Free Making Nice by Matt Sumell Page B

ten. I baked the fish sticks, ate some, and took a nap. That night I went back to the bar.
    That sign was there again, and that girl was there again, and I drank drinks and considered approaches again. Then I quit considering anything at all and walked over not knowing what I would say, which was hello. She turned around and I felt like a hose in my chest kinked. Then it unkinked.
    “I think you’re really pretty,” I said. “Got a boyfriend?”
    She leaned back and squinted at me. “No,” she said. “I don’t.”
    “I’ll date the hell out of you,” I said. “I’ll date you so hard you’ll puke. Wanna go on a date sometime? We could do something.”
    She smiled and blinked and stirred her drink with her drink straw and said, “You know you asked me out last night, right?”
    “Oh.” I looked her down and up. “Well … what’d you say last night?”
    “I said no.”
    “Oh.” I stood there awkwardly for a few seconds, then apologized for bothering her again.
    I was already walking away when she said, “You’re cute, but you shouldn’t drink so much.” I kept walking, weaved between people on my way to the men’s room where I pissed two-handed figure eights into the urinal, the intersection crossing an X on the blue urinal cake. A guy came in and started pissing at the urinal next to me and pushed out a fart that whispered Ppppert-Pppplussss . I nodded. On the wall in front of me in black marker was written SUCK MY BLOATED LOVE KNOB FAGGOT. Underneath that someone wrote fuck you with an arrow pointing to FAGGOT, and then a third person with a blue marker scribbled out the tip of that arrow and looped it around so that fuck you pointed to itself.
    I shook and tucked, zipped and flushed, washed my hands and dried my hands on my shirt and walked out and into the bar and out the front door.
    I went home, slept for four hours, woke up at six. I made some coffee, took a sip, spit it out in the sink, and tongued my tooth for a while. I sat in the sun on the porch till nine, then walked the three miles to the dentist. On the way I saw a woman walking in the opposite direction with a brown dog. Inside my skull: There goes another living organism on a piece of rope.
    The dentist’s office was in a strip mall between Mr. Video and Angel Tips Nail Salon. I walked in and people were scattered around the waiting room, reading magazines. Better Homes and Gardens. Cosmopolitan. Us. Time. I walked over to the counter. The receptionist was on the telephone, and she pointed to a clipboard. A blue pen was tied to it with a piece of green floss, and as I was signing in she asked me if I had ever been there before. When I told her I hadn’t she handed me a stack of forms to fill out: Date, Age, Sex, Height, Weight, In Case of Emergency Contact, two pages of Medical History (Question 8: Do you bruise easily? ), one-page Patient Information Sheet, one-page Arbitration Agreement, one-page Patient Acknowledgment of Dental Materials Fact Sheet, one-page Patient Acknowledgment of Notice of Privacy Practice. I sat in the lobby for a long time until a woman mispronounced my last name and led me to a white room where a Mexican man with cut-up knuckles X-rayed my head. When he was finished, the same woman led me to another white room. I sat in there for a long time, stared at a crack in the ceiling and wondered if Carey ever thinks about me. When the dentist finally came in I was glad.
    She was older, pale and pretty, thin to the point of delicate-looking, had a mole on her left eyelid. I’d date her, big-time. She said hello and asked how I was, looked through a folder, put on rubber gloves. She was very polite.
    She adjusted a surgical mask and goggles and my chair and the light. She arranged metal things on a metal tray. “OK,” she said, “let’s have a look.” She opened my tooth without a local and poked at it with a metal toothpick, asking, “Does this hurt?”
    “Yes.”
    “Does this hurt?”
    “Yes.”
    “Does