You First: A Joe Goldberg Prequel (You, #0)(119)
I must be blushing or some shit because you gasp. “Are you…This isn’t a joke, Joe.”
“I know.”
“Why do you have his dog tags? I mean, what the hell did you do to him?”
You don’t really care about him or his fucking dog tags. This interrogation is more like a Trojan fucking horse, a cover for all the questions you’re too scared to share with me when you sit and stare out the window. What am I going to do with my life? Why did I fuck up my interview at the Carnegie Corporation? Why do I want Dick when he treats me like shit? Why don’t I feel like I deserve a rare hot smart sensitive prince like Joe? What the fuck is wrong with me?
The answer is this, Vail: Nothing! Nothing is wrong with you. I mean, hello. If you were defective or unattractive or (perpetually) smelly…I wouldn’t have killed for you. We’ll be okay. You’re mad at him, but you’re mad at the world and it’s the scariest thing about you, about girls in general. Why are you so angry?
“Hey, Vail, how ’bout I get you a coffee.”
“A coffee? Are you insane. These are his dog tags, Joe! His dog tags in your pants and I just…I knew something was off. I knew it! What did you do, drag him to the beach and…and…”
You don’t really think I killed him. You watch a lot of movies. If you thought that I murdered the guy, you’d do what all the smart survivor girls do. Be a cool cat and fake an excuse to slip out. Instead, you stomp around ranting as if I haven’t been the most supportive boyfriend ever. I killed for you. (Sorry to repeat, but it’s kind of a big deal.) You swan about our loft making your closing arguments like a lawyer on Law & FUCK YOU JOE. Not gonna lie. It hurts, Vail. I love you! Even if there is something squirrelly about you, the way you load all your anxiety and self-loathing into a gun and point it at me. Me! The guy who killed for you. But maybe I deserve it. The fucking dog tags. Pretty dumb and I hang my head.
You put your hands on your hips. Haughty and naughty. “You gonna answer me, Joe?”
“You’re making something out of nothing. We hung out. That’s it.”
“You told me you didn’t end up seeing him.”
UGH. “I got mixed up.”
“And he doesn’t take off his dog tags, Joe. Ever.”
“Well, he crashed here and he did.”
“That’s a lie. He doesn’t take them off when he sleeps and he doesn’t take them off when he showers…” You come at me like there’s a wall between us, plexiglass and prison bars. “He doesn’t even take them off when he fucks.”
HE DID WHEN HE SLEPT WITH YOU but I’m not you. I won’t hit you sixty miles below the belt. I don’t mean to laugh but come on! You’re being crazy. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I am acting like “a child” but I can’t fake scared. I love you, that’s that, and you can yell at me all day and all of the night but you can’t get to me.
Love is plexiglass. Love is prison bars.
You light a pink Fantasia. Ugh. “You did something to him, didn’t you?”
Yes. “No.”
You ditch your barely smoked cigarette in a castaway bottle of Evian that you can’t fucking afford—girls—and out of nowhere, I am sad for us. Sad and yes, a little scared.
You plop into your chair and stare out your window. “I need to…Just let me sit here.”
“Whatever you want, Vail. Take all the time you need.”
You don’t respond and that’s okay. I need to catch my breath, prep for battle so I don’t fuck up again. Remember those Choose Your Own Adventure books, Vail? Oh, who am I kidding. You didn’t read those books. And honestly, I never did either. I tried, though. The first time I went to Mooney Books, I asked the boss if he had them, and he laughed. He said I seemed too smart for that horseshit. I said I saw two kids at my school reading them, that they seemed fun. One kid chooses to go one way, the other kid goes another way, and you see where you both end up. Mooney doubled down. Horseshit. “Storytelling is life, a series of choices. Any book in print is the result of the author’s choices, good and bad. You don’t rewrite a novel once it’s out there, you can’t erase the past, even if you would go back and do it differently. Actions have consequences, boy. It’s physics.”
A-fucking-men. I chose to put my life on the line for you, and you chose to wear my sweatpants. I think that’s why we’re both stuck in the mud right now. We made bad choices. And from now on we have to make good ones.
I am gentle as a husband with a Hallmark card. “Hey, Sitcom, you okay over there?”
“Oh yeah. Peachy keen. Who’s next, Joe? Me? The guy at Starbucks who gave me the free croissant the other day? You gonna kill every guy that looks at me?”
I don’t like you like this. Even crazy Carrie was never this nasty. But I don’t like me like this either, I broke a golden rule. You kill someone, you dump the clothes, same way you dump the body. How could I be so fucking stupid?
You grip those dog tags, and talk to the walls about how I’ll rot in a prison cell. What do I do? Guilty people say too much, and innocent people are quiet. I rise off the couch and you jump out of your chair and run to the door and block it. The sweetest fucking thing—Please don’t go, boy—and oh, Vail. Don’t you get it? I’m never leaving you. I love you.