Nathan again.

Nathan sat on his bed, wondering what to do. It was cold. January. He had thick socks on, but the floor was hard wood. His mother was calling him for dinner, but the floor was hard wood. If he walked with socks on the wood floor, he would slip. He wouldn’t fall, but he would be able to feel his feet slipping away from him with every step. It was how he got to the bed, and he had hated it.

He could take his socks off, but then his feet would be cold. That’s how it had been when he’d gotten up that morning, and he had hated it. His mother called him again. He wished he hadn’t taken his shoes off. He wished his mother hadn’t taken his rug to be cleaned.

She called for him again, and he could hear her foot steps coming up the stairs. He wanted to go to her, but he couldn’t.

There was a toy truck on the floor. It had been his father’s when he was young. It was metal, not plastic like Nathan’s other toys. He liked it best because the doors really opened, and he could put his little finger inside the driver’s seat and turn the tiny metal steering wheel.

The truck had a wide bed. Nathan was small for his age, and he could fit his foot onto it.

As his mother came to the door, he jumped for the truck. He would land on it, and it would roll all the way to his mother, and they could walk down the hall because it had an old rug that made his feet itch when he wasn’t wearing socks but he was wearing socks so it would be okay. But he missed the bed of the truck, and instead the heel of his foot landed squarely on the sharp edge of the bed, and his mother screamed as he lurched to the side and fell on his arm, which hurt a lot, but not as much as the sole of his foot which felt like it was bleeding.

He sat up and twist his foot to look at the bottom as his mother rushed over and threw her arms around him. There was a tear in his sock, and he could see his torn skin below it. He wasn’t bleeding then, but when he squeezed his heel blood began to ooze from the jagged cut along his foot. His mother screamed and grasped his wrist, wrenching his hand away from the injury.

She carried him to the bathroom and set him down on the edge of the bathtub. She rolled his socks off, throwing them carelessly to the side. She then found a washcloth, wetted it in the sink, and pumped liquid soap onto it. She folded the cloth in half and rubbed the two sides together to get the soap to lather. As she was doing this, Nathan had pulled his bleeding foot onto his lap and began picking at the cut with fascination. He even forgot about how cold his feet would be now. If he pulled one way it hurt a lot, but if he pulled another–

“Stop that,” his mother snapped. Nathan stared up at her in confusion. He wasn’t sure why what he was doing wrong. “You’ll make it worse,” she continued and kneeling before him with the washcloth, cradling his foot gently with one hand.

“But then how will I know how I work?” He asked.

His mother frowned as she scrubbed his foot. “You can ask a doctor. Or read a book. But don’t hurt yourself.”

“How do they know how I work?” Nathan asked.

“They just do,” his mother snapped and scrubbed harder.

The soap stung and the pressure from his mother’s adamant washing hurt, but Nathan didn’t say anything. Instead, he sat wondering why the soap and the rubbing hurt in different ways, and how he instinctively knew the stinging was from the soap and the dull pain was from the rubbing, and then there was another pain from the cut itself, which was sharp and more like the soap’s sting than the rubbing’s ache.

His mother had him turn around and wash his foot off with the water from the bathtub faucet. Then she let him dry his foot himself with a towel while she found gauze and medical tape under the sink. She covered his cut with gauze and taped it in place.

“Can you walk?” she asked. Nathan carefully stood and nodded. The bathroom tiles were like ice, but he wouldn’t slip.

It didn’t occur to him until later that she had really meant, “Does it hurt to walk?”

The next day I got up early to pretend to go to church. Our church had services all day Wednesday, and I always said I went so Mom wouldn’t get mad when I almost always skipped Sundays. I almost always skipped Sundays because I was almost always out late on Saturdays. During the school year I couldn’t go Wednesday mornings and Mom would drag me in and usually with a horrible hang over I had to act like I didn’t have, and that was awful. But there were more awful things like going out Thursday night and taking a physics test first thing Friday, and it was okay now because it was summer.

I went to Barnes and Noble. That’s a pretty lame way to skip church, I know. But most of the rest of the mall was closed at that time, and you could see employees getting ready for the day or something. I didn’t really know what they were doing; I’d never had a job. Anyway, I went to the self-help section because I thought maybe I’d go on a diet.

There are lots of books on being happy back there, though not as many as the ones about being skinny, or getting rich quick. I bet you think I’m going to comment on society now, about how we value being rich and beautiful over being happy, but I’m not. I’m not because I could never be happy knowing I’d found happiness from a how-to guide.

I picked out one of the dieting books I hadn’t read yet and sat down with it and read for a while. Then I thought stores were probably open and I went out and bummed around the mall for a while. The only thing I bought was coffee, though, because I was yawning all over the place.

Eventually I went to Catherine’s house. She was still in her pajamas.

“Hey,” she said and walked away from the open front door. I followed her back to the kitchen, where she was watching a movie on her mom’s portable DVD player and eating Lucky Charms cereal. I told her I was going to make grilled cheese. She grunted, and I made it.

After the movie was over and we’d finished our meals (mine was lunch and hers was breakfast), Catherine went upstairs to shower and dress and I started on what we called ‘Operation Party-Proof.’

I started in the main dining room. Catherine’s family normally ate in the ‘breakfast corner,’ even when it was dinner, and their dining room was dominated by a huge, grand table that was still pristine from years of only eating out their for holidays and big social gatherings and the like. At first we were going to put the snacks out on it, but the table was too perfect and broke up into pieces anyway, so we decided to move it out of the way.

I didn't know how to take the table apart, so I just went about getting rid of the cream-colored tablecloth and the fancy glass centerpiece and all the useless decorative plates hung on the walls. I put them in her parents’ bedroom, which we planned to lock. I wasn’t sure what to do with the plants in the huge, painted ceramic pots. They framed the bay window looking out to garden they’d put in the front yard, and I knew there was no way I could move the plants by myself.

Catherine found me taking small, decorative things from random rooms down to the basement. Some vases, family portraits, a little bonsai plant. Those sorts of things. I got her to help me take apart the table and drag the pieces into her parents’ room.

We had this plan, you see. Operation Party-Proof. We’d spend two or three days moving everything we thought could be broken into the basement and her parents’ room, then we’d lock them and her room upstairs. We’d leave the guest rooms open– you had to have free beds at big parties. Then we’d cover the fancy couches with old blankets. It would look stupid, but it would be more comfortable than my grandma’s plastic covers.

After the party, we’d spend the next few days before Catherine’s parents came home from Seychelles cleaning up. We’d also take down all those fliers we put up for it.

We were really excited about this plan because even though we’d spent all of last semester party-hopping with our new drivers’ licenses, we’d never had one of our own. We weren’t even really sure how to get booze, short of raiding Catherine’s dad’s collection– but that was out of the question. We would definitely get caught that way.

That’s where the fliers came in. We’d get a bunch of cool, older guys to come and bring their own beer. It was perfect.

If there’s one thing I’d learned from movies, it’s that no matter how bad it got, you’d always know what to do in the end. I wasn’t stupid enough to think I’d get music or a long walk in the rain to figure it out, but I always figured that if I ever got into a bad spot, something deep inside me would tell me the best thing to do, and I’d be alright again.

I was trying to explain this to Catherine as I drove her all over town, stapling flyers to telephone poles.

“Did you mark this one too?” She asked me. She hadn’t been paying any attention at all as she grabbed the stapler and hopped out of the car, but I didn’t really mind.

“Yeah. But it’s not like anyone will see it there anyway,” I said back to her, shuffling through the maps of telephone poles in the area she’d found on some county website. I was in charge of following her directions to them and then putting a big fat, red X on all the ones we put fliers on. So we could take them down before Catherine’s parents got home, of course.

“Some might,” she protested, smacking the head of the stapler as hard as she could against the flier and the wood pole. Neither of us could hunt down a staple gun that morning. “Sometimes guys use this road for drag racing, since it’s so low traffic.” She cocked her head to the side, admiring her handy work. “And for its width, I guess,” she added, and slunk back into the passenger’s seat.

I snorted as I started the engine. “It’s not like drag racers read signs. There are too many trees and bushes and stuff around it anyway.”

Catherine shrugged. “Well, whatever. Where’d you put the maps?” And I shoved them into her hands as I pulled back onto the road.

So that’s how we spent our afternoon.

Here’s another thing I learned from movies: falling in love is stupid. It does funny things to you, and it’s supposed to be beautiful, but really you’re just crying over stupid things and giving up fun things. And I know that’s true because mom said she was in love when she got married, but now she can’t go out and do anything fun anymore. And dad said he was in love too, but mom bitches at him when he has friends over. So I’m not going to fall in love, ever.

Holy shit guys I just caught a bug that was flying by me like I just grabbed it out of the air like a friggin bad ass holy shit.