Read The Girl who Couldn't Come Online
Authors: Joey Comeau
The Girl who Couldn't Come (6 page)
calculator
At fifteen, I was caught with half a carton of rotten eggs in the woods. They knew it was me right away. I wasn’t wearing a mask. Halloween was about being horrible, not just pretending.
The police never pressed charges. The man who arrested me knew my father from downtown. He sat down beside me in the back seat of the cruiser and rested his thin hand on my leg and said, “This is no way for a kid to behave.”
At home, my mother took me upstairs to my room and laid into me with a wooden spoon. “You think you’re too old for this?” And then I waited in the dark for hours. I waited until they were asleep and then I opened my bedroom window and I dropped from the second floor to the ground.
I landed on my ankle funny and limped to the garage for a weapon. A tire iron. There’s a special way that a tire iron feels in your hand when you know what it’s for. And I knew exactly what a tire iron was for. I broke sixteen car windows before dawn.
My hands were cold and shaking when I put the tire iron back and snuck back inside. At breakfast, I acted as surprised as my mother that the ankle was broken.
My father offered to pay for law school, if and when I got to be law school aged. I studied math instead, worked weekends. I kept breaking glass because I liked breaking glass. Baseball bats and wine bottles in the woods.
A sales clerk caught me with my hand down the front of my pants in the personal finance section of an office supply store. She turned bright red and I almost dropped the calculator I was holding. It had two lines of display, and a multi-level undo function.
I pressed the buttons on the calculator in sequence, exploring its functions, admiring the second display line, the speed of its calculations and the utility of its error control functions. I lost track of my surroundings. I slid my hand down the waist of my jeans and a fifty year old woman in a bright red vest was suddenly at the end of the aisle snorting at me.
Tuesday night in an office supply store, fingering myself. The woman spun and marched off. I wanted to run, but I wanted that calculator, too. I needed it. I wanted to take it home with me. Anyway, there were no cameras on the calculators. The cameras all pointed to laptops and ink cartridges. There was no evidence. It was her word against mine.
The only evidence was easily handled. I set the calculator on the shelf carefully and turned and walked through the bright, clean aisles toward the back of the store. The clerks that I passed smiled politely at me. They hadn’t heard. They would.
At the back of the store I entered the bathroom and I ran my hands under warm water. I soaped them with a squirt of the pink pearl soap. I washed the soap away and then I soaped them again.
The calculator cost me sixty-five dollars at the front cash. Washing my hands had given the old woman plenty of time to spread the word. I paid in cash and smiled at the nervous girl behind the cash.
Outside, I sat in my car and took my knife to the packaging. I cut into the plastic again and again, until the calculator sat in my palm. Then I pressed the pad of my thumb against the shiny black ON button. The number zero appeared and already the world around me was beginning to fade.
I sat hunched forward in the parking lot of that store, my fingers on the plastic squares of the calculator, my other hand down the front of my pants. I had to concentrate. It was difficult, entering numbers and formulas with one hand and circling and stopping and circling again with the other. It was the perfect form of concentration.
When my legs began to shake, I pulled my hand out from my pants and I pulled them down to my knees. The skin on my leg pressed against the door of the car. I set the calculator against my cunt, so that the hard corner of the device pressed into just the right spot, and the cool plastic edge ran through the soft skin just right. I spat on my hand to make the plastic wet. I moved the calculator back and forth, pressing with the corner and then I reached for the knife.
I took the knife blade and pressed it into the fissure where the two halves of the calculator’s casing met. I continued to press the calculator into me, moving it slower now, my thumb reaching for the function keys. I ran the knife to the top corner and twisted it, like I was opening an oyster. The casing cracked. I moved the knife to the lower corner.
My legs were shaking more and more. I was thinking one and one hundred thousand. I was thinking compound interest and multi-level undo functions. Two level display. I cracked the lower corner, and the calculator opened.
I leaned forward as I came and looked inside. I put the knife down and I ran my fingers, wet, over the circuitry of the calculator. There were no sparks. There was no hiss. The circuit board was flat, with sharp points, and it was slick under my fingers.
I leaned back into my seat and left my hand resting on the exposed and ruined insides of the calculator. My breathing came easily and I felt as though I could sleep right there in the parking lot. I don’t know how long I stayed like that, listening to the passing traffic and the calm of my breathing.
dirty word frequency count
ass.......................................22
audience................................1
beg.........................................1
bite........................................8
blindfolded...........................2
blood.....................................8
body....................................12
breast.................................18
bruise....................................1
caught...................................5
choking.................................2
cock....................................27
come....................................47
condom..................................4
could...................................32
couldn’t..............................11
crying....................................2
cunt.....................................10
dildo.....................................4
dirt......................................16
equation................................5
eyes.....................................32
fingers................................61
forced...................................2
fuck.....................................16
fumble...................................3
generosity.............................2
gently...................................2
grind.....................................3
grip........................................2
handcuffs.............................3
hard....................................25
hidden...................................5
hole....................................15
inside..................................37
moan.....................................4
mouth.................................43
naked....................................3
neck....................................13
nipple..................................14
photograph...........................4
please...................................3
rough....................................8
secret...................................3
sex......................................12
shove..................................11
smile...................................31
soft.....................................18
sperm....................................2
struggle...............................5
teeth.....................................6
throat..................................4
tongue................................19
touch..................................22
use......................................13
violent.................................2
virginity...............................2
wall....................................15
watch..................................17
we.......................................54
about the author
Joey Comeau is the author of Overqualified, Lockpick Pornography, Bible Camp Bloodbath, and One Bloody Thing After Another. He lives in Canada and, with photographer Emily Horne, he makes the webcomic A Softer World. Google that shit.
