“I didn’t even know you were still in school.”

  “What, you thought I’d drop out?”

  “No, opposite, actually. Kinda. Thought you’d be in with the four years-flat team.”

  “Yeah, well… late on registration once, it all gets bogged down. Feels like.”

  I reach for a smoke. Not from any real urge, just to buy myself a tug’s extra second between remarks. Dwell over my words without revealing to her that I’m looming, unsure of myself, uneasy beside her. I left them at home. Empty pocket feels like that reluctant step from the hospital bed into the pit, only to realize there’s a fall of many miles and flame springs up. Then you cling to infirmity. She speaks first: Tombstone tumbling to catch or bonk me over the head in collapse.

  “Hm, tell me about it. I thought I’d be running around downtown with a degree like two years ago. But here I am. Pretty sure I still have a second-year class in my timetable, too.”

  “Once we have it, that’s it.” I zipped up my jacket. Breeze was picking up and the bus was still out of sight. “I gotta imagine the hustle feels pretty stupid, at that point.” Looking forward, to the spinning dimensions of the stagnant cubicle, your own square. Bevelling your eye’s edge, stunting the rebel soul’s razor on grainy carpeting, vacuumed morning then afternoon. “I don’t think we have anywhere else to be right now, really.”

  “Yeah, that’s a good way of looking at it, actually.” We both wanted to put our earbuds back in. I liked to believe she was also flattered, that I suspended the drums and the guitars and the screamers. “I don’t know,” she began. “I always sorta decided different ages were for different things, you know? Kinda ordered my expectations around that. Like 20 I’d be fully academic, 25 I’d be professional… It’s weird. I feel pretty adult, but like I don’t know anything.”

  There was a scratch in her throat, like the static of a wire. Recording for the right frequency, an accolade in happenstance. In her mind, in her circles, this little chat between other things could well be an immortalization of my own youth. As if words unrehearsed could ever mean an impact. I didn’t want continued contact, maybe just for her to vouch for me if my name came up. That wasn’t her responsibility.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  “After high school, I saw a prodigy in the mirror.” The bus appeared, a block away. “Nothing like higher education to make you feel like a fucking idiot.”

  “Are you happy with your program, at least?”

  “Eh…” Are ghosts good conversationalists? Wouldn’t know until I was haunted. “It’s not bad. How ‘bout you?”

  “Yeah, it’s cool. I mean, I love theatre, so if it was up to me I would’ve done acting, but I’m learning useful things.”

  “Who’s it up to?”

  “Oh, you know what I mean… Like if I didn’t need to afford rent, and groceries and shit.”

  “Yeah, I hear that. I would’ve flipped a coin and picked an art, probably.”

  “You don’t really pick it, though, right? It’s just kinda… like, it’s there.”

  She chucked her cornerstore poetry at my feet and I stumbled. There’s never a clear reason for the lie, you’re just false and in bed you regret it. Sooner or later, you shift onto your other side and forget. The bus arrives. She gets on and I nod goodbye.

  “Well, good luck with it,” I tell her.

  She just nods and smiles.

  There’s no second act and I sense it. Maybe we write to fabricate the plotlines we’re beneath. I watch my bus leave without me and decide to head home. It’s her territory. There’s an obtrusion in my jacket and I realize I had my smokes all along, then like a jittery pup let out its cage for kibble, I start clawing at one. It bends in the extraction and suddenly there’s hate in my heart, right under that enlivened little lung pain. I kicked a fence and no doubt looked stupid doing it. Somehow, my music came back louder.

  As a child, loitering around the kitchen was forbidden, coming along for grocery shopping, obnoxious. Tapping the hip, thrusting up art to be beheld and stuck to the fridge was burden, spurned for later and later survived illness and graduation and death. Early on, I memorized the jingle the bottle makes when it kisses the glass. You type long, loudly, against sleep to drown the noise of the crying upstairs. My room was dark and my bed never fit, cold feet stepping into school-shoes. The greatest treat was tap-water; could gorge and not feel wasteful. Learn to accept what you won't get by the time you shut the screen down, plug in, and charge. I still don’t clean my screen. They might see the glamour, the shine, and name me ungrateful. I’m grateful for nothing, and the cigarette tastes sweet.

  A blackbird sits the fence. It hears my veiled coughing and smirks, then the feathers turn to wiser wildlife. This is the background of a morbid documentary; a side-story we never hear and rather wouldn’t guess at. She was wrong and right: you can be an adult and not know a damn thing.