Chapter 99
Your Permanent Record

If I say that I absolutely adore Baby Face then it means I absolutely adore Baby Face. It creeped me out at first, I thought that maybe I had a crush on a 17 year old. I’m slowly learning to identify this strange new feeling that I have towards Baby Face, good news I don’t have a crush on him…at least I really don’t think I do. I just want him to make the right decisions some times. I worry about him. So while I absolutely adore him it doesn’t mean he is immune from disappointing me. He is making all the wrong decisions and I am worried about where he’ll end up in life. I don’t know, maybe all young guys are like this and I just never realized before, but they can’t be. I’m trying to remember when I was 17 what the guys were like. Then it makes me realize that I didn’t really know what my guy friends were like. So I’m at a lost.
Baby Face’s locker is filled with stolen products from the store. He’s not the one putting stuff in there (at least not that he’s informed me) but he is letting random people do it. What did he do for Halloween? Got drunk with his friends. He told me about that and I said something about under aged drinking and I may have sounded mean because I was really disappointed. He doesn’t want to go to college and he’s trying to figure out if he can make a living working at Ukrop’s. I can answer that, “No, you can’t.” I barely make a living and I lucked out with my rent, my parents pay my car insurance, but I don’t have health insurance or any benefits what-so-ever. Need I mention that I think he has a juvenile criminal record? He did get arrested and had a court date, though he’s still here so I guess that court date went well. Either that or he really should be hiding out somewhere.
The Warrior and I are going out for ice-cream on Friday (sorry to get random but it all happened in the same night). I have to work until 9 so he gave me his number and I’m going to call him when I’m headed over to our store and he’ll meet me there. When I was getting his number Baby Face came up and asked if I was giving the Warrior my digits. Made me laugh to hear Baby Face say “digits” for phone number. I told him I was getting digits. He had to go do something so as he walked by he grabbed my piece of paper that I had begun to write The Warrior’s number on. I had to go grab it from him.
One pretty funny part from the night (at least it was funny to me) was when we were flipping coins around…I don’t know why, but I picked up a penny and told Baby Face to look up (I was going to try and throw it in his shirt). He begins to look up and then stops, probably wondering what I am about to do. But then he grabs his shirt (he’s figured it out) and says, “Oh, do you want to get into my shirt.” I couldn’t help myself and I said, “Well, I don’t want to get into your shirt, but I’d like to get the penny in there.” His face turned a little red. Sometimes you have to be careful with your wording around me because I’ll turn it on you.
I have decided however, that I am officially lonely, because last night I shouldn’t have even seen Baby Face and The Warrior because I should have just gone home after work, but I impulsively drove there and hung out for half an hour. I can’t hang out in grocery stores, it’s weird, it’s Unabomber-ish, and it’s pathetic.
Speaking of lonely people, I found out that my dad took George away yesterday afternoon. So no more George, the deed has been done. It’s good and bad, good because it’s liberating, no more dog jumping on the counter eating our food, bad because I had gotten attached to the guy and taking him on walks is what was really helping me to lose weight. He was a good dog really, just too active for what my family could handle. We made sure to tell the S.P.C.A. that he needs a home that can provide him with enough activity.
In other news (still revolving around loneness) I cut my hair yet again. I just felt weird yesterday. I got home and I came into my room and I just laid down on my bed. No music, still in uniform, I just stared at the ceiling. Then my stomach started to hurt, so I had a reason to be laying there but it wouldn’t go away and it reminded me of the commercials for some anti-depressant drug where it says, “Where does depression hurt? Everywhere.” The music itself in that commercial makes me want to cry and cut myself. Depression has physical as well as mental pains. Maybe my body was so sick of being lonely it felt like it was going to throw up. Not completely absurd.
Then I started to get text messages from Crunchy asking me about my visit out west. I told him I was definitely coming and couldn’t wait that long. I checked with him to make sure he’ll be in town to hang out otherwise the trip is a waste. Then he had my old friend (his ex-girlfriend) to text me about my trip out west. Well I can only assume that he had her text me because what are the odds that they would both text me on the same night about the same thing? So I said, “Oh Crunchy told you? Yeah I’m so excited.” She asked when and I told her I would e-mail her my itinerary. Which I promptly did. I e-mailed her an update about my life as well and went ahead and planted a seed for a possible en-gag-ment in the near distance future. If Crunchy can use her for his purposes I can use her for mine. I mentioned that I was going out with this guy on Friday for ice-cream (ahh…the Warrior) and that we’ve been on dates before and I actually look forward to dates with him, blah, blah, blah. I didn’t mention that ice-cream wasn’t really a date and that The Warrior and I are not starting anything. Just wanted to put the bug in there. I feel kind of bad because she didn’t do anything to me, but she’s close to him I can’t let her in on it. I talked to Oreo about it last night and decided that she should get him to hang out with her and then when they are hanging out I’ll call him and tell him that it was a prank, the whole trip and then Oreo can take a picture of his reaction so that we both can get to see it. It would never work out that way but its wishful thinking, he’ll probably forget I even ever said that I was coming out there.