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so bad.“Of course I do,” he says. “How could I not?”He lets his eyes meet hers, big and open. It was the exact right thing to say and to do.“I was worried you forgot me,” he says, in obvious but charming false modesty, so that she has to say, “No, no way, not you.”I want this girl whose name I don’t know and will never know to rub glitter on me, too. I want her mango-smelling hair on my cheeks like corn silk. I don’t want to want those things. I want to be above it, detached and mature, observing young, desperate lust. But I am young and maybe I am desperate. I wonder if I come back again, maybe without Hank, just me under the shuffleboard lights, if she would teeter over to acknowledge that we knew each other, had made a mutual impression.
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likes his shirt; it’s classy like something a TV star would wear, or a magician. Tell him she has a car. Tell him that her kids are with her sister tonight. Tell him that they’re nice kids but he doesn’t have to meet them.He tells her his name. I hear that.“Erasmo,” she parrots to him as they grind, her body arched so that her ass rubs on him while she whispers, upside down, in his ear. “Erasmo. Erasmo.” Over and over until it becomes part of the beat of the song, and I watch her lips move from the edge of the dance floor, saying words, random words, just to hear them disappear.I won’t speak to Erasmo again tonight. I will crash on a carpeted floor between two other players, speculating in too much detail about him and this stranger, their hypothetical walk to her home, their sweat and bare backs making a ripping noise against a plastic couch. How she won’t have to say, “Shh, the kids,” because it will be just her and Erasmo, this serious boy with a real future, and she’ll be able to call out his name as loud as she likes. Why is it important to me that she calls his name? He will walk home in silence, through the deserted downtown, and he will start to run, as he often does when going anywhere, the pound of his dress sneakers bouncing off century-old brick. She will come to games for the rest of the season, when she can. ThenShe will write on his Facebook wall, and I will eavesdrop on her Internet pleas all through the winter, while he lifts weights in an academy in a jungle in Venezuela and she is in this town in the snow.U just crossed my mind. I wanted to say “hello.”How’s the baseball? U still practicing?I miss u so very much my friend.R u coming back this year?He will stop answering, because he will have learned how to be an important person, and he will never go back to Clinton, and sometimes I will feel like her, stuck, waiting, listening. @LucasWMann