Page 89 of Johnny

“No, I didn’t.”

I sigh. She makes me tired.

But then she grabs my arm as we walk and for a moment I think she’s like… clinging to me. Only

she’s not. She’s holding it up. Actually, she’s unbuttoning my cuff and rolling up my sleeve. “What the

hell are you doing?”

“These,” she says, pointing to my tattoos.

“What about them?”

“These, Johnny Boston, don’t say ‘gentleman’. They say ‘mob boss.’”

She drops my arm and I start rolling down my sleeve. “I’m not a mob boss. I’m a banker.”

“Yeah, in our world that’s the same thing.”

“There’s nothing wrong with my tattoos. They’re classy.”

“Classy?” She laughs.

I roll my sleeve back up and point to my forearm. “Do you even know what they are?”

She barely glances back down at my arm. “Um… words. Maybe? In some weird language?”

“It’s a poem,” I say. “The earliest example of literature, in fact. That’s fuckin’ classy.”

“There is no such thing as a classy tattoo. And hey, I’m not saying yours are bad, I’m just saying

they say you’re a bad boy. That’s all. And it’s fine. Because you are.”

“You don’t even know me.”

She glances at me, rolls her eyes, and looks away. “Which poet?”

“It’s the Epic of Gilgamesh. It was written collectively by several people.”

“Who?”

“No one knows who, Megan. The fuckin’ thing is like four thousand years old. Who cares who?

The fact is, my tattoos are literature. This arm here,” I say, holding up the arm with the sleeve rolled

up, “is the original Akkadian cuneiform.”

“That’s a language?”

“Yeah, it’s a fuckin’ language. The first fuckin’ language. Well,” I amend, “it’s not actually the

original. The original was in Sumerian. But there’s no surviving tablets of that. So—”

“Can you not swear? It bothers me.”

“Fuck you.”

“I’m just kidding,” she says, bumping me with her hip. “You’re so moody. Why are you so moody,