In the [B-]Doghouse I

I guess I had expected a little more fanfare, considering how I had just walked up to the popular girl’s table and asked one of their kind out. But the three of them simply stare at the two of us in stunned silence like they’re accomplices to a murder. Anne-Marie fidgets in the hot seat for a moment, her eyes still locked on mine. For once in my whole life, I’m not nervous. Because I can read what she’s going to say next off her beet-red face. And she speaks, fighting over control of her voice like two toddlers for the same light-up toy:

"Oh, uh. Yeah, sure thing. Sort it out over snap?"

I merely nod, for fear of my guts spilling out of my mouth, and start walking away. On the way back to my table, I can hear trumpets calling to me from the heavens. The inside of my head is a slot machine that keeps coming up with triple-sevens. I feel like a thief that just walked out of the bank unnoticed with a million dollars in gold bullion in his suitcase. I feel like a triumphant general strutting along the parade held for his victories on the eastern front. I feel-

A complete, stomach-churning emptiness as I realize that I have the entire rest of the lunch period to spend alone. Well, not entirely alone. I have the flutwins to keep me company, after all. But they're doing that thing where they're touching each other's faces like they're counting pimples, so I just pull out my backpack and get a head start on my homework.

Math problems trickle out of my head across the rest of the day’s classes, echoing in my head like the twins’ nasally hyena cackles. The only relief I find is when my head hits the pillows of my bed at around half past five. But silence is even poorer company than a couple of weirdos who tickle each other in public.

I can't take it anymore.

So I send Anne-Marie the message I had overthought like 80 times, which is also thankfully around the time that her soccer practice should be ending.

"Hey, so about today"

Her icon pops up in the chat as if she'd been waiting for me, and she replies, "Dw, it's all good."

I frown, and part of me fears that we've gone back to the curt formalities of the days before.

“I’m sorry if I put you on the spot there.” My fingers are melting in their own sweat. “I really mean it.”
"Nah," she types.

I wait a couple of seconds in paralytic disbelief. It says she's typing, then that she's not. Then that she's typing again. She goes offline for a moment, and comes back. I can't tell if she's losing connection or losing her mind—or even losing patience with me. That is, until she says:

"Look, I think you're really cool"

And I clench my jaw, my stomach communicating its intuition through a pervasive sense of nausea. Any second now, I'm about to get my day ruined so bad that I'm going to crawl back to Ricardo and the boys to beg for forgiveness.

And she continues, "So I think I have to come out and say it"

The pile of socks on the floor starts to morph into a shadowy black monster from how long I've been holding my breath. All I can think about is the chance, the singular thin possibility that we're both clinging onto the same taut thread for dear life.

"I'm really sorry for the way I've been treating you at school."

My head feels as resoundingly empty as if it just gave birth to a bowling ball. But with that comes a kind of freedom that the founding fathers must have felt when they signed the declaration of independence.

"I wasn't trying to push you away," she says. "I just had this really stupid idea in my head that something bad would happen if the parts of me that I shared with you and them collided.

"It's not that stupid," I reply. "Well, actually it kind of is. But it's relatable."

"Thanks for the pep-talk, coach. You really know how to comfort a girl going out on a limb."

"Sorry."

"Nah, don't apologize. It's really awkward to say this, even over text, but I really appreciate your bizarre, borderline socially-inept honesty. I kind of wish I had that level of confidence, sometimes."

Confidence. I burst out laughing.

"Oh yeah, for sure. It's definitely confidence, and not the other thing. I'm just chill like that."

"Whatever helps you sleep at night. The point is, I'm glad you came out and said it."

"Well, one of us had to." I add a nerd emoji for good measure.

She gives me a middle finger. And then types:

"Yeah. It doesn't give me any pleasure to admit it, but you're right."

"I'll have you know that I, on the other hand, take great pleasure in me being right."

"You're such a dickhead, Goggles."

I let her know that I find that amusing by sending her an eggplant. After a few seconds, I can’t help but feel an uncomfortable bubbling under my tongue, so I type:

"So everything's good with your friends then?"

"Yeah. If anything, they think that I'm the weirdo."

"How so?"

"Well. I sooorta told them that I'd be bringing you tomorrow. As my plus one to the thing."

"A Thing, you say?"

"Yes. A thing.”

“What. Is. The thing.”

“A social event. A function where people gather for a shared purpose."

Blowing a raspberry, I reply, "You don't need to define what a social event is for me."

"Well, ya never know. I'm still trying to measure how deep the hole is beneath the rock you live under."

“Ever heard of the Kola superdeep bore hole?”

“No, but you’re being a whole bore right now.”

My tongue twists around in my mouth like one of those cotton candy machines. I scratch my balls as I imagine the best and brightest kids at my school swarming me like shambling corpses. Then I ask:

“Are they going to eat me alive?"

"Don't worry, they don't bite," she replies, with her usual telepathy. "Just make sure you wear something nice and you'll be fine."

"Oh trust me," I say, giving her a flexed bicep, "I'm dripped out like a leaking faucet."

She gives me a laugh emoji, says, "I'll swing you the deets in a bit." One more middle finger follows, and that's the end of that.

I’m sitting in silence, feeling what I can only describe as immaculate social bliss. And then it happens. Between the heap of socks on the floor and a closet full of bargain bin shirts with breast pockets, the dilemma appears. My sheer lack of fashion dawns on me the same way Muhammad Ali’s right straight dawned on George Foreman.

Okay, so maybe I'm in a bit of a pickle here.

I scramble for leads, googling a dozen different top 10 articles on whatever trend Tik-Tok is in a consumerist tizzy about this week. But none of it makes sense. I feel as culturally aware as an American tourist dropped into the center of Tokyo. And then, like the light at the end of the tunnel that turns out to be a big, black pickup truck, I see it. Anne-Marie shares me Brian's story of the day, in which a squirrel climbed him like a tree as he was doing planks and tried to store nuts in his hoodie.

I pounce on his add friend button like I'm the first person off the Titanic. As if answering my prayers, he instantly accepts and says:

"YOOOO, it's Og-dog! What up bro?

"Yo B-dog, I was just thinking about you. Down to hang today?"

"That’s kind of gay bro. Let's do it."

I give him a heart, and he sends me some address out in the middle of nowhere.

"U have good timing, bro. im at the gym and i need ur help."

"You want me to come by right now? It'll take me like an hour to get there."

"Yea bro im here all nite. You should come, itll totally be like a squid-pro-quote!"

"You got it, boss."

"Sick bro. im glad I get to do a squid-pro-quote, my english tutor was mad hyping it up"

At first, I chuckle at it as if it's a joke. Then, I imagine the poor soul stuck teaching him his own native language. I grimace with the red-blooded enthusiasm of a haunted ventriloquist dummy, and type:

"Bet. See you there."

I take a look at my phone, and the maps app says I have three minutes to catch the bus, so I throw all my crap into a bag and dash out the door. A pungent kick of cheap whiskey in the air confirms that my dad’s loitering somewhere around here, so I save a good half a minute without the need to fumble around with my keys at the lock. The bus arrives just as I do, and I stumble in and slap down my fare, too out of breath to even curse myself for being so out of shape. Discounting the lung pain, my chest resonates with a sense of pride at how efficiently I’d negotiated all the cul-de-sacs and lawns on the way over.

I consider myself a bit of a navigator, after all. There’s even a little game I play where I guess all the streets by name as the bus hisses past them. And ever since I was a kid, I’ve been constructing an RPG menu map in my head, points of interests and dragons in the margins and all:

My little town is a pretty straightforward suburbian satellite of the big city down south. You have your quaint, cobbled main shopping street where all the tourists and cool kids go. The distinctly less upscale shopping street where you can find the jeweler-shoemakers, barber-surgeons, and mugger-dealers. There's the giant, big-box mall just south of that, which comes replete with a wide assortment of pensioners and vagrants pretending like it's still the half-dead husk's '80s heyday. Dab on a couple of radiating suburbs, throw on a cinderblock school or two, smear a picturesque nature park across the top—and you've got yourself a pretty standard American strong town.

Somewhere you can see all of in a day's drive once and never think twice about.

But every time I interact with Anne-Marie or Brian, it feels like entirely new neighborhoods keep materializing out of thin air. Either that, or they’re making my world feel bigger.

And as the bedraggled city bus shivers along the fraying dregs of a forest road, I can only wonder just what kind of a gym can survive out in the middle of beer-bellied-middle-aged-men-grilling-half-naked-in-their-front-yard country. The vehicle chuckles to a standstill, and my navigation tells me to get out at a bus station that is less of a dedicated stop than it is a collapsed log over a creek. I send Anne-Marie a picture of a cute frog that greets me as I step off, but there’s no signal. With one final study of my last known position, I start my hike into the woods.

Honestly, I've never been much of a nature guy.

While going out with Anne-Marie to the fairy pit has definitely helped me appreciate the finer points of birds and mushrooms and shit, I still find myself flinching at every nearby snapping of twigs and boiling in my skin beneath a too-heavy winter coat. And I can't tell you how much tripping into your fourth muddy culver makes you want to burn the entire place down. Or was it culvert? In any case, this little vision quest has made sense of that ridiculous two-story death machine Brian calls a car—whose shiny black exterior at long last catches my eye through the millionth nameless patch of pines and oaks.

It's parked outside a garage with the sheer size and door-count of a horse stable, which reveals itself as but the appetizer to the ominous, modernist silhouette of a sprawling evil villain lair looming nearby. Whatever parts of the mansion’s three floors that aren't tastefully drenched in glass blend seamlessly into the woods with locally-sourced facadework. I double check my frozen navigation to make sure that this is the right place, but there doesn't seem to be any gym located here. In fact, there doesn't seem to be another building, let alone a business, for like three miles in any direction.

I swallow my growing fear and approach. Only to be stopped in place by a terrifying, monstrous groan from the other side of the garage doors. And yet, in that Frankensteinian, primeval shout, I recognize something human. My knuckles meet the sheet metal exterior with a light rap, and I call out:

"B-dog? It's me, Ogden!"

The garage doors lurch into motion with a cantankerous growl, and I stumble back onto my ass. While I rub my eyes free of dust, I get a peek of a massive, bulb-headed form climbing off of some arcane pedestal. Then, in a flash, it leaves its chaotic jungle of geometric, gray machinery and bounds towards me. I'm ripped from the ground by brutish force, accepting my fate with limp surrender.

Then I'm hoisted up in a shoulder press.

"YOOO, IT'S OG-DOG IN DA HOUSE!"