The Boy Recession by Flynn Meaney

growing up, she would let me wear whatever I wanted. I could wear my Halloween costume to school and refuse to cut my hair for four years, and she was cool with it.
    When I get my pick and start playing the guitar again, my mom watches me for a few minutes, smiling.
    “Did you write that one?” she asks.
    “Yeah. I’m starting a song,” I tell her. “I never finish them, though.”
    “I have a bunch of staff paper downstairs that I took from the school,” my mom says. “You should write down what you’ve written so far!”
    “Yeah. I have to figure this part out first,” I say. “I keep messing it up.”
    “Well, I stole a lot of paper,” my mom says, winking, and then whispers, “
So you can make lots of mistakes.
”
    My mom gives me a hug, which is really brave, because I haven’t showered and I still smell like Dave’s car. She doesn’t seem to mind. Then she gets up, and as she pulls the door shut behind her, she says, “There’s bacon downstairs, too.”

    Half an hour later, I’m still in bed. The only thing that’s changed is that a pile of blank staff paper and a plate of bacon crumbs are in bed with me. I’m still leaning against the wall, picking at my guitar, when my dad comes bursting into my room.
    “Let’s get going!” he says, clapping his hands. His clap is so loud it hurts my ears. “Let’s go and get a pumpkin.”
    “What?” I yawn at him. “When is Halloween? Soon?”
    “Halloween is next week!”
    Whoa. Seriously?
    “We’ve gotta get ready,” my dad is saying. “We’ve gotta stock up on candy, we’ve gotta put the spiderwebs out on the bushes, get the fog machine out…. What if we did a haunted-house thing this year? Whadda you think about that? You and I could hide in the bushes, and when kids come out, we’ll jump out….”
    This plan sounds like something we could get sued for. Plus, I’m not sure I want to spend Halloween night hiding out in a bush with my dad, waiting to jump out and make little kids cry. I’ve gotta go out with Derek and six cans of shaving cream and make bigger people cry. But for now, to make my dad happy, I’ll go get a pumpkin.

    Let me give you some advice here: People who want to have the sex talk with you will act the same way as people who want to murder you. First they get you in their car, so they’re in control and you can’t escape. Then they drive you someplace in the middle of nowhere. Today my dad takes me to a farm on the outskirts of Whitefish Bay. On the hunt for one of those huge monster pumpkins they inject steroids into, my dad treks farther and farther back in the field, back where there’s a lot of wet grass and mud and animal shit, and my sneakers are sinking into the ground. When we’re back in the last few rows of pumpkins—this is the isolation thing I’m talking about—my dad says, “So I saw Gene Pluskota at the hardware store this morning. He said Eugene has a girlfriend!”
    Wow. Eugene works fast. When did he tell his dad about Bobbi?
It had to be sometime between midnight last night, when they stopped making out long enough to agree that they were actually dating, and 9 AM , when my dad was at the hardware store.
    “So…” my dad follows up, grunting as he rolls this huge pumpkin over. No go. It’s all rotten on the back side. “Anything going on with you in that department?”
    Crap.
Well, I guess he had to ask about my love life eventually. But I don’t have a lot to tell him. Some people think Eugene and I are dating, because we’re always together and he pays for my food. I do hook up with girls, but my hook-ups are pretty sketchy. Usually I’m drunk or the girl’s drunk, or she’s pissed at another dude who rejected her, and we’re in some weird location. Once I made out with a girl in Dave’s smelly parked car in the Applebee’s parking lot. Maybe it means something that girls kiss me only in dark places. I tell my dad, “Uh, not too much going on.”
    I go over to this huge