Chapter 5: One True Thing

I kept June's note in my sock drawer and told no one, and for two days she passed me in the hall like a stranger.

On Thursday I rode my bike to the only place in Ridgemont where nobody would ask me for anything.

The Strike Zone smelled like shoe spray and fryer oil, and it was dark except for the lanes.

Eight people were bowling.

At the far end, on a four-by-four platform painted black, a stool stood in a puddle of yellow light.

I took the table closest to the exit and ordered fries.

A woman in a bowling shirt with a stopwatch on a lanyard stood at the end of lane twelve and tapped a microphone.

"Open mic," she said, in a voice that carried over the pins. "Thursday, same as every Thursday. Two minutes each, no exceptions."

She looked at her clipboard.

"Bobby."

I looked behind me.

Nobody else was there.

"Bobby," she said again. "Come on, I've got you down."

"I didn't sign up."

"Somebody did."

She pointed her pen at the sign-up sheet on the counter, and on the fourth line, in my own handwriting, it said "Bobby O."

It was the form I had filled in at the front desk at ten to seven, to get a pair of rental shoes.

Nobody had ever told me the shoe form and the comedy form were the same piece of paper.

"That's a rental form," I said.

"It's a contract," she said. "Up."

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