On Life as a Sarcastic Fringehead

Posting this without edits. I'll rewrite it later. Just wanted to get it up before getting back to work on the next development.

I am completely unused to actually having to listen to someone’s life story. I am nearly always faking it in one way or another and, here with Parker over super nachos and pitchers of margaritas, I don’t know when to laugh or when to hang myself by stringing together strips of my napkin and jumping off the wooden bench we’re sitting on so intimately. Are people always this detailed? And, I hate to say: boring? How many times can you tell the story of visiting your grandparents for the summer and in how many ways? I’m highly interested, though, in this girl and her habit of sitting no more than three millimeters away from me as she’s talking and animating herself into spastics. She’s sexy as hell and, honest to God, I’m trying to remember if pancakes Mom has ever displayed a written objection to her tenants fucking their new best friends in their single-bed, one-window rooms.

Then, I get it: Parker is making up half her shit she’s been telling me tonight. I know this because usually halfway through people’s stories, I can plunge in and surf the rest of the waves with them. As I say, I know where they’ve been, I know where they’re at, I know where they’re trying to go. With Parker, I was getting nowhere until I began to understand what she’s doing, which is lying to me.

I put aside, only temporarily, I assure you, any thoughts of taking her home with me and I take her hand until she stops talking (five long and crazy minutes). Leaning over, into her ear I whisper to her how much I really like her. She’s quiet, perfectly quiet, resisting the urge to dismiss me frivolously. I don’t say much else as our fingers interlock and I know it’s killing her to keep silent. I’m thrilled that she knows how to follow her instincts. Kisses almost imperceptible, I come to rest against her forehead with mine and ask her if she wants to start over from the beginning. Tell everything, but tell, this time, only truth.