Flagged Victor by Keith Hollihan Page B

plan in an even more ludicrous light.) After we goofed around for a few hours and did our shopping, I felt migrained by the intense jangling, bright-lighted mall experience, and we slunk out into the slushy cold to go home. But instead of drag-racing through the parking lot for the exit, as we typically did, Chris drove slowly around the back side of the mall to a less parked-up region. He pulled into an empty slot away from the glow of lampposts and put the car in neutral, pulled up the emergency brake. Then did nothing more, just sat with hands in lap, staring toward the facade of the mall.
    I started to laugh and say something, but stopped. Chris was not laughing, nor was he saying something. He was watching the bank.
    It was still open on a Thursday night. The lights were on but you could tell that there were few people within. I had an itch on my forehead, but if I lifted my hand to scratch, I worried that my fingers would tremble. So I did nothing, and I tried to be silent even as I let out a ragged, timid breath.
    They close off the mall entrance to the bank at eight-thirty, Chris said.
    I tried to focus on what he was seeing.
    For the next thirty minutes, he continued, there’s usually only one teller at the counter, and the other three workers disappear into the back. If you parked here, he said, you’d be out of sight from the mall but less than five seconds from the curb. I go in alone, but when I come out, you’re waiting for me, and wedrive away. Not too fast, not too slow. The east exit is right over your shoulder. There’s never any wait and there’s no traffic light. We’re on the highway within ninety seconds. The whole thing from beginning to end takes less than seven minutes.
    Each word was a pulse in my forehead, a flick on the nerve along my cheek.
    Chris seemed to break his own trance when he looked over to me finally, not with a mocking grin, or an air of all-seeing, all-knowing awareness, but an honest, straightforward question.
    Robbing a bank has got to make you a better writer, don’t you think?
    I suppose, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, he got me right there.
    I finally got fucked the next night, which seemed proof that some kind of cosmic realignment had taken place. How else to explain the progress in bank robbing, writing, and sex?
    Chris had been seeing Susan on a regular basis since Halloween. This meant my time with him was rationed, and made our circumstances doubly painful, even tragic. Susan had been meant for me. Didn’t Chris know that? I hated her for abandoning me, but I blamed him for allowing himself to be led, unbidden, into the bathroom and capitulating without a struggle when she stepped out of her clothes and showed him her back, bracing herself face-forward against the wall while he thrust into her over and over. I resented learning that this experience had been, according to Chris, the single most intensely erotic encounter of his life. To undercut his assertion,I reminded him of Leah on the pier and a couple other stories he’d told me about. He contemplated the full set for a few moments and then agreed with me.
    Yup, them too.
    When Leah had swooned for Chris in a compromised setting, Susan dropped her like a hot potato, but Radha did not seem bothered by the bathroom incident and remained Susan’s best friend. And so the four of us hung out. This set me on a spiral of self-pity masked by acerbic wit. Not that anyone seemed to notice my difficulties or care. The nights were often marked by a detour period in which Chris and Susan politely parted from us for a half hour or so, fucked, sucked, or whacked each other off, then returned. In the uncomfortable pause, I felt as worthless as a fluffer on a porn set.
    The night after our shopping reconnaissance, we all went to a movie and saw
Less Than Zero
, which was great for the sex and the debauchery of college students but not so great for the descent into male prostitution. Shortly after it ended, Susan announced