“Ice cream headache?” Mindy asked. Earl nodded in silent agony.
“Remember on Saturday Night Live where the guy predicted annoyances in people’s lives, like ice cream headaches? Who was that?”
Pain receding, Earl said, “Christopher Walken.”
“Yeah, that was so random.”
Earl wanted to say it wasn’t random, that Walken had starred in The Dead Zone where he could foretell disasters, that the SNL skit had been a parody of the Stephen King novel/movie. He knew Mindy’s reaction, though, would be to repeat, “yeah, so random,” as if he hadn’t said anything.
He didn’t have to be psychic to know that. Whenever someone around Mindy got an ice cream headache—or a Slurpee brain freeze—she brought up the skit. Better to return to his Butter Brickle than succumb to repeated history.
Earl and Mindy walked through Haskell Park in silence. Earl suspected Mindy knew he had a ring box in his pocket, had had it there for a week. Unfortunately, every time he got the nerve to propose, one of her “quirks” would emerge, giving him cold feet. If it wasn’t being incapable of assimilating new information into her worldview, it was saying irregardless or pasketti, or braying like a donkey when she laughed too hard. He knew he had flaws; maybe they kept her from proposing to him.
He licked his ice cream cone, almost knocked the scoop loose, woofed it into his mouth, felt the pressure building in the center of his forehead. “Auuuuuuughhhhhhhh!”
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