Page 54 of The Progressions

“What an asshole.”

“Yes, and I told him that he was and that I was upset,” I said. “Unfortunately, I did it in verse.”

Tyler blinked. “What does that mean?”

“I thought I was a serious poet, so I wrote him an emotional villanelle,” I explained.

“Come again?”

“It’s a kind of poem with nineteen lines, five tercets and a quatrain.”

“I don’t know what you just said, but it sounded so sexy.”

“Did it?” I wondered. “How about if I told you that villanelles have two refrains?”

“Hot,” he said, and I laughed softly.

“There are two repeated lines throughout the poem, and mine were, ‘My soul torn asunder by a wild coyote’ and ‘Love, unbounded, eternal, Cody.’”

He winced. “Less sexy, now. Fuck, that’s…”

“Yes. Yes, it is, and it didn’t work on him, either,” I agreed. “I should add that there aren’t many words that rhyme with his name. Goatee? Bony? Now I might say, ‘You repulsive little toady,’ but it was supposed to be a cri de coeur. Anyway, villanelles are hard and I was a terrible poet, but I did better with insult rhyming couplets.”

“I’ve never heard of an insult couplet.” He gestured with his hand, motioning his fingers toward himself. “Lay some on me.”

I remembered what he’d said about his first kiss, that the girl had laid one on his cheek. I would have to lay couplets instead. “How about, ‘One day I look forward to your existence as a ghost, you smarmy, slimy, shitty milquetoast?’”

“No,” Tyler said. “No, that’s not better. What the hell is the milk thing?”

We talked for a while, laughing about poetry. Eventually, I dug out some of my old journals and he read them with the light from his phone, shaking his head. “This is…”

“Yes,” I agreed again. “At first, I saved them because I thought they were so good. Now I look back in amazement. I would go around speaking in verse all the time. Isn’t it hard to believe that I didn’t have a lot of friends?”

“I didn’t, either. And I wrote stuff, too,” he admitted.

“You wrote poetry?” I asked in amazement.

“No.” He looked down at the page and tapped it. “You put your feelings in verse, but I just did it straight.”

“In prose,” I suggested.

“Exactly. Some counselor told my mom to try it, to give me a notebook rather than watching me fight everybody in the whole damn class. I was so pissed that sometimes, I’d use the point of the pen to dig right through all the pages to the back cover. I hope my mom didn’t ever read the stuff I wrote, because it would have broken her heart to see it. We never could hold onto much of our crap anyway, just what we could pack fast and carry with us. Those notebooks must be long gone and that’s good.”

He had just said so many things that could have broken my heart, too. “But then you found football,” I said. “It helped you to feel better and make friends.”

“It worked better than the journaling to stop me from fighting so much, and I did meet more people. I wouldn’t say that we were friends, but at least we were teammates. One of my PE teachers had told my mom that I needed to be in athletics. He said I was tough and I was fast, too. It was hard at first because we kept moving but then that ended.”

“Why?” I asked.

“When I was fourteen, my father got arrested for drug possession and he was carrying enough to make his prison term serious. We didn’t have to worry about him for the next seven years and nine months, and during that time, I got big enough that I wasn’t ever going to worry about him again. When he got out, he picked a different fight with the wrong guy. He was always starting shit and that time, he was beaten to death.”

“Good grief.” Now I thought about Tyler practicing with the Woodsmen and the bruises I’d seen when he was in the bathtub. They wouldn’t have killed him, but it made me afraid for him.

“You’re over it. You’re over that guy.”

“Uh, what?” I asked. “Who?”

“That little guy who was touching you,” he answered. “I guess you don’t usually try to hit people with furniture if you’re interested in them.”

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