Thirsty Read Free Page B

are my two best friends, I guess.
    When we were younger, we used to spend the afternoons running around in the woods together and we stayed over at one another’s houses and all. Late at night, after watching
Twilight Zone
reruns on cable, we’d look out the windows at the stars and have wide-eyed, frightened conversations about whether there was a God. Once, when Tom’s parents had his grandmother taken off to a home, after she went insane and kept breaking dishes and saying that the Lord would make whole what was sundered, Jerk and I went over to Tom’s house and invited him to go walking, and we all talked seriously about the whole thing and then told some dumb jokes and we all laughed, and later Tom thanked us for being such good friends. And Tom did the same for me when my grandfather died. So we have been friends for years.
    We first called Jerk Jerk back when he was shorter than us. First us, then everybody else. Now he is much taller, even though he stoops to try to apologize for it. His name is Michael Polinsky. At least, that’s what he writes at the top of his papers.
    Tom is slim, though not as slim as I am, and girls think he’s cute. He often reminds me of this. He doesn’t have braces. I have had braces since I was ten. Tom and I have been friends for at least that long. In some ways, out of the two, I am starting to prefer the braces.
    Tom and I have been friends mainly because he has always had an imagination of some sort and so have I, I’d like to think. We pretended a lot of things a few years ago, back when we were into pretending.
    Recently I have been noticing that his imagination isn’t really as good as I thought it was. It mainly revolves around things just being louder and more explosive than they really are. He’ll say things like, “What if you had this car, and it went five hundred miles an hour and shot flames out the tailpipe?” There is really no answer to that kind of question. The speed limit is fifty-five in Massachusetts anyway.
    I picture myself with different friends. They are artists and dress in black, and we say cool things to one another and laugh about wrecking slick cars. I don’t know anyone like that, but I want to. Instead, I have to hear dumb plot synopses for B movies involving nunchaks and helicopters. Recently, I have found myself wanting to talk about more serious things with Tom. Instead, even though I know he must think about serious things, somehow we always end up talking about more nunchak movies, with maybe a brief break for a cat-o’-nine-tails. Sometimes I want to say, “Tom, enough cats-o’-nine-tails. Can we talk about something that doesn’t cause internal bleeding?”
    But I don’t want to offend him; and I don’t want him to know that I am confused and don’t know what to do. I don’t want him to know about these new feelings of unrest in the evenings, unless, as I suspect, he feels them, too.
    The sky is moving along quickly. I am nonsensically scanning the crags and paths for Rebecca, because I always feel like I might meet her here. Far in the distance, a man in black is walking toward us. The brown grassland by the shore rises up to the woods. Tom is still telling me about the combat. Choi has now been pinned to a metal table and they’re bringing a drill toward his face.
    “So he grabs this gun —,” Jerk adds.
    “It’s on the table right next to him,” explains Tom. “The other guy forgot about it completely.”
    “Who grabs the gun?” I say, uninterested.
    “Choi, duh,” says Tom. “The other guy has the drill.”
    “Well, it’s not like you can only have one weapon in life,” I explain.
    “Well, it’s not like you can only have one brain cell in life,” says Tom.
    “Sorry,” I say. To our right are rows of bottlebrush pines. The shadows of the stark sun on the limbs blotch and stripe the bark. The man in black is getting closer.
    “Who are you looking for?” Tom asks, squinting toward the trees.
    I shrug