Dave is the king of trash.

It’s the sort of self-bashing wit that tends to cling to him. He named himself, that’s all. Lolli calls him a Princess and Luis calls him Fucking Crazy, and everyone calls him Shady Dave here and there, except for Val, who just says Dave because she doesn’t know him so well, and that’s how it goes. So Dave calls himself all of the above. And it’s funny while it lasts. It’s funny enough for him to say it too, so why not.

He’s doing his whole curbside trash-to-treasure thing, rummaging, scrounging, foraging, with Val’s surprised smiles and interested eyes beside him. And he likes that. It’s romantic. Not like long walks on the beach and cupid’s arrows and little individually foil-wrapped Godiva truffles, but romantic. Epic. Daring. Adventurous.

Romantic, like skeletons of dead furniture and dartboards lost under decades of nightly indents; take-out containers with old remains of pasta that really aren’t as bad as you’d think. Tattered harlequin novels, trash-fiction, pulled out from hiding spots under bedframes and blankets. Smutty stuff, used condoms, more. Gross stuff, your regular toilet-scented waste.

But David never minded.

And Val doesn’t seem to mind coming along.

Maybe that’s why he’s liking her in this almost-Lolli way, right here. Lolli’s surreal, but Dave wonders if she’d still be so magical without the blue and the glitter — wonders if she’d still be Lolli if she took a razor to her hairline, pulled a Val.

Val, it’s hard to visualize her with the long, auburn hair she’s said to have had, at least for Dave. She calls it a past nuisance, so extra, but then, it’s not like she’s shaving off the new growths either. She’s got this spiky red, orange, strange sort of stubble at the moment. It sticks up straight, scruffy and patched, like a beard all down her cranium. It’ll probably thin out when it grows, but right now, it’s just, wow.

And it fits, you know. Being “just, wow.”

Twisted, porcelain Lolli. One-eyed Luis. Prince Valiant. Dave-of-the-trash.

Strange enough to stand out. Strange enough to be invisible.

“It’s a good feeling,” says Val, like telepathy and like-mindedness, “being invisible.”

“Only when you want to be,” says Dave — and therein lies the question. “I don’t know how great that is. Progress is progress. What about going back?”

He shouldn’t have said it, because Val can’t meet his eyes now. Of course. It’s stupid. Val can go back anytime. Val, with her cell phone and her hundreds of fucking frenzied messages. Val has complications, but that’s really all there is that keeps her on the streets. Val can fall back any time she wants. Val has family. Val has friends.

Dave has friends too, in a way. A background cast of monsters, but even then. Sometimes it’s all monsters. Sometimes he’s just the backdrop.

“I can’t go back anyway,” says Val. “You know that,”

All I know, Dave wants to say, is that you really don’t know. At all.

“All I know,” Dave says. But he leaves it hanging, with all the trash that isn’t good enough to sell.

- - - - -

My endings just keep getting worse.

Umm. I like Dave. Dave is underrated. Dave is cool.

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