The Only Help I'm Giving You

Ace wasn't really sure about a lot of things, like why he hadn’t run after his girlfriend after she broke up with him three days before Christmas Eve; why he was considering meeting up with his mom over dinner after she disappeared from his life at age three; why he was sitting out on a balcony in cold New York wind, drinking orange juice out of shot glasses on New Year’s Eve.

With the gallon right next to him, he could have easily drunk straight from the container and downed the measly amount of liquid left within five gulps, but his arms were lost to the laughing puppeteer as they splashed the breakfast drink into his cold glass. Kimberly would not be happy to wake up tomorrow morning to find that her first breakfast of the new decade would be missing the acidic spice of orange juice.

But what was he supposed to do? He was a virgin college freshman who had been dragged to the seventh or eighth floor of a brick apartment building somewhere in lower Manhattan. At least he knew that one of the residents was Kimberly...whoever she was. The music (which was really just three tall men stringing curses into barely discernable sentences as fast as they could) was reaching the point of irritating, and Ace was sure that everyone who was passing by—whether it be by foot or taxi—were thinking the exact same thing. The night winds that flew by were throwing his flimsy strands of hair in all directions, leaving him with the slight look of a disheveled poodle which had gotten lost in bushes while sniffing for that one stick. Ace sat in a striped lawn chair, tipped back with the front legs raised dangerously high while his legs rested on the balcony railing and his feet dangled precariously over and into the night sky (he had taken off his shoes at the front door). He held the shot glass in his right hand and had the almost empty orange juice gallon’s handle hanging from his pink. 

“What am I doing?” Ace murmured as he pushed the chair further back on its hind legs, challenging gravity and everything the universe had said yes to. While he let the hair he had just washed two hours ago sweep the gray cement floor of the balcony, picking up the dead and wrinkled bits of lost autumn leaves, he felt a soft tide of mild air run over his closed eyelids. 

“You tell me. It’s quite pitiful watching you from up there and not being able to slap you every time you think it’s okay to go to your room at three in the morning and not turn off any of the lights. Like, isn’t New York housing expensive enough on its own? Do you really have no care for your electric bills or the environment?”

Ace’s eyes flew open, and of the smooth and girl-stealer man he was, the college student fell on his back. He really shouldn’t have pushed gravity and his luck to such limits, but it was too late: The first impression was gone. Or at least, what he assumed to be the first impression. 

Scrambling to regain both his posture and dignity, Ace quickly got up, brushing off his newly thrifted jeans that reached a little too low to the floor—if only he had listened to his mom and followed through with basketball. 

Standing before him was a woman who he was certain he had rested eyes on before, yet her name was beyond his grappling fingers. It was only as he peered harder and let his eyes blink away the stars that had just clouded his vision that he realized that the familiarity that hung to her like a cloak of identity was because she was him...of course, in a genderbend type of way. She had the same abrupt bump of a nose; it was like God had forgotten that she too needed a nose to smell vanilla bean scented candles and chocolate chip cookies...while also performing other tasks like breathing. Her skin was tinted a similar complexion, a rather pale snow that had been mixed with flecks of Crayola’s peach crayon. His dark hair that sat like soggy buckwheat noodles on his head curved a bit more elegantly on her, wrapping itself in long ends around her elbows. This girl was him.

And as his mind tried to pin down the realization and stare it hard into the eyes, his tongue was already beginning to lose itself in knots of confused questions and untameable thoughts.

She held her hand up, and in some strange way, he collectively obeyed, and the chaotic control his body had been trying to gain over the entire situation was silenced. She was the one who was driving this car, and he was nothing but a passenger; she had at least made that point clear even if everything else, like her uncanny resemblance to Ace and mysterious appearance, were shrouded in shadows. 

“I’m going soon, and there’s really a lot I should be saying, or more like I could, but the thing is, one, I only have three minutes to talk to you and my mouth can only run so fast, and two, I don't want to take away all the fun in your life, so I'm just giving you a few pointers because you really could use them. I don't need you dying on New Year's Eve because you thought it would be a good idea to have your naked feet hanging over a railing and in the bare air. Like, no one wants to see your toes.

Anyway, I just want to say, stop running. you're smart but face it all. please for my sake and yours."