Page 53 of The Progressions

“What are you smiling at?” he asked me. “Are you glad I woke you up and came over?”

“I was awake and yes, I’m glad you’re here,” I said, and it made him smile, too. “I’m glad, but I still don’t know what you’re doing.”

“For one thing, I wanted to check on your dad,” Tyler answered. “I heard he left the game early.”

I stopped smiling. “I think he’s ok,” I answered. “I’ve been worried, lately.”

“And that’s why you want to drop out of college?”

“Can we not talk about that again? I don’t want to fight, and I’m not going to listen to you no matter what you say. Your opinion doesn’t matter.” I took a breath. “No, it’s not because I don’t respect you or anything like that. It’s because I’m the one who has to deal with this, so I have to do what’s best for me and my dad.”

“Ok, I get it. Your dad won’t, though.”

I expelled another breath that was as sigh, well aware of that. “Now let’s talk about your game, and how I could tell that your ankle hurts.”

“Was I moving like it bothered me?”

“No, I could tell when you were sitting on the bench. You were keeping your weight off that side,” I said.

“You could see that? Did Herb and Buzz notice?”

“If they did, they didn’t say anything,” I assured him. “I checked all the Woodsmen sites and social media stuff and there’s nothing there, either.” I paused. “Are you really ok?”

“Yes. Now I know why your neck never healed,” he said, shifting uncomfortably.

“That’s also ok.”

“Bullshit. It will only get worse if you keep sleeping on the floor of your office. And you were doing that when that little guy came in and tried to assault you.”

Cody wasn’t exactly little, because he was bigger than I was. “I was wondering how long it would be until you asked me about him,” I said. “That was someone I knew from high school.”

“And why the hell was he touching you?”

“I didn’t want him to!”

“I got that,” Tyler said. “You were making it obvious with how you were going to knock him out with the lamp.”

“Cody thinks…” I thought about the phrasing. “He thinks we have some kind of residual relationship.”

“Which means that you did have a relationship, way back when?”

“When I was a freshman,” I said. “He was a junior and played alto sax, and he drove a car his dad had given him. I thought he was amazing.”

“That little shit?” He sounded stunned.

“Remember how I mentioned that people could make mistakes? I did,” I answered. “I made a mistake in falling for him. He seemed to like me, and I wasn’t used to that. I was the kid who was always wrong, somehow. Like, I had to go eat in the officesometimes, because so many people messed with my lunch tray. My dad didn’t know how to deal with my hair so I always got the same cut that he did at the barber. I dressed like him, too, in work boots and cargo pants. Those things didn’t serve to make me popular,” I explained. “They served to make people call me names, and unlike you, I wasn’t a fighter. I stood up for myself but not in a scary way.”

“I didn’t fight everybody.”

“Right, you were busy kissing some of them,” I said, and he smiled.

“Some of them. So you were kissing Cody.”

“More than that. He told me that girls in high school had sex so if I wanted to be with him, we had to do it. Then the next day, he dumped me. Publicly, in front of all the woodwinds and the low brass. It was awful.” I remembered him laughing as I had tried not to cry.

“Why’d he do it like that?” Tyler asked. He sounded sympathetic.

“Well…it’s because he was upset about the sex. He thought I would be so into it and have a major orgasm, like he must have seen when he watched women in porn. I didn’t. I was upset because it hurt and he took that as a personal insult. He told the whole percussion section that there was something wrong with me, that my vagina was malformed and that was why I couldn’t come. He started calling me No-Kasia. No, as in, no O.”

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