They were dancing at the prom-Miss Crane in a stunning red dress and Mister Hansen in a Tuxedo and then the final episode where Veronica tearfully leaves for college and a degree in wildlifeīiology and a life of outdoor adventure, while Sam goes to Portland to work at his uncle’s pillow factory. I nodded as the re-runs of “Sam, the Sensitive High School Sweetheart,” starring Sam Hansen and Veronica Crane played in the theater of my brain: they were cuddling on a bed with too many pillows “It was not that way at all, Douglas,” she said, as if my anti-Sam sentiments were scribbled upon my face. The type of guy who makes a normal man look like an ape or even Bigfoot. A man who was not afraid of the phrase, we need to talk, but rather, looked forward to talking. Sam, her best friend whom she also had a relationship with during her senior year in high school, who now was just a friend. “Do you want to change out of your wet clothes?” I didn’t have any furniture, no place for Veronica to sit, but she Peter had given me sat in a tall stack an unwashed plate and drinking glass lay on the floor where I had eaten dinner a week ago. The room was empty, except for unpacked boxes the scientific papers that I fumbled for my keys, opened my door and flipped on the lights. We need to talk, the four words most feared by males.

The whites of her eyes were riddled with red and her dimples were nowhere to be found. I had just returned from a riotousĪdventure in the field with Peter, while she looked like she had the worst week of her life. Her long black hair was soaked and her clothes clung to her. VERONICA WAS AT MY APARTMENT door when I arrived home from the Queets late that Sunday night. Chapter 10 from Somewhere Upriver, by Patrick Loafman

Somewhere Upriver by Patrick Loafman