“I thought you had to work Thursday afternoons,” she says.
“I do but not until later. It never hurts to get a little fortified before work, you know.”
She stares at her burger. “So where do you two go to have drinks?”
“Nowhere. We just hang out on the patio mostly.”
“At her house?”
“Yeah. In fact, we were just talking about going on a double date—me, you, Cassidy, and Marcus.” Maybe that’s not exactly the truth, but it is something that could be arranged somewhere down the line, and it gets the subject back on a positive track. “How about that? Think we should do it sometime?”
“Uh, sure, that’d be all right, I guess.”
“Great. You want some of my French fries?”
“Okay.”
And that’s that. No accusations, no tears, no big scene. Everything’s cool. For the time being.
Of course, the situation might have become more emotional if we were having sex, but I have wisely steered away from that so things don’t get too messy when the end comes. So far, it’s just been the same old car-in-the-driveway kiss and rub. I figure we’ll never go too far as long as there’s the threat of Aimee’s mom or Randy-the-Walrus walking up on us at any second.
See, I agree with what Cassidy says—once you have sex you’ll always be sewn together with an astral thread. I’m no expert on astral stuff, but she’s definitely onto something there, and I sure don’t want Aimee getting all tangled up in a sticky thread like that come time for her to say adios to the Sutterman.
It’s not easy, though. I’ve counted to about a million, listed most of the presidents, and played mental reruns of my favorite old movie, Dumb and Dumber, just to keep the horniness at bay while making out with her. I know I told Ricky there’s no way she could ever be a hottie, but the body doesn’t lie. The head does, but not the body. My blue balls testify to that every time I drive home from her house.
But my greatest challenge is yet to come. Only a couple of days after our Cassidy talk at McDonald’s, Aimee hits me with the big question—Do I want to sleep over and help with the paper route the next morning while little brother Shane’s spending the night with a friend and Mom and Randy are off for an all-night run on the Indian casinos?
Maybe the timing is just a coincidence, but I can’t help wondering if Aimee wants to shift our relationship into the bedroom as a way of competing with Cassidy. Of course, just because we’re spending the night together doesn’t mean we have to have sex, but it’s sure going to make it a lot tougher to avoid it. But you know me—I’m always up for a challenge.
When the big night rolls around, I do the usual deal, tell my mom I’m spending the night at Ricky’s. Then I load up on videos, pizza, chips, salsa, Twinkies, whisky, 7UP, vodka, and cranapple juice. Of course, when I get to Aimee’s, she has the soft sixties music playing and the candles stationed around the living room, so I’m starting out with a ten-degrees-of-difficulty super-challenge already.
We have three movies to choose from, two comedies and one moody sci-fi flick. Nothing too romantic. Definitely nothing with nudity. We start off with the sci-fi, which works out fine since, with Aimee explaining it to me, there’s not much time for the conversation to tilt toward relationshippy issues. That’s the big fear right there—getting caught up in one of those “Where are we going?” talks.
Strange thing is I actually find the movie and her commentary interesting, especially after she hits a couple of vodkas and really starts cranking. It’s one of those movies set in a screwed-up society in the near future. Totalitarianism rules. Half the characters look like refugees from a seventies punk-rock club and the other half look like space Nazis. One of the women is pretty hot for a bald chick.
Aimee says the themes are simple: Goodbye individuality, goodbye uniqueness. The uniform, soulless future is coming and the seeds have already been planted. She’s read or watched about a billion similar stories. That’s what people fear, she says, because they think it’s like death and that death is the ultimate robber of identity.
“Do you think that’s what death’s really like?” I ask.
“No,” she says. “I think, when we die, we don’t lose our identity, we gain a much, much bigger one. As big as the universe.”
“That’s the best news I’ve heard all day,” I tell her, and we clink our glasses together to toast our grand universal selves.
There’s a little punk-rock girl in the movie with an old, punk-rock father. I think the guy playing him used to be a pretty big star. It’s sad, in a way, to watch movie stars grow old beneath their fabulous hair. But this is the only part of the movie that seems fresh to Aimee. When the movie’s over, she admits the guy reminds her of her own father because they understood each other when no one else did.
Her father was the one who turned her on to sixties music. He even used to sing the songs to her. He read to her, too, even when she was old enough to read for herself. He loved some writer dude named Kurt Vonnegut and another one named Isaac Asimov. I’m sure they did science-fiction stuff. In the evenings, he’d read her chapters at a time and explain all the philosophy behind it as he went.
“He used to set his little red ashtray on the window sill and blow his cigarette smoke outside so I wouldn’t have to breathe it. And he had this old, beat-up St. Louis Cardinals cap that tilted back on his head, and sometimes he’d crack up laughing so hard at what he was reading he could barely go on.”