Nothing Is Terrible by Matthew Sharpe Page B

because I am black and standing here, you think it must have been I.”
    His white dress shirt was neatly pressed and so were his khaki pants. His brown loafers with gold buckles had just been shined. He didn’t look like a marijuana dealer, but then again Ihad led a sheltered life in the suburbs, reader, and didn’t know what a marijuana dealer was supposed to look like.
    “I think I know what I saw,” I said.
    “I think I know what I am,” he said, with his hands on his hips.
    “Come on, just sell me some pot.”
    “Listen, would you please get away from me before I call the police?”
    “What’s that perfume you’re wearing?”
    His body relaxed into maybe one tenth of a faint, as if what I had just said were so exasperating it could have knocked a person unconscious. “It is not perfume. It is a men’s cologne. It is Safari for Men.”
    “Well, it stinks.”
    “I cannot sell marijuana to a small child.”
    “I’m not a small child, I’m a small adult. My growth has been stunted by smoking marijuana.”
    “Trust me, you’re a little girl and you don’t know anything.”
    “I know a lot more about life than you’ll ever know.”
    He made a
tsk
-ing noise with his tongue and teeth and made a little rounded gesture in the air with his long, supple hands that seemed to be a comment on the elaborate wrongness of what I had just said.
    “I do,” I said.
    “Such as?”
    “Lust.”
    “And what do you know about lust?”
    “Savage extreme rude cruel.”
    “So the little girl has read Shakespeare. Big deal.”
    “So sell me some pot.”
    He rolled his eyes back in his head. “I can’t believe I’m doingthis. This is really stupid.” He reached into his pocket and removed a small plastic bag. “That’ll be twenty dollars, please.”
    “I have to smell it first.”
    “Yes, of course. I’m sure that William Shakespeare always smelled it before he bought it.” He handed me the bag.
    “Well, I have to stand away from you to smell it because of your ‘Safari for Men’ cologne.”
    “Fine.”
    I took several steps away from him and, for no reason that I can think of, turned around and sprinted toward the edge of the park at Fifth Avenue. I looked over my shoulder for long enough to see this boy try to organize his two very long, thin legs into a running motion. He was having trouble getting started, like a young colt. I eased off to a quick jog, which was a mistake, because once his legs got the basic concept of running they did quite well with it and he almost caught me. During a whole summer of running, I had developed a burst-of-speed technique, which I deployed just as he was about to catch me. None of the skaters, nor any of the young mothers pushing strollers, nor any of the drunks, nor the old people feeding pigeons seemed to care that a tall black boy was chasing a short white girl through the park. By the time I reached Fifth Avenue I had maybe ten paces on him. I hailed a cab and climbed inside.
    “The toy store,” I said to the cabdriver, who moved out into traffic and also didn’t seem to care that there was a boy chasing his car. I stared at him out the back window of the cab and wished he didn’t look so despondent.
    “Which toy store?” the driver said.
    “That huge one on Fifty-eighth Street with all the nice toys.”
    “F.A.O. Schwarz,” he said.
    “Yeah, F.A.O. Schwarz,” I said. “I have thirty-one dollars and I’m going to buy my teacher a nice present.”
    Back in Skip Hartman’s room, I sort of missed the boy from whom I had stolen the marijuana that I was now smoking. I saw delicacy and hopefulness in his face, and a puzzlement that I understood all too well: why am I this when what I wish to be is that?
    I don’t know how long Skip Hartman had been standing in the doorway watching me meditate and take puffs of pot. She stood in the doorway and I sat on the bed and we observed each other for a while. One of the pleasures of living with Skip Hartman was having