Inexcusable by Chris Lynch Page B

respect and adoration she deserved. And I would like to tell you that she loved me beyond almost.

CLOUD
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    T his is the problem. This is what Gigi does not understand. Things have conspired, to cloud her mind. She’s not a drinker, Gigi. Some people shouldn’t drink. It is understandable, but she has just got it wrong. Some of it is cloud, some of it is misunderstanding, but all of it is wrong, and all of it can be straightened out. It has to be straightened out.
    â€œWe just need to talk,” I say. “Please, can’t we talk?”
    â€œNo, we cannot.”
    â€œIt’s practically not even light out yet.”
    â€œIt’s light enough. Let me go. You have to let me go.”
    â€œOkay, Gigi. What if, even if I didn’t, I said all right, you’re right, whatever. What if I did that and then I said it so you can feel all right, and we can just leave it there, leave it right here in this room behind us when we leave,and nobody, not Carl and not my father and not your father or anybody, has to be involved or upset about it? What about that, and then, like I said, we can leave it behind us, close the door on it, and you can feel all right and we can get on with stuff. What if I did that for you?
    â€œBecause I am sorry, Gigi. Whether I did something or I didn’t, I am sorry because of how you feel about it. How you feel and how you feel about me.”
    She tries the doorknob again, and I grab her wrist with both hands.
    I have both hands tight on Gigi Boudakian’s lovely soft long wrist. She looks up at me, almost as if she is afraid of me. Things are so wrong.
    â€œPlease, Keir,” she says, and her voice is a shaky whisper. She looks down at my hands holding her wrist, and Gigi Boudakian’s tears drop, right onto the back of my hand, and this is a nightmare now. I should be the one crying.
    Things are so, so, so wrong.

WHAT HAVE WE HERE?
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    S omething changed in those weeks and months heading out of my high school life. Things were different. I was different. Physically different.
    After football and soccer seasons were behind me and party season was in full session, I became aware of myself and my appetites. Myself as appetite.
    But like I said, something changed. During the last half of the last year of high school, my body started treating life differently. I kept up with my hunger, my thirst, my desires of all kinds, kept them all going at a fairly high level, but my bod shifted down a gear.
    My boyishness, which I had come to rely on, started to desert me.
    My waistline had the nerve to protrude. “What have we got here?” I said to myself out loud as I stood naked infront of my freestanding, full-length, oak-framed mirror, as I was wont to do. My father got me the mirror for my birthday. I had requested it.
    I stared at it full-on. Turned sideways, then sideways the other way. Hell.
    â€œRay,” I called.
    He came quickly down the hall, opened the door, found me there.
    He stood with his hands on his hips, shaking his head at me, as I stared at me.
    â€œYou’ve got to get yourself a girlfriend, soon,” he said.
    â€œI’m fat, Ray.”
    He seemed a little surprised by this. We had been living alone, the pair of us, in bachelor conditions for a good while now. We were not shy or careful around each other. The house had its sights and sounds and smells, which we had gotten pretty good at not noticing, which the girls certainly would not have tolerated, but this here, me and the nakedness and the mirror and all, this was testing him.
    â€œYou are not fat. You’re not so fine I want to see you naked, however. Get dressed.”
    He left me there, alone. Me and my body, alone. Me and my body and my gut, all squeezed into my room together, uncomfortably crowded. My lean frame, cornerback lean, kicker thin, soccer-player light and springy, suddenly mutated with this jiggly Jell-O mold grafted on around mybeltline. I turned