Fingerless Gloves

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Authors: Nick Orsini
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every single cilia en route to my chest. Streets watched me as I exhaled a thin trail, like an airplane leaving behind a reminder of its flight, right out of the side of my mouth. Streets said, nasally holding back smoke, “The way that thing is drawing, you’re going to paint a masterpiece.” Right after his words, came his smoke. It spilled out of his mouth and nose, unevenly and without much poise.
    I think, after four more hits, I began to contemplate the entire world as it hinged on the gentle axis of this weird and long night. I said,
    “Streets, goddamn it. What the fuck happened to James? I don’t know if he’s on a drip, hooked up to wires and pumps, watching TV. I saw Beth tonight. Her patience with me, with James, with pot, and that asshole Vin Thomas and his never-ending bullshit, is so weird. Why doesn’t she just tell me off?…call me an asshole or something? It’s like this: I want to do something to make this better, but my head is like a bad music video and the words get really big as they fly out of my mouth and hit people in the face…you know those videos?…from the early 90s I think.”
    That, to be honest, was probably too real for Streets at that given point in time. I had absolutely no idea what I was talking about. Neither did he. He exhaled steadily and just looked at me for a few seconds before saying,
    “I think you think about all this too much. Your boy Squire will be okay. Your old girl, Beth…I don’t know about her or about you or the two of you. I’ve been around, but I’m never around. She sounds like, well, not what you need right now…maybe what you will need some day, but trust me, needs come and go like that.”
    A snap of his fingers and I knew what Streets said was true. He was the kind of kid who was always there - at parties, at proms, in the student parking lot, at the bar on the night before Thanksgiving. He was this unmistakable background face, like an actor you just can’t put your finger on. While no one hesitated shooting the shit with Streets, no one actually had a functional friendship with him. He isn’t the kind of kid you ask to third wheel on your dates with you. He’s not the kind of kid you want to admit knowing or find yourself going to bat for, even though tonight, as the temperature dipped, I was doing him a huge favor. The only friend Streets Anderson had was the town we lived in.
    Suddenly, the events of this evening, and the last two years, seemed to sandwich my brain in a vice. I felt my life constricting my thoughts, and I began to have a meltdown. Streets, back when he used to voluntarily stay after school, would shun even the girls who had crushes on him. They’d walk up to his locker, associating being flirty with some sort of badass quality they imagined movie stars had, and ask him if he wanted to “go somewhere.” Going somewhere, as far as I remember back in high school, used to mean hooking up behind the fire doors in the back by the gym. A younger Streets, without his current scruff and long hair, never went anywhere with any girl.

The LCD clock in the still-motionless car read 1:20am. The colon in between the numbers blinked again and again like a heartbeat. It felt like my first ten years on the earth were being played back in some sick frame-by-frame fast forward. I hadn’t figured on being up that late. Truth be told, it had been awhile since I’d seen that hour of the night. In high school, when your biological clock seemingly runs like a trite time-lapse shot in a romantic comedy, you can sleep until mid-afternoon, then wake up and stay up through the night. In college, this is exaggerated by booze, pot, midterms, “platonic” sleepovers, and newfound nicotine habits. Then, in the working world, Friday night becomes an extension of Friday’s workday. Saturday is a day to realize how much you haven’t accomplished, only to be burned out by Sunday. Nowhere, during this time, is it acceptable to sleep past 10am. That

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