by Seth King
Just then, George texted me goodnight. I swallowed, turned off the screen, and pushed the phone away without responding, knowing it would hurt him and not caring at the same time.
The retreat, it seemed, had officially begun.
Books in Real Life
So: what is love? Why is love so stupid? And am I going to be a loner forever?
Soooo, I just finished this book. About love. It was good, but…I don’t know. Why is the main character always reduced to a pile of pudding when she starts liking someone? Why can’t she be both a normal, functioning human, and in love? Why is it always one or the other? Why was she okay with just tossing her life away and making her entire existence about this one guy? Doesn’t she know that’s dangerous? Doesn’t she know people can change their minds and walk away and hurt you and leave you on the floor? Why does anyone love anyone else at all?
I’m in a very feminist-y moment, obviously, since the gay fiction options are still so meager. If any of you have any book suggestions where a strong, independent woman falls in love with a dude is not reduced to a helpless pile of lusty feminine yearning, please leave it in the comments. Thanks.
Love you all. We’ll talk soon, I promise. I’ll be a little distant until then. Oh, and I’ll go through your emails when I have a free day, and when the Bookworm isn’t slammed. Until then, though, I will be single, bitter, and increasingly overweight, if recent eating habits are any indication.
Love,
Your favorite homosexual bookworm
Teddy Martin
“Oh, great,” my dad said two evenings later as I sulked on the couch, halfway through a work conversation about how we were expanding the parking lot to keep up with crowd demands. I took a moment from my moping to look up and study him. He’d been acting totally weird lately, disappearing for long stretches of time and concealing random things, and he was starting to look confused and flushed, too. I was starting to think he was sneaking off to eat crappy food against doctors’ orders, but I didn’t have any proof. Besides, I was acting weird, too. In two days I had read no less than nine books. I was on a binge, and I knew he was noticing.
“What?”
“You’re re-reading the entire Harry Potter series again. I just watched you go from book three to book four.”
“And, what? Goblet of Fire happens to be my favorite. And not just because of Robert Pattinson-related reasons.”
“And, for a while there, you were actually out doing things instead of reading. But you’re regressing. Ugh, it’s another case of the blues,” he said, shaking his head. “The boy blues. Come to think of it, I haven’t seen that guy around the store lately…the one that makes you act all weird…”
“It’s nothing,” I snapped. “I’m fine. Please stop. And you don’t know him. He’s not as perfect as he seems.”
“Is he mean?”
“No, he just…has issues. Not that it has anything to do with me.”
“Come on,” he said. “I’m fat but I’m not blind. You mope around the house all day, you get mad at nothing, you glare into the distance, you find issues with everything under the sun.”
“How is that different from my normal routine?”
“Oh, stop. I see what’s going on here. I’ve been there.”
He opened a can of buffalo-flavored Pringles, which to my estimation he had not put down for five minutes since they’d been introduced a few years back. He’d been sidelined by a minor heart attack three years ago, and it baffled and infuriated me that he’d continued eating like a thirteen-year-old Lacrosse player when his heart was already on such shaky ground.
“Don’t worry,” he said soon. “Sometimes life pulls you apart from someone to show you how badly you need to get back together. I would know. And I’ve only been around you two a few times, but I could just feel the…the bond. You guys were so natural together. And also, he makes eye contact and shakes hands like an adult. He seems great.”
I bit my lip and grimaced. “Please don’t talk like that. Ever.”
“Uh-oh. I know that look. I need to know the story with this friend of yours.”
I frowned. “George isn’t a friend. He’s…very far beyond that. Or, he was.”
“Was?”
“I’m sort of questioning things.”
“Well, was he good to you?”
“I mean, yeah. Too good...”
“Then deal with it and call him.” I couldn’t deny how correct he was about this.
“Why do you even care?”
“I don’t know this kid well, but I know you, and if running from people who loved you were an Olympic sport, you’d be at the top of the podium.”
“Leave me alone!” I said as I got up and left the room. Work had been the only thing keeping me sane, but the shop was closed. So I got lost in my favorite book instead, Maybe In Our Next Life.
Within a few pages I wanted to call George and talk about it, share how wonderful and curious and alive her work made me feel, but I couldn’t, and it made me so sad. And not just because we weren’t communicating – I also didn’t know how to talk about this particular book in general. Because it wasn’t just a book. This was the book. It made me wish desperately that the world it presented was real, and the one I actually lived in. It was my Hogwarts, basically. Reading it for the first time had felt like falling on a sword and getting cut to the bone – the author saw right into me, knew me better than I knew myself. The main character was a bookworm, but she wasn’t presented as a ~quirky~ *adorkable* little fantasy because of it. She was just a regular, shy girl who happened to prefer the page to reality.
I also liked the book because the author wrote about love in a devastated way that told you she had once loved and lost with everything inside herself, ensuring that she really knew what she was talking about. Even the most sublime forms of love contained some form of sadness, like a daisy that smelled of blood when you got too close. That was why people cried when they kissed their spouses at their weddings, why an old man’s eyes filled with tears when he looked at his wife. I just didn’t get it whenever a happy, carefree love song came on my shuffle. I just wanted to track down the singer and shake some sense into them. Have you never been on the floor? I wanted to ask. Have you never been rejected? Have you never looked your love in the eye and known for sure that they didn’t want you anymore?
As I read, my mood only got worse. What was there to be happy about, as far as love was concerned? Where was the joy promised in love, and why was I running from its early signs? And why was it always, always, always better in my books?
I barricaded myself in bed, but soon I became too exhausted to read. And then I was falling asleep, and a nightmare of epic proportions was blooming in front of me…
Hands. Greedy, searching hands. The hands are what I remembered most out of everything, but then again that wasn’t saying much, as much of it was a rush of muffled sounds and disgusted sighs and concealed terror and dread. But I do remember the hands. Those hands. Touching, prodding, pulling, taking things that didn’t belong to them, that would never belong to them…spreading shame, spreading disgust, spreading hatred…
Then, in my dream, I saw myself somewhere else. I was covered in dirt, but when I reached down to wipe it off, my skin started coming apart and crumbling.
I was made of dirt, too – I was as worthless as the ground under me.
I was soil.
By the time my eyes sprung open, it was still only one in the morning. Apparently the nightmare was intense enough to wake me up. I reached for my phone to reorient myself, and I saw a text from George:
Where have you been? What happened? What’s up?
I didn’t know what to say. The dream was right – I was dirt, I was trash, and I didn’t deserve anyone like George. He was cute and sparkly and smart and too good for me. And so, dragged down by my brain and my fears and my doubts and my self-hatred and my damages, I took my phone and texted him back:
Turns out I can’t actuall
y go to Key West. So sorry. Will talk soon. Bye.
He called me then. For some crazy reason, I answered.
“Hello?”
“What do you mean, hello?” he responded. “What was that text? What’s going on? Hello?”
I didn’t say anything. The nightmare was still reverberating in my brain, telling me I didn’t deserve him. I was soil. I didn’t deserve for this to work out. I wanted my old life back, the one where I could retreat into literature and not have to Feel Things. Because Feeling Things was hard. So, so hard. If you convinced yourself you were trash, you spent the rest of your life fulfilling that prophecy. And I didn’t know how to un-do that wish on myself.
“Seriously, what is it?” he asked. “We spend so much time together, we’re starting to have a great summer, then you start pulling away a little, and finally I get this weird text…what’s your problem? Are you depressed?”
“There’s something you don’t know,” I finally said.
“What?”
“It’s…the first time we met, or maybe the second, when you confessed your mental illness to me, there’s something I should’ve told you, too. But I didn’t. I hid it. And I’ve been hiding it ever since, like an asshole.”
I think I heard him swallow. “Teddy,” he said. “Come on. Whatever it is, it’ll be okay. I will deal with it.”
“Not this.”
“Are you sick?” he asked after a pause. “Do you have cancer, or something?”
“No, this isn’t a Nicholas Sparks book. I’m okay. Well, besides mentally…”
“Um? What does that mean?”
“It means I can’t do this,” I said way too quickly, sounding totally crazy. And before he could say anything else, I said I would talk to him soon and hung up the phone. But I wasn’t going to talk to him soon, and I knew it. So I turned off my phone and cried myself to sleep instead of waiting for his response.
And when I pictured what he must’ve been feeling at that very moment, it made me want to disappear into vapor.
George Charles
I stared at my phone in disbelief. He couldn’t have…he couldn’t…but he did.
I knew things were getting weird. I just didn’t know they were this weird. To keep from crying, I clutched my head and then shoved it between my knees as I huddled on my bed. Okay. Let’s recap and do a little Q&A session with my brain, at that very moment, like one of those author interview videos on YouTube:
What was it like to find him?
Like feeling rain after an endless dry summer.
What was it like to be with him?
Like discovering gold or oil under a plot of land you’d thought was worthless junk. Like striking riches in a swamp. Like finding a first-edition Hemingway at a garage sale.
What was it like to know that I was maybe starting to lose him?
Like seeing everyone who had ever left me, hearing every word that had ever disappointed me, experiencing every emotion that had ever broken my heart, all at once.
~
I glanced up at the ceiling and tried not to cry. I wasn’t ready yet. It couldn’t end yet. Not after all this. Something in his voice just now had sounded hollow, like he didn’t actually believe what he was saying. It felt like a performance. But why? What was leading him to push me away like this?
All I knew was that this, whatever this was, needed to be fixed. The thing was, I had no idea where to even begin.
But I knew I had to try.
Teddy Martin
A day passed with no text. Outwardly I was going about my business, but inside I was screaming. I kept finding myself daydreaming about him, waiting for texts and calls and emails that would never come. Nelson told me to go the cafe, but I didn’t want to risk an awkward run-in with George. He told me to go dancing, but I only wanted to dance with him. So one afternoon I went jogging – or attempted to, I guess – but still, this was something the old, pre-George Teddy never would’ve done. I even got up to a mile before I slowed down and started panting and dreaming of donuts and Ben & Jerry’s. When the act of breathing officially became as easy as pushing a pear through a keyhole, I started back home. I made my way back the short way through my neighbor’s backyard, then checked my phone.
No text.
In book terms and timelines this would’ve been our relationship honeymoon: this would’ve been our time to merrily bike down sunny streets and buy each other vegetables at farmers markets and quietly kiss under streetlights in the summer rain and all that shit. But none of this happened. I was shocked by how much I suddenly missed him.
All day long I waited to feel normal. I waited to feel like myself. I didn’t, though. I was so bored, so restless. But then again, I should’ve known. I’d spent my whole life adventuring between the covers of my books, so I guess it was time I went on one myself – I just didn’t know that adventure would come in the form of a boy named George Charles.
That night I walked to the closest McDonald’s, ordered seven different things off the night menu, and subsequently had a carb fest-slash-emotional breakdown in the corner while a homeless man in a leather vest watched in politely confused horror. Then I walked home alone, crying so hard, my face got sore. I’d never been like this in my life, and I didn’t know what to do about it. Was this heartbreak? Not Junior Heartbreak, the kind you get after infatuations end, where you’re over it after two days. Was this big-league heartbreak, the kind they write books about?
The morning after my little meltdown my dad appeared in my doorway, a sigh all over his face. He looked sad and pale, no doubt worried from my depression and moping and general bookworm-ness. He was always worrying like that. Or maybe he was worse lately? Anyway, I was mildly hung over from the carbs, and I didn’t want to deal with him at the moment.
“Dude. You’ve got to stop this,” he said as I avoided his eyes. “Go out with George. Call Dooley and go to that store you both love. Do something. Anything.”
“You’re my dad,” I said back. “You’re not supposed to encourage me to date. You’re supposed to encourage me to, like, end world hunger or something. And are you okay? You look…sick. And awful.”
“Thanks,” he said, pulling at his collar, making me notice his neck was weirdly splotchy. “Yes, I’m fine, just under the weather from my allergies, I think. And I’m not encouraging you to date. I’m encouraging you to live.”
I groaned and pulled out the big guns. “This college wants me to write a five-thousand-word essay on why I’d like to join their ranks this fall. Wanna help?”
He immediately frowned his way out of the doorway. “I’ll be in the kitchen,” he said as he disappeared down the hallway.
I sat back and exhaled. I was grateful that I’d been set free from his interrogations, but at the same time I was so anxious I felt like I’d stuck my finger in an electrical socket. I already missed George, I already wanted to undo what I’d done, but I was too helpless to stop the bleeding. What was I going to do? Life got hard, so life became books. Books were safe. Books wouldn’t hurt me. Books were home. But George’s eyes were fires in the dark, calling to me day and night. And the last time I let love into my life, it tore me apart from seam to seam…
~
“Dad?” I asked after I got sick of my latest thriller later that afternoon, padding down the hallway, feeling guilty about being such a dick earlier. “Can we go out? There’s a reading by some local author tonight that we’re catering downstairs, which is fine. But I was kind of craving-”
I walked into the kitchen, heard a halfhearted groan, and saw my father lying on the floor in a small pool of his own yellowy mucus.
Teddy Martin
It took thirteen minutes for the ambulance to arrive. I knew this because I counted every minute, every second, until the orange-purple lights bloomed in my kitchen and made me finally exhale again. As I let them in, I kept getting this wet, scratchy feeling in my throat that told me I wanted to cry. I wouldn’t let myself, though. I had to keep it together. Rig
ht now I was the only thing Nelson had in the world, and if I lost it, he’d have nothing.
I drove to the hospital in my dad’s purple Plymouth minivan, since I wanted to be surrounded by his smell in case…in case. I couldn’t even finish that sentence. I thought about when he had been better, before he became the older and slower and sadder creature of the last few years. It was all my fault – I’d let him coop himself up in the apartment and spend his nights on the couch, stuffing his face, when he should’ve been walking and playing tennis and getting pushed out the door by me. What had been wrong with him lately, mentally speaking, anyway? It wasn’t like my mom had just gone away. It’d been years, and yet he seemed no better. It was almost like there was something else…
I got lost in the parking garage and finally skidded into the bland, bright lobby an hour after leaving my house. I’d always hated hospitals – every hospital was the same, and they were all equal in their clinical, spotless misery. After talking to a succession of rude, unhelpful receptionists, I waited in a purple chair. And waited. And waited…
After what must’ve been several hours, they sent a nurse come talk to me, since a doctor couldn’t even be found amid the ruckus. In the end a pretty girl named Nicole sat me down near the overly-bright family waiting room with generic popcorn bags piled next to the dirty microwave.
She couldn’t meet my eyes.
“Your dad had a mild heart attack,” she finally said as my insides plummeted down to hell. Her tone was heartbreakingly business-like, and I hated it. “He vomited and lost consciousness out of shock more than anything else – it’s the body’s way of protecting itself. He should recover quickly, but he’s going to be watched much more carefully than he was before. And his life is going to change, from now until forever.”