I laughed. “Oh well, it’s not like we’ll be running into him again. Hey, I’m not getting anything done here, you ready to leave?”

We walked out of the bookstore, stopping briefly to ask the nameless, bearded employee if he wanted to shoot pool with us later that night. He had other plans.

The smoke hung in the air, heavier than Charles Dickens’ foreshadowing. Jana and I met up at On Cue. We sat in a round booth and played poker with a couple of guys she knew.

“So what exactly is ‘bling-bling?’” someone asked.

“It has to do with the jewelry, right? The big-ass gold chains they wear,” someone else offered.

I held my cards fanned in my hand. King of Hearts missing a Queen, Three of Clubs is a crowd. The guys cozied up to Jana, the socialite, and my mind drifted back to the jazz, the bass, the concept of optimism and how much longer I would believe in it, the memories of being a little girl and free to run barefoot through freshly cut grass. My feet would turn green with brown mud splotches and I would make up songs and dances. The sky would always be better than my sky-blue crayon and I would lay on the damp ground, contemplating the clouds that were drips of white in my blue finger-paint.

“Hey bitches.” Matt. Of course. He pulled me from my childhood daze back to the startling reality I didn’t want to accept. It took me a moment to register his face. Of course he would be there. He was dressed up, shiny black shoes, olive slacks, and a charcoal button down. And why was he back anyway?

“Hey,” Jana said, sliding over in the booth. “What’s up?”

“Oh, not much really, just partying. In town for a funeral. Sad story, actually.” He sat next to me and I scooted over, away from him.

“You’re partying after a funeral?” I asked.

“Well, kind of in honor of her, you know.” He turned his attention toward me. “So are you ladies going to be nice to me tonight? Am I going to get to talk to you alone this time?” He brought his face in close to mine. I looked away, pretending not to hear him. “Oh, I see how it is. You two really are bitches.”

Now if there’s something I hate, it’s being accused of something I am not. I couldn’t sit there and take that. My eyes felt like they could fire lasers, but I softened them before I looked back at him. I wanted desperately not to be proven wrong, to be able to find the positive attributes in him that maybe were only hiding under a sandpaper exterior. Maybe he just hadn’t felt accepted by anyone and held up this asshole front as a way to combat rejection. Or maybe I had taken too many psychology courses in college.

“Well, ladies, if you want to come play with my friends and me, my table’s over there.” He pointed across the room and walked away. He winked at me.

Jana and I eventually grew tired of waiting for our names to be called for a table and crossed ourselves off the list. Matt came over again.

“Is there something you’re trying to get, Matt honey?” Jana asked him. I laughed. He looked flustered for a moment but answered her with a smile.

“No, if there was something I wanted, I’d have it by now.”

“That’s the funniest thing I’ve heard,” Jana said. “You know, you are really entertaining. Isn’t he a riot, Haley?”

I nodded. But what would be even funnier is if we played along. If we played him as much as he thought he was playing us. Be nice to him, make him think we liked him, and then have a great laugh about it afterwards. Or was my motivation something other than that? A desire to prove Jana wrong, to prove myself wrong and know that there was still a reason for optimism? that my childhood naïveté didn’t need to fade with my summertime freckles?

“So you were telling me last time that you mentored kids. That true?” I asked him.

“Of course.”

“What age?”

“Third and fifth graders. You gotta get them before middle school, because after that there’s no hope for anyone.”

Bingo. He hit on pet peeve number two. No hope for anyone? Isn’t that what I was trying to prove wrong? That’s why I kept reading and editing term papers, because I thought maybe I could make a difference in someone’s life, make them not hate writing so much or maybe realize they were unexpectedly good at something. That’s why I volunteered at the Salvation Army daycare on the side, because I still had hope.

“No way, I know too many people whose lives have changed much after middle and high school. I can’t give up on people like that,” I answered. I was surprised at the conviction in my voice.

“Well you don’t need to be hostile with me, I’m just trying to be friendly, and it pisses me off when I go out of my way to be nice to someone and they don’t do their part, you know?”

“I’m being hostile? You’re the one who introduced the insults tonight, by calling us bitches.”

“You two have fun,” Jana interjected. “I’m going to go say hi to Mark over there. See, now you can have your little one-on-one conversation with her like you’ve wanted, Matt.” She stood up and walked to a group of people. I vaguely recognized one or two of them.

“Anyway,” Matt said, “so about the insults, you know I don’t mean them, I just like to have a good time. I’m not really into commitments, relationships, just a good time. You ladies seemed to like the sarcasm, were returning it.”

“How about a decent conversation? Forget the insults from before. Start over,” I said. I was willing to bring the score back up to at least a zero, maybe a five. Not ten, though. We talked for a few minutes. Rather, he talked. He told me his rags to riches story about how he worked for everything.

“And I want people to respect what I’ve done. It makes me mad when they don’t respect me, when they don’t see how hard I’ve worked.” He fidgeted, gesticulating with his hands, hardening his eyes.

Was I disrespecting him? No. I rarely got a word in edgewise. I tried to shift the conversation, to ask questions aside from his appreciation of one night stands, his conquests at singles’ bars. But no.

“So basically I’m attracted to both you and Jana. I mean, you’re the sweet one, kind of quiet. She’s more outgoing and feisty. And I’d really like to take you home tonight, but only if you were comfortable with doing whatever.” He paused. Did he actual expect me to reply to that? To jump up and down with joy? To throw myself at him, rip off my shirt, and breathe ‘fuck me now!’ into his ear? “Yeah, if I don’t get any every day, I do it myself.” He laughed but I only gave him a wan smile in return.

“I should really get going,” I said.

“But—it’s her, isn’t it.” He pointed at Jana with a tilt of his head. “See, I knew you couldn’t make your own decisions, she makes them for you, doesn’t she. I don’t know what she’s got against me, though.”

I gathered my coat and purse, reapplied my chapstick, made it obvious that the conversation was over. He had hit on my weakness, my pride. I tried to give him an out so he could save any remaining dignity. But he kept talking, mentioning something about how he expects people to like him, how he makes lots of friends but if people didn’t like him that was their problem, their loss. He repeated his story of working his way out of a bad situation and reminded me that he deserved respect. But he had done it again, he had stirred in me an actual intense dislike, something not easy to accomplish. I no longer cared to listen. Fuck that. I gave him a chance and too many second chances.

“Actually, I was planning to leave around this time anyway. But thanks for your high esteem. It was so good getting a chance to talk to you again. Maybe I’ll run into you some other time?” I slid off my seat before he could process the sarcasm and I pulled my coat around me. It stunk of smoke, just like my hair. But I could easily wash my hair as soon as I was home. The hot water would carry the stench away, the bathroom fan would suction it into the sky where it would dissolve with the clouds.

Jana and I walked out of On Cue, arm in arm.

“You should’ve come over there with me,” she said. “Mark’s friends, Ben and Zach, were really funny. They’re all writers, too, so we stood around talking literature and ideas.”

“I wish I had. Did you ask them about your mission, to find that book?”

“No. I didn’t want to be disappointed again. Did you find what you were looking for? That shred of decency in him?”

“No. And I did try, too. It was hard to give up. But there’s still some hope, right? Maybe he was simply pretending to be truly vile?” I laughed when she looked at me with disbelief. “Seriously, though, I’ll still meet people and give them the benefit of the doubt, but I do know that there are limits. I don’t plan on talking to Matt again, even if we do happen to run into him.”

“Even if he says you’re mean?” she asked with a smile.

“Even then. He’s one of the handicapped ones, anyway,” I laughed.

We had a long way to walk back to our parking spot that evening. I didn’t care. It gave me a chance to clear my mind of Matt’s conversation and accusations. I inhaled the January air; it was so cold I nearly choked as it filled my lungs. But I exhaled a white cloud and it rose into the silvery night. I imagined it joined the wisps in front of the waxing moon, stretching fingers across it without hiding the soft light that reflected off the patches of ice on the ground.