Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before
A short story inspired by The Smiths
I hated frat parties, but Wendy was a Zeta and insisted on bringing me along. I would have made Chuck go so I’d have someone normal to talk to, but he was still ill from too much Jaeger the night before, so I didn’t even ask. We parked a block from the frat house, because outside the Quik Mart on London Street there is a light that never goes out; my car had been broken into too many times already.
As we walk away from the store, the manager leans out the door and yells that we can’t park there.
“Frankly, Mr. Shankly,” I yell back, “we’re not parking it. We’re abandoning it.”
The frat house is an old two-story Victorian that sits just outside the cemetery gates of the oldest graveyard in town. I guess pretty girls make graves tolerable. I start to panic as soon as we step inside.
“These people know I’m not a frat boy,” I tell her.
“What difference does it make?” she asks. “They don’t care.”
It’s a miserable lie, and she knows it. I grab us two beers and we move into the large common room where all the furniture has been removed so underage freshmen girls can oscillate wildly to techno-pop under flashing golden lights.
Wendy heads upstairs where the bedrooms are, eager to find a boy she’s been chasing all semester.
“He’s probably still asleep,” is what she said as she left. I am alone among the Philistines, and heaven knows I’m miserable now.
The heat is oppressive inside, so I step out back where a group of boys reel around the fountain that dominates the yard. They call to a blonde girl afraid to join in; her fears are confirmed moments later when a lanky kid careens out of control and into a rose bush. The boy with a thorn in his side leaps back up and rejoins the scrum, going nowhere fast.
Wendy appears at my side, unsuccessful at coaxing her boy downstairs.
“He gave me some bullshit excuse about having a girlfriend in a coma,” she says bitterly. “Why am I so unloveable? Why do I want the one I can’t have?”
“These things take time,” I say. After a few minutes I convince her to leave; Chi-Chi’s has dollar margaritas tonight. When we get back to my car we find that, despite the light, some sweet and tender hooligan has stolen all of my tires.
This story was prompted by a story by Aimée Gramblin and a challenge from Michael Whalen to write a story using as many song titles from one band as possible (I managed 25, including the title). Here is the original prompt:
Why not give it a whirl Terry Barr Noah Levy Kevin Alexander Keith R. Higgons Jessica Lee McMillan Simon Dillon Eric Pierce Rob Janicke Danielle Loewen and Jillian Spiridon? It was a lot of fun.