More Than A Maybe (25 page)

Then they get testy:

> Did you send that FedEx package yet? Send me the tracking number, please.

And then worried:

> Is everything okay? Call me. Or I’ll be back tomorrow and we’ll talk.

The last message he sends me is only four words, but it makes me so incredibly hurt and sad that I think I’ll break:

> Call me, Veronica. Please.

I throw the phone onto one of the pillows and just stare at it for a while.

I feel dead inside.

Then the iPhone buzzes
again,
and with a frustration so pure and undiluted that I’m almost sure I’ll scream, I lunge at it to turn it off . . .

But before I can, I read the new message that’s just arrived:

> hey there it’s Mark

I pause.
Mark?

Oh . . . Oh yeah.

Mark on the beach with his Blackberry.

Library Mark, with his eyes all over Baby’s boobs.

That
Mark.

I sigh, but I find myself tapping a message back with my thumbs:

> hey what’s up

I know instinctively that he is going to text back
not much.

> not much u?

I sigh again and text back:

> not much :)

Marks begins texting more quickly now:

> i was just studying but man it is driving me nuts! lol

> so

> how about i take a break and we get some tacos

> i know this place that has amazing tacos

> do you like fish tacos

I realize that even though I’m not hungry I haven’t really eaten a real meal since last night.

I can hardly believe my thumbs as I give my answer:

> sure I like fish tacos : )

Mark picks me up at the motel in a blue Honda Civic. He is wearing a silk bowling shirt that says
Carl
over the breast pocket. He is wearing a thick pair of black glasses. I’m casual in a halter top and shorts, but Mark’s appearance makes me feel like I’m just this side of overdressed.

I open the passenger door for myself and step inside, and after I buckle Mark looks up at the hotel sign.

“Oh, wow,” he says. “So are you . . . is this like vacation for you?”

“Oh! Ha! Yeah,” I lie. “I’m visiting friends. From college.”

“Cool. On the beach, that was . . . ”

“My friend. Uh, from college.”

“Cool,” says Mark, feeling around for a thread of conversation that isn’t really there. “Great, okay! So. Actually, you know what? Wait just a second . . . music . . .”

Mark reaches into the glove compartment and pulls out a chunky old iPod, along with something plastic wrapped in a mess of black wire. “Here . . . let me just . . . ”

He fumbles with the tangle for a few seconds, then shoves part of it into a slot on the dashboard stereo. I finally figure out what it is: it’s a cassette tape adaptor for the iPod.

A few seconds later a steady pulse of dance music begins to thump its way out of the stereo. Mark grins like it’s the best thing he’s ever heard, so I put a smile on my face and nod my head in time to the music as I tap my hand on my leg.

“Great,” I say. “What is this?”

Mark smiles. “Do you like this? I made this! I mean, I made this mix. The track is actually Underworld.
Old
Underworld.”

“Oh, okay. Do you DJ?” I ask.

“Oh! Yeah!” he says enthusiastically. “There are some CDJs in the student union and I spin there sometimes. Well . . . not so much lately. I’ve gotta study right now, some of my grades have been . . . but yeah, that’s where I DJ. Most of the time.”

I nod. “Great. Very cool.”

The car hasn’t moved, I notice — we’re still in the parking lot, engine idling, the heavy thump of Old Underworld knocking through the Civic’s thin-sounding speakers. I just nod my head and try and look appreciative until Mark eventually figures out that we’re not moving.

“Okay!” he says. “Who’s ready for tacos?”

“Me!” I say.

“Great!” he says, putting the car in gear. “Here we go!”

We pull out of the parking lot onto the road, and Mark gives me a smile. I catch him glancing over at my boobs just a bit before he turns his attention again to the road in front of him.

A few minutes later we arrive at the taco shop. Mark parks the car alongside the road. It’s really more of a taco
truck,
actually, but there are a couple of plastic folding tables and chairs set up next to it. Mark orders three fish tacos and a big glass bottle of Coke. I order two fish tacos and a bottle of water.

“Ahh! Can’t beat this,” says Mark once we’re seated, taking a long drink from his bottle of Coke and smacking his lips noisily. “This is Mexican Coke.”

I frown at him. “Is that special?”

“What? Oh,
yeah.
Totally different,” he says, his face looking serious. “Mexican Coke is made with real cane sugar, but American Coke is made with corn syrup. Big, big difference. Here, just taste it.”

He slides the bottle over to me and I take a sip. It tastes like any other Coke.

“See?” he asks, trying to impress upon me how important this is. “Can you
taste
that?”

This obviously means a lot to him . . . so I nod. “Yeah. Yeah, I think I can,” I lie.

I slide the bottle back.

He smiles, picks it up, and takes another big gulp. “Amazing! Well, anyway, eat up. Tacos are getting cold.”

* * *

The tacos are actually really good, and after we drop our paper plates in the plastic trash bag at the side of the taco truck Mark asks me if I’d like to go for a walk on the beach, and I say
Sure.

We go down near the ice-cold water line of the incoming tide and we stroll along for a while, and after a while he puts his hand out and takes mine in his and I find that I don’t let go.

Mark stands a little straighter then, and his stride becomes a bit longer and more confident. He takes a deep breath.

“So . . . Veronica. We’re both students, right?”

I nod. “Uh . . . right.”

And then suddenly Mark is talking incredibly fast, saying absolutely nothing . . . and he does not stop:

“Ha! Okay. So we both know what we’re doing
now.
But seriously: doesn’t it seem like everyone is always asking you what comes next? Like — okay, get this: when I was in grade school, they asked all the kids what they wanted to be, and I told them that I wanted to be — get this — a
Pok
é
mon Trainer.
So the teacher tells me, no, that isn’t something you can be, so I thought for a while and then I told her that I wanted to be a
zookeeper.
Because . . . I think I had just
been
to the zoo, and that seemed like it was close enough to a Pok
é
mon Trainer. Or something! Ha!

“Anyway. My point is that people are always asking you, like, what you want to be in the future. And most people don’t know — like, there’s going to be school, and then some kind of . . . of . . .
vaguely defined period
of job hunting or whatever. And then you have a job, and then you start work, and then you work for fifty years, or whatever, and then maybe if you’re lucky you’ll have a few years to do what you want before you die. Right? So for the longest time I was just trying to work this out in my head. Because I didn’t want that like everybody else. So whenever anyone asked me what I wanted to be after that, I just said
zookeeper,
for the longest time. You know?”

I have absolutely no idea what he is getting at . . . but I feel myself nodding anyway.

“What I actually want is to not have to work all the time. Like, right now. While I’m
young.
I want to be able to . . . I don’t know, go see the aurora borealis in Iceland if I want to. Just pick up and go, just like that. If I want. Or that place in Cambodia with . . . that place, with all the green temples and stuff.”

“Angkor Wat?”

“Angkor Wat! Yes!” he says, grinning like a maniac. “That’s it! So then I figured it out, Veronica: why should I have to waste my future, working all the time for some
other
guy, helping him to get
his
dreams, when I could just make my own dreams come true? Seeing the world . . . or, you know, making my music. DJ more. Not just at the student union, but actually at real actual clubs. Ibiza, um . . . Berlin. Everywhere. And so that’s when I figured it out. How to do it. What I have to do.”

“What?” I ask, surprising myself at just how much I actually want to hear the answer.

“I need to have my own company! Make something and sell it all over the place! Online, or whatever. Like my friend — my friend does that . . . thing with the hooks. Crochet. And she was making these custom crochet iPhone cases and selling them on some website called Etsy last summer. She made like
eight hundred dollars.
”

Mark stops walking and talking suddenly, and he turns to take my other hand in his, and he’s looking into my eyes like he’s trying to see if I understand.

His smile is so incredibly, impossibly pure . . . and I realize despite myself that his dumb enthusiasm is infectious. My smile makes Mark’s grin even bigger, and his breathing is excited and he is absolutely deadly serious about himself, and me, and now . . .

He leans in for a kiss.

His mouth is open a little too much and mine is closed, because I am absolutely not expecting it at all, but then I can feel my lips part, and he’s kissing me again — and now I am kissing him too, and his hand is on my face and my hands go to his chest, and I think for a moment I might push him away from me . . . but I don’t.

Finally his lips leave mine, and he takes a step backward.

“Whoa,” he says. “Wow.”

* * *

Mark lives in a tiny one-room efficiency over a bicycle repair shop.

There’s an elephant graveyard of mangled bicycle parts in front of it — tireless wheels, chainless Schwinns in various states of disrepair. We pick our way carefully over to the rusty wrought-iron stairs and begin our three-storey climb to Mark’s apartment.

“That guy is amazing — the bicycle guy,” says Mark, taking the stairs two at a time and pointing his thumb over his shoulder. “I have this folding Dahon bike and it needed a new pedal one time. That guy fixed it in like three hours, only charged me thirty bucks. He’s great.”

Mark opens the door of his apartment — or he tries to, anyway; the door only opens halfway, then bangs against the aforementioned Dahon. He gives it a kick with his boot, and I’m able to squeeze myself inside.

Mark clicks on a table lamp, and I get my first good look at the inside of his apartment. It’s a look I decide to call University Hodgepodge: it’s low-ceilinged and squarish, with a basic kitchenette and dining nook to one side of the entryway. I walk past into the smallish main living room/bedroom — it’s slightly larger than my current room in the Ocean-View, though not by much. To one side is a blue foam Ikea sofa covered by the frayed folds of what looks like a serape. On the other side of the room is a pressboard Ikea desk, with a sticker-covered laptop computer and a few piles of precariously-stacked schoolwork. The bed is a basic twin with a suspiciously neat-looking duvet; the walls above it are covered with black light posters, a dented SPEED LIMIT 55 sign, and what appears to be a long line of large black shark teeth.

Mark catches me eyeing the teeth. “Oh, hey — check this out,” he says, and I hear a
click.
The string glows to life, filling the apartment with a bright electric red. They aren’t teeth after all — they’re illuminated chili peppers.

“Ha! Sweet, right?” says Mark proudly. “My friend Steve used to work at Chili’s, and he stole these on his last day, just before he quit. They all totally knew it was him, and they called him a bunch of times . . . but they couldn’t prove
anything.
”

“Huh! Way to go Steve,” I say, staring at the chili peppers as I move to sit on the sofa.

“Yeah, that guy is
crazy.
Listen, though — do you want something to drink? I have . . . let’s see, I have PBR and . . . I have some vodka . . . and I have a little limeade.”

“Can I have the vodka and limeade?” I ask.

“Sure! I can do that — hold on for a moment, and I will
make you a cocktail.
”

Mark finds a glass and puts some vodka and ice in it, and then he splashes some juice into the glass and stirs it with a reasonably clean-looking fork.

“Stirred not shaken. For the lady,” he says, handing it to me.

“Thanks.” I taste it and it’s a little too strong, but it’s fine. Mark gets a PBR and cracks it open and clinks the can against my glass.

“Cheers!”

He takes a huge drink of PBR. I stare at him for a second — and then I shrug, taking a big drink from my vodka thing.

“Oh, hey — music,” says Mark. “Let me get some music up in here. Hold on.”

He turns on his stereo, then goes over to the laptop and clicks around until iTunes comes up, and soon we’re listening to the thumping beat of dance music for the second time that night.

“Do you like this? This is goa. Goa
trance,
” he says. “Actually, let me turn it down a bit — my neighbor can be a real asshole about noise,” he says, moving over to twist the knob on his stereo. I don’t like the music much, but then Mark starts to do a little dance in the middle of the floor and it distracts me. It’s not a very good dance, and he moves his arms way too much, but it makes me smile in spite of myself.

I take another gulp of my drink.

“This is an extremely difficult dance,” says Mark, “that I invented myself.”

I laugh. “Did you really?”

“Yes,” says Mark. “And I need to practice it every day, obviously. Still: I think you might be able to handle it.”

He holds out his arms and gestures for me to join him, so I put down my drink and I let him take my hands. I am not a very good dancer either, so I just put my hands on Mark’s waist and step back and forth while Mark does his thing. Then we get nearer to each other . . . and then Mark closes the gap between our lips and we are kissing again.