You Love Me(You #3)(126)

The reggae fades into “Shout” and Fecal Eyes and women from your Book Club are calling for you—Mary Kay, come do a shot—and it’s the part of the song where you slowly get down and what a sight this is, middle-aged mountain bike people trying to twist. We can have game night, fine, but we won’t be having any fucking dance parties, that’s for sure.

Nomi loses her balance and grabs my shoulder. “So Melanda texted me yesterday.”

Impossible. She’s dead and Shortus told the same fucking lie and I stumble but I don’t grab the Meerkat’s shoulder. “Oh yeah? How is she?”

It’s the part of the song where we work our way back up and Nomi’s talking about Melanda like she’s alive. This is my stepdaughter. This is a child—she’s eighteen but she’s a young eighteen—and she grew up in a should-have-been-broken home so I shouldn’t be surprised that she’s a liar. She lied for the same reason that Shortus lied, because lies make us feel better about ourselves.

The Meerkat pulls a strand of hair off her face and builds a better world. She tells me that Melanda is so much happier in Minneapolis than she ever was here. “She’s still mad at my mom for not having her back…” In Nomi’s fantasy, Nomi is the glue. The secret. The one with all the power. “But I get it and honestly, she does too because I mean that kid was a kid, you know?”

I do know and I nod.

“Anyway, mostly she’s just really happy about how you helped me get back on track with NYU and stuff.”

“Well that’s great,” I say and Billy Joel picked one hell of a time to start singing about loving somebody just the way they are. I stuff my hands in my pockets. I won’t slow-dance with my fucking stepdaughter. She wears a bra and those father-daughter Facebook dances are perverse. That’s your daughter, you shithead. Alas, Nomi’s father was dead when he was alive—the end of the summer, the end of all your fun—and she puts her hands around my neck. She wants to dance and this is wrong—eighteen is too close to seventeen—but she leaves me no choice. I rest my hands on her hips and I hit bare skin, but if my hands go lower, they’re on her ass, if they go higher, they’re on her chest. She looks up at me and there is moonlight—Are people looking at us?—and she smiles. “I owe you.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I say and I wish Billy Joel would shut up and I wish you would come back. “You don’t owe me anything.”

“No,” she says. “The only reason I get to go to New York is cuz you helped me see that Ivan was a jerk.”

I lie to her and tell her that Ivan isn’t necessarily a bad guy, that good people go through hard times and that life is long, that Ivan will go back to being good. Her smile is too bright and we need to find this kid a boyfriend. Or a best friend. These new Friends of hers are no good—two of them are pouring vodka into red plastic cups—and Nomi looks into my eyes—no—and I search for you, but you’re busy by the fire pit with your fucking Friends. The Meerkat has fingers—who knew—and she runs the tips of those fingers through my hair. I pull away. She claps her hands. She doubles over. She’s laughing at me—Omigod you are so paranoid—and she’s teasing me—You really do watch too much of that Woody Allen stuff—and then she turns serious because I am too serious. So I muster a laugh. “Sorry.”

“You just had a bug in your hair. I was pulling it out.”

I scratch my head the way you do when someone reminds you that you have one. “Thanks.”

“Don’t worry,” she says, stepping back, on her way to her bad-influence friends. “I won’t tell my mom about your little freak-out. I’m not stupid.”

None of our wedding guests saw what happened and maybe that’s because nothing happened. I fix a drink—I am of age—and I search the air around me for bugs. Gnats. Fruit flies. Anything. I see nothing. And then you are here, by my side, following my sight line into the abyss. “We really hit the jackpot, huh? No rain.”

You make everything better and you stare at the stars above and you sigh. “I saw you dancing with Nomi,” you say. “That really made me happy. That’s when it all kind of hit me, Buster. We did it. We really did.”

We all know the rules. IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING. You saw us dancing and you saw nothing and this is the good part of my life so I go with it, I go where you go because I can, because I have to. “Yep,” I say. “It made me happy too.”





50





Better safe than sorry and I am playing Centipede, just like Oliver and Minka. I play alone—you don’t know about my game—and I am winning. The goal is simple: Do not be alone with Nomi. Kill that Centipede every time it appears onscreen. Except in this game, I don’t kill her. It’s in her nature to want to be with me and there are bugs, she might have been trying to take a bug out of my hair. But you just never know, do you? And the Centipede isn’t evil and we’re all just prone to root for the soldier, the player, because the Centipede is presented as the enemy. I am like you—a future cofounder of the Empathy Bordello—and I am able to see things from Nomi’s perspective. She lost her father. Her uncle’s a motherfucker. Her fake uncle died in a hunting accident and proceeded to be torn apart by wild animals. And now she has a stepfather. It’s confusing stuff and the Centipede is on a mission to get close to me and it is my duty to do what is best for the Centipede: to stay the fuck away from her.