Play Me Backwards by Adam Selzer

night we dropped Dustin off first, leaving Jacqueline with us. All night long Dustin had tried to be charming, and she’d looked as though she wished she could just disappear.
    Paige turned around to face her. “I’m really sorry,” she said.
    â€œI don’t know what to say,” said Jacqueline. “He’s a sweet guy. He’s just sort of trying too hard.”
    â€œHe means well,” I said.
    â€œI know. But . . . you know.”
    â€œYeah,” I said.
    She shrugged. “Hey, he didn’t text me any pictures of his scrotum,and when I wouldn’t let him kiss me he took it well, so it wasn’t the worst first date ever.”
    â€œPeople do that?” I asked. “They send you pictures of their nards on the first date?”
    Both Paige and Jacqueline nodded. I thought this over, and out of instinct I tried to rationalize it.
    â€œWell, maybe they think they’re living the golden rule,” I said. “They’re doing unto you as they wish you would do unto them.”
    â€œThey want me to send a picture of my scrotum?” Jacqueline asked with a laugh. “Girls don’t have scrotums.”
    â€œYou know what I mean.”
    We all had a good chuckle, and Paige put a hand on my shoulder. “See?” she said. “Leon is hilarious. And he’s never texted me anything gross.”
    I was beginning to see what it was about me that Paige seemed to like. I might have been a loser, but I wasn’t an aggressive loser, and I at least had enough sense not to start a date by texting her pictures of my scrotum or anything. Maybe I was a pretty good catch, by certain very low standards.
    I had noticed over the course of the dinner that among this crowd, the one that circulated around the football team, Paige was sort of the shallow end of the pool. I mean that in the nicest possible way—not that she was shallow or a person of little consequence, but the other people in the crowd were just a bit more popular, a bit better-looking, and a bit better dressed than she was. She wasn’t in over her head, exactly, but maybe she operated on the fringes of the group, the same way I did among my crowd. I fit right in with the burnouts and bums of the Ice Cave, but I wasn’t that fucked up.I didn’t have a drug counselor or a parole officer. I didn’t drink too much, and I hadn’t committed any crimes. Not the kind you could get arrested for, at least.
    Paige and I were both a bit out of our depths among our own crowds. Maybe together we could find a niche of our own.
    After dropping Jacqueline off, I drove to Paige’s house and we made out in my car for a bit. If we weren’t in front of her house, we might have even moved to the backseat. But all the lights in the house were on, and she was fairly confident that her little sister was spying on us through binoculars.
    The evening had gone well. For both of us. I’d been able to get a conversation about turds going, and she’d gone through a date without getting any pictures of balls sent to her.
    Those may have been pretty low hurdles to clear, but at least we’d cleared them.

9. EXPERIENCE
    After I dropped Paige off, I headed to Stan’s place. His parents had never gone through with selling the house, so it was the same house I’d been to all those years before, but he’d long since moved out of the room where we’d played video games that one time and into the walk-out basement. This made the back porch into a private entrance to Stan’s place, so I was never actually in the house itself, just the basement. I don’t think I ever saw his parents once; sometimes I wondered if he even had any. The upstairs occupants might have just been a group of demons who used the old bedroom as an office now. How else could you explain the fact that he got away with making so much noise? Like the hangover cures, it defied rational