At Jenna\u2019s, we have to be vigilant about every surface: we must not track dirt from the back yard into the kitchen (Jenna\u2019s is the only house I\u2019ve ever seen with two doormats). Once when I put a glass down on the coffee table\u2014this was the ordinary coffee table in the family room, not the fancy one in the living room\u2014Jenna\u2019s mother came flying in with a coaster. She reminded me of a cartoon character running, legs a blurry wheel.<\/p>\n
So I prefer hanging out at my house, where everything is dirty and no one gives a shit. No one\u2019s dad says, \u201cSo, Will, what colleges are you considering?\u201d<\/p>\n
Sometimes Jenna looks around my bedroom squeamishly, like there\u2019s no clean place to sit.<\/p>\n
In two weeks her parents are taking her to New England to tour a bunch of colleges. They\u2019ll be gone ten days. \u201cI\u2019m going to miss you so much,\u201d Jenna tells me, as if she\u2019s going into combat, and will be gone for years. I tease her for being melodramatic, but I can\u2019t shake the feeling that when she leaves, she\u2019ll be gone for good.<\/p>\n
My ex-girlfriend Amy-Rose said to me once, \u201cYou only like me because I\u2019m pretty.\u201d She wasn\u2019t wrong, though I could\u2019ve retorted, \u201cYou only like me because I play guitar and have a car.\u201d A shitty car, but still. Instead I said, \u201cMan, you have such a huge ego.\u201d I gave her crap for one aspect of her comment (that she believed she was hot) rather than acknowledging the other (that the only valuable thing about Amy-Rose was her surface).<\/p>\n
I lie on my bed watching Jenna look up college websites on her laptop. The buildings are gray or sandstone or oatmeal or brick, but all have the same swaths of ivy, like dudes of different ethnicities who all have the same facial hair. I didn\u2019t know the ivy thing was so literal. Over time, ivy damages stone. Watching Jenna click and scroll, I feel like something sticky that clings, for now, onto her skin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
“My ex-girlfriend Amy-Rose said to me once, ‘You only like me because I\u2019m pretty.’ She wasn\u2019t wrong, though I could\u2019ve retorted, ‘You only like me because I play guitar and have a car.’ A shitty car, but still. Instead I said, ‘Man, you have such a huge ego.'”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14934,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[1876,83,1877,1875,1874],"class_list":["post-14833","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction","tag-coasters","tag-exs","tag-ivy","tag-new-england","tag-shitty-cars","writer-kim-magowan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14833","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14833"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14833\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15046,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14833\/revisions\/15046"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14934"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}