The Rules of Attraction

PAUL I got off the bus with the other college students and the blind man and the fat woman with the blond kid and got lost amid the flotsam in the large terminal in Boston. Then I was outside and it was rush hour and overcast and I looked around for a cab. There was a sudden tap on my shoulder and when I turned around I was confronted by The Boy Who Looks Like Sean.

“Yeah?” I lowered my sunglasses. I was experiencing an adrenaline rush.

“Man, I was wondering if I could borrow five bucks,” he asked.

I got dizzy and wanted to say no but he looked so much like Sean that I fumbled for my wallet, couldn’t find a five and ended up giving him a ten.

“Thanks man,” he says, slinging the pillow case over his shoulder, nodding to himself, walking away.

I nodded too, an involuntary reaction, and started to get a headache. “I am going to kill her,” I whispered to myself as I finally wave down a cab.

“Where to?” the driver asked.

“Ritz-Carlton. It’s on Arlington,” I told him, sitting back in the seat, exhausted.

The driver turned his neck and looked at me, saying nothing.

“The Ritz-Carlton,” I tell him again, getting uneasy.

He still stares.

“On … Arlington…”

“I hear you,” the cab driver, an old guy, muttered, shaking his head, turning around.

Then what the fuck are you staring at? I wanted to scream.

I rubbed my eyes. My hands smelled awful and I opened a package of Chuckles I bought at the bus station in Camden. I ate one. The cab moved slowly through the traffic. It started raining. The cab driver kept looking at me in the rearview mirror, shaking his head, mumbling things I couldn’t hear. I stopped chewing the Chuckle. The cab had barely made it down one block, then turned and pulled over to the curb. I panicked and thought, Oh Jesus, what now? Was he going to kick me out for eating a goddamn Chuckle? I put the Chuckles away.

“Why have we stopped?” I asked.

“Because we’re here,” the driver sighed.

“We’re here?” I looked out the window. “Oh.”

“Yeah, that’ll be one forty,” he grumbled. He was right.

“I guess I forgot it was … so, um, close,” I said.

“Uh-huh,” the driver says. “Whatever.”

“I hurt my foot. Sorry,” I pushed two singles at him and tripped in the rain getting out of the cab and I just know Sean’s going to fuck someone at the party tonight and I’m in the lobby now, soaked, and this just better be good.