'I don't see her,' says Taylor, craning over the displays. 'Typical. You want to go talk? I'll understand if you don't…'

'Sure, but you'll have to keep some pretty heavy secrets. I'll understand if you can't.' Girls just love secrets.

'Whatever.' She wrinkles her bitty nose. 'Like, I don't need to know where the bodies are buried or anything.' She flashes her teeth, and walks me to a fancy-looking cafeteria across the concourse.

'Hell, there's no bodies or anything,' I say.

As she docks her ass onto a barstool, I notice she's not totally airbrushed after all – a couple of her teeth are crooked, and you can detect a recent zit under her make-up. I melt like a wad into Kleenex. She's so fucken real, so here.

'So, like – are you guilty?' she asks.

'Nah, I don't figure.'

'Is it, like, robbery or something?'

'Murder.'

'Eek,' her face crumples like she just stepped in puke. 'Don't you think it'd be better to, like, stay and fight it out?'

'Nah, the way things're stacked, I have to disappear awhile.'

Her eyebrows scrunch in sympathy. What I realize as I melt into her syrup is that I have to steer talk away from the slime, and start to build a platform of excitement to tempt her along. Order tequilas or something, kiss her on the mouth.

' Tay,' I frown, 'this might seem sudden, but – I have to ask you something real important.'

Her face stiffens, like faces do when there's an incoming choice of shit. Right away I know it's the wrong approach.

'Cash?' she goes. 'Like, if you need a loan…'

A waiter turns up. 'What can I get y'all?' Taylor and my eyes take a moment to separate.

'I'll have a guava licuado,' she says.

'Uh – make it two,' I say. Tequilas my fucken ass. After the waiter leaves, I try another angle. 'Heck, Tay, I'm being real selfish here – I didn't even ask how you're doing…'

She rattles both my hands. 'You're killing me, like, God. I'm just here, finishing this thing, I tried out for TV but didn't get casted yet – just like, whatever, you know?'

I smile, and suck warmth from the moment to mold into a platform of romance. Then she flicks back her hair and drops her eyes.

'And I'm seeing this doctor, can you believe it? He's an older guy, obviously, but I'm like sooo in love – he's the reason I'm shopping today, him and my cousin's new man are such panty-pooches.'

I start to hear her through a distant echo-tunnel, you know how you do. Then Mom's voice scurries from my mouth.

'Hey – wow.'

'God, I can't believe I just told you that! Anyway he drives a Corvette, like an original Stingray whatever, and in November we're doing Colorado for my birthday…'

'Hey, wow.'

O-so-soft-and-gentle-on-your-skin Fate now makes me die squealing for every pixel of her being, and with each turn of her smile, every token of how remote my dream is from her mind, I fucken die knowing this is barely the germ of an infection for a thousand miserable deaths.

Then Taylor stands off her stool, and waves up the concourse. 'Hey, there's my cousin – Leona! Loni!' she calls. 'Over here!'

Jesus fuck. It's Leona Dunt from back home. I don't know if Lally's with her. Fuck. I explode off my stool, snatching up the backpack. Leona stands posing by the lingerie store, she hasn't looked over yet. 'What's up?' Taylor asks me.

'I have to run.'

'But – what were you going to ask me?'

'Please, please, please, don't breathe a word of this to Leona.'

'You know Leona?'

'Yeah, please.' My Nikes fire me onto the concourse.

'Vern!' she calls, as I vanish into the crowd. I glance over my shoulder and capture her image forever; she's there like a lost kitten, lips open, eyebrows scrunched. 'Be careful,' she mouths silently. 'Call me.'

I fester and decompose in the back of a Greyhound bus bound for McAllen, under the tumor light, the twisted lava-lamp of sky, just a shell of meaningless brand names, a shelter for maggots and worms. Vernon Gone-To-Hell Little. And I didn't call my mom at all, you guessed it. I didn't even eat all day. All I did was hammer myself to a cross.

Screen One in my brain plays endless warm close-ups of Taylor. I try not to watch, I try to stay in the lobby and avoid it. But the thing's right there, doing big rotations of milky ass. Screen Two runs that other timeless classic, Mom, or, Honey I Butt-Fucked the Family. I ain't trying to watch that one either. All I watch is a double-exposure of my ole goofy face in the window, as infinite distance rolls by outside; spongy, darkened distance, like rug-lint balls on wet graham cracker. Power lines and fence posts read past like sheet music, but the tunes are fucken shit.

This is the scenario when I get the day's clincher, the one I forgot to expect. A song gets attached to Taylor. Just when you think you're dicked to the maximum extent of natural law, something always comes up that you forgot about. I know the routine from here. Everybody knows deep down there's no way to kill a Fate song once it's stuck. They're like fucken herpes. The only way to wash them out is to buy the song and play it day and night, until it doesn't mean anything anymore. Only forty gazillion years it takes. Everybody knows it, but I don't remember being taught that little pearl back in school, about the destructive power of Fate songs. Correct me if maybe I was absent that day, or if that was the day I spent cleaning the yard on account of liberating frogs from the lab. No, as I remember it, we were too busy trying to assimilate fucken Surinam to be taught anything of actual value to our lives, like Fate songs for instance.

I hear Taylor 's song through the 'Tss, tss, tss' of a guy's earphones, a couple of rows up. 'Better Man' is the tune, by Pearl Jam. I don't even know the words to the song, but you can bet I'll spend the next eighty years in hell making every line fit my situation. Even if it ends up being about fucken groundhogs in space or something.

Worst of all, it ain't even a pure sex song. No dirty little bass riffs running up and down the back, swinging and plucking; nothing masturbation can relieve. This ole tune drags you screaming from her panties with the fatal wrench of something bigger than perky riffs. Anodized, gritty wanting and yearning. The deathly heem of love.

A sob pops in my throat. I choke it, and look around for a harmless visual distraction, but all I see is a stocky young woman with a baby, a few seats up. The baby is pulling the woman's hair, and she's faking this look of terror.

'Oh no,' she says, 'how can you do that to Mommy?'

She pretends to bawl, but the baby laughs and gurgles like a psycho, and pulls even harder. I'm witnessing a fresh knife being laid into a brand-new soul. A training dagger. A maternity blade.

Here's his mom quietly opening up the control incision, completely innocent in her dumbness to the world.

'Oh no, you've killed Mommy, Mommy's gone!' She plays dead.

The little guy giggles for a minute, but only that long. Then he senses something's wrong. She ain't waking up. He killed her, she abandoned him, just like that, over a pull of hair. He pokes her with his finger, then he gets ready to bawl. And there you have it: he takes the handle in his own tiny hands and pulls in his first blade, right up to the hilt. Just to bring her back. And sure enough, with the splash of his first tear, she wakes right up.

'Ha, ha, I'm still here! Ha, ha, it's Mommy!'

Ha, ha, that's the Scheme of Things.

'Drrrrrrr,' the motorcoach fangs into a violet dusk, a bitter projectile full of knives and Vernon. I know I'm just being sour about shit. Tell me I'm just being sour about shit, on account of everything. I know it. But I just get this feeling in my head, like the Voice of Ages that says, 'This is no way for a young man to spend his learning years.'