All I Have in This World by Michael Parker Page B

you or some shit like that.”
    They were pulling into the parking lot of Dairy Queen, where they would waste another night leaning on cars with their friends. Maria had wanted to go see a movie or something, anything but hang out for hours at Dairy Queen, and maybe her boredom was what caused her to be so prickly that night.
    â€œI’m not trying to trap you. You were the one who started talking about columns. You know you love me more than all the items in your stupid car column. So why don’t you show it?”
    â€œBy coming to pick you up a half hour early, you mean? By cutting your daddy off in the middle of a sentence just because you’re ready to go?”
    â€œFor God’s sake, don’t you dare disrespect Daddy by not finishing a sentence y’all have already exchanged six thousand times. No telling what he might do.”
    â€œYour daddy is a good man.”
    â€œI wouldn’t know. He hardly ever talks to me. Why should he? I couldn’t point out a carburetor if my life depended.”
    â€œGood thing your life don’t, then.”
    Maria got out of the car and went inside and sat in a booth with her friends, and Randy stayed outside in the parking lot, sitting on a lawn chair in the back of his best friend Johnny’s pickup all night and glaring at her through the streaky plate glass. Finally Maria grew tired of her friends and their conversation and she went outside and announced to Randy that she was ready to go, and all his friends looked in another direction because it was obvious that Randy and Maria were “in a fight.”
    On the way home, Randy said, “Why do you have to be like this, you know I love you to pieces,” but she did not say anything even when he pulled into the driveway. As she knew he would, he left what he called “some rubber” on the highway in front of her drive. The next day at school she pushed a note into the slot of his locker that read, “We broke up,” and after the next class, she found a note in her locker that said, “No, WE didn’t break up, YOU broke up.” Both “ WE ” and “ YOU ” were underlined so angrily that the lines punctured the page. The next class, biology, they had together. She did not look at him but she could feel him in the back row with his friends, slumped in his desk chair, the anger coming off him like the flame under the Bunsen burners. After three days of this—Randy calling her house nightly, Maria telling her mother and father she did not want to speak to him, her mother telling Maria, “I’m not going to lie for you. If you want me to tell him you’re not here you better go off somewhere,” and her father asking her what was going on, why was she mad at Randy, what in the world had happened—Randy dispatched her best friend, Connie, to argue his case.
    â€œHe’s acting crazy, Maria. He got so drunk last night he threw up this morning after history.”
    â€œThat’s supposed to be my fault?” said Maria.
    â€œHe told me to tell you he loves you,” said Connie. “Since I don’t got anybody telling me they love me, all I got is boys saying they want to do it to me, not even
with
me,
to
me, I would say you got it pretty good.”
    Maria said, “How does he even know what love is? He just misses being seen with me. All he’s got now is his car. That’s all he cares about, anyway.”
    â€œYou don’t love him?” said Connie.
    â€œWhat do I know about love? I’m only fucking seventeen. I don’t know, Connie, don’t you think it’s different?”
    â€œDon’t I think what’s different?”
    â€œThe way we say we love each other in the parking lot of the Dairy Queen and the way people say they love each other, I don’t know, in college? Or after college?”
    â€œI wouldn’t know,” said Connie. “That’s what I’m