Chapter 5
“I call it Chekhov’s wig,” I said. “It’s a basic principle of storytelling.”
“We heard you the first three times,” Fox said before taking a long—and pointed—sip of their cocktail.
My “friend” (notice the scare quotes) was dressed tonight in what they had informed us was Victorian matchstick girl meets The Ring.
All I know is that there was a smock and a lot of waifish eye shadow.
“We were trying to ignore you,” Keme said.
He was looking enviously at Millie’s beer, clearly hoping she would take pity on him and share (with a seventeen-year-old’s undue optimism).
Millie—blond and beautiful and of legal drinking age—was oblivious to both the look and, even more amusingly, Keme’s massive crush.
“How’s your Coke?” I asked. “Oh God, my shin!”
For a boy perpetually in flip-flops, Keme can land some devastating kicks.
We were in the Otter Slide, which was the closest thing Hastings Rock had to a gay bar.
On the jukebox, Cher competed with the ding-ding-ding of the pinball machines in the back, the roil of a dozen conversations, the clink of glasses and bottles, chairs scraping across the floor.
The usual weekend crowd clustered around the bar where Seely was behind the stick, and scattered around the room, little stuffed animals perched on tables and chairs and shelves: an otter, of course, and a bear with rainbow-colored fur, and one extremely gay narwhal.
“I’m just glad you didn’t get hurt,” Bobby said—also for the third time.
He had been super sweet about not saying things like You could have gotten killed and Why did you do something so stupid?
and I told you so. Some of that was because he was Bobby, and he understood me.
And some of that was because he was dead on his feet from working a double dealing with the landslide, but he’d refused to go home and go to sleep.
His thigh was pressed against mine. His shoulder to my shoulder.
If he wasn’t careful, he was going to fall asleep on me, and I honestly might die from how cute that would be.
“The Chekhov’s wig principle states that—”
“We don’t care,” Keme said before giving Millie puppy eyes again.
“—in any story involving a wig—”
“Nobody cares,” Fox informed me before taking another sip of their cocktail.
“—the wig in question—”
Fox and Keme booed me until I stopped talking.
“You know what?” I said. “I’m not going to tell you. I’m not going to tell either of you. You’ll never know.”
“Is it like Chekhov’s gun?” Millie said. “Only with a wig?”
I actually felt my jaw go slack. But somehow I managed to say, “That’s a gross oversimplification—”
“If there’s a wig,” Keme said, “somebody has to have it ripped off by the end of the story like two drag queens fighting in an episode of Drag Race?”
“That never happens in Drag Race, and it’s an ugly stereotype, and furthermore, my theory of storytelling—”
“The wig has to have some sort of significance to the plot?” Fox asked.
Ladies and gentlemen, these are my friends.
“You can tell me later,” Bobby said, squeezing my knee.
Which was exactly why I loved him.