After the breakup Kevin threw away all his records, just threw them away, and he tells her about how just looking at them, piled up in plastic milk crates under the window in his living room, it made him sick, made him want to puke. He boxed them up three days after his girlfriend told him that she wanted to see other people and Green Is Blues and Hello Nasty and Frampton Comes Alive!, everything, everything, it all went flying into the trash when he realized she wasn’t coming back. Kevin’s hands rattle in his lap as he talks, picking at the bandage tape wound all the way up to the knuckles of his left hand, and just looking at him makes Holly want to cry.
Holly knows Kevin the way you know anyone you see maybe once a week, that sort of localized osmosis that comes from shared social contact, occasional occupation o the same space. Kevin smokes Marlboro reds; Kevin drinks White Russians; Kevin spent an entire evening two weeks ago putting nine dollars’ worth of borrowed quarters into the jukebox, playing Green Day and Springsteen and Modern Baseball and exactly one Stevie Nicks song, just because Holly asked him nicely. The girlfriend was there – Layla? Lila? Dark eyes, lovely, distant; she sat apart from Kevin and his friends, far from Holly and hers, staring at her phone in the corner by the dartboard. Holly glances over at that space now, the big picture window fogging from the bodies crammed inside, momentarily distracted by the darts sailing toward their target: double ring, triple ring, bullseye, wall.
In Kevin’s pockets there is only: ten dollars, lint, guitar pick, keys. He pats the front of his shirt and comes up empty; Holly slides her Camels across the wire table they’ve been sitting at, leans over to light it for him when the spark doesn’t catch, his hands shaking too much to be steady. “We were friends,” he says, keeps saying, palm opening and closing, the tape around it dirty. “Like you and – what’s the fuck, that guy, whosit, fuckin’ Jim, the one you used to –”
Holly chokes on smoke, coughs through it. She’s three drinks in but still painfully sober, and what can she say? She already spends so much of her time sifting through old hurts, new pain, unearthing all her traumas like some sort of emotional paleontologist, excavating wounds from the Mesozoic Era. Who wants to hear about the numbers she can’t call, the places she can’t visit? Sitting on the tile floor of the shower, the water cranked so hot it feels cold; sitting at the table, head in her hands, music drifting down from the apartment upstairs – I have my own life, and I am stronger than you know. She wishes she had a better story. She wants a better story.
Holly stubs out her cigarette, finishes her drink. Kevin slumps forward, taped hand over his face. Beyond them, in the parking lot, the lights flicker.
Rach (Out Loud) 