When I was eight, Tommy Strauss used to put worms down my shirt on the playground. It perplexed me, since I’d never done anything to him, and there he was, nearly weekly, putting a creepy crawly down my back for no good reason at all. When I cried to my mother for the seventh time or so, she said simply, “he likes you. Little boys have a shitty way of showing it. Most men aren’t that much better.”
Her candor confused me even more, so the next time it happened, I made a statement: I didn’t like him. I punched him in face. He ended up crying in the nurse’s office, while I waited outside the Principal’s with a bag of crushed ice on my fist. He never crept up behind me again and I got grounded from the television for a week.
Fast forward a decade, and I realize that Hayden and Tommy were similar creatures.
I didn’t know how old he was, that first day in November when he sat on my bench at the mall, but I figured that he was in his early 20s. He had the swagger that years of inexperience, overconfidence and mommy’s preening had provided, yet drove a piece of shit on four wheels and wore clothes that looked as if they’d recently been crumpled in a ball on his floor.
He smelled good, I’ll give him that. And he had pure green eyes. You never find those, anymore – they’re always muddied with brown or blue.
I said hey in a perfectly crafted adolescent way and he said, “I don’t fuck whores. But I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.”
Instead of planting a fist or boot in his face, I gave him the finger and stalked away.
The next couple of days, the weather chilled, making my fur-trimmed parka a necessity over my usual uniform. I’d lifted it the week before from a table that some princesses in the food court had marked as their territory. Failing economy, you know? It was cold and I needed it, and really, there was no doubt that mommy or daddy would buy her a new one.
It was a warm coat, but it didn’t make up for the bare skin north of the equator.
Hayden came walking up to my bench again, where my hands shook as I sucked smoke into my lungs – my fingers were numbing and I almost dropped the ciggie the last trick had pushed into my hand when I asked for a tip.
“Smoking can kill you, you know.”
The arrogance dripping from this asshole made me see red, immediately.
“What the fuck do you care? Fuck off.” My attempt to get him out of my face was misguided, spurring further response from him.
“Well, you’re polluting the air. Air that I breathe. So I care, because I don’t really feel like dying of lung cancer one day. If I did, I’d look just as classy as you right now, sucking back mouthfuls of tar.”
I didn’t want to admit it, but he had me there. If I hadn’t perfected my don’t-give-a-shit, you’re-boring-to-me exterior, I’d have raised one eyebrow and smiled at him. Instead, I stood up to walk away, saying, “I’ll just leave you to some clean air, then.”
He stood up, too, facing me. I hate admitting this part, too, but I really thought that I was about to be swept up in a Hollywood romance encounter, where the hero rescues the tortured heroine from herself with a magical, soul-tearing kiss. He stepped toward me and I turned to face him. I was pretty fucking spooked.
And that’s when that evil shit took the smoke out of my hand, threw it in a rain puddle and handed me a cup of coffee.
“See ya, whore,” was what he said to me, as he turned and walked away.
I at once wanted to kill him. I also wanted to jump on his back and tell him to piggyback me away from the mall parking lot, into, I don’t know, the freaking sunset, maybe.
I’d never been so frustrated and confused by a man before, because Jerry had taught me well the ins and outs (ha. Sorry, more occupational humour) of the male brain. Men were so simple. Most of it had to do with thinking with their dicks. But Hayden seemed both dickless and like he was made of balls.
On that day, I didn’t know his name, just that his 20 year old car was dented and rusting out from under him. I didn’t know how big a role he was about to play in my life.
All I knew for sure was that he bought good coffee.
