Hot Pink by Adam Levin Page B

want to be alone right now. Think about stuff. I want to take a walk or something.”
    â€œAlright,” my dad said. “We’ll get ribs later, maybe. Or pizza. Whatever.”
    â€œGet some lunch, though, Cliff,” my ma said. She opened her purse and handed me a twenty. “You can keep the change for that. Eat something good.”
    I thanked her, and started heading to Theo’s, but then I changed my mind and got Burger King instead.

RELATING
    MIXED MESSAGES // TWO CONVERSATIONS // BILLY // A PROFESSOR AND A LOVER // THE END OF FRIENDSHIPS // CRED // IMPORTANT MEN
MIXED MESSAGES
    The message the natives, with hand signs, conveyed was: L EAVE OUR CROPS BE, AND WE WILL GIVE YOU OUR DAUGHTERS .
    We hadn’t any interest in their crops or their daughters: not their daughters till we realized they were so undervalued, not their crops till we saw that by torching their crops we might teach them to value their daughters more highly.
    That our actions could be taken by the natives to mean E VEN TO THE LIKES OF US SEAFARING MEN, THOSE DAUGHTERS OF YOURS ARE OF SO LITTLE VALUE THAT THE PLEASURE WE DERIVE FROM DESTROYING YOUR HARVEST IS PREFERABLE TO THAT WE’D DERIVE FROM THEIR POSSESSION , or perhaps W E WILL TORCH YOUR CROPS AND THEN HAVE YOUR DAUGHTERS did not occur to us—these sorts of possibilities simply refuse, in the heat of the moment, to occur with the facility they occur to you later, in your well-appointed quarters, sipping from a magnum of pupu-tree liquor, reviewing the day’s events in your log—but such misunderstanding on the part of the natives might in fact provide the correct explanation for why they elected, in the glow of the fires we had put to their crops, to pulp all their daughters’ skulls with clubs.
    At the time we assumed they were offering us a sacrifice.

TWO CONVERSATIONS
    A FALSE START . It meant something to the man it didn’t mean to the woman, something it didn’t mean to normal people. But that, in itself, was not the problem. It wasn’t what drove her mad, so to speak. What drove her mad— “Drove her mad,” so to speak! the woman thought; “‘Drove her mad,’ so to speak,” the woman thought! she thought—came three days later, in their next conversation, when she’d called to clarify the first conversation, a brief conversation, the one in which he had said A FALSE START , which brief conversation she had since realized to have been too easy for him (she had, she’d realized, been too easy on him), too easy in the sense that she had not shed tears till she got off the telephone, had exhausted all her powers via holding back tears and controlling her voice and the sound of her breathing , telling herself—while still on the phone—that weeping, hers, was what he was after , and therefore weeping would mean her defeat , when that hadn’t been, she now reflected, the case at all, but quite the opposite , for failing to weep , the woman saw now, had signaled to the man her ready acceptance of all that he’d said about A FALSE START , which nullified in him any sense of obligation , any sense of his duty to offer her comfort , to clean up the mess that he’d made because mess ? where mess ? mess what? what mess ? No one had wept . No one had argued . No one had done anything except to accept and stammer about A FALSE START once or twice, and when she called him up, weeping , three days later, what drove her mad was the way he made it sound as though she was betraying—in calling him, weeping , three days later—an agreement they’d made, the way A FALSE START had become THE FALSE START , as in “But we already discussed THE FALSE START .”

BILLY
    I had this mutt once. Medium-to-large. A gift from my father, a schmuck. I forget the mutt’s name. It had a few before it died and I can’t remember what we finally settled on. When we dropped its corpse