Paid Furlough, Vernal Guilt

The sun is reflecting, transmuting, bouncing from abandoned storefront to dented car hood to sinewy bicycle spoke; the air is ripe with lust, mulch. I spend the morning heaving and dry heaving and taking names in vain and I don’t leave my bed until someone tells me it’s 81 degrees outside, start your weekend, yayfuckingyes. I exhume flip-flops, willing to expose chipped nail polish at the expense of painfully severing winter webbed feet. Neighbors take notice. “I love me some white girls!” he yells from his station in the semi-circle, onlookers in the arc tittering, my belly's contents rebubbling. He means me, though I’m not girls plural. I can never bring myself to check WHITE (NOT HISPANIC) on a form and the flip-flops are a minute feature of the composite. I waddle to the wireless café, so I can osmosize weather via customer joviality, a door propped open with a tub of wall putty, while I reply to Dad’s e-mail, which begins, “Honey Child, I cannot begin to say how sorry I am.” He really has no reason to be sorry, to begin with Honey Child, to begin calling me Honey Child. The professors lean against the red wall (not the burnt orange or taupe walls) and talk of peace marches and social movements, but add buoyant words to the discourse—“gleeful.” I will work toward glee. The inescapability of ultraviolet waves brings me back to a dysfunctional relationship two summers ago—he was older than the usual elders, had an awful proclivity for daytime drunk dials that shared the state of his dividends, the temperature of lake water, the disdain for my day job. We only started dating because my jankyass phone dialed his number when my bag pushed against the partition on a rush hour train. After the initial palpitation (it went to voicemail), I decided: girl, you’re in it now. Usually Kay is the Ernie and I am the Bert. “You called before?” “I only called because I was returning your call. Is everything alright?” “I called you? Oh, I must have accidentally dialed when I was looking up your phone number to get the discount on toilet paper at Dominick’s.” “Do you realize how many tard clauses there are in that sentence—you forgot your card, you use my number, you’re buying toilet paper, you accidentally dial? This is good TV.” I want a summer of reflection, transmutation—I want to bounce, short of encouraging my parents to feel embarrassed for me, which has been the custom between April and September (and sometimes the clowning bleeds into October, if the right teams reach the playoffs). They don’t need to know I killed the last of my sick days.