Bro Wars VII: The Farce Awakens

I find her sitting on her legs on the front lawn, twiddling a dandelion between two fingers. My approach is announced via the crunch of shattered poolside glass dislodging from my shoe. Anne-Marie whirls around. Then turns back just as quickly. I clear my throat, and drop to my knees with an exaggerated moan of pain a couple steps away from her.

“I’m here to talk.”

She does not turn around. “Then talk.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I fucked up. Like a dumb, moronic, reckless-”

“Keep going.” Her eyes are on me now.

“I’m running out of synonyms here.”

“Let me help,” she stands and pulls me close by the collar. “Pea-brained. Simple. Dense. Dim. Dull-”

“Done yet?”

Her mouth twists diagonally. And she lets me fall to the grass. “Yes.”

I crack the whiplash out of my neck and say, “Okay. So I’ve been advised by certain legal counsel that it’s best if I commit to a change in behavior. But first, they told me to lead with a satisfactory apology.”

“I don’t have to forgive you, you know,” she replies.

I wince.

“But,” she continues, pausing to sigh. “An apology is a good starting point.”

I shift off of the twig jabbing me in the scapula and ask, “And what’s the endpoint?”

“It’s simple. You apologize. Explain. And then never do something this stupid again.”

“I already did the first two, so all I have to do is the last thing.”

“Is that a promise?”

The way she’s looking at me, I can tell it’s taking all of her strength to keep the anger going. I don’t really have a choice, do I?

“Yeah. It’s a promise,” I say.

She nods.

But I add, “Trust me. If I ever do something as stupid as kissing Brian again, you’ll know well ahead of time.”

And she laughs. “I don’t care that you kissed Brian. I’m much more concerned with what the hell goes through your head for your decision-making process to wind up like that.”

I shrug. “It’s sort of a vibe-based aggravation matrix.”

“A what.”

“You know, gut instinct.”

“Ah, of course.”

Anne-Marie steps forward, and doesn’t so much pull me from the ground as rip me from it straight into a lung-crushing hug.

“Just don’t be a dumbass, silly.”

I return her embrace, interpreting the particular juxtaposition of ‘dumbass’ and ‘silly’ to indicate how I’m not so much as forgiven as I am appreciated independently of my actions. Her warmth is striking, both in body and in mind. It utterly numbs my instincts to fight back with a retort. Amid the currents of hormones and girl’s perfume whortling through my head, it takes a refrain of distant cheers to remind me that there’s a party going on. That all of my idiocy had some vague sort of purpose.

But I wouldn’t dare to let go of her until she lets go of me.

I’m smiling. But I can only bear to look at her in the reflection of the shards laying in the grass nearby. It’s not every day you almost get yourself killed over something as ultimately moot as a man’s pride. And yet, something’s bothering me beyond simple guilt. Like an itch of the mind, I feel wind coursing around me. It’s cool and gentle in the newly-minted night, and I come alight with a replay of mere minutes ago:

The rush of freedom at the wheel, with the road ahead and the blurred, burning sunset behind me.

I’ve never felt that way before—My hands fading away into the corners of my vision, the dashboard and the rest of my body melting along with it. Sure, I might’ve almost died. But there’s something intoxicating about the feeling of barrelling down an open road with company by your side.

And then, out of nowhere, Anne-Marie speaks:

“I was just thinking.”

“Mhm?”

She drops her head onto my shoulder. “That we haven’t spent all that much time together, you know.”

“What do you mean? We’ve seen each other at least twice a week for the last two months.”

“You know what I mean, though?”

“Yeah…”

I’m sure we’ve both been thinking it—That there’s only two months left in the schoolyear. That even though the past two months have felt like the good kind of forever, it’d all be over soon—Just as quickly as it seems time’s passed when I think about the day we met. It’s obvious until the first time you really think about it, but there’s loads more to life after high school. College, maybe even Grad-School. Work, new friends, family. If you think about it from the perspective of taxes and mortgages, who’s to say how much time we really have left together?

“So.” Anne-Marie looks up at me. “What do we do about it?”

Moe and Trissie pop up on either shoulder of mine like an angel and a devil indistinguishable from each other. Both of them immediately give me a noogie and scream, ‘don’t waste your chance, dumbass!’

Clearing my throat, I say, “I might have an idea.”

“Yeah?”

Great gray stretches of striped asphalt shoot through my head like film reels derailed from the loops of an old camera. They snake and whip around in an unseen storm around the strange, dawning sensation in my throat. The thought comes out as gracefully as a boy that left his yaoi manga open on the family computer:

“You want to take a roadtrip?”

She cocks her head. “Huh?”

“You know, just me and you. And the open road, I guess.”

“What, like, you mean you want to drive up to the Dells?”

“No, not the Dells,” I say. “Or, like, not just the Dells. We could go anywhere you want. Anywhere we want.”

“Even Chicago?”

I look her dead in the eyes. “No, sorry. The furthest south I’ll go is Evanstown.”

She buries her fist in my shoulder. “Dick.”

I waggle my eyebrows in turn. “I thought you liked dick.”

“I-” she pauses, and I swear to god I actually see her blush for a second.

I relieve the pressure by throwing in, “Is this when you tell me you’re into girls?”

“No,” she laughs, “I’m saving that for after I force you to sign a prenup.”

I snicker. She snickers. We all scream for ice cream. And then she looks me in the eyes, dead serious.

“Are you for real, though?”

I glide my fingers along her cheek. “Does this feel real?”

“Not really.”

“So?” I ask.

“Do you really mean it…” Her eyes have this glowing urgency to them. “That you want to take that roadtrip?”

I feel the icy cool of the dewy night creep up my legs. I’d asked so easily at first. But that was on impulse. And now, when she’s expecting the world from me, it’s all too easy to feel the icy needle threading my mouth shut. So I rip my lips open with a yell:

“Oh hell yeah!”

Anne-Marie’s eyes are wide, clearly startled by the volume. But before the echoes of my voice can even break out across the dales and glens of the Drakkenson estate, she parrots:

“Oh hell yeah!”

We pat each other on the back so hard that we end up rolling over each other on the grass. She winds up on top, pinning my arms into the soft turf. Her blue eyes glimmer violet under the dark purple sky. Our lips close in on each other. She’s close enough for me to feel her body heat once more. I think it’s finally going to happen.

And then something rustles in the hedges in the distance.

We scramble off each other and duck into the grass as if we’re dodging lead on D-day. But whatever’s in the bushes also stops moving, as if in perfect sync with us. I nod to her, she nods to me, and we start slinking forward towards the source of the sound. The hedge is still at first, but once the moon falls over us in full, I can see two shadows clear as day silhouetted behind its wooden circuits. Evidently, they can also see us-

Because they bolt for it.

And so do we. Unfortunately, both us and them make a break for the same place—that being the well-lit foyer of the Drakkenson family home. In an instant, all my fears about a potential home invasion are assuaged as we come face to face with the mysterious hedge-dwellers. All four of us stare at each other in silence, equally flustered, equally sweaty, and equally covered in grassy fragments under the revealing orange glow of the grand vestibule.

I pretend like I wasn’t just holding Anne-Marie’s hand.

And Moe pretends like he wasn’t just holding Drake’s.

The four of us agree, without words, to speak nothing of what had just transpired. In complete silence, we make our way back towards the pool.