I'd only signed up in the first place as a deterrent to picking up my little sister from her piano lessons, and I'd never had any interest in Katie. Too plain, too pasty, too easy even for an unassuming basket case with mousy brown hair and a secondhand uniform. But when Brenda Baker called off sick and Ross Burgess had to leave early for an orthopedic follow-up, it was just me, Katie and a parochial ghost town.
More specifically, once her button-pocked denim jacket was shed, it was me, Katie and a fuck-me glitter-rimmed tank top that would have had the sisters in fits had they not bused off to whatever sad community center bullshit constituted their Friday evening. Katie was about 20 pounds too heavy, and I couldn't take my eyes off a mustard stain on her right hip, but there's only so much you can do when you're bored and unattended and your prick is straining against the zippered bar of a pleated prison.
It wasn't so much the sex—about as speedy and forgettable as you'd imagine it to be—that left me flushed with the existential acid bath of guilt, or the fact that all of my peers confessing the very lust I had acted upon were sitting on my gravy stains. It wasn't about desecrating a church, sullying God's house or tarnishing some sacred place. It was about Katie, who thought it meant something. Who thought I liked her. Who thought coitus was an equation, our hormone-driven union something beyond boredom, approaching continuation. The comedown an ellipses. The fumbling for trousers and re-tightening of belt buckles a procession other than re-dressing our nakedness.
The eyes were the worst. The batting blues of a lost puppy, and I had the clawmarks from her lingering leg-humping to prove it. I don't think I ever said another word to Katie Meyer, who went out of her way to stop by my locker or bump into me between classes, who did her homework within a half-hour of its assignment just to give herself an excuse to pass a paper into my hands to copy and ever-so-briefly re-establish bodily contact through the grazing of our fingertips—mine cold and burdened, hers painted exactly as they were that one Friday afternoon.
I guess Katie moved away before we graduated, and I never knew what happened to her. The church caught fire some six or seven years later, which was all for the better considering Father Simon had become a sad old drunk and Quinn Caffrey was selling speed during Wednesday Mass. From the ashes rose an arcade, the type of tacky establishment that tried too hard to look retro, posters of 80s video games left preserved and not torn and stained with Chef Boyardee as any true Tecmo talisman would display.
Still, when I'm feeling particularly self-loathing, and that could be any November day when it suddenly dawns upon me that the only living thing that loves me without hesitation is a tabby cat named Lilly, I stroll down that block with my hands stuffed inside my dirty, wrapper-digesting pockets. I look at the after-school crowd leaning against the obnoxious neon storefront idly toeing their boards and taking drags off menthol cigarettes, and I wonder if kids these days even care about confessional booths, about a Catholic school that once stood where they slap hands and eye strangers and passers-by with a certain "try me" only emboldened by the safety of scarf-wearing numbers. I guess we both have our history: mine real, fucked into non-existence and collapsed to cinders, theirs imagined, manufactured, a playground of lies told through tolls of copper tokens and the carcinogenic clouds outside.
I look for her eyes in theirs, or their eyes looking for hers, or some inscription in a foreign iris that approves of my apathy, that says not caring is okay. All I see, though, all those times I pass by, are angry eyes and tightly-drawn lips. And I probably deserve them. It's what haunts me, you see, what has been passed to me from my past, what has taken hold as I've noticed time slipping by and the city, the entire world, shrinking by the second.
It's the continuation. The incomplete equation. The mathematics of the misguided, searching for someone who could ever be so foolish as to mistake me for important again...
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