The Overthinkers

by Lisa Portolan

  “Did you have sex with her?” she asked.

  I took the glass from her. “Yep.”

  It felt strange revealing that detail. Like it was a bizarrely intimate or private one, even though Francesca Moore knew every other detail about Maddison and me. She was the only one that did. But now something had shifted between us. Between Maddison and I, and it didn’t seem right telling Francesca. It seemed kind of ... wrong.

  Being with Maddison was the best buzz ever. I couldn’t tell Francesca that. She wouldn’t understand.

  “You’ve got to stop doing that,” she moaned, as she extended her skinny legs across mine. Propping them up.

  I took a sip of the vodka.

  I knew I needed to stop being a doormat, that it was wrong, that it made me feel bad, that the exchange was beyond unpardonable ... but I just couldn’t. This was by no means my thing. I was not the type of guy that traded drugs for sex. No way. That was gruesome. Was I a shit guy? Yeah, probably. But I wasn’t at that level – not even close. I didn’t treat women like that, I didn’t treat anyone like that.

  It had all started that one time. I’d gone to Maddison’s house. She’d texted me to come around. Late at night. And I’d legitimately thought it was an honest hook-up. Just a simple hook-up. A chick texts you, you go around, you have sex, you leave, that’s it. Who doesn’t want some quick and easy sex? A transaction. Did I like Maddison at the time? Yeah. So maybe I shouldn’t have gone, because I knew I could catch some feelings. But who is going to say no to a hook-up with someone they like? Like, really? I’m not Robinson Crusoe here.

  I went, and we hooked-up, and then she’d just looked at me. Like she was waiting for something, and I’d thought, fuck, she thinks I’m that low, that I’d trade drugs for sex ... and so I just handed her a bag, and it was done.

  I felt like a piece of shit when I left.

  Firstly, because I’d sunk to a new level, and even I didn’t think that was possible. And secondly, because I’d sunk to that new low with someone that I really liked – that was pretty awful.

  And that’s how it had started.

  It was like a line in the sand crossed.

  You know I’d crossed a lot of those lines, and it always happened in an unexpected way. It’s not like I thought, I’m going to go out and break the law or anything. It wasn’t premeditated in the slightest. It was kind of like someone suddenly handing me something, asking me if I wanted to participate in it, and me not giving it a whole lot of thought, and just going ... okay.

  And then it started something. Like a fucking juggernaut of a bad thing you couldn’t get yourself out from.

  I was completely conscious that I had somehow participated in those decisions, but I maintained it had been unintentional. To everyone, including myself.

  So then this exchange had started with Maddison, irregularly. Maybe once a month, sometimes twice, and I’d found myself unable to stop it.

  The weird thing was, it was this incredibly complicated doubleedged sword. When she didn’t contact me, I felt like shit because I just wanted to see her and be near her, and when she did, the joy was short-lived, because afterwards it kind of felt seedy and gross.

  Except tonight, tonight it felt less seedy and gross.

  I didn’t respond to Francesca’s statement. I’d taken two sips of the vodka, and I was starting to feel a little out of my mind. I’d spent the afternoon drinking and in the sun, so it was a quick slide.

  “Are you listening to me?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I heard you,” I responded lazily, not willing to go into further detail with her.

  “But you’re not interested in listening?” she said.

  “C’mon Cesky ...” I said playfully, using the nickname only I called her to highlight our intimacy. “I never pretended I was a good person.”

  “It’s not about you being a good person ... because clearly you’re not. It’s about you being self-destructive,” she said.

  “Thanks, but I already have a councillor,” I told her smoothly. It was pretty rich coming from Francesca Moore. Self-destruction was her middle name. It was like she was a nineties rock band on steroids.

  “But you don’t tell them anything, because your dad pays for them. Besides, I’m just saying it to you as a friend.”

  Of course. Words of advice were always concealed in that way. Given to you by a friend. But I was being unfair. Francesca Moore had been a friend to me, more so than anyone else. And contrary to popular belief, we were just friends. But people liked to think that we were something more to each other, and that served both of us well. It served Francesca’s plan for world domination, and it made my nearest and not-so-dearest (family and pseudo friends) think I was on the straight and narrow. Just part of a sweet eastern suburbs couple.

  I was by no means on the straight and narrow.

  And besides the pair of us got along. We were equally messed up, in very different ways.

  When I’d asked Francesca to make a show of our “relationship” at Dan’s party for Maddison, so that she didn’t think I was some down and out loser, she’d gone along with it. Of course, it had completely fucking degenerated and backfired. Maddison had ended up hooking up with Benjamin Carroll, that pretty-boy that all the girls seemed to be obsessed with, and then Francesca had completely disappeared. I’d been off my head, standard, and spent half the night trying to track her down, only to discover her back here with Benjamin Carroll the next morning.

  Then I’d had some jealous fit of rage.

  How was this guy everywhere now? Like who was he even?

  Then I had Maddison asking for his number. Like any self-destructive prick I couldn’t stop myself from helping her out. Here, I’ll do you a favour, will you love me now?

  Not even close, they never did. It wasn’t like shooting yourself in the foot, it was like shooting yourself in the face.

  Then today I’d seen her at the bar ... and I’d been so desperate to be near her. So fucking desperate. But she hadn’t wanted a bar of it. She’d looked down, like I was embarrassing her, like she didn’t want to be seen with me.

  And here’s the thing, she was right. I was embarrassing. I was damaging. I didn’t belong with a girl like Maddison.

  She belonged with a guy who was as pristine and fresh as Benjamin Carroll.

  Not some ratchet junkie like me.

  Christ.

  “It’s fine,” I said to Francesca suddenly. “It means nothing. She knows it means nothing and so do I.”

  There were so many holes in that sentence, I was in danger of slipping straight through one of them.

  “Okay, if you want to play it like that,” she said with that fake little laugh of hers. On and off so quickly, so you knew it had never been intended.

  “What about you and that kid then?” I asked her, looking to shift the subject quickly.

  “I don’t know who you mean.”

  “Oh please,” I said with an eye-roll. Leaning back on her couch. Being at Francesca Moore’s house made me feel like there was someone else. Someone waiting up for me, someone that cared. Less like there was nowhere to go, and no one that cared. I knew Cesky cared, even if it was in her strange, listless kind of a way.

  “Why do you both pretend to not know each other’s names?”

  “So you do know who I’m talking about?” I said, raised eyebrows.

  “Yep ... Benji ... gotcha.”

  “Sounds like a dog’s name,” I said unhelpfully.

  Another little laugh. On and off – totally fake.

  “Nothing, absolutely nothing,” she responded.

  “You didn’t text him or anything?” I asked.

  “No ... I just can’t at the moment. I just can’t deal with it,” she responded. She looked down about it. Like it wasn’t really the decision she wanted to make, but she had to nonetheless.

  The thing is we were all keeping secrets. And Francesca was keeping a big secret too. Only it played out on her very body. Visible, but co
ncealed in lies. Maybe, they were all like that. Secrets, I mean. They were all as obvious as Francesca’s only it was easier to believe otherwise.

  I knew her secret. It meant no one else could be near her. Not now at least.

  “He’s too normal Hamish, he just won’t get it.”

  I wanted to say that she was wrong. That she wasn’t at all hard to understand, that her situation wasn’t either. That we were all fucked up, and that was the beauty of intimacy – discovering someone else’s fucked up nature, and being able to share our own. That’s what everyone said. But it wasn’t true. I knew it for a fact. Reveal your issues, and people couldn’t wait to get away from you. They didn’t just run a mile, they erased you from their mobile, and from social media ... and even from their minds.

  I’d seen it hundreds of times before.

  So I didn’t want to pretend that Benjamin Carroll was going to be okay with her eating disorder, her moods, her volatility, and her desires. Because Francesca Moore wanted a lot.

  A whole heap of things.

  But most of all, she didn’t want to be herself.

  “You agree, right?” she said finally, biting her nail. It was tattered and messy, a smear of yellow nail polish clinging to it sadly.

  I sighed, leaning an arm against her legs.

  “I don’t know what to think,” I finally said. “But I understand what you’re saying.”

  She nodded her head, pleased with my response. Like it justified her behaviour.

  “I mean, he’s so nice, and smart, and pretty ... He thinks about things a lot. He considers everything in such a detailed way ...” She furrowed her brow. “I just can’t deal with that at the moment.”

  I got it. Francesca Moore didn’t want someone unpacking every detail of her life, and trying to readjust it in the right order. She didn’t want someone psychoanalysing her, or pointing out her deficiencies. I was sure she was pretty aware of them. And on top of that ... she didn’t want anyone trying to fix her.

  Because like me, she had no intent on changing.

  She was perfectly happy, being perfectly unhappy.

  I mean sometimes you had to sacrifice happiness for something else. Something that was more important.

  Francesca was sacrificing food, her health, and even her mind for thinness. And she was sacrificing being nice, and kind, and even friendships and love to social-climb.

  And me? Well, I didn’t want to give away the drugs. I didn’t want to give away how they made me feel.

  Epic, right? They made me feel like gold.

  Sober I felt like complete shit.

  I could write an ode to cocaine. I could write the Odyssey for ice.

  And I didn’t want to give up the money, or the social connections the sales gave me. My parents had been pretty well connected to begin with ... but I’d never been enough for them. Not enough for them to really foster any of their time into me. And so I’d had to make my own way. I’d had to find other ways to impress people.

  Some of those ways were illegal.

  “Tell me why you like Maddison?” Francesca Moore said, lolling her face on her thin hand, in a ‘thinker’ position, like she was prepared for a deep and meaningful conversation. Francesca Moore didn’t like Maddison, I knew that much. She thought she was a woeful excuse for a human being. Vapid and vacant, lacking in any outstanding features.

  I knew, because she’d told me. About one hundred times before.

  The question struck me as strange. But Francesca was strange. Always. It was her most defining feature. She just couldn’t act like everyone else.

  I thought about the question. Deeply. Like I imagined Benjamin Carroll might. What did I like about Maddison? I struggled – I wasn’t good with words. I didn’t know how to articulate things. I just sort of felt them, and I thought maybe Maddison felt them too. In the same way. It was just a vibe, and maybe it was totally unfounded.

  I didn’t know how to answer the question, so instead I asked something else altogether.

  “Hey, have you noticed that we refer to Maddison as just Maddison?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you’re always Francesca Moore, you live with Leo Teoh, I’m Hamish Chiel and he’s ...”

  “He’s Benjamin Carroll,” she said with that on and off laugh. Like a lamp, iridescent for a single second.

  “Yeah, why do you think?”

  “Because she’s not relevant. She’s boring. Who cares about her full name?” Francesca said vindictively.

  Sometimes I wondered why Francesca hated Maddison so much.

  “No ... that’s not it,” I said, brushing the comment aside.

  “Then what is it?”

  “I don’t know ... I don’t know why.”

  “It’s because ... she has this weird quality to her ... like she disappears into the background. Like she’s translucent.”

  Francesca was good with words. She had a way of constructing them perfectly, of making you feel something through syllable and sounds. She was an artist, you see. Capable of seeing and articulating stuff that us mere mortals could only just imagine. She was an artist, that didn’t paint anymore.

  “But I can see her,” I responded.

  Yeah, I could see her. And I’d always been able to see her. Since she was a kid. We’d grown up in the same circles. Around the same people. I had always been the stupid, naughty kid, with the expensive family, and she had just been the girl ... that yeah, faded into the background.

  All the more for me to see her.

  “Well, maybe she was made just to be seen by your eyes,” Francesca said.

  I liked that. I liked that a lot. And it made me smile.

  “You’re a clever thing Cesky,” I said, finishing off the vodka.

  “Oh thanks Hamish ... if only that was enough. If only, being smart, and having a nice turn of phrase was enough to make someone,” she said ironically, swinging her legs off my thighs, and heading to the kitchen.

  I knew she was going to collect the vodka.

  I shook the pins and needles out of my legs.

  “Maybe it is enough?”

  She swayed back into my vision, skeletal and kind of deranged, refilling my drink. Serving it up, like it was water.

  “It’s not. Trust me. You need to know people to make it. The right people.”

  I shrugged my shoulders. The thing is, I didn’t have the right ingredients anyway, all I could rely on was the old family name ... and the drugs. It was a strange combination, but it worked.

  “You know the right people Hamish. So does Maddison. You grew up with them.”

  She sat back down and propped her feet back up, unconcerned by any potential discomfort on my end. That was Francesca, she took and took ... and she rarely gave back. Except with me. I knew what she gave me in return – her loyalty. And that was big, and important, rare. People always marched away from you when you revealed yourself to be a basket case, those that hung around – they were important.

  Loyalty, it was everything. And hers had been unflinching.

  “Yeah, and look at how far it got me,” I said with a laugh. I knew I was starting to slur my words. It was my favourite part of the evening, when you’d had just enough, and you were about to tip over to the other side. By the other side, I meant forgetting. Forgetting who you were, where you were, and what you were doing.

  Just disappearing. I loved the idea of disappearing. It was my favourite part of having a buzz.

  She rolled her eyes.

  “If I don’t seize these opportunities now Hamish, if I don’t meet the right people, if I don’t align myself with them ... I’m done ... and then I’ll have to go back to being a nobody for the rest of my life. I won’t be a nobody.”

  “Sometimes I wish I was a nobody.”

  “No, you don’t, that’s such bullshit. Who wants to be a nobody?” she asked, like it was an open question to the room. Like she was demanding a response.

  “Do you ever think that you’re
just being too much? That it’s just all a bit desperate? That if you sat back it would just come to you?” I asked. I didn’t know what I was saying. I was off with the pixies. Maddison’s beautiful face kept swimming in front of my eyes. Those blue eyes, and cheek bones that seemed to pierce the sky. Maybe, I could go back past her house ... would she have me? I fished my phone, and considered sending her a text.

  But there was some truth in what I was saying. Francesca was a lot. And she came off with the strangest whiff of desperation. It was obvious that she didn’t quite fit. But instead of embracing the weirdness, she kept trying to buffer the edges ... or make herself small.

  She kept trying to make herself smaller.

  And then she spun so fast, like she was constructed or substituted by a manic energy.

  It felt like desperation sometimes, and on other occasions like panic.

  “I don’t get to sit back and wait for things Hamish. Things don’t just happen to me. That’s such a privileged thing to say. Manifesting is for rich, white people, with the right connections. Do you know what would happen to me if I just let things happen to me ... I would end up as a hairdresser, with a couple of kids, and a mortgage.” She sounded kind of angry. Her voice was coming out super fast. Like each word was connected to the one before. And maybe it hadn’t been the right thing to say.

  “What’s wrong with that?” I asked finally.

  She scoffed loudly, and removed her legs from my lap. A sure sign she was annoyed. She was putting distance between us physically. I knew her well. That was the advantage of having her as a friend - somehow you reached a place of intimacy faster. With no romantic pretences, and just friendship and loyalty, we were who we were, and that was it. No pretending.

  Love made you pretend.

  To be better.

  “Every – thing,” she said dragging out the word loudly.

  I lifted my eyebrows. Yeah, she was pretty pissed.

  “I don’t want to be nothing Hamish. I don’t want to be nothing. I want to be something. More than something. I want to be epic. I want to be someone who makes an impact. I want people to remember me.”

  I stared at her. They were heavy words. But I couldn’t take them seriously ... I wanted to but I was just so trashed. I could feel a laugh coming on. A full on laugh out loud moment.