Smooth

by Matt Burns

  The chair next to her was open. I reached into my pocket and blindly clicked buttons until I found play on my iPod, then rushed into the seat. My legs felt jittery. I pulled on the bottom of my shirt to tug the wrinkles out and make myself look less like laundry. “Needle in the Hay” blared through my earbuds at full volume. It stung my ears. I stared forward, my heart pounding, waiting for her to hear the song, ask me about my love of the song, then schedule the time and date when we’d make out to the song. My bleeding ear holes would be the sparks that set off the lifelong fireworks show of our romance.

  Jesus Christ, it felt like the earbuds would explode inside my head.

  I shut the music off, and in the sudden silence her eyes flicked up at me, then back into the book. Like she had no idea who I was.

  Oh, no. Shit. Christ. Abort mission. Abandon ship. Forget all my hopes and dreams as I slap the eject button beside my chair and launch my head through the pockmarked tile ceiling. I couldn’t give her back her earbuds now — she’d think I was a serial killer.

  Get it together. I’d probably never see her again. If I didn’t say something now, I wouldn’t have another chance. I’d spent hours last night rehearsing this conversation in my head, fantasizing about this absurd coincidence that was now real.

  “Hey,” I wheezed.

  A beat, and then she tilted her head toward me and shut the book. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. “Oh, hey,” she mumbled through a mouthful of granola bar, spraying a few crumbs onto her lap. “Sorry,” she said, swallowing.

  I opened my lips, felt the dried crust all over them like pencil shavings, and no words came out.

  Say the line, I told myself. Say the goddamned line. I’d spent six hours writing and rehearsing the script for this conversation, honing it into a slick, knot-free masterpiece guaranteed to make her laugh and realize how perfect we were for each other. But it would only work if I could nut up and say the goddamned first line. Wait, what’s the first word? Shit! If I get the first word, the rest will come. Get it together, you idiot. How stupid are you?

  Are you!

  “Are you, uh” — I swallowed hard, then pushed ahead — “interested in grabbing a couple of burgers and hittin’ the cemetery?”

  “What?”

  “Huh?”

  “Did you say burgers?”

  Sweet god. Holy hell. My face roasted and my armpits ejected sweat. My shirt’s stiff collar scraped my wet neck. “Yeah . . . Do you . . . ? Uh . . . I, uh . . . Royal Tenenbaums? It’s a line from that.” I felt like I was being cooked in a rotisserie. I was such a moron. I’d spent forty-five minutes reading through Royal Tenenbaums quotes online to choose that one, and somehow didn’t consider that when the other person has no idea you’re quoting a movie, you’re just asking her to eat fast food with you in a field of corpses.

  She nodded. “Oh. Right. You really like that movie, huh?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I guess.”

  “Cool.” She held out the last inch of granola bar. “Want any?”

  “Oh, uh, I’m, uh — I’m good, thanks,” I said. Wait. Fuck. Why hadn’t I taken the granola bar? I wanted to take it. But there had been no granola bar in the scene I’d imagined. There were no snacks at all. It was a crumb-free fantasy with none of my lip smacks. She was supposed to recognize the Tenenbaums reference, and we were supposed to bond over our love of the same movies and music, so that when I gave her back her earbuds, she’d be primed to see me as the literate stud I’d scripted myself to be.

  Instead I was a stammering kid strangling stolen earbuds in his pocket, wavering with indecision: Returning them would prove I was a thief and imply I was a stalker, but I’d backed myself into a corner and already looked stupid, so fuck it. “Oh, your, uh . . .” I trailed off while I wrestled the knotted mess of cords out of my shorts pocket. “You left these. Last time. I was, uh, keeping them safe.”

  “Oh, cool,” she said. “I figured they just, like, vanished from existence. Thanks.”

  She set them in her lap, then flattened the granola bar wrapper and folded it in her hands and we didn’t talk for a while. My face heated up. It felt like everyone in the waiting room was listening to me. Why was it so awkward? It shouldn’t have been so awkward between us. Was it my dumb-ass button-down shirt? It felt huge on me. I looked like a third grader in an art class smock. This had all been a terrible mistake.

  Finally she looked over and whispered, “You here for Accutane?”

  I sat up straight. I had a comeback for that question: “How can you tell?” I asked. “Was it the, uh . . .” Shit. I pawed around the cavern in my head, looking for the rest of that sentence and found nothing. I coughed. “Yeah.”

  “Same.”

  Holy hell. We took the same pills. It was the first time one of my romantic daydreams had actually been true. We had a connection. The same chemicals blasting through my bloodstream, potentially destroying my kidneys, were potentially destroying her kidneys as well.

  She said, “How’s it working out?”

  “It’s good,” I lied automatically. Wait, what? Why had I glossed over the truth to her, like she was one of my parents? She wasn’t part of the stressful, tangled-together mess of my friends, classmates, parents, and friends’ parents. Anything I said or did to one of them rippled through everyone else. Alex was completely separate. I could be real with her. And some nurse would probably pop out any second to call one of us back and I might lose my chance to talk to her forever. “Actually it sucks. My face is still red all the time and it always kind of hurts. It stings and is dried out and feels pinched. I don’t think the Accutane’s doing anything yet.”

  She smiled. “Yeah, it tends to make your face worse for the first month. Then it gets better.”

  “Hard to tell if it got any worse, considering I looked . . . burnt before.”

  She laughed the tiniest laugh, mostly an exhale. I felt like I’d slam-dunked a basketball in front of fifty thousand screaming fans.

  I said, “I’m still using all my salicylic acid and creams and stuff to try to make it work faster, but it’s not really helping.”

  “Whoa, no. You’re not supposed to be using any of that stuff while you take Accutane. Just take the pills and wash your face and moisturize. The pills dry your face out like crazy. Any peroxide or toner on top of that will, like, suck all the water out of your entire body. That’s probably why your face stings.”

  “Oh. Huh.”

  “You can use basic stuff like Cetaphil to wash your face. Do you use that? The stuff that looks like camel spit?”

  I laughed and nodded.

  “Your dermatologist didn’t tell you this stuff?” she said.

  I shrugged. “I probably just wasn’t paying attention. That’s the tricky thing with advice. You have to be listening. I’ve probably let, like, dozens of inspiring quotes sail straight over my head because I was distracted wondering if, like, a hat exists that might look normal on me.” She didn’t really react to that. No laugh, no slam dunk. Not a big fan of the rambling. “So, um, you said it’ll get better?”

  “Mine’s starting to. Thank god. Since this whole process is so annoying. My parents fight over who has to drive me to all these doctors’ offices. And you know they test girls for pregnancy every month?”

  “Your parents make you take pregnancy tests?”

  “What? No.” She rolled her eyes and smiled. She thought that was funny. I was just being a moron who misunderstood her. But I’d take the points. “The doctors do,” she said. “To stay on Accutane.”

  “Wow,” I said. “That, uh, that sounds like a lot of pee.” Jesus Christ, Kevin. Pee?

  “Well, no, it’s just part of the blood test,” she said, and for some reason didn’t stand up and walk away and never speak to me again. “How are your hands?”

  “What?”

  She reached over the armrest and took my wrist. Her touch was warm and it shocked me, like I’d gotten a shot of adrenaline directly into my heart. She turned my hand ove
r, inspecting it. “Mine got crazy dry and cracked at first. Yours look fine.”

  “Yeah, they’re, uh, yeah, yeah, they’re . . . pretty fine.” I’d never thrown up from excitement before, but I sensed it brewing.

  Before I vomited all over Alex’s dry face, though, the receptionist called her name.

  She put her book under her arm and her earbuds in her hoodie’s front pocket. Before she stood up, she turned to me and said, “Your face does look better.”

  “Really?”

  “You probably can’t tell because it changes just a little every day. But compared to last month, yeah, it’s better.”

  It took all my strength to suppress the audible gasp I wanted to unleash. She remembered me.

  “See you next month?” she said, standing up.

  “Ubbidah uh, uh — yeh, yeh, yeah,” I Porky-Pigged at her.

  Knowing she was about to disappear for another month, I felt the questions I needed to ask her slamming around inside my head: Where do you live? What school do you go to? What’s your last name? Give me all your contact information! It sounded like what a stalker or murderer would ask. No, no — they were normal, necessary questions. From a creep. No, from a person interested in talking to another person. Right. Quick! Ask the basic questions: Name and phone number. Goddamn it, she was already walking away before I decided what to do.

  She walked past the check-in desk and I watched her butt the entire time. It wasn’t a conscious decision. I just instinctively stared at it, like I was a plant angling myself toward the sun.

  When she disappeared to the back of the office, I replayed her telling me that my face looked good over and over in my head. I sensed her fingers on my wrist. I grabbed a magazine to hold over my face. I can’t remember the last time I smiled like that.

  A man sitting across from me with patchy hair and screwed-up teeth shot me a weird look. I realized my devious grin was buried in The Women’s Yoga and Pilates Journal. I looked like a pervert and I didn’t care. Alex had held my hand. She had said my face looked good.

  That night I went through my bathroom cabinets and threw all my benzoyl peroxide creams and salicylic acid toners into a garbage bag. It felt important, ceremonial even. Alex had passed essential information on to me: Stop coating yourself in acid. We were bonded. Part of a distinct group with inside knowledge and secrets. The bag was enormous when I’d emptied the cabinets. A few years’ worth of ineffective goo. When I lugged it downstairs, I felt like I was hauling a dead body out for disposal. It thudded into the bottom of the trash can in the garage and it was like I’d shed a younger, dumber version of myself. One big step in the evolution of Kevin. I’d just have to hurl five or six more metaphors for my own corpse into dumpsters over the next few months and I’d be set.

  When I walked back inside, my parents looked over from the family room TV and asked what I’d thrown out. “Just some, uh, trash,” I said, clarifying nothing. They nodded, each wondering how it was possible for me to have masturbated into so many tissues that the bag of them was heavy enough to make a hard thud. I stared at the floor and went back to my room, thinking about that classic riddle: Which is emotionally heavier for parents to hear being thrown away, ten pounds of acne goo they paid a lot of money for or ten pounds of evidence of their son’s addiction to beating off?

  When I closed the door to my room I stopped caring about that embarrassment and picked up where I’d left off thinking about Alex.

  Over and over in my head, I replayed everything we’d said. Her touch, her soft smile when she laughed. My bland responses to her questions. My blank expressions. I started analyzing where I’d screwed up.

  I’d flinched like I’d been electrocuted when she touched me. How weird was that? How noticeable was it?

  I’d mumbled the few things I said to her. Completely forgotten almost all the lines I’d prepared. The words I’d managed to force out had dribbled out of my mouth like applesauce down a baby’s chin. I was such an idiot.

  I’d barely told her anything about myself. I’d barely asked her any questions.

  There were a million ways I could have handled it better. A million things I could have done but didn’t.

  But why did she touch me? Why did she talk to me at all? She could’ve just ignored me after I gave her back her earbuds, but she chose to talk to me. And she left me with a See you next month? Her voice definitely rose at the end; I was certain I heard a question mark. She asked me to confirm that she’d be able to see me again.

  Was it possible . . . ? There was no way. But maybe? Did she . . . ? Did she like me?

  No. Right? I just occupied her time for a few minutes in a boring waiting room where there was nothing else to do. I amused her. I was a novelty. I was a carnival game that lights up when you throw balls at it and holds your attention for three minutes.

  No, it was more than that. She’d noticed me the month before and she’d remembered me. I remembered none of the other weirdos in the waiting room besides her. And she remembered me well enough to notice my face was getting better.

  I let myself hope as I lay down in bed, shut my eyes, and saw us talking and holding hands under the waiting room armrests.

  After a while I went downstairs, got on the computer while Mom, Dad, and Kate watched TV behind me, put headphones in, and read a summary of Anna Karenina. It was about this smart, interesting woman stuck in a marriage with this guy she hates, and she falls in love with this other guy. And, well, things don’t really work out for her.

  It sounded complicated and melancholy and beautiful. Mature. A step forward. It was exactly the kind of thing Alex would love. I made some notes to the movie outline and started thinking that our movie didn’t have to be horror.

  In October, the high school’s hallways get covered with banners for the homecoming game and dance. This year’s had the same severe font as last year’s, which Luke, Will, and I had made fun of for making the dance seem like a mandatory military draft we planned to dodge. I wanted to make fun of the dance with them again, but I barely saw them outside of school anymore because they were at football practice all the time. I saw them pretty much all day during school, but they mainly talked about football and it just wasn’t the same.

  At lunch they’d tell stories about what happened at practice the day before. They’d both experienced these events in real time, so I didn’t get why they were even telling the stories in the first place. I mostly just sat back and observed them while I ate my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. When the guys brought up that they were all going to the homecoming dance with some girls from Emma’s group, I almost choked. “Wait, what?”

  They claimed they were all just going as friends. Since when were they friends with those girls? Did they talk online? Did they call each other on the phone? When was the orientation held where everyone announced it was time to start having friendships with girls outside of class projects?

  Whatever. I didn’t care that I wasn’t roped into their new, generic posse of kids I barely knew. Something about them playing football made me even more removed, more distant, more certain that I was different from all of them. They were just normal, boring high-schoolers; every day with them was a rerun of a TV show I’d already seen. I was writing a movie. I was fixing my face with medicine strong enough to mutate a baby. I had a girl outside of school none of them knew about.

  On Saturday afternoon Mom forced me to go over to Luke’s house, where their group was taking pictures before going to the homecoming dance, even though I wasn’t going. I had better things to do than awkwardly stand around the gymnasium floor on a Saturday night watching Sam and Patrick try to entertain a bunch of girls by acting like animals in heat.

  When I’d said I was going to stay home, Mom had said, “Kevin!” and I’d shrugged. Then she’d said, “Honey, what do you think? He only gets one sophomore homecoming dance.”

  Dad had bent down the corner of his newspaper and said, “Whatever he wants to do is fine. Do whatever makes you
happy, Kevin.”

  I’d drawn a blank. Lying flat on my bedroom carpet thinking about Alex would probably concern my parents, especially if I demonstrated the open-casket pose that was, honestly, just the most comfortable way to do that.

  Mom said I could skip the dance if I went over to Luke’s for pictures, and she told me I should shave so I looked nice. My probably-below-average testosterone levels mean I shave about once every two months, and doing it with acne is like running a lawn mower over a pile of water balloons. I didn’t want to look at my face, so I shaved with my eyes focused on my bathroom sink and cut myself a dozen times and had to dab the cuts with toilet paper for fifteen minutes until they scabbed over. I covered my face in moisturizer and tried to think about how nice it would be when the afternoon was over and I could go back to my room by myself.

  When I walked into Luke’s house, I saw Luke, Will, Sam, and Patrick pretending to box each other and doing impressions of football coaches I didn’t know, plus four of the God Squad girls standing on the deck taking pictures of themselves. I knew who they were — Lauren Gordon, Jen Evans, Veronica Wesson, and Haley Jackson — since I’d gone to school with them since second grade, but I didn’t really know them at all. I probably wouldn’t be able to identify any signature trait or article of clothing if one of them got kidnapped. They were bland background characters defined only by their snobbish blond-haired suburban Christianity. I’d spent thousands of hours in the same building as them, and everything remotely interesting about them could be written on a gum wrapper: Lauren cried when she’d get a grade lower than 90, Jen played either soccer or volleyball, Veronica was obsessed with adding more recycling bins to the school even though it was clearly only about puffing up her college application, and there was a rumor that Haley’s dad was an extra in the rave scene of The Matrix Reloaded, but how was anyone supposed to verify that?

  Seeing those girls outside of school felt wrong. I thought if I tried to touch them, my hand would pass right through.

  Luke’s dad slapped my back and shook me out of the trance I was in. “Where’s your suit, Kev?”