by Matt Burns
“We are?”
“I think so. Patrick invited me. He didn’t tell you?”
“I guess not.”
“I mean . . . I’m sure you could just come. It wouldn’t be weird. He probably just forgot to mention it.”
“No, it’s cool. I’ve got plans.”
“Oh, okay, cool.” Will walked away.
I spent the night alone in my room, working on my movie outline and watching my download of Before Sunrise, and I enjoyed every goddamned second.
After my parents and Kate were asleep, I went downstairs to the family room computer and deleted my bookmarks to the horror movie websites I used to read and saved new forums and blogs that covered the kinds of movies and music Alex and I liked.
The week after Halloween, we had an overnight field trip to south Georgia. I was rooming with Luke, Will, Sam, and Patrick. There were only supposed to be four people in each room, but Luke and Will insisted that I should be in theirs, so the school made an exception. I honestly would have been fine sleeping on the bus.
The night before we left, I was worried about the guys seeing my pills or face washes and having to explain everything to them, so I spent an hour reading articles online about techniques drug mules use to smuggle contraband. One popular method was to use a body cavity as the transport container, but I thought that walked a philosophical fine line I didn’t want to cross, where I might have to admit to myself and my dermatologist that I’d lost my virginity to a condom full of Accutane I inserted into my own anus. Instead I popped enough pills for the trip out of the cardboard pack, put them in a sandwich bag, stuffed them into a sock, then wrapped the sock in seven other socks. I tucked the socks and my face wash and moisturizers inside two T-shirts and buried the bundle in the bottom of my backpack under my other clothes.
I sat with the guys on the bus ride down and listened to them talk about fantasy football for hours, rattling off players I’d never heard of and stats that weren’t interesting and would never matter.
Patrick noticed me at some point and tried to include me in the conversation. “Kevin, I heard you’re writing, like, a romance novel for Meyer’s lit project.”
“What?”
“My mom heard it from Luke’s mom or something. Is it like a funny romance book or something? I bet you could write a funny dumb romance book.”
Everyone turned to stare at me. Like all twenty guys at the back of the bus. My face turned red and I could hear my heart pounding. “Uh . . . no,” I mumbled. “Luke and Will are in the group, too, but . . . it’s a different thing. We’re making a movie. Never mind. It’s not a big deal or anything. Forget it.”
There was a pause that felt like an hour. Goddamn it. I’d already made this vow to myself a thousand times, but seriously, I needed to stop telling Mom anything. How had she contorted a movie script into a romance novel? Suburban moms are modern-day versions of medieval minstrels, spinning minor events into bullshit legends. Makes you wonder if Homer was a middle-aged mother and Odysseus was just her son who went for a walk one time.
“Yo, Kevin,” Luke said, “let’s do a scene where someone gets hit by a bus. Or, like, no, the killer disguises himself as the driver of the bus for this football team! Shit, yeah, everyone’s stuck on the bus with the killer.”
The other guys screamed and piled on more bad ideas inspired by objects around them at the time they decided to think about the movie. The way a trout would come up with movie ideas. Christ, they were morons.
Eventually they lost interest and went back to their original conversation, which was basically just Luke, Sam, and Patrick saying, “Remember at football practice when the Measure Man or Job, Joob, Jerb, and Merb or Nip Juice J ate twenty-six mozzarella sticks or jumped off a roof and sprained his ankle or farted really loudly?” It was like Mad Libs for uninteresting people who don’t think of new ideas.
At one point, Sam said to me, “Dude, why aren’t you laughing? It was hilarious.”
“Hearing about a secondhand fart just isn’t as funny as hearing the actual fart,” I said, like I was some ass scientist with a lab full of brown beakers. “I mean, I’m sure it would have been funny if I’d been right there next to the fart.”
Sam nodded. He had no counterargument to my airtight thesis.
We spent the day listening to bearded old men explain how the forts and moats that lost the Civil War were designed by the state’s most skilled racists. No one learned anything.
That night I unpacked my contraband in the bathroom under the cover of the noisy shower and was able to stick to my nighttime face-washing routine without anyone knowing. I stayed up pretty late in the hotel room with the other guys, listening to stories about the household objects they’d put their penises inside.
I didn’t say much. I wasn’t sure if I jerked off way too much or not enough, and it was too risky to say something weird in either direction. I felt like Goldilocks chasing that magic, perfectly normal, impossible-to-pinpoint median number of masturbation sessions per week. So I mostly sat on the bed against the wall listening.
I couldn’t figure out if their stories were actually true or if they were just trying to top each other. They were so competitive about everything, even the strangeness of the pillows and coat pockets they’d had sex with. Either way, the stories were kind of funny. Maybe I was just too tired to think straight, but I started having a good time. It felt like a sleepover from eighth grade, like how it was supposed to be.
Around three a.m., we finally turned off the lights. Will kept watching TV, but the rest of us tried to sleep. My face hurt from laughing as I drifted off.
Sam woke us up by shouting, “Shit!”
He ran to the bathroom and we asked him what happened, but he wouldn’t say anything. Patrick looked over next to him in bed, where Sam had been sleeping, and screamed. “Holy shit! Sam had a wet dream.”
I laughed harder at that quarter-size stain on the sheets than I’d ever laughed at any professional comedian, movie, or TV show. Patrick and Luke knocked on the bathroom door and asked Sam if he’d enjoyed himself. Sam said it was an incredible experience and we were all just jealous that we didn’t have one. He said the dream involved a refrigerator and I don’t know if he was kidding.
Throughout the day, while we learned nothing from old men about Native American burial mounds, Sam told all the other guys about his wet dream. He should have been mortified, but instead he got funnier every time he told the story. He’d spin this tale of his magical dream that kept getting grander and more ridiculous, like he was some traveling salesman pitching the world on his new discovery of nocturnal emissions.
I couldn’t believe how confident he was about it. He took the most embarrassing thing ever and acted like he was proud of it and no one gave him any shit. The algorithm that decides what and who is cool in tenth grade continues to make zero sense.
The hotel bathroom was calm and quiet when I washed my face that night. I turned the shower on, locked the door, and spread my products out on the counter. The other guys had each only brought a toothbrush and a shriveled, crusted-over tube of toothpaste. Actually Will hadn’t even brought those. He brushed with my toothpaste on his finger.
I lost track of time in the bathroom washing and moisturizing my face and taking my pill. There were lots of purple and pink scars around my mouth and nose, but there weren’t any big whiteheads. Definitely an improvement. I focused on the spots between the scars: patches of legitimately decent-looking skin. I smiled a little.
Luke knocked on the door. “Yo, we’re gonna meet up with Mac and Cheese and some of the other guys.”
I’d never spoken to either Mac or Cheese. They were best friends named Marissa MacDonald and Brie Castillo, but ever since we all watched the Passport to French Cuisine videotape in sixth grade, they’d been known as the singular entity Mac and Cheese. They embraced the name and normalized it so even teachers addressed these two living human beings like they were a bowl of orange noodles. The only thing I
really knew about them was that in seventh grade Marissa gave Luke a gift set of Axe body spray for Christmas. I was extremely jealous when he showed it to us on the bus. Not of the gift itself, since it sort of implied he smelled like garbage. But just the idea of receiving a gift from a girl. I would have been happy to get whooping cough from Samantha Shales, the girl who went to court in fifth grade for choking her brother.
I said, through the door, “What are you gonna do?”
“Sam said he thinks Lewis brought whiskey.”
I barely even knew who Lewis was. And I didn’t feel like sitting silently in the corner of a hotel room abstaining from drinking and mumbling excuses for why I can’t have alcohol without giving away that I’m on heavy-duty acne medicine — all for the privilege of probably getting caught and then suspended.
“That’s all right,” I said. “I’ll stay here.” I started rubbing the moisturizer, in pea-size dabs on a cotton ball, across my forehead and onto my cheeks.
“Sure?”
“Yeah. You guys can go, though. I should stay back here in case a teacher comes by or something. I’ll say we’re all in here and not open the door.”
I heard Luke walk back to the other guys and explain that I had a good point and would stay back to guard the room.
“He should come,” Patrick said. “It’s gonna be fun. Is he, like, scared or something?”
I stopped moisturizing and stood still.
“I don’t know,” said Luke.
“It’s fine,” said Will. “He just doesn’t like hanging out with other people sometimes. We’ll see him when we get back.”
They overestimated how thick those motel walls were. I could practically hear the three gross, wiry hairs on Sam’s chin crinkle when he spoke. “Is he embarrassed about his pimples?” he said. “He should just, like, wash his face with soap. That’s all you have to do. It’s not that hard.”
Luke knocked on the bathroom door on their way out. “Thanks for holding down the room. We’ll see you later.”
“Yep,” I said. “No problem.”
Once the sounds of their footsteps faded, the room was completely silent. I finished applying my moisturizer, patted my face dry, and put on a clean T-shirt. I sat on the bed and tried to calm down by focusing on the sound of my own breathing. But Sam’s words kept replaying in my head. “He should just wash his face with soap. It’s not that hard.”
What the hell did he think I was doing in the bathroom for the past twenty minutes? Should I show him the bag of pills I had to bring with me for those pimples? Should I point out the vein on my arm that gets drained every month and tell him it’s slightly more complicated than washing my face with soap? It would be pointless. He had no idea what he was talking about. Sorry we can’t all be like you, Sam. Flawless, smooth skin, carefree attitude, proud of your nocturnal emissions, for whom stress is an alien emotion. That’s the kind of mind-set that gets you killed by a bus in an intersection.
What did Luke and Will see in Sam and Patrick? Why didn’t they want to hang out in the room with me? We could have watched movies. Made prank calls. Laughed at Mac and Cheese instead of fake-laughing with them in some pointless attempt to make out with them.
Sam and Patrick were assholes. I’d made a great decision to stay back in the room.
Sometime later, as I was flipping over the pillows searching for the TV remote, I heard a guy and a girl talking in the room next door. Their words were faint and muffled, so I got on my knees at the head of the bed and pressed my ear into the wall.
“Stop being boring,” the guy said. “You’re being lame as shit.”
“Sorry. Why can’t we stay here and spend time together, just us?” It was Emma, Luke’s old girlfriend. The ass talking to her was Kyle Hornchuck, who had taken her to homecoming.
“Just come with me. All my friends are already there.”
“Then go be with your friends. Tell them your girlfriend is back here sitting alone in her hotel room.”
“What’s wrong with you?”
He was getting angry. Without thinking it through, I pounded my fist against the wall. Kyle stopped talking for a second. It threw him off. That’s right, tough guy. Look at me, standing up to a bully. I could handle tons of confrontation as long as there was a locked door and a load-bearing wall between me and the other person.
The distraction only lasted a second. He sounded even more pissed off than before when he said to Emma, “What’s wrong with you? Just come. Okay? Okay?”
“‘Okay,’ what?” Emma said. “Just go. I don’t care anymore. God.”
I walked out into the hallway and pounded on their door. Then I lowered my voice so I sounded like an idiot and said, “Yo, Kyle, Mac and Cheese have their tits out.”
I slipped back into my room as Kyle said, “We need to talk later,” stepped into the hall, shouted, “Wait up!” and sprinted to the elevator.
I opened the door and poked my head into the hallway to make sure he was gone. Emma stuck her head out to do the same thing. She turned to look at me and I froze, eyes bulging, front teeth biting my frown like a beaver about to be decapitated by a Jet Ski. I figured I should have been proud, like I was some knight who’d saved her, but all I could think about was the phrase “Mac and Cheese have their tits out,” which I had just said, out loud, and which did not seem particularly valiant.
“Hey,” she said. “Did you . . . ?”
“Yeah. Um, that was me.”
“Do they really have their . . . ?”
“Oh. No. Well, I have no idea. It’s possible.”
She paused for a second. “Are you doing anything?”
I shook my head.
“Want to hang out?”
I shrugged and she opened the door to let me into her room. It was a mess of girls’ clothes and bags spilled everywhere, this fantasy realm that smelled like candy. I didn’t know it was possible to make a hotel room smell good.
I’d hung out with Emma a few times when she was going out with Luke last year, but I’d never really talked to her much one-on-one. It’s like the Sun-Maid raisin lady you’ve seen your whole life but never really gotten to know. Then all of a sudden you’re alone with the raisin lady and start to realize she might have been a stone-cold babe the whole time. And she’s wearing flannel pajama pants and a baggy T-shirt, and her brown hair is pulled back into this very casual ponytail, and you suddenly notice just how nice her lips are as she sits up against the headboard of the bed with her knees pulled into her chest, a casual pose you never see girls do at school. It feels private, like she’s letting you in on a secret by being so comfortable with you.
I wondered if she’d been able to hear us talking about wet dreams that morning. Had she heard every disgusting, stupid thing I’d said the night before? I stood there looking like an anatomy class skeleton while my brain tried to process exactly how embarrassed I should feel.
“Want to sit down?” she said.
“Sure.” I crawled across the bed, aware of my every movement. I felt like a gigantic baby. A real, genuine idiot on all fours. And the crawl felt like it took forty-five minutes. I finally sat next to her on top of the covers. I took a deep breath and accidentally swallowed a lungful of her shampoo and had to tell myself the feeling wasn’t love.
She turned on the TV and flipped through movie channels. “Kyle’s an asshole,” she said. “I’d always kind of known it, but now . . . I don’t know. Or maybe he’s right. Maybe I’m lame. Maybe I am a prude. And I’ve been all bloated and gross since I started taking birth control, which is super annoying because the whole point of being on it was to make me feel better, not worse and — You okay?”
I’d frozen at the words birth control, eyes locked on what must have been the world’s least-comfortable armchair. Birth control? What happened to her God Squad abstinence pledge?
She noticed my slack-jawed confusion and said, “Oh, the birth control is for period cramps. It’s . . . Sorry. I’m still saying way too much.”
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“No, it’s, um, it’s fine. I was just . . . thinking about something else,” I said, trying to shake the images of her and Kyle getting it on in that stiff chair. “Anyway, no offense, since you, like, liked Kyle or whatever, but he’s been a dick since fourth grade. And he’s got to be — again, no offense — a ridiculously huge dumb-ass to fall for what I did. That should not have worked.”
She nodded.
I asked, “Where are your roommates?”
“They’re all in Jen’s room. I was supposed to hang out with Kyle, but . . . whatever. Where are your roommates?”
“They, uh, went out. Just went out. I don’t know where.”
“They went to see Marissa and Brie, didn’t they?”
“That might have been on their agenda. I can’t confirm or deny.”
We both laughed a little.
She flipped through movies until she landed on a high-school romantic comedy. “Remember when me and you and Luke and Will used to watch movies in Luke’s basement? We’d laugh at movies like this, saying how the kids in them are such morons.”
“I still prefer movies over having to deal with, like, real-life high-school morons.”
She smiled at me. I was pretty happy I’d said that. It just came out of me, unfiltered and real. For a minute I felt a wave of guilt, like I was cheating on Alex with Emma. No, it was fine. We weren’t doing anything. If anything, it was a test run for when Alex and I would be together. It confirmed what I wanted in a relationship: staying in, watching movies, being untethered, safe, comfortably alone together.
We sat there watching the movie for a while. At some point I got up to go to the bathroom and saw about a hundred different bottles of face washes, toners, and moisturizers. Those four girls had enough product to stock an aisle at the drugstore. They spoke my language. I was home.
There was a little zip-up case that had EMMA embroidered on it. Inside I saw a bottle of the Neutrogena nighttime moisturizer I used. I gasped.
“Is that your Neutrogena moisturizer?” I said when I came back out.