Angry Management by Chris Crutcher Page A

huh?”
    “Yeah. It was over and I had the memory, the thing I was after in the first place. But you know what? Fuck that. There’s no difference between a five-minute memory and an hour-and-a-half memory. I’m tired of living for memories. They’re great, but they don’t sustain you. They fade. They aren’t shiny.”
    She looks away at my use of her word.
    “It’s the perfect word, Sarah Byrnes. You’re shiny to me.”
    “I won’t stay that way.”
    “Do you know a guy named Kyle Maynard?”
    “No. Is Kyle Maynard shiny?” She can bounce back to sarcastic like a Super Ball.
    “Fuckin’ A, he’s shiny. Kid was a high-school wrestler in Georgia. Went on to wrestle in college. Wanna know what’s shiny about Kyle Maynard?”
    “Lay it on me.”
    “Kyle Maynard was born with no arms below the elbow and no legs below the knee. He lost the firstbazillion of his wrestling matches, but by the time he was a senior in high school, he was headed for state. You have any idea what his parents thought when they first saw him? No warning anywhere in the pregnancy, then BAM ! We get a torso.”
    That gets her attention. Kyle Maynard gets everyone’s attention.
    “I don’t know what his parents were thinking—like, how they did it—but they must have just told him to do things as if everyone had no arms and legs. He types fifty words a minute with no prosthetics. He has better handwriting than I have. Only it ain’t handwriting, it’s stub writing. The guy just acts like the rest of the world’s like him.”
    Sarah looks down at her body. “Well,” she says, “I’m not like Kyle Maynard. I have arms and legs.”
    “Yeah, but here’s the deal. I didn’t expect to tell you a story about Kyle Maynard and have you forget that your dumb bitch mother left you in the eye of some awful hurricane and then replaced you. The deal is, if everyone had scars on their faces, then we’d add that into pretty. I’m telling you, Sarah Byrnes, I can add that into pretty. I already have. I can’t fuckin’ see anyway, and what happened last night is just in me. I don’t want to ever have to give it up. The difference between youand Kyle Maynard is, he came into the world with his condition and was loved. You came in without yours, but contempt and…indifference, I guess…gave it to you. And you weren’t loved. I can’t go back into your childhood and love you. If I could, I would. I swear to God I would. But I can love you now. And I do.”
    She is quiet a long time, then finally, “I don’t know if I can do this, Angus. I feel like I was loved by Moby, my other fat guy, but not in, you know, that way. There was a time, when he fell in love with this really cool girl, that I thought I wouldn’t survive. I mean, I thought I’d kill myself. I had the plan. It scared me so much I took it away from myself, even the possibility. If I stopped wanting, no one could hurt me. I don’t know.”
    I’m desperate. “Look, I know nobody can promise anything forever. Shit, my parents promised to love, honor, and whatever when they first got married, and they turned out not to even want the same gender. But I can promise I’ll always tell you the truth. I can promise you no surprises. Hey, I don’t like the way people look at me either.”
    “Yeah, but your ‘condition’ is fixable. Like Moby’s.”
    “Yeah, but I’m not going to fix it. If you’d seen me in the pool the other day, you’d believe me.”
    She grimaces.
    “I’m a way bigger dickwad than you are. You’ll get tired of me a long time before I could get tired of you.”
    I’m a hell of a debater. I may or may not be smart, but I’ll wear you down.
     
    A fiery sunset explodes on the western horizon as we drive up out of Winnemucca toward home. Maybe fifty miles up the road, Sarah scoots over toward me and lays her hand in my lap. We ride another twenty or thirty miles like that, her hand in my lap and mine over hers.
    “We’re not even going to the same