Segments of Flight [Tobi].

from '100,000 Years in Detention'

Tobi should never have had a crush on me. I met her when I was 13 and she was everything I should’ve wanted in a girl, and only some of what I did want. We lived in Hawaii then, on Maui. I heard she had a crush on me, that cliché junior high school recurrence, and I went to speak with her. She leaned against a wall of large bricks painted peach and wore a Boy Scouts of America oxford shirt over a black tank top and straight olive drab slacks. I asked her out and she acquiesced. Her head nodded slowly downwards as she did so.

Once we visited my house and my parents didn’t want to meet her. They were too tired from work, or the house was a mess, or they just weren’t prone to seeing people outside of the family; I don’t remember. We sat downstairs beneath our back deck, under the grill and the patio furniture, looking out at the ocean guarded by fields of high dead grass and tumbleweed-like entanglements of plant life in withering exile. A tree where the Satanists met was ornamented with the skulls of small animals, and beyond that a strip mall of convenience stores and tourist traps stood as the final barricade between the dead things and the beach. There was also a twenty-foot wall of dug-up rock we were forbidden to climb down but did anyway. We took it all in, or imagined what we couldn’t see.

I met her another day in the next neighborhood over from mine while she was on her paper route. She was the first person I knew who owned a moped, and we talked for awhile before she had to press on. The late afternoon sun waned and she offered me a ride back to my house. I hopped on the back and held on for dear life.

Later, I would meet her father, who confronted me fiercely. His thick moustache moved behind an equally thick finger he had pointed in my face. He told me his other two daughters were all grown up now, and Tobi was the only girl he had left. He told me if I did anything to hurt her, we’d have problems. He left it at that.

I broke up with Tobi after we dated for a month. She never should have liked me; she was far too interesting and independent and care-free to wind up with a guy like me. I met her in the field between my neighborhood and that of her paper route and I told her we shouldn’t date anymore. We walked opposite ways home and I turned back to look at her. She looked defeated, walking home pounding her feet into the grass with her head down. But my lasting memory of her is careening down the highway on her moped, as she took deep turns and dodged cars like in the movies, myself scared unimaginably, unable to watch the road with my head buried against her back and my eyes shut tight, smelling her clean vintage floral-print shirt, holding on for dear life, my hands wrapped around her perfect waist, heading home.