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By Root 289 0

stomachs instead of their chests. She watches The Rocky Horror Picture Show while talking about purchasing vibrators. She honks and snorts when she laughs, which she does at inopportune moments—moments of death or respect, though never moments of piety. She is deeply connected to her Jewish faith. She might just have a crush on me. I’m not entirely sure what it means when someone pins me to a couch and force-feeds me Twizzlers faster than I can chew them, red bits of licorice tumbling out of my furiously chomping jaws. She might like me, but that’s not enough. I must win her love to make up for all the bar mitzvah after-party dry humping I’ve missed; for the goals, guitar leads, all of it. For vindication.

I, of course, can’t do this by flowers or serenading, by movie tickets or even alcoholic social lubricant, because I know I’d fail at any of these endeavors. I’d go to a flower shop, spend ten minutes deliberating what to buy, and then give up and go home and cry into my pillow. I know the “opposites attract” adage, but being normal is impossible. So I pray that some wise man on a mountain plateau somewhere has another aphorism, “identicals attract.” This will yield a love, preferably carpet burn-y. I will win her not by following the well-trod traditions of civil courtship. I can’t quite do things normally, but I certainly can be weird. Her crazy and my derangement will spark and titrate and she’ll be mine in all of her oddball glory.

At least this is what I hope as I assemble by the buses at the end of school. I’m half-invited to my crush’s house and accept wholeheartedly (half-inviting myself, completing the invitation). To complicate things, two others are accompanying us to my crush’s house. Or, truthfully, I am accompanying them, since they were invited wholly, no halves. One of them asks me, “So why are you always looking down?” I respond slowly, almost quizzically, “So I don’t have to see you?”

I get into her babysitter’s car. The drive to Westchester is all undulating hills and bushy trees. When I get there, I get out of the car, but spend twenty minutes in her driveway on scooters and skateboards. Eventually my crush gets bored, and decides to head into the basement, full of colonoscopy bags from her mother’s practice. I sit on one of two brown velvet love seats. One of the other two tries to sit down with me. I shoo him away. They can sit on the other love seat.

My crush sits on me. She does not sit beside me in the open seat, not even on the arm of the love seat, but on top of me. She motions for Twizzlers, which I am then force-fed. This is the woman for me, I think. This experiment will succeed. Love will precipitate. But we are interrupted by the babysitter, who tells everyone to get into the car again. She forgot to pick up my crush’s little sister.

I am now idling in the SUV, across from the elementary school. I watch children wait for their parents. My heartstrings twang as my crush moves from the backseat, past the middle row, and into the front seat, where she can operate the stereo. Her breasts may have brushed my shoulder. This is love, I think. Maybe I should just take that elated tidbit and be content with it, but I am emboldened, ready to be apeshit crazy. Any moment now I’ll jump into action, do something. Anything. Only problem is, I don’t know what.

I fidget nervously as the other two, classic rock buffs, debate with my crush the merits of Ozzy Osbourne. I can feel every written word I’ve ever read about rock, about even just guitars, fade from my mind as I grasp for one liners about Led Zeppelin. As I haw about I watch one of the two make a move on my crush, putting an arm around her shoulder. I feel desperate. Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train” rises from the speakers. Suddenly I’m stricken by the fear that my time to be apeshit crazy may be passing. I look around for opportunities and see a dog, what looks like a terrier-size German shepherd, squatting smack dab in the middle of the road—like, haunches at forty-five-degree angles to the yellow stripe, tail hovering parallel above it. The