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The kitchen window slides open in the frame, “Yeah, babe?”

“Do you think they offer online courses for something like this?”

“I can’t see why not, but you’d probably have to get a job somewhere to get the hands-on training you’d miss out on in a school.”

Lighting a match, I drop it onto the bed of smaller twigs, shredded newspapers, and some very sappy broken branches from the pine trees on the left-hand side of my property. It sparks up almost immediately, warming me.

I back away to the deck chair, sitting and pulling out my phone. I’m too tired to put a lot of stock into figuring out my future right now, but I make a promise to myself to do it tomorrow.

Feeling bad about leaving Jessie on the hook for the bar tab, I try to figure out some way to inadvertently apologize for that shit. I don’t have her number, and I doubt they’d give it to me if I called the bar asking for it. Unless I call and ask to talk to her. Is that suspicious? It’s just past one thirty in the morning, and before I can think better of it, I search up the number for theMountain Peak Puband hit theCall Nowbutton.

“Hello?” A raspy woman’s voice, heavy with years of nicotine abuse, answers.

“Hi, is this the Mountain Peak Pub?”

“Yeah.” Well, why didn’t you say that then? Whoever this is has terrible customer service skills.

“Can I speak to Jessie, please?”

“JESSIE! PHONE CALL!” The woman’s voice cracks in my ear mid-sentence, then she must drop the phone on the counter because the clattering that follows her yelling is deafening.

“Hello?” Jessie’s tentative voice filters through the speaker, and I feel like a fucking imbecile for calling her at work. This is why I don’t have friends.

“Nightmare On Elm StreetorFriday The 13th?” I say,having thought about what my question to her would’ve been while carrying a dead body through the woods.

“Now, where the fuck did you disappear to?”

“Sorry, something came up that I had to deal with.”

“Everything okay? I don’t have to whoop anyone’s ass do I?”

That earns a laugh from me, considering what I did after I left the bar. “No, it’s all good. I just wanted to call and apologize for dipping out without saying goodbye, I felt like a dick.”

“Nah, you’re not a dick. Those two shitbags who were groping me are dicks. They stiffed me on the bill. Probably serves me right for trying to hurt one of them.” I feel nauseous with guilt, that shit is my fault, not hers.

“Hey, you wanna get together sometime? My treat!” I say, quickly changing the subject.

“Sure, as long as it’s anywhere but here.”

“Groovy!”

“What?”

“Nothing.” Why the hell did I just say that? “Give me your number, and I’ll shoot you a text.”

I switch the call to speaker phone, and when Jessie rattles off her number, I type it into my phone. We say our goodbye’s then hang up. I open a new text thread with Jessie and fire off a message to her, she responds immediately.

Mallory:

Hey, it’s Mallory.

So… Nightmare On Elm Street or Friday The 13th?

Jessie:

Both of those are such classics, it’s blasphemy to even make me pick between them BUT if I HAVE to, then it’s Freddy Krueger. What’s scarier than a dead pedo who hunts you in your dreams? And if you die in your dream, you die in real life!

I couldn’t agree more.