Nothing Is Terrible by Matthew Sharpe

shaded by large trees and down to a concrete area next to the Sheep Meadow where peoplewere roller-skating to dance music in a tight ellipse. We stood in a crowd, presumably to watch the skaters. But I was distracted by the pronounced sensation that much of the crowd was watching
me
. I felt the hair sticking to my neck and I felt the crowd looking at my arms and my neck and the black clumps of sweaty hair sticking to my pale, unblemished neck. Have you ever wondered, sexual reader, if people are looking at you funny when you’re out in public just after having had sex?
    “Watch what Harry can do,” Dierdre said.
    We followed Harry to the low chain-link fence that served as the border of the Sheep Meadow. A skinny black boy of Harry’s height nodded at Harry. Harry approached him and nodded back and the boy shook hands with him and described several arcs in the air with his hands and arms while saying something to Harry. He handed Harry a small green object, which Harry brought to his face and smelled. Harry reached into his pocket and gave some money to the boy, who jerked his head around in all directions and walked away quickly.
    “Scored us some dope,” Harry said.
    Dierdre said, “I got high just watching you,” which seemed false. She turned to me and said, “You want to get high, Little Mary Sunshine?”
    “By what? Taking marijuana? Is that what you just bought?”
    “Yeah,” Harry said. “We could go back to Miss Hartman’s house with the air conditioner and ‘take’ some marijuana.”
    Skip was not home when we returned. We sat in the kitchen and Harry rolled some of the marijuana into a little cigarette. We smoked it and my heart raced and my two friends looked like insects to me and I burst into tears. They were very gentle and stopped looking like insects, but I could not stop wheezing and shaking. They fed me bowls of sugared cereal and Ishook until I was exhausted. They poured a quart of oil into a pot and turned the electric stove on high and put the pot on the stove with the intention of deep-frying some strips of potato. But they forgot to cut the potatoes and, in fact, forgot that the pot of oil was on the stove. Starting with a small explosion, an oil fire consumed the wiring of the oven and stove and burnt the wooden cabinets above them.
    By the time Skip returned from wherever she was, Harry had found the carbon-dioxide fire extinguisher and put out the fire. When Harry explained how upset I’d become after smoking the pot, and how the fire had started, Skip was gracious. She thanked them for taking care of me. Harry and Dierdre left because they had the first day of school to rest up for.
    The walls of the kitchen were smeared black with smoke residue. The smell of burnt wood and plastic mingled in the air. I cannot remember what my reaction to the fire was. I was stunned, I imagine, and drugged. I sat in a kitchen chair and Skip Hartman stood behind me stroking my cheek. “How come you’re not mad?” I asked.
    “I am grateful to your friends,” she said. “They tried to feed you with warm food. It seems this fellow Harry had the presence of mind to extinguish the fire shortly after it began. I am thankful that you are unharmed, that you are here next to me.”
    Skip Hartman left off stroking my cheek and strolled around the kitchen table slowly and carefully several times. She looked as if she were balancing a stack of books on her head. I liked the way her quiet thighs came down out of her pelvis; the way her hands swung forward wrist first as she walked; the way, at the very front of the pendulum swing of her arms, her fingers flicked forward slightly. She had a monumental style of walking. Watching her walk was like watching the stars fixthemselves slowly, over the millennia, into the shape of a woman walking.
    “Well, I suppose it’s time for bed now,” she said, and headed toward the threshold of the kitchen, and stumbled on it, and was jolted, and kept walking