Photo by Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash
Security Question #1: who was the first boy/girl you ever kissed?
Answer: that’s complicated
Sitting at the child-size desk her parents bought her back in sixth grade, her elderly laptop’s dust-choked cooling fan filling the quiet room with a whisper of whirring sound, Adrienne closes her eyes and imagines she’s locked in some kind of police station holding cell instead of her childhood bedroom in her parents’ house back in her hometown of Topine, NY. And instead of the “Open New Checking Account” page of the Key Bank online banking website asking these questions in order to better protect her data, it’s a gruff-looking TV detective in a beige trench coat who has the same voice as her ex-husband, Ray.
After quitting her job, torpedoing her marriage, and moving back home with her parents, these are the kinds of things Adrienne does now, to fill her empty days. Still, she can’t deny that she needs her own bank account since she closed the joint one she had shared with Ray for the past two years. If she ever gets a new job, she’s going to need somewhere for the direct deposit to go.
So, after she answers Detective Ray’s first question with a non-committal that’s complicated, he fires back with a series of quick, sharp questions in that too-high, embarrassingly emotional voice he used to slip into without realizing whenever they had a fight, the same voice that always made her picture him as a ten-year-old throwing a temper tantrum in the supermarket because his mom said no to that third box of Pop-Tarts.
Detective Ray: who was the first boy/girl you ever kissed?
(This is actually not too far off from reality; he really would ask a pointless question like this, as if it mattered somehow.)
Adrienne: that’s complicated.
Detective Ray: (yelling in the screechy, too-emotional voice of a spoiled ten-year-old) why?
Detective Ray: why is it so complicated, Adrienne?
Detective Ray: it’s a very simple question!
Detective Ray: why do you always have to make everything so complicated?
Since she has neither the strength nor the patience to deal with real life right now, Adrienne keeps going with this dumbass simulation.
(Do other people actually do this or is it just her?)
Adrienne: I’m not trying to make it, or anything else, more complicated than it needs to be. The problem is with the question, Ray. It’s vague.
Detective Ray: how is the question vague?
Adrienne: it’s vague because you’re not specifying whether you’re asking for the name of the first boy I kissed, or the first girl I kissed, and that’s relevant because the answer is different for each of those things.
Detective Ray: Jesus Christ, how many people have you—
Detective Ray and the holding cell disappear and now she’s just think-talking into the reddish-black void behind her closed eyelids.
Adrienne: if you’re asking for the name of the first person I ever kissed, either boy or girl, then the answer to that would be Milly Campbell behind the big sugar maple in her backyard in fourth grade when we were asking each other which boy in our class we liked and then we both said Matty Pierce at the same time and giggled and I felt the warm burn of jealously in my face and chest because Milly was the prettiest girl in class with her long, shiny, chestnut hair and her beautiful blue eyes that looked like sapphires. So to freak Milly out and to knock the little princess off her royal pedestal that all the boys (including Matty Pierce) had put her on, I suggested that we maybe try practicing kissing on each other in case either of us ever got a chance to kiss Matty in the future. Hearing that Milly blushed and pursed her face up into a lemony scowl and said she wanted to save her first kiss for Matty, but that was the wrong thing to say because it just made me want to hurt her more for liking the same boy I did because I knew he would like her back instead of me, so I leaned forward and kind of mashed my lips against Milly’s for a very long three seconds and then I pulled my face away from hers and looked up at the sun shining on the maple leaves swaying above our heads and I saw how the light made some of the leaves glow a translucent yellow-green and how the veins in the leaves branched out all straight and sharp just like the veins in my dad’s hairy legs that I would always find myself staring at whenever he mowed the lawn. And then after a second I remembered about Milly and the kiss so I ran over to the swing set near the back deck and started swinging as hard as I could as if nothing weird had happened. So if that’s what you’re asking, Ray, then Milly Campbell in fourth grade behind the sugar maple in her backyard would be my answer.
Detective Ray: (he’s back now so he can gape, speechless, at her badass, satisfying, mic-drop answer that she could never come up with in the moment when he would ask infuriating, pointless questions like this) that’s not really what the question I was asking—
He disappears again to let Adrienne school his condescending ass once more.
Adrienne: okay well, if that’s not what you’re asking, then I guess my answer would be Matty Pierce in the middle school library two years later during study hall when he was looking for a book about his favorite animal, the arctic fox. That was my favorite animal for a while too, because it was his, and also because it was cute. And he was officially dating Milly at the time, so there’s that, but I know for a fact that they hadn’t kissed yet by the time I kissed him in the library (he told me it was his first kiss), so even though Milly got to be his girlfriend first, I actually—
Adrienne feels herself smile at this thought.
Detective Ray: won?
Adrienne: no one ever said it was a contest.
Detective Ray: (now acting as more of a confidant/therapist since her anger at him is gone for the moment) but that’s what you were thinking.
Adrienne: so what. I told you it was complicated.
From here Adrienne opens her eyes, leans over her laptop, and types an answer to the first security question.
Security Question #1: who was the first boy/girl you ever kissed?
Answer: milly c
Now Adrienne turns her attention to the next security question.
Security Question #2: in what town/city did you first meet your spouse?
Answer: another tough one
Detective Ray: (suddenly back to his angry, judgmental self) how is this one tough? I don’t think it’s that hard to remember where we met. Or have you just had so many spouses that it’s hard to keep it all straight in your head? Christ Almighty, it must be nice to have fucked so many guys that you can’t even remember where you met each akhsl fhsf ynai shlf kahsdfidf . . . (this is her trying to make him disappear again, but for some reason he stubbornly stays where he is and keeps talking) . . . was still a virgin in my second year of community college when I met you. You want to know how many girlfriends I’d had before then?
He doesn’t wait for her answer.
Detective Ray: two. Two girlfriends and all I ever got was a few toothy BJs because I was her first boyfriend and she didn’t know what she was doing when it came to—
To shut him up Adrienne opens her eyes and takes the pillow from her bed and lays down on the floor of her room. Here she stretches her wiry runner’s legs all the way to the wall and looking up at the window behind her sixth grade desk she winces in the hard glare of the noon sunlight cutting through the stacked slats there and moments after this she takes a long, slow, deep breath in and holds it for a count of one . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . and lets it out slowly. Once this is done Ray finally shuts the hell up so she closes her eyes again and continues with the simulation (which, if she’s being honest [and why shouldn’t she be? with her parents at work it’s not like there’s anyone else around to witness this] she’s really starting to enjoy all this nonsense in that quintessential Adrienne way of savoring the pathetic/blackly comic absurdities of her own pain and weirdness).
Now Adrienne turns her attention back to the original question Ray had asked her, the one about where she met her spouse. Thinking about it, she admits to herself that yes, for most people (including Ray) that should be an easy thing to answer, but for her it’s not. How many other girls can say they’re both twice married and twice divorced by the age of twenty-seven? Not many. But that’s what Ray doesn’t—
She feels herself smile again and in an instant she’s back in the holding cell with Ray, but this time he’s not wearing the TV detective trench coat (she really has to stop watching those stupid Law and Order crime shows with her parents every night) and he seems more tame and caring, like the sweet version of him that she once convinced herself she loved.
Adrienne: it’s a tough question for a few reasons, Ray. One, we’re no longer married, so I don’t think I can call you my spouse anymore (did she ever once think or say that word in reference to him over the entire two years they were married?) . . .
She speaks the word out loud to test this theory and it feels as alien and strange as a dead salmon in her mouth. (That’s a no.)
Adrienne: . . . and two, you’re not the only man I’ve ever been married to.
Adrienne opens her eyes to skip all the angry blathering the real Ray would launch into at the utterance of this sentence, but instead her simulation of him stays sweet and he doesn’t say a word and her mind is clear and quiet and the house around her is still. Outside, a bird trills sweetly: a natural, calming sound. Now she closes her eyes once again and tells the sweet version of Ray the story of her first marriage.
Adrienne: I never told you about this because I’m not sure I really understand why I did it myself. When I was nineteen I didn’t really know what I was doing with my life and I thought I’d made a big mistake by going to college for political science like my parents had wanted me to (they wanted me to be a lawyer), so I kind of freaked out and informally dropped out of school by moving in with this older guy who lived in my college town. This was before I moved back home and started up at Topine CC where I met you. He was nice to me and I thought I could escape from real life by staying with him so one day I asked him to marry me and he said yes and we got married.
Sweet Ray: wow, I . . . that’s pretty crazy Rin, I never knew that. But I’m really sorry it didn’t work out. I can see how that would make this question more complicated.
Adrienne: the marriage only lasted nine days and he was very kind and understanding and he paid for everything concerning the divorce and then I dropped out of college for real and moved back home to Topine and we’ve never talked since then so it doesn’t matter. His name was Gene by the way. Is. Is Gene. I don’t think he’s dead because he was only ten or fifteen years older but who knows. I hope not. He was a very nice person. So that’s the story. I really don’t try to make things complicated, they just kind of turn out that way with me. As you know.
A contented smile on his face, the simulation of Sweet Ray nods slowly, knowingly, thoughtfully, as if he understands everything and the next thing he will say will solve all her problems in an instant. Seeing this in her head, Adrienne feels herself smile. She suddenly remembers why she once loved this man and asked him to marry her. (Which is apparently a habit of hers.)
Sweet Ray: . . .
She waits a long time but she doesn’t know what he would say in this situation, so she sits up and tosses the pillow back onto her bed and clambers into her chair and leans over her laptop and stares at the two remaining security questions on the screen.
After a long minute, she scoffs to herself and shakes her head.
“Fuck it, maybe it’s not that complicated after all.”
Security Question #2: in what town/city did you first meet your spouse?
Answer: topine
Security Question #3: what was the name of the street you lived on in third grade?
Answer: cambrian heights
Steve Gergley is a writer and runner based in Warwick, New York. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in A-Minor, After the Pause, Barren Magazine, Maudlin House, Pithead Chapel, and others. In addition to writing fiction, he has composed and recorded five albums of original music.