Matt Cowper - The Clerk

After a few seconds, Thomas saw Emily backing out of the garage in her Jetta. Since Thomas’s Malibu and his parents’ Traverse were parked on the driveway in stagger formation, this prevented a conventional departure. Emily, however, seemed to have the unconventional in mind. She backed the car in a wide arc, ending up halfway on the grass. Her headlights were now pointing at Dan, who continued to wriggle around like a method actor hyped up on some powerful stimulant. She honked the horn, but when Dan didn’t move, she gunned the Jetta’s engine, and blazed across the lawn. Dan jumped aside, and finally stopped having a seizure; nearly getting run over had apparently sobered him. The Jetta bumped over the small ditch by the road, swerved onto the pavement, and then zoomed away into the night.

Dan stood there, a barefoot man in silly pajamas, his shoulders slumped, and stared in the direction the car had disappeared. He finally looked up at the house sadly, and Thomas quickly moved away from the window. He didn’t want Dan to know he’d witnessed this embarrassing moment. Not that it mattered; Emily’s exit had been loud and dramatic, and Thomas was sure others in the house had seen or heard the disturbance.

The question now was: what should he do? The obvious thing would be to walk downstairs and ask what had happened, and then comfort Dan, who looked like he needed a whole household’s worth of comforting. But he was drunk, and that bed was so damn comfortable, and he was tired of dealing with crazy women. He would find out tomorrow, if everyone would let him sleep and not barge upstairs and bother him. Emily would surely be back by dawn, anyway.

He belly-flopped onto the bed and sank down into oblivion. His dreams were exactly like he’d expected: vivid and implausible, though the details would be lost upon waking.

“Happy New Year!”

The collective yell was deafening inside Reggie’s small apartment. Thomas winced, wishing they were out on the beach as he’d suggested. There, they would have space to celebrate, and their laughter and hollering would be blown away by the wind, and washed away by the hissing surf. Here, everyone was all crammed together, and it was more raucousness than Thomas could handle. He counted fifteen people in the apartment, all of them at least halfway drunk, most of them trying to be louder and more outrageous than everyone else.

Reggie had invited him to this New Year’s Eve party a few days ago, fully expecting Thomas to decline, as he usually did. It had surprised the both of them when Thomas said yes, especially since he had to work in the morning. Thomas had suggested they walk out on the beach as the hours moved towards midnight, maybe not at the Atlantic Beach Circle, where there would be a crowd milling around a bonfire and listening to live music, but at some lesser-peopled spot on Bogue Banks. Reggie nixed the idea: he’d had bad experiences with the Park Service, the Atlantic Beach Police, and, it seemed, various other law enforcement/governmental authorities on previous New Year’s Eve celebrations. A younger Reggie would have said “Fuck it! Let’s pour the coals on ’er!” but the Reggie of today was weary of tickets and harassment. He was going to stay inside his apartment where it was safe.

Since Reggie had to work on New Year’s Eve, the party didn’t start until he made it home at ten o’clock. Thomas was the first to show up, closely followed by a short blonde in a slinky dress. She was one of those incongruous women who have craggy faces and ghastly skin, but whose bodies are “built like brick shithouses,” as the saying went. Thomas wasn’t feeling picky this evening, and he looked on her mountainous bosom and sequoia-like legs longingly, but she zoned into Reggie and deleted Thomas from existence within thirty seconds of walking in the door.

Thomas sipped his beer bitterly as more people streamed into the apartment and ignored him. He assumed the entire evening would be like this: everyone gravitating towards Reggie, since they were all his friends, lovers, ex-lovers, or potential lovers. For a few hours, it seemed this would be the case: most of the men were slobbering “bros,” pale copies of Reggie, and most of the women were smart-phone-addicted princesses whose emotional maturity remained at fourteen-year-old cheerleader levels.

Surprisingly, however, there was one girl who’d been willing to converse with him, and Thomas had been talking to her until the “Happy New Year” blast interrupted them. She was a plump forty-two-year-old nurse named Allison. While the other girls were homogeneously flashy in their dresses, make-up, and perfectly-coiffed hair, Allison was wearing jeans and a plain black t-shirt. Her only concession to stylishness were two large silver hoop earrings, which glinted in the light.

“So here we are in 2016,” Allison said.

“Yes, we are,” Thomas replied, sipping his Bud Light. Allison wasn’t the best conversationalist, but she was the only person, besides Reggie, who hadn’t looked at him like he was a desperate loser trying to leech off his cooler, sexier betters.

“Have any resolutions?” she asked, biting her lip in a way that probably meant he should say something like, “Yes, my resolution is to get to know a cute girl like yourself.” Thomas, however, resisted — barely.

“Yes, I do have resolutions,” Thomas replied, trying to sound stern, “but I’m not going to share them.”

“Awww. Why so secretive?”

“Well, it’s serious stuff. There are some things that need to be solved. I really don’t want to get into it.”

“Well, poop,” Allison pouted. Thomas had noticed that she replaced her curse words with cutesy euphemisms: shit became poop, fuck became frick, hell became h-e-double-hockey-sticks, and asshole became bumhole. Now that Thomas thought about it, perhaps she was just as immature as the other women, only instead of never-ending text messages and “OMG” drama, she acted as if she were in an animated movie. She reminded Thomas of Cynthia, but even Cynthia had more intelligence and nuance than this dumpling.

But… he would like to get laid… wouldn’t he?

“What about you?” he asked. “Any resolutions you’d like to share?”

“Well, I’d like to lose a little weight. I go to the gym sometimes, but not often enough to do any good. I’d like to start a schedule and stick to it.”

Again, this was Thomas’s cue to say something like “Oh, you don’t need to lose weight. You look fine.” But he didn’t want to say something like that. He tried mightily not to say something like that. He told himself he’d sound like the biggest doofus on earth if he said something like that.

It was all futile. He finally sighed, and succumbed.

“Oh, you don’t need to lose weight. You look fine.”

“You little sweet talker!” Allison gushed. “A few more compliments like that and I’ll have to drag you out to my car and have my way with you!”

Thomas took a large gulp of his beer so he wouldn’t be able to reply.

Why was he being such a goddamn peckerhead, as Rock Lewis would say? Hadn’t his goal been to get laid, to clear his head (both of them) via sweaty intercourse? Here he had a moderately attractive (well, not ugly) woman ready to let him climb on top of her, and he was acting like a kitchen wench had dared to flirt with the lord of the manor, while at the same time acting like a complete dumbass himself.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “but I need to step outside for a minute. Need to, uh, get some fresh air.”

“I’ll come with,” Allison replied happily. “It’s hot and noisy in here anyway. Some fresh air sounds great.”