I Just Want My Pants Back Read Online Free PDF

and I work at a film casting place; I’m an assistant there.” I watched her for a reaction. “But there’s only four people, so I’m this close to being CEO.” I held up three fingers.
    She took a prolonged swallow of beer. Fuck, they can never hide it. “A casting assistant, huh?” She glanced down, I think at my shoes, then back to my face. “So like, do you want to be a producer or something?”
    She was already in Phase Two. My current credentials didn’t sound that hot, so now she was sizing me up for “future potential.” Like I was a young racehorse or a piece of real estate in a gentrifying neighborhood. This exact sequence had happened to me more times than I cared to recall. It started with “Oh, this guy looks sort of interesting,” then went to “Oh, his job is kinda lame, though, but wait…maybe he has a plan,” to, if it hadn’t already ended with me immediately being dropped like a dirty diaper, “Wait, this one I can mold like a lump of clay into Perfect Boyfriend.”
    “Um, producer, I don’t know,” I shrugged, smiling. “Could be, I’m still sorting that out, to be honest. Or maybe an astronaut. I’m on the fence.”
    “Mmm-hmm. Tough choice.” Carol took another taste of her beer. Her eyes darted around the room. “They’re really different jobs.”
    I took her face in. Yeah, I didn’t have a shot in hell of ever kissing this girl. No “assistant” did. She was probably racing her friends to be first to both procreate and be made partner. “I make more money than you, AND my baby was born first—in your face!” It was all camouflaged under the stylish haircut. A friend of hers walked past and they started chatting; she was about to sail away. On cue, the wind blew.
    “Okay, well, I’m going to get back to my friends,” she said, touching my shoulder, patronizingly. “It was nice to meet you.” I watched her curvaceous body move as she negotiated her way out of the crowded kitchen. I guess you could say she had an hourglass figure. But time was running out.
    I consoled myself with a mouthful of beer. Maybe I was high but I felt like everyone in the kitchen was looking at me, so I shuffled back out into the main room and found a spot to sulk. VP, Jesus. It killed me, that crap. All of a sudden these people who two minutes ago were proud to rule the bong thought they were Gordon Gecko or something. What was I to her, a retarded busboy at Stuckey’s? I mean, I wasn’t some poet, some Utopian dreamer; it wasn’t like I wanted to live in 1967, abandon all material possessions, and give my children Native American names like Spirit Runner. I loved money and treasure as much as any pirate. These people who used their job titles just like maybe they had once used their major or their varsity letter or whatever to make themselves seem superior. Fuck ’em, I wasn’t buying it. I leaned against the wall and drained my beer. I had made an excellent argument to myself, but there was no way around it. A girl turning you down, thinking that who you were wasn’t good enough, hurt. It hurt every fucking time.
    Especially painful was the first time it happened, at Seth Strasser’s sixth-grade birthday party. We had just graduated from “Spin the Bottle” to “Run, Catch, and Kiss.” All adolescent kissing games cruelly seemed to have the rules built right into their names, rendering moot any “I don’t know how to play” excuses. The girls chased the boys under the June night sky, and Carol Kensington, a B-cupped beauty who was the inspiration behind many of my first locked-bathroom-door explorations, was closing in on me. I faked twisting an ankle, going down on the soft grass of Seth’s front yard, all the easier to be caught and kissed. But Carol passed me over. Literally. She hurdled me in desperate pursuit of James Lerner, the “hottest guy in school.” Well, until sophomore year, when it all went bad in an eruption of acne and an unfortunate attempt at a