Fried Spaghetti

by James Prenatt

Alex Bayev

​Nell

​Unlike most drugs, which are ingested by nose, mouth, or needle, Fun is ingested through the ears. It comes in these little earplugs that melt into your ear canal. Blissful and euphoric, energizing and panicking, hallucinatory and transcendental, it’s the jack of all trades and initially, the side effects are very few. You come down hard as with anything. You’ll have a headache on par with any bad hangover; you’ll be tired, irritable, and you’ll probably throw up. Overdoses happen, but what really gets you is the withdrawal. Your insides literally start to eat themselves. You lose control of bodily functions. You feel a constant tickling, itching feeling in your ears so bothersome people have been reported to dig into their ears so hard they hemorrhage and cause permanent damage. It slowly kills your hearing until everything is just an echo. You scream, run, laugh, and hurt yourself for no reason. The only thing that can be done is hospitalization. They put you under, give you fluids and essentially treat you like someone in a coma.

​When I hear Bad Veronica, catchy, poppy, and just harsh enough to be punk, I don’t think of high school like everyone else does. I think of how my best friend, Michael Shudder, felt the first time he did Fun. I think of how by the time the band went on their first tour he could barely hear. I think about the times he would call me and excitedly play songs he’d just written, and we wouldn’t talk; I’d just lie on the bed and listen.

​I’ve got his first tape ever recorded. I think it might be worth something, but I haven’t listened to it yet.

The last time I saw him was at his parents’ old house, the one they lived in before the divorce. It was broken down and haunted-looking, and I don’t mean that in a cool way. His parents had made a good amount of money at one time or another, and it was actually a pretty big house. Back then I envied him, but now I realize that it was all just gilded, like my English teacher said the late 19th century was. For every beautiful building built and every fortune acquired, there was a family dying in an industrial ghetto covered in soot.

He was lying in his old bedroom on what could barely be called a mattress, shards of glass all over the floor and plastic bags filled with going-bad food. He’d lost so much weight I was afraid to picture what he looked like with his shirt off. Michael was always a big guy, but now he just looked sickly and exhausted. I could only admit myself to this recently, but curled up in that sleeping bag he looked like a worm.

I felt as though I was waking a child. “Michael?” I whispered.

I don’t think I was talking to him. It had to be someone else. He spoke softly, smooth, and more beautiful than any singer’s voice I’ve heard since. “Nell? Is that you?”

I had to cover my nose to keep from gagging at the smell, but after a while I gave up because I didn’t want to offend him. I tried not to stare at the yellow in his ears, the cracks and infections left from plugging in so much Fun.

I set down the copy of Sifting through the Madness he’d given me before he left. “I finally finished it,” I said.

He rolled over and hardly smiled at me. “I’ve got this riff I’ve been meaning to show you.” He coughed so hard I think he puked a little. “Would you get me my guitar?” He began to shake and clutch his stomach.

I found the guitar sitting underneath a window, a light shining over it revealing the bits of dust in the air. The light faded as soon as I grabbed the guitar. His last light. I handed him the acoustic guitar, beat up and cheap, but loved.

He clutched it like a stuffed animal. “I’ll show you tomorrow.”

There was always tomorrow with Michael. Hate tomorrow and don’t be afraid of the future/love the here and now/like your dad didn’t show you how.

I had to go. The smell, just the sight of him was too much. He looked like someone about to turn into a zombie. “I’ve got to get going, Michael.”

He didn’t respond to this. Instead he said, “Could I bum a cigarette?” He coughed again, that pathetic yet cathartic sound. “Forgot. You don’t smoke.”

He curled up against his guitar and I left.

A few days later he was reported missing by one of his band mates. I told the cops the last place I saw him and they found him in that same spot, killed by Fun withdrawal, the guitar next to him like a gravestone. I wonder if he played that song he was supposed to show me. He had been gone for days, which meant he had died shortly after I saw him.

I don’t believe in the supernatural or anything like that, but Michael did, and maybe it’s what you believe that makes things true. I learned what people mean when they say, “it was like seeing a ghost.” Sometimes I wonder if he was already dead. Maybe his soul was floating in that broken house looking for someone to love him.

I’m writing this on the day of my last game. I’m not nervous anymore. I hear his voice in my head, telling me to relax, it’s just a game. I turn around. It’s not him, it’s Lance.

“Hey man, you gonna stop scribbling in that journal and play?” he says. “We may have bombed this year, but we’re still Pit Bulls.”

I close the notebook, stuff the things I’d never tell anyone, the things I can’t get out without breaking down into tears, into my locker. I get on the field. I play without nerves or distractions.

Mandy

​I remember my dad taking me for a drive around the fields, the farms, the marshes, and the riversides of Lethe County. On those drives he would just talk and I would listen without response. One time we parked outside this farmhouse hidden inside the wild mud vine and trees that grew together like a spider web.

​He did not point, he just nodded. “See that window up top on the right there? Cousin of mine had just gotten out of a mental hospital. Gets all better, all happy you know. Stops taking his meds one day, walks up in there and shoots himself in the head with a .45,” he told me, and I still don’t know why.

​After that we got some ice cream at Licks.

​When I got the news about Adam Devine putting a shotgun to his mouth I did not cry. I didn’t cry as I read his eulogy. I didn’t cry when they put him in the ground. I still haven’t cried.

But I keep thinking about what it feels like. Does your sight remain intact as your eyes split open? Do you feel yourself fly into the wall as your head crumbles instantaneously into emptiness? Does it slow down and you feel the heat of the buckshot inside of you? I’m sure there was an odd peacefulness to it, knowing that it’s your time. They say we never know when we’re going to die, but we do have the choice, don’t we?

​It’s all anyone will talk to me about. “Hey Mandy, you’re so strong. This must be so hard for you. Hey Mandy, how are you feeling since your boyfriend offed himself? It’s such a shame. Oh, don’t worry he’s in a better place.”

​I don’t have the heart to tell them he was gay.

​Nell

There was a party that night at the Thompson house. I wondered if the Thompson place was ever occupied by any authority figure. I’m pretty sure they’re just vacationing most of the year. Lance made me his specialty drink, the “Deja Entendu,” because “tomorrow you won’t remember anything, just the strangest feeling of already having been there.” I loved Lance, but he was kind of an idiot sometimes.

I was happy to drink it. That was the first time I ever used alcohol to cheer me up or give me guts, as Michael said it was intended to do. Usually it just made me sleepy, but whatever.

Mandy was there, wearing that usual don’t-give-a-shit look on her face. Never say no, was Michael’s motto, but I had said no to asking Mandy out since I first met her in Algebra 2 what seemed like just a week ago.

I was still a virgin, and I got the feeling Mandy wasn’t. She’d had several boyfriends, none of which she seemed satisfied with except Adam. Michael used to tell me that the more miserable a girl looks with her boyfriend the more experience she’s had in bed.

I never knew what to say. “Talk to girls the same you would a guy,” Michael had told me. If I did that, it would mean a lot of fake machismo and “that’s what she said” jokes. It’s not that I was completely inexperienced or something. Okay, maybe I was. I’d had two dates with the same girl, and we made out a couple of times, but that was it. After Coach K told me sex makes you weak on the field, I stopped trying and felt bad for masturbating the day before a game. His advice was still sacred in my mind, but that didn’t mean he was right.

I asked her if she wanted a Deja Entendu, and she politely declined. Apparently she was the designated driver, a role she always ended up playing. Mandy had this maturity to her that I felt was supposed to come with experience, being above it all and staying in control no matter what substance you were under the influence of.

“It’s not very good anyway,” I said. Could I be anymore boring? Luckily, she ended up doing the work for me.

“You played well out there,” she said.

I shrugged. “We’ve played better.”

“I said you, not the whole team.”

I was pleasantly surprised to find out that she had seen me around and wanted to talk to me, but I always looked too caught up in my current task to bother doing anything else, too intense and a bit scary. “I get that a lot,” I told her. I was even more surprised she didn’t ask me about Michael, though Adam was briefly brought up.

She thought it was stupid to have a party for a dead person. “Nothing says ‘we’ve all moved on without you’ like a shitface party like this.”

“Yeah, it’s like everyone knows exactly what he would’ve wanted…he wanted to die,” I said and instantly felt bad about the sentiment. “Sorry for being so morbid.”

“No, I like it.” She told me I was honest and not fake like the other guys. I didn’t seem concerned with the size of my cock.

I choked a bit on my drink and told her I needed a refill. I was worried she would leave. Anytime I talk to a girl at a party and walk away so do they. But she was still there, smoking and snickering at a circle of kids playing Asshole.

“Want a puff?” she asked.

I took the tiniest hit ever known to Augustowne and coughed as though I’d jumped out of a burning building. She was nice about it and didn’t giggle.

“So, Knock 'em Out Nelson, what are your plans for after graduation?” she said in a mocking tone. I’d never been so embarrassed about my nickname.

“College, I guess. You?”

“Naval Academy.”

I never would’ve guessed that Mandy would want to go somewhere as uptight as that. To be honest, I didn’t even know she had plans to go to college at all. Maybe that’s why she had such a chip on her shoulder. She’d already been accepted.

Ashamedly, I told her my mom was expecting me home soon. Oddly enough my mom wasn’t particularly strict, but she had been good friends with Michael’s mom at one time or another, and it made her wary that I’d get into the same things he had.

And then I got stupid and said, “But uh… maybe you might want to come home with me?” I didn’t even mean it like that, I just wanted to be someplace private with her. I didn’t have a car to drive her, either.

“We practically just met,” she said.

“Oh. Right. Well, never mind. I’ll get going.”

I was almost out the door when she told me to wait up. “Hey, don’t go.”

“I’m not supposed to have girls over like that anyway.”

“It’s okay. I’ll sneak out before anyone knows I was around.” She didn’t even wait for me to confirm anything.

I guess it was one of those last-night-of-our-youth-things, but I wouldn’t think of it that way until much later.

​Mandy

​As I spotted him from across the room, I thumbed the letter in my jacket pocket. Okay, not letter. Sonnet. I’d kept it for him all this time. I’d been working on the thing practically all of high school, and if anyone comes across it, they better publish it, and it better win some stupid award for all the toil I went through writing it. Nell looked so awkward with that drink in his hand like it was his first. Baby. Something about that look he always had on his face, like he was constipated by all the things he wanted to say but was too shy to speak up. Innocence, I think they call that.

​No, that’s obliviousness. I’d been giving the asshole I-want-you looks since ninth grade. He’s clueless.

​So when he asked me to go home with him, I almost did what I do with everyone. Say no.

​“Do you do this to all the girls you bed? ‘Hey, I’m Nelson. I’m a sensitive puppy-dog-nice-guy type. Sleep with me!’” What I really meant to say was, “Carry me up in your arms and make sweet love to me.”

​Man, he looked like someone had to perform an emergency castration. “I uh — no, sorry. I’ll go.”

​I fake punched him on the shoulder. “Relax, big guy. I’m just yanking your chain. I’ve really got to be DD tonight. For some reason my friends trust me not to lose control at these things.”

​“That’s okay.” He gulped down his drink nervously.

​“Nah, let’s go. I’ll pull the whole ‘oh, poor me, so sad about Adam’ card and we’ll jet. It works every time.”

Nell

I’d never been in a car with a girl alone, and I always wanted to be like the rest of the guys, driving around in a jeep with the top down and a girl in the passenger seat looking excited at the privilege of being with a Pit Bull.

“Can you keep a secret?” she said.

“Yeah, of course.”

“I really love trees.”

“Trees?”

“Yup. I’m a tree-o-phile. Sometimes I make love to trees. The orgasms are great, but getting the bark out of your pussy sucks.”

I couldn’t hide the disgust on my face.

​“Dude, relax. I’m kidding. You really are pent up, aren’t ya?”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize.”

I directed her to my place. She only lived a couple blocks down, and if I told her how I used to admire the way she stepped onto the bus each morning, she’d think I was crazy. Luckily my parents had gone to bed by the time we got home and for the first time, I knew the rush of tiptoeing upstairs with a girl, trying not to wake my parents. I was a little buzzed and instead of calming me, it made me more paranoid. As I shut the door I closed the handle before doing so in order to make it quieter.

She sat down on my bed and thumbed through a pile of CDs. “You like Lagwagon?”

I used a phrase I otherwise said just because other people did. “Yeah, man.”

“So much better than NOFX,” she said.

“That’s not hard, I think. Propaghandi are in a close second, though.”

She lied back against the head of the bed and looked through the inside art of the CD case. It made me even more nervous that she looked so comfortable there. I’d only ever shared a bed with Michael, and that was when we were kids. “I thought no one had heard of them.”

The bed barely had enough room for both of us. I didn’t know how to get to that point, so I asked. “Can I kiss you?”

She answered with a smile and her lips against mine.

​Mandy

​I’m not sure that anything in life can be a disappointment so long as you don’t get your hopes up. Making every day count ’cuz every day’s a new destiny. That’s a line from a Bad Veronica song. But then again, I don’t think that when Howard Hughes made it around the world in record time he was thinking, Well, I can’t get my hopes up too much, can I?

​​Nell

I didn’t feel any different, which I guess is normal. Instead I felt like I’d just shared my deepest, darkest secret with a complete stranger.

“I’m starving,” she said. “Got anything to eat?”

I went um, uh for a minute.

“I can go if you want,” she said, and I almost shouted no at the word “go.”

I got dressed, kind of hating how wet I was and needing something to absorb that cold feeling. We walked downstairs and again I felt that pleasant nervous feeling in my stomach, and in moving slowly I only made the steps creak more. I looked inside the fridge and pulled out a bag of leftover spaghetti. The microwave was broken, so I heated up some canola oil, fried it, and slathered it in salt.

“You’re crazy,” said Mandy.

“Try everything once and make the most out of what little you’ve got. How else do you know if you’re alive?”

“Did you write that?”

“No, just something Michael used to tell me.”

“I’m not eating this.”

“Trust me,” I said.

She took a little bite. “You’re a genius.”

“I know.”

She saw the picture on the fridge of me and Michael at Cheeseburger Island, smiling bigger smiles than anyone’s capable of past the age of thirteen. If you eat the full pound burger you get your picture taken and put up on the wall. This was one of few accomplishments we had both worked on together. They never said you couldn’t be on the wall if you shared it with someone. It was still finished, right? They weren’t big fans of that, so we kept the Polaroid to ourselves.

“Hey that’s…” she said.

“Yup.”

“You were friends? I never would’ve guessed.”

“At one time or another,” I said, taking a look at the picture with my own hands.

“I’m so sorry,” she said.

“Don’t be.”

She admitted that she really loved his music. His music, everybody called it, as if the rest of the band didn’t exist. Michael may have written lyrics, but he didn’t sing a word; he just played guitar. To the kids of Augustowne, he was the band.

“I never saw him around school,” she said.

“You wouldn’t have. Michael wasn’t one for academics. He was maybe half way through junior year before he left.”

“How long had you known him?”

“Since I was eight years old. I was real pudgy back then, and I remember thinking, ‘Wow, at least one kid here is bigger than me.’”

“That’s cute.”

I don’t know why I kept talking, but I hadn’t told anyone these things before. “We were running track one time and both of us were trailing way behind all the other kids. He said, ‘Here, I’ll stay one step behind you so you don’t come in dead last.’ I still imagine him behind me sometimes when I’m on the field.”

I don’t remember what she said or if she said anything at all, but she decided it was time for her to go home. Before she went, I decided to give her something. “It’s his first ever demo tape. There’s just one song on it, I think.”

She smiled. “You don’t have to do that.” At first I thought she didn’t care, but later I realized that sincere smirk was more emotion than Mandy would ever share with anyone. Every now and then we’d pass each other in the hall and flash that same smile at each other. That smile was my first girlfriend.

“Thanks,” she said. “Let’s do this again sometime.”

I don’t know what part of it exactly she wanted to do. Whatever it was, it didn’t happen because we never hung out after that. Well, there you have it, Michael. All that time you’ve been telling me to ask this girl out, and I gave her a piece of you. Hope you’re flattered.

My dad walked downstairs for his usual midnight snack. “You’re up late,” he said. “Have fun at the party?” He grabbed a pastry and some chips from the cabinet.

“It was alright.”

Like most interactions with my dad, this one was awkward and really wasn’t much of a conversation. “Girls,” was all he said.

Mandy

​On the way home I popped the tape in. I was surprised Michael’s voice was so deep, not like the nasally whining voice of the lead singer.

​“Alright this is ‘Meghan,’” he said.

​“Could you come up with a more subtle name?” said a sarcastic voice, who I soon realized was Nell’s. Man, I didn’t know he had a sense of humor.

​“Shut up. It’s romantic.” They both laughed. “And creepy.”

​A tinny acoustic guitar strummed and I recognized that riff. It was weird to hear it so uncut and unpolished. Come back to you every time/going out for a drive at the prospect of seeing you/my heart’s not mended/there’s not enough glue.

​The music stopped suddenly and Michael said, “No, not tight enough,” whatever that meant.

This went on a while and the song was never played all the way through.

​Nell of all people said, “Quit striving for perfection, man. It’s fine the way it is.”

​“Think someone will ever listen to this?”

​“Doubtful.”

That’s when I cried.

Nell

I went upstairs and sat on my bed, ran my tongue over my lips, reminisced about the taste of metal from her lip ring. Morning would come soon, the time I would usually go out for a run. I didn’t need to anymore. You can sleep in now, Michael told me.

There wasn’t much point in going back to bed, so I went for a drive. Bad Veronica was on the radio, and even though it wasn’t his voice, I heard him sing it: Parents think that we’re the ones to blame/well I don’t need your riches and fame.

Well, you’re famous now. Goodnight, best friend. A part of me is glad you didn’t live to see it.

*

James Prenatt’s writing has appeared in magazines such as Criterion Journal, Five2One, and Cactus Heart. He lives with his wife and son and writes a column on parenting and masculinity called “Father, Stepfather” for The Wild Word. He enjoys horror movies and snow.