I grab my empty cup and basket of wings and head for the Pepsi dispenser. There’s one group of Asian college students sitting in a long booth. Two pretty girls and a boy with thick glasses. The girls are giggling and spitting their soft drinks while the boy sucks on his wings. I take the booth right behind them. The place is otherwise empty of customers. Two mute TVs are mounted high in separate corners. One, tuned to NFL replays and the other is some Discovery Channel showing a snake slowly devouring a huge yellow egg. As soon as I’m seated I see Dicky heading over in my direction, head down, shuffling toward me with his hands in his pockets. He slides into the booth and sits right across from me, keeping his face hidden behind his cap.

“It’s not exactly true,” he whispers right off.

“What?”

“About the sign. I mean like I wrote the sign and everything; I hung it up there but it wasn’t my idea. I mean like, what the sign says—that was another dude’s idea. It wasn’t mine.”

“Oh,” I say.

“He’s the dude you wanna meet. You know how you were saying he might be different and stuff?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Well, he’s the dude you wanna meet.”

“Who is he?”

“Bruce. Bruce is the dude who thought it up.”

“Who’s Bruce?”

“He’s the dude who does all my piercing. He put all these rings in.”

“Oh,” I say.

“He’s totally awesome. You should meet Bruce. He’s got all kinds of ideas like that.”

“Where is Bruce?”

“He’s around. I could like track him down if you want.”

“Well, I’m kind of just passing through, Dicky.”

“Oh,” he says, and starts to hoist himself up out of the booth, keeping both hands in his pockets. “I just thought maybe you wanted to meet him. You said you wanted to meet the person who like wrote the sign.”

“I met you.” He hangs there at the corner of the booth, teetering between going and staying.

“But I’m not the one, see. I mean like he told me that thing— Bruce did—what the sign says. He told me that like a long time ago and I remembered it ’cause I thought it was like cool, you know. So I just wrote it down, but I wasn’t the one who thought it up.”

“I know that.”

“It wasn’t me.”