There was a single wrap on the door and a wait of about ten seconds before it creaked open. “Hello!” Holly called out as she stepped through.
“Hi,” Brent answered her. “How’s it going?”
“Just fine,” Holly said distractedly. “Is my knight in shining sun-glasses here?”
Ha ha. I thought. Very funny.
“Of course he is; he’s just hiding,” Brent said. Then he looked at me. “Well? Say something.” He sounded more annoyed than he had a right to be. I always wondered about him, about how he took to Holly. For a guy who was still coping with the loss of his own girlfriend, my relationship, or lack there of, had probably wedged itself under his skin.
Holly took the two steps down the hallway and came out into the room. “Hi!” she said, beaming when she saw me.
“Hi,” I answered. “A bit early, aren’t you?”
She frowned slightly. “It’s not like they need an extra person at an ice-cream shop in the middle of winter. I can just go home, if you want…”
“No, no, it’s fine. I just hadn’t quite finished this.”
“A resume?” she asked, looking over my shoulder. “Looking for a new job?”
“Just keeping my options open,” I answered, turning around.
“Well, it’s a good idea.” She pulled her coat off, her locket bouncing above her collar bone, then spun in a slow circle as she looked around the main room for someplace to hang it.
“I’ll hang it up for you,” Brent offered.
I snorted. “Why? She can toss it on the couch. It’s not like we’re going to be here that long.” She gave me a glare, but I just shrugged my shoulders in response. “You can just wear it for the next hour and a half if you want.”
“I can hang it up for you,” Brent offered again.
“No, thank you. It’s okay.” One handed, she tossed the coat over my head. “There,” she said with a smirk, “that works just fine.”
I pulled it off and threw it over the back of my chair, along with my own.
“You know,” she suggested, “we could always go to the movie now.”
I shook my head. “Not really. We actually just ordered a pizza. You’re welcome to a few slices, if you want.”
She smiled. “Thanks. I was hoping we’d do something about dinner. I’ll go get some plates, then.”
“Plates?” I asked as she walked off. She ignored me. Her footsteps paused as she reached the kitchen.
“Uh… Did you guys have a party for New Year’s?” she called out.
“What do you mean?” I asked, saving and closing the resume. I walked into the kitchen to find her staring rather blankly at the row of bottles on the counter. “Oh, that. Just our usual New Year’s binge.”
“Usual?”
“Well, it’s the second year running, so yeah…. Usual.”
She sighed. “You know, you could have gone to the party I invited you to.”
“You didn’t tell me about a party!” Brent complained from the doorway.
I ignored him. “What? And give up on a perfectly good tradition?”
She made a disgusted sound. “Do you guys recycle?”
“Sure. It’s in the closet on the left.”
With a side-long glance, she picked up as many of the bottles as she could at once and pulled the door open with her foot. When it swung open, she paused again. “Uh….”
“What?” I asked exasperated.
She stepped aside, showing me a rather impressively high pile of beer bottles. “Would you like to explain this?”
“That’s all him,” Brent said then, with a shake of his head, went back to the main room.
“Like he doesn’t make a weekly contribution…” I muttered. Holly was still glaring at me for an explanation. “That’s about three months of accumulation, okay? We just haven’t gotten a chance to take it there.”
“But it’s right down the block!”
“So?”
Gingerly, she placed the beer bottles on top of the pile, then looked at me with her arms crossed. “How long until the pizza gets here?”
“Probably about fifteen minutes. Why?”
“Good, that’s more than enough time.” She crouched down and fished a bag out of the closet, then began filling it with bottles.
“Wait a minute, what are you…” And then it dawned on me. “No,” I said flatly. “No, no, no. We have a movie to go to. And pizza’s about to be here.”
“Oh, come on,” she said, working steadily. “It will only take about ten minutes.”
“Ten minutes we could spend doing something else.”
Holly looked up at me and just gave me a long, hard stare. The kind of look that was both pleading and forceful at the same time.
I sighed. “Fine, fine,” I muttered. I crouched down and, getting a good grip on the box, lifted it up, revealing the second behind it. “Brent,” I said as I made my way to the door, “Holly’s dragging me to the recycling center. We’ll be back in about fifteen minutes.”
“I’ll help,” he offered.
“No, it’s fine. You need to stay here in case the pizza guy shows up.”
“Okay,” he said as he opened the door for me.
* * *
“I still can’t believe I’m doing this,” I muttered under my breath.
“Oh, get over it,” Holly said beside me, way too cheerfully. “What? You wanted to fill the entire closet with your collection? Don’t tell me you wanted to keep them?”
“That’s not it,” I answered. “We could have done this on a weekend or something.”
“Like when?” Holly demanded, though she sounded like she was enjoying herself. “A weekend in April? You’re lucky I dragged you out to clean it up. Just think of all the space you’ll have in your closet now!”
“Sure,” I said. “That’s just what I always wanted.”
“You can’t just keep living in a junk-heap,” she said seriously.
I gave her a smug grin. “That’s what you think.”
She cocked her eyebrow at me, but I didn’t say anything else.
The recycling center, which was really just a bunch of unmanned dumpsters to put old bottles in, was only about five minutes away. When Holly and I pulled up only one person was there: a scruffed up teenager in a white t-shirt and jeans who was doing his best to pretend the cold wasn’t getting to him. He had several boxes of beer bottles that he was slowly and laboriously dumping into the bin.
When Holly and I dragged our own pair of boxes out of the car, he gave them a curious look. “A party?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “Just lazy.”
The guy indicated his stack of boxes with his head. “Not me, man. You can see, I had a big party on New Year’s Eve.”
“It looks like it,” I agreed, hoping the guy would shut up.
“Like you wouldn’t believe, man,” he said grinning, apparently mistaking my tolerance for interest. I looked at theguy, wondering why it was my lot in life to be talked to endlessly by anybody who was bored.
Holly was nodding, feigning interest. Is this guy ever going to shut up? I wondered to myself.
“…and it was like, the biggest thing ever! There were fifty people there, maybe sixty, and we were all drunk, really really drunk! And there were all these hot girls, and they were naked. Oh yeah we got all sorts of fucked up, and then…”
Right when I was about to ask whether or not the guy actually had a point, Holly broke in.
“And this was New Year’s Eve?” Holly asked, then pointed out a little worriedly. “That was…days ago.”
“Yeah, like I said, one hell of a party.” The guy’s face fell and he kicked at a bottle that had hit the pavement and rolled its way over to his shoe.
Holly looked at him, puzzled. “And?”
The guy looked back up, shaking his head. “Well, I got really, really drunk,” he explained, picking up the bottle that he had been kicking at; there was a condom stretched across its tip. “I passed out and missed the orgy.” He tightened his grip on the bottle. “Fuck it!” And with that, he flung the bottle hard enough to bounce it off the back of the bin. Scowling, he got started on the next box.
“Featherweight,” I said, then dragged Holly back to the car. We sat down, and I took a moment to get one last glance at the guy. With a shake of my head, I started the ignition and pulled out of the recycling center.
“Well,” Holly said, a little flustered. “The party I went to wasn’t like that!”
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