Alex Connors

20 Questions

1. What is your dream date?

My dream date is the one where Alex K. took me to the movies and Dad got arrested halfway through in the parking lot of the Not Your Average Joe’s.

Alex wanted to make out with me through the whole movie, I could tell. The way his leg shook—bounced up and down. But I never leaned in. I was too busy pretending that I had never been born. That the dark of the movie theater was the limbo between heaven and earth where God assigns you to a womb, and by that point in my life, I knew better. I would tell God, no thank you, and float back up to heaven with all the saints and dead people.

I didn’t want to make out with Alex, but I did want to ask him if he’d lie on top of me and pretend he was a stone or a dead body and stay there unmoving for the rest of his life. This is what I hoped marriage was, the space underneath a bed, between the box spring and the floorboards, where a body can just fit and no one will ever think to look for you.

I let Alex kiss me as the lights turned on. It was 2006. Neither of us owned cell phones. We didn’t suspect anything was wrong until hours passed, and my Dad wasn’t there to pick us up.

2. What is something you don’t miss but still think about?

I still think about when Colleen used to come over and steal my dolls. I’d get mad at her, act like I cared about law and order, but I was secretly relieved when they were gone.

When I didn’t have to bury them in the bottom of my hamper before bed, didn’t have to worry that they’d somehow find their way into the kitchen in the middle of the night, pull one of the knives from the drawer and bleed me out. One time, just to be safe, I hid the knives too, put them where no dolls could reach.

When Dad demanded to know why all our silverware was in the microwave, I told him Colleen did it, and she never came over again.

3. Who was your first love?

My first love was Shawn. Shawn would always lend me his sandy Chapstick during preschool recess. He helped me tie sand pails to my feet so that I could see over the wall of the playground and into the yard of a house next door, where teenage girls would lay in swimsuits, tanning as soon as the crocuses pushed from the ground in April. The girls were older in a way that I didn’t think it would ever happen to me, but somehow did anyway.

4. What is the worst thing that has ever happened to you?

The worst thing that has ever happened was that time that I fell off the couch with a lollipop in my mouth and choked during Barney and Friends. Dad kept telling people over the phone that I almost died, even though he wasn’t there.

5. What is your greatest failure?

My greatest failure is that I let the auto mechanic on to the fact that I don’t really know what a “strut” is. His voice changes tune and tempo, and I feel like I am about to pay more for my truck that I was doing a good job pretending to know about until right now. Now that it’s clear that I don’t know what a “strut” is, he can charge me whatever he wants, and I will likely just be nice and say—Okay.

I care about being nice, but it doesn’t get me anywhere. Grace says I am too honest, and this is why I don’t have any money. This is why I am leaving her apartment at 4:30 AM to go pick apples for $10 dollars an hour. If I was a little less honest, maybe we would have more time in bed in the morning. Maybe we would actually have a sex life, Grace would say.

—Okay

Dad says that money is just pictures of dead presidents. I told my bank account this, but it doesn’t care, the little numbers just keep going down. The dead presidents are getting away—they are crossing over, becoming dead president ghosts. Will they be good ghosts or bad ghosts? I don’t know. It’s hard to tell.

Dad wants to know when I’m coming to visit. I tell him I’m broke. The dead presidents have all left me, just like Grace.

6. Are you afraid of the dark?

Yes.