“So I’m thinking to myself—mid conversation with this girl—if you want me to buy you dinner and swing open doors for you, fine. That’s fine. I don’t mind doing that.”

“But isn’t that what you’re bitching about?”

“No, dude. You don’t get what I’m saying. I actually like doing that.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

She leans out the window to give a sack of burgers and fries to the four guys sitting in a rumbling out of date car–a Charger or Nova–that’s orange, rusty, or naked with primer. Her blonde hair comes loose from behind her ear as she takes the wad of cash from the hairy arm extended through the window.

We met in seventh grade, when you stole my girlfriend, Lisa.

Serena had lived next to Evan in their east Hollywood building for the past two years – ever since her father died. Still, she’d never actually thought about Evan being inside her apartment before. They spent most nights sitting out on their second-floor balconies drinking the beers that Evan supplied, but the only reason he was in her apartment today was because her toilet wouldn’t flush. Serena stood in the doorway, embarrassed for him to open up her toilet while her pee was sitting in there.

The small girl pedaled her tricycle around the abandoned parking lot, little brown legs spinning, imagining herself on an empty road. Her brow wrinkled in determination as she swerved to avoid one of the potholes that littered her racetrack. Short pigtails flew out behind her, one of them starting to unravel as the thin elastic band that held it snapped and dropped to the ground. Crooked bangs stuck to her sweaty forehead as she looked ahead, focused on not running over the broken glass and fast food bags hidden by the tall weeds. She only had a few minutes to ride, the clock ticking as the tobacco smoldered.

Banana Man tells the man he went to an Ivy League business school and that his wife used to joke that she picked the wrong guy because three of his classmates are billionaires.

She keeps asking what he does even though it’s obvious he’s exhausting all of the permutations of the nouns and gerunds he’s already listed on his profile, rehashing clipped versions of what he’s already typed in their email exchanges. She says that the bucket of Coors Light bottles on the table between them makes her feel like she’s in an interview (“Is there a clipboard in your hands I can’t see?”) so he moves next to her in the haggis-smelling dim of the Scottish sports bar that looks like pretty much any other sports bar, that he chose because her social preferences included “low-key scenarios with a twist.”At least here, just behind the open front doors rimmed with sharp-smelling cedar (he remembers carving wood like this into ninja stars at summer camp for an impending war with a rival cabin that never came), he has a clear view of their respective vehicles – her moped with the duct-taped engine and yanked-off fuel cap, his fixed-gear Schwinn – safely shackled together to a light pole near the edge of the curb.

Charlene had been waiting a long time. She considered patience to be one of her best qualities, however, and she did not like to complain. She was drinking the last of the good brandy in a purple flower-patterned teacup. It was a fine day for celebration, she thought.

I was disoriented, out-of-body, capable of anything—of killing myself. But that’s not what scared me most. What scared me most was that I knew in my swimming brain that I would do it again.