Play Me Backwards by Adam Selzer Page A

were holding hands with one of them, honestly.”
    â€œThat won’t happen either.”
    â€œBut if you ever lie to me, I’ll come after you with a butcher’s knife.”
    Then she’d given me a very serious look and started laughing. The laugh didn’t make the look seem like it had been less serious.
    That day had been the first time she threatened to stab me. I think it was the first time anyone did in my whole life. But one thing I never realized about adult relationships is that when you’re in one, people threaten to stab you a lot.
    The day after Paige first made that threat I ended up getting paired up with Claire Downing, who had been friends with Paige since kindergarten, to diagram the parts of a cell on a worksheet (now there’s an activity that takes two people).
    â€œSome people are saying Paige is crazy to go out with you,” she said, “but I think you guys might make a good match.”
    â€œI wouldn’t have thought we would be,” I said. “But she’s really nice, you know? We have fun together.”
    â€œGood,” she said. “But just so you know, if you ever hurt her, I’ll stab you in the eye with a butcher’s knife.”
    Everywhere I went there was another threat of being stabbed. Bythe day of the cherry limeade massacre, when her dad threatened to stab me within the first few seconds of meeting me, I was starting to take it in stride.
    I kept listening to Moby-Dick, off and on, all the while. Ishmael was talking about setting out on the voyage, the crew of the ship, and all of the ins and outs of the whaling business. But as much time as he spent talking about it, he seemed like he was leaving out some pretty basic stuff that maybe everyone just knew back when he wrote it.
    Like, how did all the whalers have their own harpoons? Wouldn’t those get lost a lot when you used them to fight whales? I would have thought whalers went through harpoons like guitarists go through picks.
    And how the hell did they get the dead whales onto the ship, anyway? I got the impression that the way they fought the whales was that they spotted one, then loaded everyone into three small boats to go out and harpoon them. If your harpoon was attached to a dead whale, wouldn’t it sink down and drag you to a soggy grave?
    Every now and then I’d just listen and think, Fuck. I don’t know anything about commercial whaling . Maybe Herman Melville could expect readers to know this stuff back in the day, but living in Iowa, the closest thing to a whale I’d ever seen in person was Willy, the whale-shaped ice cream cake. We didn’t use whale oil to light our lamps.
    But I picked up the basics over time by listening to Ishmael, just like I figured out the basics of being in a relationship by simply trying not to do anything particularly stupid during my time with Paige.
    I was “going steady,” as they used to say back when people datedcasually and fucked seriously, instead of the other way around. Steady as she goes. Like the sailors in Moby-Dick , I managed my first weeks on the strange new voyage without having to be dumped into the sea as a mangled, bloody corpse.
    I knew that they all died in the end, though.

11. SNOW
    Being with Paige didn’t make me stop thinking about Anna. The Slushee hunt, in fact, really only made that problem worse. See, most novelty shaved-ice beverages are about the consistency of snow after someone’s stepped in it with a wet boot. And snow had a tendency to make me think about Anna. Lots of things did, but snow was one of the bigger ones.
    When we were first starting to turn into a couple, Anna and I both had the same “move.” We would write plays and scripts and stuff where we’d play characters who kissed. We acted out kissing scenes three or four times in eighth grade before we had one proper kiss where it was really just the two of us, not two characters that we were