by Matt Burns
I pulled my sixth-grade yearbook off the shelf to try to remember. I looked at my picture. I didn’t have acne, but I was chubby and had a bowl cut. I guess it was a trade-off. Maybe when my skin cleared up, I’d grow a potato-size cyst on my neck to keep my overall value even.
I found no clarity about my feelings in that picture. It might as well have been of some other kid. I remembered things I’d done but couldn’t think back to feeling sad or stressed out or even happy or excited. My memories were all facts and information, all quantitative. It was like I knew the list of ingredients that made up my middle-school years, but I didn’t remember how the recipe actually tasted. I couldn’t decide if that was a good thing or a bad thing.
I shut the yearbook and fished around my desk drawer for my list of questions to ask Alex at our next appointment. I read through my questions over and over so I wouldn’t forget them. I’d find out about her life and I’d tell her about my movie. Our snow-globe-waiting-room world would have no noise and no chaos, nothing but us.
“Is everything okay?” is probably the least effective question a parent can ask. Despite its zero percent success rate, Mom persists.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” I said. I had the minivan stopped at a red light on the way to the blood test place after school, trying to rehearse my questions for Alex in my head. Mom sat in the passenger seat and I could feel her staring at me as I accelerated.
“Mrs. Rossi mentioned earlier today that the guys and the girls they took to homecoming went out to Waffle House with all the other kids from school after the football game last weekend.”
“Yes,” I said, picturing myself asking Alex, When do you —?
“But she said you didn’t go with them.”
“Yeah,” I said, trying to picture myself asking Alex, How far from —?
“It sounded like fun. You didn’t want to go?” she said.
“No.” How long does it take you to —?
“You know I don’t want to be a mother who gets involved in her son’s business, but . . .”
“But what?” How many siblings —?
“Did something happen between you and the guys?”
Goddamn it. “I just didn’t feel like going. I’m sorry. I’ll be grounded forever because I didn’t want to eat Waffle House scrambled eggs and hash browns immediately before going to sleep.”
“Kevin. She said Luke and Will have been going to all the football games this season. But you’d told me no one went.”
“I just didn’t want to go. It’s not a big deal.”
“Okay. That’s fine.” She was quiet for a minute. “Would you tell me if anything was wrong?”
“Sure,” I lied. There was no point in spilling my emotional guts to her. She’d get on a conference call with every mom from school and let them all know that poor wittle Kevin was a sad wittle boy.
The stiff silence in the car made the last five minutes of the drive feel like ten hours. Finally I pulled into a parking space and told Mom I’d be back later. On the walk through the parking deck, I reviewed as many of my conversation notes in my head as I could remember. I didn’t let myself think about the possibility that Alex wouldn’t be there, about how much luck would have to pile up for us to once again be in the exact same place at the exact same time. I held my breath as I pushed open the door — and there she was, in her usual spot.
The bumps underneath her makeup hadn’t gone away. Her hair was kind of wavy or something, and it wasn’t in a ponytail; it was tucked behind her ears. The color was a little different from what I remembered — lighter, maybe — and it looked very good with her jeans and purple sweater. I don’t know how to talk about a girl’s appearance without sounding like some illiterate brute. Clothing is like another language I never learned how to speak. I wanted to tell her she looked good, or pretty or whatever, but I figured that would come off as creepy, so instead I played it suave by staring at the carpet and not saying anything.
She looked up from her book and our eyes caught each other’s. She nodded at me. I sat in the chair beside her. It felt right. “Hey,” she said. “Your skin looks good. Did you stop using salicylic acid?”
“Yeah.” Holy shit, she’d remembered our conversation. Thirty days had passed and her memory of me had withstood it all. I froze for a second, zapped by her words into a smiling mannequin who couldn’t string a coherent thought together.
Stop. Focus. Remember the questions. “So, how, uh, how long have you been here?”
“Ten minutes, maybe?”
“Cool. Any traffic on the way over?”
“Nope.”
“What time did you get up this morning?”
“Uh . . . ?” She shifted her eyes around, confused. “Seven thirty?”
“Nice. So, uh . . . When, then, I guess, did you go to sleep?”
She sat up and leaned toward me. “Are you, like, wearing a wire?”
“What?”
“You’re, like, grilling me with questions like you’re trying to get me to admit to, I guess, not getting enough sleep?”
Shit. My questions made me sound insane. Dad’s advice was not relevant to this situation at all. I was trying to bond with a girl, not make small talk to sell a condo. “Sorry. I’m just . . . I don’t know. It’s . . .” My face turned red and my whole body got hot.
She tilted her head at me. She looked me in the eye and I felt like I was being inspected. Something in her expression softened, like she let her guard down. “What happened to your head?” She reached over and brushed the hair off my forehead to reveal the scab where the pimple had exploded at the football game. I felt adrenaline surge through me as her finger made contact. I felt like Adam getting that touch from God, except, fortunately, my penis wasn’t hanging out.
“I, uh, went to a football game I didn’t want to go to. Made the mistake of trying to fit in and got elbowed in the face.”
She pulled her hand away. “Sorry for, you know, touching your face. My hands are clean. Promise.” She held up her hands to demonstrate how clean they were. Objectively I didn’t give a shit about fingernails, but hers were purple and I adored them.
“It’s okay,” I said.
“I touched your hand last time, too. That was weird. Sorry.”
Why was she apologizing for my favorite moments of my entire life?
She said, “What’s going on in your life?”
“Huh? Oh, uh, not really, uh . . . not much.”
“Really? Come on. How are you?”
I shrugged. “Fine. I guess.” I hadn’t prepared answers to any of her questions, so the standard autoresponses fired out.
“You sure there’s nothing bothering you?”
Her eyebrow lifted and all my Dad-sanctioned robot questions evaporated from my memory and this corked-up emotional shit spray blew out instead: “You ever realize that everything and everyone is the worst?”
She laughed a little and slid her book into her bag. “Oh yeah?”
I nodded. “My best friends are . . . I don’t know. They joined the football team, but then they got hurt and even though they aren’t on the team anymore, they’re still friends with all those guys — and girls, too — and I think they’re, like, leaving me behind.”
Oh, no. Why did I say that? Why did I let that self-doubt and weakness spurt out?
She leaned in closer to me. “Oh, wow,” she said. “That sounds hard.”
“Heh,” I laughed nervously, feeling myself redden.
“Do you wish you joined the team with them?”
“Well . . . no. That’s part of what sucks. I replay everything that happened to see what I’d change and there’s nothing. I’d do it all the same and always end up . . . like . . . alone and stressed.”
I couldn’t believe I’d said all that. It just spilled out of me and for some reason I wasn’t embarrassed. Maybe it was the way she looked at me, with genuine interest.
She said, “Do they, like, not talk to you anymore at school?”
&n
bsp; “No, they do. Everything’s technically the same between the three of us at school, but it feels completely different. They brought these annoying new guys into our group.”
She nodded. “That sucks.”
I laughed a little. “It’s all right. It’s . . . I don’t know. Did your school have homecoming and all that stuff?”
“Unfortunately.”
“Yeah, it’s such a waste of time,” I said. “I don’t even get the whole concept. It’s supposed to be for people who graduated to come back to their high school? What kind of insane person would voluntarily come back to their high school after they finished?”
She smiled.
I said, “My friends and their jackass new friends went, but I skipped it.”
“No girl to ask?” She raised an eyebrow. “Got a crush on anyone?”
“No,” I lied, feeling my armpit birth a beetle-size drop of sweat. “My mom made me go to my friend’s house when he and all his new friends and some girls were taking pictures for homecoming. I barely even know who those girls are, but suddenly Luke and Will are blowing me off to go watch dumb romantic comedies with them. It’s annoying. I kept staring at the guys when we took the pictures. I’d never seen them in suits before. They looked like adults. I don’t understand why school dances even exist. I’m convinced literally no one wants to go. It’s entirely peer pressure.”
“Could be. Did they have fun?”
“They talked about it like they did, but I always think that’s, like, some teenage Stockholm syndrome, where you do all this stuff you don’t actually want to do and then to survive, your brain convinces you that you had fun when you really just wanted to be curled in the fetal position under your covers.”
She smiled and leaned her head back against the wall. “It sounds like things are really overwhelming.”
“Yeah. Definitely overwhelming. That’s the word for it.”
“I get it. My mom moved out and . . . and I get being overwhelmed.” She shook her head. “When you get stressed, do you ever worry about your heart stopping? For no reason? Sometimes I worry that if I think about it too much, about how I don’t really get why my heart just keeps beating on its own, it’ll be like shining a spotlight on it and it’ll freeze up and forget its lines and just stop beating. Like I’ll just be standing at Target and drop dead.” She laughed and closed her eyes. “I sound crazy.”
“No, it’s . . . It’s, uh . . .” I floundered, unable to think of anything except the fact that I was unable to think of anything. But then something clicked and I said, “Everyone knows the heart is like a sixth grader on the opening night of the school play.” We both laughed and she had no idea I was feeling the same adrenaline and endorphin rush Tony Hawk felt when he landed the first nine hundred.
She looked over to the receptionist and rolled her eyes. “It’s taking forever today.”
I hadn’t noticed.
“I wonder if someone back there’s getting bad news,” she said.
“Like, just finding out they have no blood at all in their veins?”
“Or they have a terminal illness.”
“Right. Yeah. Yikes. I, uh . . .” I suddenly saw my opening in the conversation. I shifted closer to her. “What would you do if you found out?”
“That I was gonna die soon?”
“Yeah. Like, how would you end yourself? If it was ending anyway so you had to?”
Her eyes narrowed while she thought.
I pounced: “Sleeping pills for me. Or leave the car running in the garage. Fade out comfortably, you know? I don’t think I’d have Cecilia’s guts to jump, or Bonnie’s arm strength to tie a noose.”
She nodded, smiling. She got my Virgin Suicides references. Proof we were on the same wavelength, that we overlapped on the pie chart of things we liked. The thinnest little slice, this barely visible line where only the two of us lived.
“You wouldn’t try to make the most of it? Definitely suicide for you?” she said.
“I mean, if you know you’re gonna die anyway, is it suicide? Or is it just taking control? Maybe I’m just impatient. Like, let’s just get it over with.”
She leaned closer to me and whispered, “Have you ever really thought about killing yourself?”
I leaned toward her and our heads were just a few inches apart. I whispered, “Just when life’s at its bleakest, like when the internet goes out.”
She laughed a little and I had to suppress the urge to sprint around the waiting room high-fiving nurses. She got me and my sense of humor. She said, “Wait, so, what’s the project your friends are messing up?”
“Oh! Right! Well, we’re . . . I’m making a movie. Our language arts teacher gave us this assignment that lasts the entire year and all we have to do is tell the class a story. Most people will just rush some lame comic strip or something two days before it’s due, but we’re gonna make a full movie to premiere at this film festival our teacher helps run.”
Her eyes got wide. She was impressed.
“Or, at least, I’ll make the movie. I’m the only one putting any effort in now, but — I’ll figure it out.”
“So . . . ?”
“What?”
“What’s it about?”
“Oh! Right. Sorry. So, yeah . . . it’s about this musician who’s kind of like Elliott Smith, who goes on tour and . . . and he falls in love with this girl — or this woman — and he, uh . . .” Shit. I couldn’t remember which of my thousands of bullet points I’d decided to use. “Well, he, uh . . .” My brain started writing new scenes on the spot. Things she’d like. “So he’s in, like, Russia for a concert and he falls in love with this woman. They meet on a train and stay up talking all night.”
“Is that a reference to . . . ? Isn’t there some other movie . . . ?”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Before Sunrise.” I knew she’d get that and like it. Now I had to watch it. I had it downloaded, so I was halfway there. “And so he and this woman, they . . . they decide to run away from everything and flee to Italy.” I was pretty sure that’s what the people in Anna Karenina did.
“Wow. Cool.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said through my smile. “And there’s stuff kind of based on . . . all this.” I waved my hand at the waiting room. “He gets sent to a hospital in Italy. He meets all these other interesting people, and — and there’s this crazy structure with these flashbacks to memories and — and . . . I mean, I’ve got a ton more outlined.”
“That’s awesome,” she said.
“Yeah.” The movie I’d just described was nothing like the one I’d tried pitching to the guys, but Alex seemed really into it — maybe I was onto something. Chasing after her made me better. “Oh, and since music will be a big part of it, I wanted to talk to you about what other bands you li — ”
“Alex?” the receptionist called from behind the counter. “For the fourth time, Alex Mae? M-A-E? Are you here, Alex?”
She sprang up from the chair. “I didn’t hear her before. Did you?”
I shook my head. Why couldn’t that receptionist have been eaten by a snake on her way to work that morning?
“Keep me updated on your movie. I want to read the script. And see you next month, right?”
I nodded and as she walked away, I imagined the two of us on the couch in our pajamas. We watch some French movie and she puts her sort-of-wavy, sort-of-light-brown hair up, effortlessly pulling together a knot she doesn’t know is beautiful.
When I came out from my blood drawing, she had left and it felt like part of myself had gone missing.
That night the vision of my future life together with Alex — Alex Mae — crystallized in my brain. I stared at a chart in my chemistry textbook for an hour while I lived with her in my head. I didn’t picture us at a bar or some dumb nightclub or any place people go hoping to be seen. We walk together down an aisle at Target in hoodies and jeans. We’re unguarded, open, safe. The other halves of each other, barely having to talk. Understanding each other’s glanc
es and movements, bound by our secret language. Pointing at things and laughing, making other people wish they understood.
I closed my chemistry textbook, accepting that I’d get a zero on the homework. I went downstairs to the computer and started searching for her again. I’d already searched for Alex Mae, Alexandra Mae, Alexis Mae, Alexandria Mae. Nothing had turned up. Maybe she went by her middle name online. Or maybe she didn’t bother with social media at all; maybe she’d decided not to participate in any of that mess.
Did I even need to find her online? Why would I want old digital photos of her, when I knew her in real life? What I needed to do was take a step forward at our next appointment. I’d told her the truth of how I felt about my friends, so I should tell her my real feelings about her: I like you.
At the end of seventh period on Halloween, my teacher handed me the packet of hundreds of photos Mom had ordered back on picture day. I didn’t want to see whatever weird airbrushing had happened, so I crammed the pictures into my backpack before I, or anyone else, could see.
At my locker, I shoved my books on top of the already-dirty, bent envelope. Will walked over to me right after I’d buried it. “So, are we, like, not going to your house for horror movies this year?” he asked.
“What? I mean, no, I hadn’t really even thought about it.” We always watched slasher movies in my basement on Halloween, but I hadn’t planned anything. I didn’t feel like watching more identical, crappy horror movies that were all rip-offs of each other, and I didn’t want to have to deal with Luke inviting Sam and Patrick and probably the girls from homecoming.
“Okay, yeah,” Will said. “Just making sure, since I guess we’re all going to Jen’s house.”