WHY I'll ALWAYS WEAR LAYERS
BY CAROLINE KEPNES
|
I have to dump this Sheila before she dumps me so I open the door to my Honda and get in, turn on the ignition and she taps the passenger side window and finally I hit the automatic unlock, as if she is an afterthought and when she gets in she isn’t angry at my lack of chivalry and my little plan is foiled because she was supposed to get pissy which would give me the ammo to dump her for being an irrational, fussy psycho bitch. She rubs her hands together and blows into them and says that it’s cold and I grunt and I never grunt and I want her to dump me right now so I ignore her comment about the weather and say something about my car but she doesn’t care that I ignore her and fuck me for getting confused already and trying to get myself dumped. What I need is to dump her and let the dumping turn me into a man of action and her foot sits on one of my comic books and if she cared about me at all she would have picked up the comic book with gentle pancake hands and placed it in the backseat and used that same hand to scratch the back of my neck. She doesn’t care that she’s going out with someone she doesn’t care about and that’s probably because it isn’t easy to meet people in College Station, Texas and I am a starter boyfriend who she probably describes as enough for now, whatever, to her girlfriends when she talks on the phone about how Texas sucks but at least she has someone and now she says she is excited to meet my friends at the bar and I know that she is going to dump me for Rex because he goes four-wheeling and splices genes whereas I read too much and complain about Republicanism, and this is why I need say “You know Sheila, we should just be friends so you can make your own life.” But I can’t say that because we never were friends. She asked me for directions to the Russian department and I offered to walk her there and buy her coffee and we kissed the first day we met and if I dump her and she starts dating Rex, who is going to be at the bar before we get there, they are going to become a couple right in front of me and my theory about her needing her independence will be proven to be total bunk and I will be left alone, invited to hang out with them once a week or so. So I can’t dump her, even though she pulls down the mirror and applies lipstick which means she is thinking about the new guys she’s going to meet and how she wants to look her best and she doesn’t react when Steely Dan’s “Dirty Work” comes on the radio, which is funny because I am wearing a Steely Dan T-shirt. But I can’t dump her for not saying anything about the T-shirt because I put it on while she was sitting on my bed reading the newspaper and immediately I put a flannel on over it because Texas can get cold. But if she did love me as a boyfriend more so than her new boyfriend, she would have noticed and she gets out of the car before I do and rubs her hands together again and would I please hurry because she is dying for a beer because being a T.A. is hard and I should have gone to NYU for my PhD because in a city there would have been so many girls that one girl would never matter that much but I came here because if you put yourself in a smaller pool with fewer eligible partners life would reward you and provide you with “the one” whereas if you were a greedy horny academic fuck who chose NYU because of throngs of girls in peach thongs who wanted to fuck you because you weren’t a Wall Street shit or a married sleaze but a decent guy, in a decent shirt, studying decent things, you’d never find happiness and she wants to know what’s taking so long and she can hear the bar’s music and she says she loves Guns & Roses and if it was a movie I would say “You love Guns & Roses but do you love me?” and we would both know that it was over, that I had initiated it and I would leave her alone here because girls like her fare well in small town bars and I would go home and I wouldn’t have to know that she went home with Rex until he eventually called, all uncomfortable, and admitted that he’d taken home my ex-girlfriend the very night that I dumped her. And I would say it was fine, that I had moved on, and months down the road, she would confide in me about their problems and she would see that I am the man who was man enough to love something and set it free and she would dump Rex and we would get back together and the night we did, it would be the kind of sex that makes you smile more easily and in the morning she would slip into my Steely Dan T-shirt and I would be changed, warmer, and I would wear a flannel because I didn’t need layers now, because I wanted her in my T-shirt but she really wants to go into the bar and she opens my car door and I get out and she takes my hand and I see Rex’s car, and when I open the door to the bar Rex calls out my name I see three chairs at his table and if she loves me, she’ll sit across from me so that I’m the place her eyes naturally fall. [Forever after at http://eyeshot.net/kepnes.html] many more this summer |
B R A V E S O U L S R E C E I V E
|
Archive of Recent Activities - Advice for Submitters
Enhanced Navigational Coherency - Long-Ass List of Contributors
Super Lo-Tech Slideshow - Four Years Ago, Maybe - Three Years Ago Today
Two Years Ago Today - Last Year Today
*
the memorial compilation of letters to frank conroy from his students
daniel alarcon's first story collection is now available -- read transmissions from his travels starting here
attend to an obsessive philadelphian's sensational sports blog
*
we'll be visiting the eastern homelands till the first of june, thus our extraordinary ability to post nothing new till then