The Pen Is Mightier

David flipped through the teenie bopper magazine on the rack next to the cash register, eliciting stares from the teenage girl working at the counter. What would he possibly want with her magazines, she thought, that pervert. And then her attention was diverted to her bubble gum. She blew a beautiful pink sphere out from between her puckered lips.

David flipped through the sex quizzes unaware of the temporary gaze the cashier had given him. Anyway, he would be unconcerned with what a teenage girl thought about his interest in looking through a teenage girls’ magazine even if he had been aware of her investigative stare. He liked the glossy pages. He looked up from the magazine long enough to scan the aisles for his companion. There was no sign of him. Charles had mentioned something about non-fiction, or something like that. David couldn’t remember. Why didn’t he listen to his friends when they said things, he wondered: that’s right, he hated them.

“Excuse me,” David said to the teenage girl who now was filing her nails. Since blowing a bubble, she had lost interest and discovered not less than seven new activities. Filing her nails had been the latest five second craze.

She looked up from her nails long enough to think, now what does this pervert want?

“Wha?” she asked.

Teenage girls are easily identified by their inability to complete simple words like “What.” The “T” is too much for their little brains.

“Could you tell me where the non-fiction section is?” David asked.

The pervert probably wanted some sex books, the cashier thought to herself. “Um, well the fiction section is all the way at the back. So everything else is non-fiction, I think,” she said.

Before the sentence was finished, the girl began thinking about dinner. Her mother was going to be suspicious if she skipped the meal again. But then, if she ate it, she would never fit into the prom dress this stupid job was supposed to pay for. Would she lose her virginity at the prom? She wondered if she would still be with her boyfriend then. She thought maybe he was sleeping with the head cheerleader. What color was she going to paint her fingernails?

David understood now that the staff knew more about Azerbaijan than a bookstore. He needed to fend for himself. Bookstores upset him. There was a time when he felt a bookstore was a special place, where the world lain waiting for him to discover. Yet, somehow, in the last few months, bookstores brought him no comfort. Instead, they had become a place of failed promises, a place of possibilities never to be realized. He felt anxious being in the bookstore now.

Charles, left to wander the store for almost fifteen minutes, had enough time to pick a half dozen books off the shelves. He still had not arrived at the non-fiction section, which indeed was where he indeed had said he would be going to. He had every intention of finding a book of essays vaguely regarding some social upheaval, or perhaps a book of philosophy, or maybe a biography. He felt he needed some “whole grain reading.” The truth in the matter of course was that he rarely read anything other than comic books, and even those lately had gone untouched. He had a vast collection of classic English literature, a library of poetry, and dozens of essay collections. But rarely had he read any book beyond the first chapter. On some occasions he ventured as far as the second. Sometimes, he read the first sentence of every chapter in the book. He never retained any information. The books wound up on the shelves in his living room or stacked knee high on the floor next to his bed.

“You finished yet,” David asked.

“No man, I still got to get a book on the, um—”

“Yeah,” David said, running his finger over the spines of several books. He had been wandering up and down the aisles caressing the books as he went. He had of course been ignoring their titles. Finally though, his fingers grasped one of the books and pulled it from the safety of the shelf. He looked at the book, a collection of shorts stories by Martin Amis. He flipped through the pages of the book. They were not glossy like the teenie bopper magazines. He carried the book with him as he followed Charles. Charles was wandering in and out of aisles, finally stopping in a section of the store that didn’t even sell books.

“Have you seen their selection of pens?” Charles asked David.

“No,” he said.

Charles pointed to a twelve dollar model. “I really have a thing for good pens,” he said.

“Why do you need a twelve dollar pen?” David asked.

“For writing things,” Charles said.

“You don’t write,” David said, wanting very much to be done with the store. He was beginning to feel inadequate.

“I write things,” Charles defended himself.

“You don’t write letters. You don’t write stories, or poems, or novels. You even pay your bills over the internet. So Charles, what is it exactly that you write?”

“If I had a pen like that, I would write things,” Charles said lifting a forty dollar pen from the shelf.

“So why don’t you buy it and write me a fucking sonnet.”

“I’m not paying forty dollars for a pen,” Charles said.

David looked at him wondering why Charles was so fascinated by the pen. “Fine,” he said after a long pause in their conversation. Charles had started moving on towards what David hoped was the non-fiction section so that they could finally leave the store. David looked around for prying eyes. Then he slit the pen’s box with his key and popped the pen out of the package. Once free of the packing, he slipped the pen into his pocket. For a moment he thought the cashier was staring at him, but then realized that the girl instead was staring out the window at a passing convertible. Then she was flipping through a magazine. Then she started doodling on the page of her magazine.

Charles had disappeared again. David headed for what he thought was the non-fiction section. He was very aware of the pen held close to his leg by his jeans. He looked down at his pants to see if the pen’s outline could be seen. No, you couldn’t see it. Now he really wanted to leave the store, and not just because of the ever present sense of failure brought on by bookstores.

He found Charles flipping through several books on photography. David knew immediately what Charles was doing. He was looking for nude pictures. It was something they had done when they were sixteen, before the internet had come along and revealed to them the wonders of the female body.

“What are you, twelve,” David asked. There was a tone of mocking as much as annoyance.

“Haven’t you ever wanted to be a photographer? You know, invite women back to your apartment and get them naked and then take pictures of them?” Charles said this through a sinister chuckle.

“You don’t have to be a photographer to do that.” David said. They were never leaving, were they, David thought. “Why don’t you just buy a playboy or something?”

Charles ignored him and continued flipping through the glossy black and white photos. David was wondering if the security cameras had seen him stuff the pen down his pocket.

“Are you going to buy all those?” David asked, looking at the stack of books Charles had placed at his feet so as to have two hands free to flip the pages of the oversized photography book.

Charles continued to ignore him.

“Hey, did you notice the girl at the register was checking you out?” David asked.

“Seriously?” Charles asked.

“You bet. Hey, so let’s go pay and get the fuck out of here,” David said.

Charles looked at him with a skeptical glare. He wasn’t sure whether or not to believe him. But then, Charles needed every opportunity presented to him, given his history with women. Or lack of history. Finally, he relented, recognizing that the pile of books he had was more than enough to keep him busy, despite the fact that he was only going to read the first chapter of each.

At the register, Charles either ignored or enjoyed the fact that said cashier was only fifteen. David couldn’t tell, but knew Charles was doing his best to flirt with her as she rung up his books.

Outside, he said, “she totally wanted me.”

David ignored him. He knew that the only reason Charles believed that was because he had been told to believe it. David supposed that was a good enough reason as any. Of course, David had only told Charles the girl had been looking at him so Charles would get his fat ass out of the store. David wanted to head over to Lily’s new apartment, where they had agreed to go after the trip to the bookstore. There were worse reasons to be friends with a guy, then because you wanted to get in his sister’s pants. David just couldn’t think of any right now.

Sitting in Charles’s car, David reached into his pocket and produced the pen. “Here,” he said, handing it to Charles.

Charles looked confused by the present.

“You got this for me?”

“Yeah, I got it for you,” David said, stressing the ‘got,’ or rather, stressing the lack of ‘bought’ in his sentence. Charles didn’t seem to notice.

“Where to?” Charles asked, as if they had not spent the ninety minutes before arriving at the bookstore discussing Lily’s new apartment or David’s infatuation with her.

“Fine,” Charles said, finishing the conversation they had been engaged in before the trip to the bookstore. “You can do what you want with my sister.” The unspoken part of the sentence was, “because the pen is payment for her.”

“Let’s go then,” David said. He was certain now, that he hated Charles, least of all because Charles had sold his sister for a stolen forty dollar pen. But thinking of Charles upset him. Especially upsetting was thinking of Charles as he hummed along to the Beach Boys’s “California Girls.” Instead, he thought of Lily.