Your Plan Which Is Assured of Success

From your bedroom you will call a friend, your heart abuzz, and nonchalantly but for your traitorous ululating voice you will ask if I have a girlfriend, and your friend will be unsure,
      or else your friend will confidently tell you that I do not, and give you my number,
      or maybe your friend will be sitting opposite you in your bowl-shaped chair, giggling and counseling you to call, to do it, now, stop thinking and just do it, and you will dial each number so slowly that a recorded voice will suddenly materialize and order you to redial,
      or you will hold your breath and stare at your thumb as it rapidly bangs out the ten digits, and feel as though you were diving into the icy chlorine-sharp pool in the high school basement, and the phone will purr interminably, once, again, again, and my sister will pick up, and you will lose your nerve,
      or you won’t, and you will ask for me, and she will ask who you are, and you will tell her, and she will heave a mighty put-upon sigh and bellow my name up or down some unseen set of stairs, and after an equally mighty silence I will pick up, and with a rigid transparent bravado ask what’s going on, or some other banal and anodyne thing, and as you have planned it you will ask what I am doing this Saturday afternoon, and I will be busy, and without thinking you will absurdly ask about the following Saturday, realizing that in the intervening eternal nine days we will be in limbo, seeing each other in the halls, in class, but necessarily divorced from each other, as in an arranged marriage, you will realize that the anticipation will wreck the moment, irrevocably ripen and rot and ruin our conceptions of one another, and you will despair, and so will I,
      or instead I won’t be busy, and you will ask if I want to see a movie, and I would, and you will excitedly run off a list of movies at a mutually convenient theater, and in your haste we will both find something off-putting, and realize that this is not love, but a lust for attainment, that in our adolescence we are incapable of love except for ourselves,
      or else you will not call at all but wait for days, until the moment is right, when the only seat at the cafeteria table is next to mine, except that all during lunch I am occupied with the loud vulgar idiocies of my friends,
      or I am not, my friends serendipitously are introverted and mellow, except that then when we converse, it is over our shoulders from point-blank range, our faces ridiculously close, our anxieties occluding our natural smooth likeability, such as it is, our verbal tics multiplying by the moment, and we know that the foundation we are setting is crooked and flimsy,
      or instead my friends are talkative but not overbearing, and allowing me to joke fluently and easily, and instead of speaking you dominate my attention with your knee and your hip, gradually nestling into mine, vibrating warmly with your laugh, and when the bell rings, feeling infinitely grown up, you will ask with seductive ambiguity if I want to do something together at some point, except that I will suddenly fail myself, clumsily outlining my own busy schedule for the next few weeks, insanely suggesting that I have an opening next month, as though I were a dentist, or a celebrity,
      and then many years later when we are just out of college I will find you, and laughing at everything we will stagger home from a bar,
      or our mutual friend’s party,
      or a party thrown by someone neither of us know,
      and we will consummate our love, such as it is, on your roommate’s futon, and then abruptly never speak to each other again,
      or else we will eventually get married, and then divorced,
      or else die.