Edward Adrift

bitchin’ iPhone to download some different music.
    “It will cost some money, but not very much,” he says.
    “How much?”
    “Twenty or thirty dollars.”
    I think it’s funny—not ha-ha funny, but interesting funny—that Kyle considers this “not very much” money. When I worked at the
Billings Herald-Gleaner
, before I was involuntarily separated, I made $15 an hour. It would have taken me two hours of patching concrete or repairing the press or snowblowing the parking lot to earn what he proposes to spend while we’re sitting in a restaurant booth in Burley, Idaho, waiting for pancakes. (I decided to have breakfast, too. I like pancakes, even though they’re not on my approved diabetic diet.)
    “Go ahead,” I say. “I’m fucking loaded.”
    Kyle doesn’t even have to tell me. I take out my wallet and push a dollar bill across the table to him. A stern-faced lady at the table to our left looks at me and shakes her head.
    “He earned it,” I tell her.
    “As long as you have the wallet out,” Kyle says, “you better hand over two more dollars.”
    “Why?”
    “You remember when I jumped out of the blankets in the backseat?”
    This is a silly question. It happened just a little more than an hour ago. Of course I remember it.
    “Yes, I remember.”
    “Do you remember what you said?”
    “Not really.”
    “You said—” Kyle stops short. “I almost messed up. You said, ‘What the
f
-ing
f
, Kyle?’ That’s two
f
-bombs and two dollars for me.”
    The woman at the next table is looking over here again.
    “I’m not paying,” I say.
    “Why not?”
    “Our agreement was not in force when I said those things, and there is no codicil in our contract that allows you to collect on things said before you signed the agreement. Also, ‘codicil’ is a really good word. It means ‘supplement.’”
    “You still shouldn’t have said it.”
    “That may be true, although I would argue that it was a natural response to your scaring me. In any event, it’s still not covered by our agreement.”
    “That’s not fair.”
    “It’s completely fair. Do you think I should be able to mark down nasty things you said to me and your mother yesterday? Or what you said to your teacher last week?”
    “No.”
    “What’s the difference?”
    Kyle is stumped. Kyle is also unhappy.
    “This is a big
f
-ing load of
s
,” he says. The woman at the next table looks horrified.
    “You shouldn’t use stand-ins for cursing,” I tell him. “It’s not much different than actually saying the real words.”
    He digs into his pancakes, which have just arrived.
    “Yeah? Well, there’s no cod-i-something in our agreement that covers stand-in words. So shove it up your
a
-word.”
    The woman at the next table picks up her plate and moves to a table at the far end of the row. I don’t blame her. Kyle used to be a nice boy, but he’s gotten sour somehow, as Victor told me that first night. If I weren’t responsible for him, I’d probably move to another table, too.

    As I’m paying for our meal, I ask Kyle what kind of songs he downloaded on my bitchin’ iPhone, although I’m careful not to actually say “bitchin’” so I can remain fucking loaded.
    “Country songs, mostly,” he says.
    I stick out my tongue, which I’ll concede isn’t mature. I will have to be careful about such things, since the question of Kyle’s maturity is now such a hot topic.
    “What’s wrong?” he asks.
    “I like rock ‘n’ roll better.”
    “Well, too bad.”
    “I’ll make you a deal,” I say. “We’ll listen to three of your songs, then three of mine, then three of yours, and so on.”
    “We just listened to maybe ten of your songs before we got here, so I think we should get to listen to ten of mine before we start going back and forth.”
    “That’s not the deal I’m offering you. It’s three of yours, then three of mine, as soon as we leave. That way, I can minimize my exposure to bad music.”
    I’m thinking now about when my OCD was out of control and I got in a lot of trouble for writing Garth Brooks forty-nine letters complaining to him that he had ruined country music. The “Garth Brooks incident,” as my father always called it, is what led to my being kicked out of my parents’ house and being put under the care of Dr. Buckley starting in 2000. As it turned out, this was a good thing, as I wouldn’t have met Donna and Kyle if I hadn’t been forced to move, and I wouldn’t have gotten