Page 2 of Knock Knock

“Give her a little gas. She’s a slut for gas!” I smacked him, hoping it felt encouraging.

“Shit!” he cursed. “Brittany’s coming.”

“Brittany?” I paused, shirt half on. “I thought her name was Bridget?”

Xavi kept trying, and Bridget or Brittany was three long strides from us. “I heard you call her Brittany,” he said. “Please don’t flood. Please don’t flood.”

I shoved an arm through my sleeve and tried to ignore the chick coming our way for the explanation we totally owed her but didn’t want to give. “Well, shit. Now I’m second-guessing myself. Are you sure it isn’t Beatrice? I thought there might be a B and an E in there somewhere.” I smacked him again when Beatrice squawked. “Hurry the heck up, Xav, or I’m leaving you here with this hunk of junk and making a run for it.”

“How dare you talk about her like that.” He gave the dash a pat.

“She’s reaching for the door!”

The engine roared to life and backfired beautifully, waking half of Garron Terrace—the hoity-toity trailer park outside Garron. With a whoop of victory, Xavi jammed the old biddy into first and chewed gravel.

I rolled down my window and leaned out. “There’s a condom on your lava lamp!”There. Who said I wasn’t responsible?“Forgot how cool lava lamps are,” I told him, and he nodded.

My heart rate slowed when we passed through the gates, but the cheesy smile on Xavi’s face never left. With Garron Terrace behind us, I leaned my head back to let the breeze dry my sweaty hair.

“Come to think of it,” Xavi said, “it’s Bethany.”

“Bethany?”

“Yeah. Definitely Bethany. Because I added her to my phone as ‘Beth with an E’, and that shit tracks. Don’t smoke that.” He tossed a packet of nicotine gum on my lap when I pulled out my pack of cigs.

“Where the fuck do you conjure this shit from?” I chewed the stale gum and hated every second of it. “Well, Bethany is…”

“Never happening again,” he filled in. “We’re fucking this all up. We had the strongest game going for a bit there, and now we’re…”

“Trying too hard?”

“Yes. That. Since when have we ever tried at anything? We’re better at the whole flow thing.” He nodded, taking a full minute to hand-crank his window down for a little humid air.

“Yeah, going with the flow is more our style. Actually, we’re better off just falling into a situation, not understanding what the situation is, and then making fun of it.”

His continuous nod said it all, but he added, “We aren’t dumb.”

Debatable. We lived a whole life with one responsibility: keep our brothers alive. That left us with no idea how to put ourselves first, no ability to plan ahead, and a promise to have fun together because nothing else in life was fun. Maybe we weren’t dumb, but we weren’t the sharpest shards of glass. Dulled down by rocks and waves that softened our edges and matted our shine. But whatever. We got by, even with all our downfalls, insecurities, and self-doubts.

As far as life bonds went, we’d gotten through a hundred percent of our shitty situations with ours, and that wasn’t something I took lightly. Ever. But now we were stuck in the same doubts. As in, someone—a whole slew of someones—made us doubt ourselves. Never, not even once, had I questioned myself as a person, and I knew Xavi hadn’t either. Yeah, we questioned our lifestyle, our upbringing, our financial situation, our luck, our tiny goals, and the methods we employed to get them, but never ourselves. Then, a while back, someone planted that seed of doubt, and it never stopped growing.

We hit the ripe old age of thirty, and suddenly, different kinds of life questions started coming our way. Turned out we had no idea how to answer them. Well… I sure as shit didn’t.

“But maybe we are dumb,” Xavi said, his smile finally falling. “Maybe that’s what we need to change. We’re getting older, being held to new standards, and let’s be real, we’re fucking failing at all of it.”

This was the part I hated. To watch someone as incredible as Xavi second-guess himself just because a bunch of people told him to start thinking differently made me borderline homicidal. And there weren’t too many things that made me a homicidal kind of guy. I wanted to yell at those fuckers, confront all those chicks, and throw it in their faces that Xavi was more than they’d ever be.

We got dumped for being immature.

We got left behind because we weren’t serious enough about life.

We got ditched because we cared more about each other and our brothers than some idealistic notion of marriage and kids.

We got told to grow up.

We got laughed at for being failures.

We got treated like a pair of jokes who didn’t know our own punchline.Knock, knock, right?

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