Fear and Laundry by Elizabeth Myles

multiple thumbtack holes marring the corners. “These from your Cell Farm days?” I asked. The Celluloid Farm was Carreen’s biggest and best video store. Jake had worked there for about a year before leaving for school.
    “Some,” he said as I paged through them. “I had ‘em up in my dorm room but they sort of freaked out my roommate.”
    I uncovered the poster for Dario Argento’s Deep Red , featuring a blonde woman impaled on a broken window, rivers of her blood pouring over shards of jagged glass. “Like this one?”
    “Now that,” he said, “is an underrated film.”
    “I don’t know,” I said and told him my theory that Argento was more important for his overall influential impact on the genre than for his individual film contributions. Jake seemed appalled by this supposition and tried to argue with me, but I was unconvinced and in the end we had to agree to disagree.
    I settled the posters back where I’d found them, swiveled the desk chair a little and caught sight of the notebook he’d been writing in when I entered. “Were you working on something for school?” I asked, not really thinking he had been, but looking for an excuse to broach the subject. If Lia wasn’t going to question him about his unexpected return to Carreen, I might as well.
    “No,” he said. Then, realizing how terse he’d sounded, “Sorry. School’s sort of a sore subject for me right now. You may’ve heard.”
    “Lia said something about you dropping out.” I tried to sound neutral.
    “That surprise you?”
    It honestly did. “I thought school was, like, your thing ,” I said.
    He shrugged a little. “Yeah, well, it’s started to feel like a waste of time.”
    “Since when?”
    “Freshman year.” No, longer than that, he corrected. Since before he’d even left for college. He’d thought things would get better, he said, once he “got going,” and he’d tried to throw himself into the work, spending the last two summers in Austin doing what he was “supposed” to do, taking summer classes and volunteering at hospitals. But his ambivalence had only deepened as the semesters passed. While the other pre-med students researched medical schools and prepared for the MCAT, he’d started to look for ways out.
    He said he’d never intended to wind up back in Carreen in the middle of the night but as the fall semester neared, his doubts had overwhelmed him. He said he couldn’t face going back “for more of the same.”
    “So I threw all my stuff in the van and drove back here, instead,” he told me. “Looking back, probably not the greatest decision I ever made. I mean, I don’t know what sort of reaction I expected to find here.” But he didn’t have anywhere else to go.
    “Your parents are giving you a hard time,” I said, remembering what Lia’d told me.
    “They don’t believe me when I tell them I’m done. They think I’m just burned out; that I’ll come to my senses and go back if they just bother me about it enough.”
    “Maybe you are burned out,” I said. “Sounds like you’ve been working pretty hard.” He could try taking fewer classes, I suggested. Or switch his major to something less demanding.
    The terms of his scholarship, he explained, complicated both those issues. Not that he was convinced it’d matter even if he could make changes. He knew pre-med wasn’t for him. “But nothing else seems to interest me all that much, either. I mean, besides playing music.” He smiled joylessly. “My parents flipped when I told them that. They’re scared I dropped out because I think I’m gonna be the next Clyde Kameron or something.”
    “But you don’t?”
    “Course not,” he snorted.
    “What, then?”
    “Well, that’s the big question, isn’t it? What’s Jake gonna do with the rest of his life? ” He resumed eating, taking an angry bite of pizza.
    “You think I’m crazy?” he asked, when I hadn’t said anything for a while.
    “What?”
    “The consensus around