Page 4 of Life Out of Order

“You know what I mean.”

Zach looks at me more carefully. “How old are you?”

“Twenty-one.”

“And how old were you when you started playing the violin?”

“Four.”

“But aren’t your parents going to be kind of pissed off if you drop out of college after seventeen years of playing the violin?” I open my mouth to answer and Zach continues, “Because, don’t you have to be incredibly good to even get into Northwestern in the first place?”

“You have to be good.”

“So isn’t it a waste, to just—stop?”

“I can still play . . .”

“But how are you going to keep learning?” Zach sounds as though he has suddenly morphed into my grandfather. I am getting upset because he’s getting upset, and I forget that we don’t know each other and we are sitting on a bed full of coats in a house full of fake Nazis and a few real ones and I say, more loudly than necessary, “What’s it to you, buddy?”

He laughs. “Nothing. Not a thing.” He sips his beer and looks at me with interest. “Seriously, though. You’re just going to walk away from this thing you’ve been doing your whole life?”

“Yes.” The idea fills me with joy, I want to say.

“I get it. I was writing a novel, but I quit, too. It wasn’t very good.”

“What was it about?”

“It was kind of autobiographical. About my fucked-up childhood. But the more I wrote, the more boring it became. I figured if I was bored by my own terrible teenage suffering then no one else was ever going to read it. I put a zombie apocalypse in it but it was still crap. Actually, I’ve been thinking of bailing on the whole writing thing altogether.” Zach reaches into his inside suit pocket and then stops himself. “Do you smoke?”

“No.”

“Good. Neither do I. At least, I just quit.”

“When?”

“About an hour ago. I ran out of smokes.”

I laugh. “So you gave up on your novel?”

“Yeah. I burned it.”

“That’s melodramatic.”

Zach beams at me. “You’re the first person I’ve told who wasn’t horrified.”

I shrug but am secretly pleased. “You’ve got a copy on your computer, right?”

“Deleted, trashed.”

“Backups?”

“Nope. It’s ‘not only merely dead,’ it’s ‘really most sincerely dead.’”

“‘Manuscripts don’t burn.’”

Zach says, “That’s my favorite book.” Okay, huh. Bulgakov is an interesting choice for a friend of a friend of Junior’s.

“I’ve always wanted to have a cat named Behemoth,” I say. “If you’re not going to write, what are you planning to do instead?”