"The Joker" • Steve Miller Band (by Mallory Smart)

The Joker comes on while I’m filling up my tank at Speedway, the pump clicking slow while I watch bugs slam into the lights overhead.

I haven’t heard it in years. Or maybe I have and just didn’t notice. That happens with songs like this. You think they’re gone, but they’ve just been playing quietly while you were busy pretending to be fine.

This time I notice.

This time it ruins me.

The gas station speaker buzzes the song back again. That tinny, overhead noise that makes every song feel ironic, even when it isn’t. It’s the 4th of July and I’m headed to a party I don’t want to go to. The kind where the paper plates collapse and nobody brings up the election.

But words wash over me until I can barely hear the pump click: I’m doin’ you wrong, doin’ you wrong.

Fucking Dave. I get into the car, and he’s already there. Or maybe it’s not him. Maybe it’s just the version of me that existed with him.

“There’s the Target my dad had to pull over at so I could throw up...”

“That the 7/11 where we found the last Four Loko?”

“I wonder if Dave still lives here…”

If asked, I’d lie and say we kissed during fireworks at Summerfest. Cinematic. Like a teen movie with a decent budget. But that’s not how it went. It was daytime. A backyard two blocks over had a mariachi band playing something too fast and too joyful. It smelled like grease and scorched woodchips.

We were pacing around this old tree like idiots. Not nervous. Just two overthinkers stuck in analog. We knew we wanted to kiss, but neither of us knew how. We actually talked about it. Not in a cute, flirty way. More like reading aloud from a driver’s ed manual.

He had that sharp smile, like he didn’t mean it but didn’t want to be rude. Wore his flannel like armor. I was too tan from boredom and wore a Sex Pistols shirt I screen-printed in graphics class. We looked like a Nirvana bootleg and a dropout from a coming-of-age film orbiting each other’s wreckage.

We didn’t kiss because we liked each other.

We kissed because we were feral and out of excuses.

Neither of us had kissed anyone before. You wouldn’t guess that. We looked the part. The kind of kids people projected stories onto. But we were both introverts with good camouflage. People who made others feel seen, then vanish, because being known feels like exposure.

We just didn’t trust anyone enough to open.

It wasn’t romance. It was recognition. Two people realizing they’d both survived the same fire.

That kiss didn’t change our lives. Didn’t heal us. But for a second, the world paused. We’d slipped into a crack in the universe where nothing was expected of us except honesty.

Dave once said Steve Miller Band sounded like rock music underwater.

I told him it sounded like lying about being okay.

That felt like truth.

We both acknowledged it later that week. The Joker was our song now. Not because it said something about us, but because it didn’t. It just happened to be playing while we circled the tree and stopped pretending.

I remember the line that was playing when we kissed: I’m a joker, I’m a smoker, I’m a midnight toker.

Dave laughed. Said he didn’t relate to any of it, but it still felt like truth.

Everyone has a Dave. Some version of him is trying to lodge himself in your bones as we speak.

We didn’t talk much after summer. There was college, and the slow fade of people trying not to sink.

Now the song keeps showing up. Grocery stores. Lyfts. Gas stations. Always too early. Just before I remember something I’ve been trying to forget.

Maybe it’s just in rotation.

Or maybe the song never stopped. Just got quieter when I got older.

Like a messed-up guardian angel in aviators and cutoff jeans, showing up just to remind me that one time, when I was 18 and pretending not to be messed up, I kissed a boy who was pretending too.

We just stopped lying long enough to touch.

And maybe that’s what music is.

Not a memory.

Not even a glitch.

Just proof that we were there.

The echo left behind by whatever selves we had to shed before we got too old to believe they ever mattered.

Mallory Smart is a Chicago-based writer and the author of I Keep My Visions to Myself and The Only Living Girl in Chicago. She runs Maudlin House, edits for Zona Motel, and hosts the podcast Textual Healing. Her work has appeared in Hobart, Scaffold, Vlad Mag, and HAD. She’s currently teasing a horror novel with no title and no explanation. Just the way she likes it.