Hot Pink by Adam Levin

Author:Adam Levin [Levin, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Fantasy, Literary, Humorous, Short Stories (Single Author), Psychological, Short Stories
ISBN: 9781936365210
Publisher: McSweeney's
Published: 2012-03-06T05:00:00+00:00

“Exactly,” the therapist said. “And I want to expand on that: it is truly positive to unpack the sorts of thoughts and feelings that Sally just unpacked. If we don’t unpack the thoughts, we soon forget we have them, and all we notice are the feelings, and the feelings make our negative attitudes stronger, only we can’t challenge them and make ourselves better people, because we can’t point at them and say, ‘Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I shouldn’t have felt sad.’ Because we can’t argue rationally with feelings. Because feelings aren’t subject to rationality. Feelings come after thoughts, which are subject to rationality. And the good news, of course, is that we can argue rationally with our thoughts. We can say to ourselves: ‘Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I didn’t cross a line. Maybe Ben was having a bad day when I told him that I liked his haircut. Maybe it even made his day better that I told him I liked his haircut, but he was unable to express. I should explore this further. I will explore this further. There are so many possibilities.’ And by doing that, we can argue ourselves out of feeling sad. We can make our negative attitudes that much weaker! And that’s good news.” He nodded his head.

Everybody agreed it was good news. They nodded their heads.

The other Rick I met was a sales clerk at Pep Boys, where we’d gone to buy whatever part it was Tell thought she needed to replace to get her truck running. He wore his glasses on a chain around his neck. I was in the seat-cover aisle when I saw her follow him to the garage at the other end of the store. I ran after them and, as I came through the swinging doors, I saw him palm-strike her chest. Tell crumpled into the wall behind her and slid to the floor. The guy turned and saw me. He was shrugging.

I swung on him so hard. When I missed, I fell.

He said, “It’s alright, buddy. Just take it easy.”

He walked back into the shop proper, rubbing the lenses of his glasses with a handkerchief. Tell brought me to the employee bathroom and lifted her skirt in the grease-smudged sink.

“I hate this,” I said in her ear.

She said, “It doesn’t feel like you hate it.”

Still, after that, Tell quit getting Ricked in front of me.

The school year ended and I got a job washing windows and cleaning gutters on the North Shore with a small crew run by the son of a friend of my father’s. They were good guys. They didn’t try to make me talk a lot. The job paid twenty-five an hour and it tired me out. If it wasn’t raining, they’d pick me up at six in the morning in an old Jetta with a ladder bungeed to the roof and drop me back at home around four. I started eating three full meals a day and I came to appreciate sleep. Tell mourned the scrapes and then the calluses on my hands.

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