated by the fact that our main character, Nancy, never gave up on Peter’s dick, no matter how hard (insert sexual innuendo here) things had gotten. I ended up reading until the wee hours of the night, bawling into my third cocoa mug, and wondering how I could get my hands on all of Steel’s books without going bankrupt.

When I couldn’t keep my eyes open anymore, I turned off my lamp and patted myself on the back. I may not had been a great musician, but I sure knew how not to come off as desperate.

I didn’t check my phone or ICQ messages that night after Alex dropped me off.

In the morning, however, I ran to my computer and logged into ICQ before I even brushed my teeth. I knew that if Alex was going to contact me, it was going to be there.

Sending a text message via phone was way too normal for him.

My heart pounded so hard and fast, it deafened the sounds coming from the breakfast table in the family room. My brother was whining about my finishing the orange juice. My mother was yelling at no one in particular that she was nobody’s maid. The dog was barking. Dad asked where the remote was, but he was probably sitting on it again.

And me? I sent a silent player to the universe as my computer coughed its way into life.

Please, let there be a message waiting.

Please.

Please.

Please.

Sure enough, Alex’s name was in bold when I logged into the messaging software.

The timestamp from the message showed that he sent it to me not twenty minutes after he dropped me off. He must’ve gone straight to the computer as soon as he’d gotten home.

Alex: Let’s do this again, Honeypie.

Daaaamn. Someone cried into his cereal while watching Clueless yesterday, too. Whatever happened to breaking skulls and performing in seedy underground clubs?

Okay, I wrote back. But you know the rules. No kissing.

His message back to me was immediate.

Alex: No kissing. Girls are fucking gross.

Things were not going great for Alex and me.

And by ‘not going great’ I mean they were going kind of fantastic, but without any of the good parts, if that makes sense.

Oh, it doesn’t? Allow me to elaborate, then.