Adverbs Read Free

operation manage to stop him, and guess if the famous guy gets to use that top-secret mini-submarine we got to see in the opening credits. Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Obvious.
    The only reason I’m blah-blah talking about it is so that youget what kind of night it was. Late, is what kind, but also obvious, and the obvious part was sort of messing with the kickass part, if you know what I mean. Like, just for instance, standing ten feet away from Lila was sort of kickass, with her nails drumming on the box with the slot in it where we put everything that we rip in half, and with her blue-eyed beauty and with the gum she was chewing and with how lovely she was, in that way that makes you want to find something else lovely just so you can give it to her and see how really kickass it is to have two lovely things next to each other in the Sovereign Cinemaplex. But the kickassness of Lila was a sort of muted kickassness, a kickassness tainted with melancholy, because there was also the obvious part, which was named Keith.
    Keith. Unchivalrous Keith. Keith who picked her up from work every night, and who, if this was Kickass: The Movie , would have a little fuzz of mustache so that we would know what an asshole he was, except this being the real-life Seattle Metropolitan Area there was no way anybody could tell and so he just drove up to the Sovereign and beeped his horn and Lila just pushed open the swinging glass doors with the stupid sticker-heads of all the famous people stuck to them and ran out into the night of Keith without anybody running after her and saying, “Don’t go out there to Keith! The boy who has stood by you, at the left-hand escalator, for nine Thursdays and eight Saturdays, loves you very much, plus his chivalry!” Which is the kickass part on my end, the part I think about every Lila moment, from the first bell for Ms. Wylie to the tearing of every little ticket that is handed to me: the total King Arthur chivalry that sits deep inmy puny, frantic heart. Example of chivalry, why am I working at the Sovereign? What is the money for? To buy flowers for Lila and to give them to her. Keith? Honk honk honk, please come running out of the Cinemaplex doors and jump into the seat next to me where there are no flowers and I won’t even tell you how nice you look, I bet. But my secret special kickass chivalry is tainted, obviously, by obviousness. And it’s the obvious thing that it’s not going to happen. Because there might be a suburb of Seattle where a girl says, “Oh my god! Flowers? You are chivalrous, Joe,” and then I win and she doesn’t care that Keith has one of those all-terrain things that will come in so handy when the world ends and we need a nine-thousand-cylinder engine to drive over the hordes of bloodthirsty mutants crawling all over the video-game landscape, or maybe there’s a suburb of Seattle where Lila wouldn’t care whether or not her chivalrous suitor was wearing a fucking WELCOME TO THE BIG SHOW! button on a red why-the-hell-is-it-fireproof Sovereign Cinemaplex vest which is sort of blocking the signals of that hungry heart of mine, and Lila and I drive around this other suburb of Seattle in a car I take care of myself on weekends and tell each other a big bag of secrets we’ve been hiding underneath the beds our parents bought us, tossing and turning over its poky burlap creases and staring out of the window screens at a spooky blue moon that is beaming down secret New York bus tickets of a grown-up love future, and then someplace where the sun is setting or rising she takes her top off, but I don’t live in that suburb of Seattle. I live on Mercer Island, and here we just tear tickets and wait to watch her go home.
    Here I was maybe forty minutes ago, sort of claustrophobed in the gap between the kickass movie world where Lila dumps the guy with the smarmy mustache and the obvious one where it just keeps getting later. It was the last show and were I to guess it was just