Andromeda

This is a story about looking out at life, when we should be looking in.

If you told me the day I met Charlie Sails that I would end up loving her, I would have laughed in your face.  People say that a lot, but I really would have went to town, spitting and wheezing so you’d always remember me as the guy that made it literally rain when you mocked him. 

I never would have met her if it hadn’t been for Matt.  But I might never have lost her if it hadn’t been for Matt, either.

He was my best friend.  I think.  I’m pretty sure.  It’s hard to tell, after a while, if you stay near someone because you like them or because it’s habit.  I’d known Matt all my life.  We both lived on Kettle Street in Marlow, New Hampshire.  Our dads bonded over being single parents through divorce and golf.  Matt’s dad, Mr. Novak, would drop him off at my house so my older brother could watch us while the two of them went golfing.

Matt hadn’t had a good life.  His dad worked long hours as manager of Greenie’s, the local grocery store, and still barely raked in enough cash to pay the bills.  He didn’t talk much about his mom, but I know she’d been a drunk, unemployed, so, even though he couldn’t afford it, his father won custody in the divorce. 

When we were kids at Marlow Elementary School, Matt and I were the boys that made Ben Dirsch, the scrawny, pale dork with glasses, eat worms.  We were the little bullies that ran around on the playground tugging girls’ ponytails and throwing woodchips at people.  In middle school we were the first guys to smoke cigarettes, setting the standard for everyone who wanted to be cool.  We were the guys that people dressed liked, talked like, tried to be friends with.  High school wasn’t any different.  We were the core of Marlow High �" the school formed around us.  Our circle of friends was constantly changing, but Matt and I were always the head of it.  We were the kind of guys that people worked to impress; we ruled the school, as small as it was.  It was our kingdom.  We could have whatever, whoever we wanted, and Charlie was the kind of girl that I didn’t give a second glance. 

She was the kind of girl who wore those black, plastic framed glasses and kept her hair cropped short and dyed all kinds of colors, like red or purple.  She wore things like cargo pants and holey t-shirts or old, worn-out jeans and frumpy sweaters.  She never looked like she cared, like one of those ‘dare to be different’ chicks, but she kept her chin tucked into her chest and did her best to seem invisible.  It was September when I met her, and I just might associate the colors of fall and the taste of peanut butter with her for the rest of my life. 

Living in a small town, there wasn’t much to do.  There were plenty of crummy diners to eat at and a bowling alley in Stoddard.  Sometimes we’d go there to play pool and smoke, looking for girls that might be looking for us.  But most of the time we went to Keene to party with the university students. 

We’d go and sit in Matt’s car, people watching in different parking lots around town while we waited for something to happen.  We’d smoke and make fun of people like the fat women pushing Wal-Mart carts to their SUVs and men with Amish beards who looked like they hadn’t been laid in five years’ time striding along beside them.  Those were our weekends during the school year; sitting in his car, giving ourselves cancer, and being a******s.

Our most common place to park was Lindy’s Diner right off 79.  It was your typical, dingy, cube-shaped building.  The kind of place truckers stopped in at three in the morning for a cup of s****y coffee and pancakes; nothing outstanding or special about it except for the fact that it was locally famous for its peanut butter pie.  Matt was allergic to peanuts, so much so that I couldn’t even eat a piece in the car with him or his throat would close up because of the enclosed space.

Charlie sat inside the diner, one of the people we made fun of.  She would sit there with a piece of that pie and read, study, whatever.  She’d paint and write and work right there in Lindy’s, hunched over so far that her nose just about rubbed the paper.  We saw her every day that summer.  She’d sit there by herself for hours, afternoon to evening, never seeming to run out of things to do and somehow making her dessert last the entire time.  Usually we left before she did, on to bigger and better things, forgetting all about her.  Out of sight, out of mind.

One Friday I remember we were sitting in Matt’s old a*s Corolla at Lindy’s.  It was our senior year, and we were ready to spend the majority of it fucked up and taking it easy.  The sun was setting and the highway beside Lindy’s was congested with people driving home from work.  The sky was turning sunset purple and the lights in the diner made it easy to see the lower class families and trucker people inside, fisting platefuls of greasy dinners into the garbage disposals in the center of their faces.

That night our friends were Tom and Scott and they were in the backseat.  Matt blew cigarette smoke through the crack in his window, his dark eyes narrowed and critical.  Tom was talking about some f*****g party he’d been at over the summer.  No one, except maybe for Scott, was listening to him, and I knew that for sure when Matt shook his head and turned around in the driver’s seat, leather interior squeaking, to smirk at them and say:  “Sick.”

Tom shut up about his party.  I watched the smoke curling from Matt’s cigarette, escaping.  “What is?” Scott said, trying to look through the windshield from the backseat to see what Matt saw.

I knew that face.  It was the same wicked grin from second grade when Matt would watch me push bugs through kids’ lips.  They were the same arched eyebrows from sixth grade when he watched me swallow my first gulp of the whiskey he stole from his dad.  It was mischievous; bored cruelty.  This was what we did, how we were.

“Look at that f*****g chick,” he said and took a drag from his cigarette.

Everyone in the car looked where Matt suggested.  I heard Scott snort because he didn’t get it.  Tom didn’t pretend which made me like him more, but I still didn’t really like him.  “What about her?” he said.

The girl wasn’t doing anything particularly fascinating.  Her usual life’s collection of books was stacked on the table, but she wasn’t looking at any of them.  She was writing.  Just writing.

But Matt’s laugh slipped through his teeth and he tapped some ash off his cigarette out the window.  “F*****g everything, man.  She must reek like cat piss or soup or some s**t �" she’s always by herself.”

“Like a f****n’ leper.”  Tom was getting it.

Matt laughed.  “F**k yeah.”  He elbowed me.  “Could you imagine pounding that s**t?”

“F**k no, man!  You’d probably pick something up.”

And laughed.  “Like the Herp.”

“I was thinking rabies.”

And he really laughed, making the air tremble.  It was a genuine, satisfying sound.  He didn’t let go of his laugh too often, and when he did it was like he was putting lines of endorphins out for you to snort up like an addict.  It felt good to make him laugh like that, which is probably why I said the things I did around him.

When we were kids, playing while our dads golfed, we found this place behind my house.  Two miles of wooded area spanned in my back yard, and we hiked through it one time, exploring.  After the woods, there was this clearing that came out on top of a ledge, maybe it could even be a cliff.  I don’t f*****g know the terminology, but it’s our place.  We called it ‘the View’ because we could see the sun setting over the rest of the world.  It had been our place ever since.  When we got older, we would bring beers or Matt’s dad’s whiskey or even the occasional joint out there to get hammered until our tongues were so loose we felt like we could’ve said anything.  We let our feet dangle, sitting dangerously close to the edge of the cliff and looked out over a vast, almost infinite view.  From there we could see mountains covered in forests and bigger towns up to thirty miles away.  We could see all different kinds of life. 

He asked me out there once if he was a bad person.  He said he always felt like a bad person.  I told him he wasn’t and we were silent after that.

We didn’t stay in the parking lot much longer that night.  We cracked some more jokes and then drove off to get drunk and laid.

It was when Carl and Jason were in the back seat.  Matt pointed out the girl again.  This time she was reading and pulling her hair.  Studying, probably.  He used my joke.

“She’s probably f*****g rabid.”

He had Carl and Jason laughing so hard I was expecting them to piss themselves, but they were as high as a f*****g zeppelin so it didn’t really count.  Matt caught me rolling my eyes at them, annoyed, and something in his smile died a little bit.

“What?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“You just rolled your eyes.  You’re f*****g rolling your eyes at something.”

“Forget about it.”

His smile disappeared completely and his eyes were dark and defensive.

“F**k you, man.”

“What?”

“You think you can sit there and roll your eyes at us?  You think you’re f*****g better than us?”

“Matt…”

His jaw was tight.  “I know you, Craig.  Better than anyone, you smug f****r.”

I sighed.  “I don’t think I’m better than you.”

That grin again.  Bored cruelty.  “Prove it.”

 

My dad was a biology professor at the community college in Keene.  It wasn’t like he was Charles f*****g Darwin or anything, but Matt liked to pretend that I thought I was better than him because we had more money than him.  He got intense about it, sometimes.  This was one of those times. 

Something as simple as rolling my eyes had him daring me to ‘get within biting distance’ of this rabies chick we’d been making fun of all summer.  “Go in there and charm the s**t out of her, make her blush, swoon…” Matt had said, pinching my cheek like my grandma did when I was younger.  “Or mock the f**k out of her, Compton.  Your call.”

It was f*****g stupid, and I knew it.  I also knew that Matt would be an a*****e until I redeemed myself for rolling my eyes.  He thought he was reprimanding me, putting me in my place for my supposed holier-than-thou thoughts, and he wouldn’t be happy until I showed him I was the same son of a b***h he’d learned to love.  So I’d sighed and worked hard not to roll my eyes again and got out of the car to go get close enough that I could tell Matt if she smelled like cat piss or soup.

The diner smelled like pancakes and burnt coffee.  There weren’t many people inside, which was most likely why the focus had been on the girl that day.  It was weird, seeing her from this angle and distance.  It actually made me feel nervous, like a little kid who was about to sit on Santa’s lap at the mall for the first time.  We’d built her up to be some disgusting, sub-human creature, and I was about to get close to it.  I glanced out the window at Matt’s car and then walked over to her booth.

The books that were stacked on the table beside her were all art texts �" the history of, techniques, biographies about Monet and Van Gogh…  For the first time, I considered she might be a college student, older than me.  I flopped down on the booth seat across from her and didn’t say anything.  Neither did she.  She continued writing in a notebook, the line breaks telling me it was poetry.  Her hand didn’t pause, eyelids didn’t twitch, lips didn’t purse.  She just kept doing what she was doing like she was in another world completely.

I sat there for a minute or two before getting impatient and trying to draw a reaction from her.  “Hi,” I said, overly friendly and sarcastic.  She inhaled through her nose and let out a sigh that’s length contained a lifetime’s exasperation.

“You’re finally here to make fun of me to my face.”

She capped her pen and closed her notebook, trying to pack up and high-tail it out of there before I could open my mouth.

“I- I wasn’t gonna make fun of you…”

“Don’t think I’m so ignorant, Craig Compton, I’m not.  I see your friends out there now.”

My head whirled to look out the window and get her crystal clear view of Matt’s Corolla.  I could just make out the whites of his eyes and his teeth, lips curled back around them in a s**t-eating grin.

“I- f**k, you don’t know me!”

She stopped.  Her messenger bag was pregnant with books and she still had so many, slipping from her arms.  She stood there, her pants loose around her hips and baggy sweatshirt hiding her from something, and she looked at me like I was vermin, like she could spit on me and still be a better person.  “Oh, I know you,” she said.  “How dare you come in here, acting like you know me.”

She walked out of the restaurant without a second glance, leaving me blinking and staring after her, feeling dumbfounded.  I’d never spoken to her before in my life, but she knew my name.  I still didn’t know hers.

 

The guys were laughing by the time I came back out, having seen the whole thing.  I told them she’d hardly let me say a word and Matt barked a laugh.  “Your reputation precedes you,” he said, clapping me on the back and making it clear that all was forgiven.  I didn’t tell him that she was terrified I’d make fun of her.  I just laughed along and let him crack jokes. 

But when we got to the party that night, I felt weird inside.  Rotten, like I was just starting to realize what a bad person I was.  For the first time in my memory, I didn’t get piss drunk and pick up some college chick while I was there.  I couldn’t.  Alcohol tasted like pollution and that girl’s words kept echoing in my head.  “Oh, I know you.”  Like she had me all figured out.  The more I let it roll around in my head, the bigger it got.  I was sitting in some frat house armchair getting pissed off about some girl I got dared to talk to, and the fact that I was letting it ruin my fun pissed me off even more.  But I couldn’t get drunk and by the time it was quiet enough to crash I had resolved to go back to the diner and tell that b***h what was what.

When I finally fell asleep, I dreamt she sat in my place in Matt’s car, smoking in the passenger seat, looking through the diner windows and making fun of me.

Matt dropped me off at my house the next day.

“F*****g sick party, man.”

“Yeah, dude, sick.”

“Wanna chill later?  Maybe go to the View before it starts getting too cold?”

“Oh, not today, man.  I don’t have the energy to go out there today.”

“F**k yeah, you’re right.  Can’t imagine tripping through the woods today.”

“See you at school, man.”

He left and I got my bike out so that I could ride down to Lindy’s.

It was about fourteen miles away, which sounds like a lot and kind of is a lot, but didn’t seem that bad because I was still thinking about what the f**k I was going to say.  Actually, it wasn’t until I was already at the diner and off of my bike that I could even feel the lactic acid burning in my muscles.  Along with it, I was starting to feel dumb.  What the f**k was I doing here?  Was it really that important?  Who cared what this chick thought of me?  But regardless of my efforts to convince myself I was being stupid, my heart was pumping some serious adrenaline or some other natural drug when I saw her pull up in that dirty, white Chevy.

By the time she had parked and was walking towards the entrance, towards me, I had my spiel all planned out and my temper was rising again.  Who did she think she was, telling me who I was when she didn’t know the first thing about me?  What a f*****g hypocrite!  And by the time she stopped in front of me, her nose pointing at the ground and shoulders slumped, the image of defeat, it was all gone again and I felt awkward.

She let out that sigh again, the really long one, and asked, “Look… what…?  What do you want?  What do you want with me?”

The glare of the midday sun made me squint my eyes and I found myself looking down, as well, my chin tucked into my chest, just like her.  There was a shard of green glass next to my shoe and the cars on the highway were the soundtrack to the awkward silence as I searched for words.  My heart, for some reason, was beating in my tongue and I was afraid of embarrassing myself for the first time I could ever remember.  I tried to answer.

“I…” but I didn’t know.  I didn’t want anything.  “I just want to know your name.”

I looked up enough to see her knuckles shifting under her skin as she clenched the strap of her messenger bag.  She looked up too and answered, “I’m Charlie.”

“I’m Craig.”

“I know.”

“How?”

She rolled her eyes and moved around me, going into the diner.  I watched the glass door close behind her before I followed.

She was already sitting down, her pile of books towering over her, looking at the menu as if today would be the day she ordered something different.  I think she tried to ignore me for a minute, but I just sat there and drummed the table with my fingertips over and over.  It sounded like a racehorse and she couldn’t do it for long.  Her menu hit the table with a light slap and the breeze pushed a stray napkin at me. 

“What?”

Surprising myself, I had to fight a smirk.  Not the kind of smirk that I knew I wore when I was dicking around with Matt, a real smirk.  A smile.  One that I could feel trying in my cheeks.  She had really pretty brown eyes, big and fierce behind her glasses.  She was unexpectedly… cute.  And she didn’t smell like cat piss.

I leaned forward over the table.  She leaned back. 

“How do you know my name?”

“Oh Jesus, Craig, half the girls in New Hampshire know your name.”

“What can I get for you, sir?”  A waitress put a piece of peanut butter pie by Charlie and looked at me for answers.

“Oh, I…” hadn’t planned on staying.  Yet, there I was, bombarding this girl that told me off, stung me the day before.  Again, I wondered what I was doing here, but I said, “I’ll have what she’s having.”  Charlie’s shoulders drooped across the table and I was working against a smile again.  I was annoying her.

The waitress bustled off and Charlie’s face was in her hands, glasses pushed up, a groan lost in between her fingers.  “Why are you still here?”

I couldn’t do it anymore.  I smiled and let out a laugh.  I couldn’t remember the last time I’d laughed like that �" without it being induced by cruelty or alcohol or drugs.  It was so organic and it felt like someone or something inside me was trying to come out.  Without thinking about it, I said, “I think you’re interesting.”

As soon as I said it I knew it was true.  That was why I was still here talking to her.  That was why I’d come back in the first place. 

Her hands were still in front of her face and I noticed how nice they were.  Long, piano player fingers, delicate knuckles, pale skin stretched over blue veins… she had purple and blue paint stains on the edges of her palms, but her fingernails were clean and the same shade of pink as her thin lips.

“Interesting?” she said from behind the wall of her palms.

“Yeah.”

Slowly they came down.  Her cheeks were red, her brow swimming into confusion.  “Why?”

“You make me think about you.”  I tried to choose my wording carefully, but it came out too bluntly.  Too forwardly.  I wasn’t good at this, talking about what I thought.  I was good at talking about what other people thought �" what Matt thought.  But when it came time to be upfront about myself, I found I was searching too much for the right words, or words in general.

She didn’t blush deeper.  Her brow didn’t smooth.  She didn’t smile.  She just stared at me, not moving so much as an eyelash.  The waitress put my piece of pie in front of me and I broke eye contact.  She winked and smiled at me and walked off and I realized what this must have looked like.  But I didn’t think about leaving.  I didn’t care what it looked like.  At the moment, anyway.  I took a bite of the pie �" my first piece of Lindy’s pie ever, because of Matt �" and it was the most delicious thing I think I’d ever had.  It tasted like a cure to some emptiness I hadn’t noticed until yesterday.

Without warning, Charlie said, “What’s your favorite galaxy?”

It was a weird question, and I wondered if she was trying to scare me off, but I answered.  “The Milky Way, I guess.  Ours.”

She had a funny little smile on her lips and she scrunched her nose, which was cute.  She had the sort of nose you don’t think about until you can’t find a flaw on her face and you look for it there.  “It’s not ours, Craig.”

“It’s the one we live in.”

“Right, but it’s the Universe’s, not ours.”

“Why do you ask, anyway?”

Charlie looked at me with intensity in her eyes and the corner of her lips for a second, and then slowly pulled a piece of heavy paper out of her canvas bag and handed it to me.

It was space.  A galaxy, it looked like.  She’d painted it and it was beautiful.  Purple and blue gas and a solid black sky and bright white stars �" it didn’t look like paper, it looked like space.  Like I could reach through the paint and pull myself out of the world.

“My favorite’s Andromeda.”  I looked up at her eyes and they were filled with passion.  Whether it was for the galaxy or her art, I wasn’t sure, but she was about to speak with her heart and it had me listening.  “I mean, you can’t see the Milky Way.  We’re on the inside of it and it’s beautiful, but it’s not the same view we get of Andromeda.”

It made me think of days where I’d let my feet dangle over the edge of the world with Matt.  The only times I ever felt like I might be able to learn about myself were when I was looking out and enjoying the view.  And then something clicked in my head about Charlie and the way she thought.  Suddenly I understood her better than I understood anyone, and it was because we were the same.

“This is beautiful.”  I handed her back the painting.

“Thank you.”

 

By the time I left the diner that night, I knew that Charlie Sails liked blue, the Tragically Hip, Sylvia Plath, and daybreak, and I knew that I liked her.  When she talked she used her entire self, gesturing with her perfect hands, her eyebrows moving up and down and around, and the corners of her mouth telling me what she was really saying.  I missed her company when I left, but I still smiled while I thought about her on the bike ride home, and I realized these were the seeds of something.

It wasn’t too late by the time I walked in through the front door, maybe seven or eight.  My dad was sitting on the living room couch with a glass of red wine, watching some sitcom on TV.  He looked at me and raised his graying eyebrows.  “Where’ve you been?” he said.

“I was down in Keene today.”

He nodded like he understood I’d crashed somewhere after a party, but this time he was wrong.  I didn’t correct him, though.  “Matt was around looking for you earlier.  Said you weren’t answering your phone.”

“I wasn’t.”

“I know.  I called.”

“Sorry.”

Dad shrugged and yawned at the same time.

“I’m gonna go up to my room.”

“You hungry?”

The taste of peanut butter was still lingering on my breath and I fought back the grin.  “Nah.  Just tired.”

 

I called Matt back and it felt awkward to talk to him after a day of insight and intellect.  Wrong.  “F**k man, where you been?”

“I was just…”

“F**k it.  Some frat house is having another party tonight.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, man, you gonna come?”

“I don’t know…”

The other end went silent and I thought the call dropped.

“Matt?”

“What the f**k do you mean, ‘I don’t know’?”

“I just…”

“You don’t f*****g drink at last night’s party, now you don’t even want to go with me to this one… the f**k is wrong with you?  What am I supposed to do without my right hand man?”

“Nothing’s wrong, dude, I’m just not in the mood.”

“Not in the f*****g mood?”

“I’m not in the mood!”

“Alright, Compton.  F**k you, you pretentious p***y.”

This time when the line went silent, he’d hung up.

 

In bed that night I did a lot of thinking.  So much that I didn’t sleep a whole lot.  I was thinking about Matt and how he was probably more pissed than I realized.  I cared about Matt.  I did �" he was my best friend.  I didn’t want him to be mad.  I imagined him out getting wasted and felt guilty when I realized he was probably getting even more hammered because of me.

He drank and partied because he wanted to forget about life.  About his mom and how she didn’t pay child support, about the sloppy divorce in general.  He tried to forget about the distance between him and his dad.  And now he was sucking down booze and weed to forget about me blowing him off.  I should’ve gone out with him, if anything to watch him and make sure he didn’t end up in a f*****g ambulance. 

But even the mild worry for Matt couldn’t keep my thoughts away from Charlie.  I kept seeing the way her eyebrows expressed her words and I kept wondering why I wasn’t just thinking about f*****g her.  Why I cared about the way she saw the world, the thoughts she had.  I was captivated by her.

The hours dragged on Sunday.  I stayed in the house and ate and poked at an English essay I’d have to do at some point, but there was no point in the day.  My dad locked himself in his office to grade papers, and not even my phone buzzed with texts and calls.  I wondered about going to the diner and seeing if Charlie was there, but I didn’t because I was scared of what I was feeling after just one conversation.  She could be a drug, I realized.  Talking to her sober was like smoking pot with Matt. 

The sound of the second hand ticking on the old clock in the kitchen was the loudest thing in the house.  No creaking floorboards from the office, no groaning from the plumbing.  It was a ghost day, a fake day.  It felt like a Sunday.  I was hungry and tired and I had a headache and tomorrow would be Monday.  That’s always the worst part about Sunday.  But at least I slept that night.

I barely got to school on time and it felt like just another day. 

“Hey f****r.”  Matt came over, slamming my locker so I would have to open the damn thing again.

“Hey man.”

“Look, what are you avoiding me for?”

“I’m not avoiding-”

“The f**k you aren’t!  You been acting funny since that day at the diner, and I want to know why.”

“I haven’t been.  I’m not.  I’m just stressing about college, I guess, the future.  I don’t want to be a f**k up.”

Matt stared at me so long and hard I didn’t even hear the bell ring.  I kept eye contact, though, because if I didn’t he wouldn’t believe me.  Finally he looked away, rubbing and pulling at his bottom lip so I could tell that he wanted a cigarette and that he didn’t believe me.

“Alright,” he said.  “We’ll see.”

I didn’t know what he meant by it, but I just re-closed my locker and turned my back on him, headed for class.

In all honesty, I wasn’t avoiding him.  I was avoiding his behavior, his cruelty, his popularity.  I didn’t look behind me as I walked down the hall, but I was positive, halfway to my first period class, that he was still there, leaning against the lockers, pulling at his bottom lip and thinking about how he was going to make me come around.  He always made me come around.

After school that day, I went to Lindy’s and felt new things stirring inside me when I saw Charlie sitting at her booth, hunched over a notebook.

“Hey,” I said, standing at the corner of the table.  She looked up and tried to hide her smile by pulling her lips into her teeth, but her cheeks still rose, making her eyes light, happy.

“Hey,” she said.

“Can I sit with you?”

She smiled in full.  “Sure.  You know, I didn’t really think I’d be seeing you again.”

“Yeah, well…” I slid into the booth.  “I didn’t really think I’d be coming back.”

“I’m… sort of glad you did.”

I held the sudden rush of feelings between my teeth.

“You’re different than I’ve heard,” she said.  “Not what I expected at all.”

I swallowed and tightened my jaw.  I was only different because of her.  She made me feel comfortable, like I could, and should, be myself.  But I wondered how long it would last.  I was only free of the image I had to uphold when I was here with her.  It was such an unrealistic dream to think that it could be like that forever, especially with Matt breathing down my neck.

I watched her taste her pie and she was real.  She was temporary.  It disappointed me to know that.

“What’s…” she started to ask, but her eyes ended up flickering out the window beside me.  Her face dropped like a brick.

I turned to follow her eye and felt my own face turn to stone.  Matt was in the parking lot, behind the steering wheel, two cronies in the backseat.  I met his eyes, dark and displeased.  We were both clenching our jaws, me in panic, him in anger.  He was getting out of the car, his movements stiff and quick.  Mad.  I turned back to Charlie.

Her pale face was sad, her eyes shadowed.  She knew what was coming as well as I had.

“Charlie, I’m sorry.”  When she looked up at me, I could tell my words meant nothing, like static to her ears.  “I didn’t… I just wanted…”

She started packing up her bag, but she wasn’t fast enough.  Suddenly, there was Matt, sliding into the booth next to me.  “So this is why you’ve been blowing me off,” he said, nodding towards Charlie who was still fumbling for her books.

“I told you-”

“It’s cool man, I totally get it.  Hoes before bros, right?  Now why does that sound off…?”

“Matt.”

“So are you going to introduce us?” he said turning his attention to Charlie, his voice mocking.

“Well, hi there,” he said and I felt fire in my stomach.

Charlie started to get up to go, but Matt sprang from his seat to block her escape.  “Oh, don’t go anywhere; I just wanna know your name.”

I saw Charlie’s eyes widen with hurt, but she didn’t look at me or Matt.  She sat on her booth seat and tucked her chin into her chest, trying to look insignificant, and it made me hurt a whole lot.

“Matt, get the f**k out of here,” I said, rising from my seat, my voice deadly quiet.

He turned back to me, amusement in his eyes, that grin on his face.  Cruelty.  But I didn’t think it was boredom this time.  He was pissed and humored that I would try to stand up to him, and I knew I’d be yielding.  He had someone I cared about to dangle in front of me.

He cleared his throat.  “Fine.  But you’re coming with me.  What are you doing, Craig?  You can do better than this.”  He gestured with his thumb over his shoulder, looking at me, skeptical.  I tried to meet Charlie’s eyes, but she was looking at her shoes, waiting for Matt to get out of the way so she could make her escape.

“Let’s just go,” I said.  She finally looked up, and I could see in her eyes the bitterness, the disappointment.  I knew if I went with Matt now, I’d never be welcome here again.  Just as I knew that if I didn’t, Matt would be awful to Charlie �" some how, some way �" just to get back at me.

He cleared his throat again.  “Thank God.  I think I’m reacting to the goddamn peanuts, already.  Come on, man.  Let’s go to the Outlets and meet Z.  Get some stuff, put this behind us.”  He clapped my back and started out, jingling his keys.

“Bye, Charlie,” I said.  My voice was as heavy as my feet.  “I’m sorry.”  She didn’t look at me.  I wished she would have looked at me one more time.

Dragging my feet, I left Lindy’s for the last time, got in the car with Matt, and watched the diner disappear in the rearview mirror.  Matt was glad he’d gotten his way with just an itchy throat.  He was talking, his voice getting lost in the rumbling bass that blared from the stereo.  The guys in the backseat guffawed and agreed and cursed along with him.  I watched the cars we passed, wondering how many of the people inside had let Andromeda slip through their fingers once upon a time.