by Matt Burns
“Oh — yeah. Sorry it’s so messy in there. I meant to clean it up, but — ”
“I use the same stuff.”
“Cool?” she said, laughing a little.
I sat back beside her against the headboard. “It’s good, I guess. Gets the, uh, job done.”
“Yeah.”
We watched the movie silently for a while. I couldn’t tell what it was, exactly — perfume or shampoo or laundry detergent or some other liquid I’d never heard of — but she smelled as good as a human has ever smelled. I kept thinking about looking over at her, but it would be too risky. Our eyes touching could set off a spark I wouldn’t be able to handle, causing some emotional reaction that would seep into the half of my head space reserved for Alex. You’re just friends. She went out with Luke. You’re not allowed to like her. I didn’t pay attention to the movie at all. I just lay there like a corpse in a morgue freezer, thinking about how we had the exact same moisturizer on our faces.
Out of nowhere, she offered, “I think I’m gonna break up with Kyle.”
“Really?” My eyes dilated with excitement.
“Yeah.”
“Oh, wow. That’s awesome. Cool. Really cool.” Those words felt off-key. She was describing a relationship ending and I was describing a red electric guitar.
“I guess.”
After a second, a Blink-182 song played over part of the movie and Emma mentioned they were one of her favorite bands. I smiled and nodded, remembering when I used to be into them, and thought about sending her some links to other bands she could get into.
Before I could mention anything, though, her phone rang and she answered, “Hey, Mama.” She got off the bed, motioned to me that she’d be a minute, and stepped into the bathroom. I focused my attention on the wall between us so I could eavesdrop better.
“Yeah, it’s a lot of fun. Learning a ton. Did you know the Okefenokee Swamp got its name from the Indian word for trembling earth? . . . I know, right? . . . We’re just all back at the hotel now, hanging out. . . . Yeah, they’re all here. How’s Mark doing? . . . Okay, well, give him a hug for me. I miss you all, too. Okay. Wait, you start or me?” She giggled. “Okay, okay. ‘Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. And if I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. Amen.’ . . . Love you, too, Mama.”
The call felt honest, like I’d seen behind a curtain. I’d heard how she was with her parents. The little-kid names she still used for them. I saw a version of her that almost no one else gets to see. I’m not religious. Her prayer should have weirded me out. Talking about the Lord taking her soul in the night like he was a blade-wielding slasher crouched in a tree outside her window. But it didn’t weird me out the way she’d said it.
“Sorry if I was loud,” she said when she stepped back into the room. “Just a quick parental check-in.”
“Do you do those a lot?”
“Every night I’m not home, yeah.”
“Do they, like, make you?”
“I don’t really mind. I know it’s not, like, cool and rebellious and whatever to like your parents, but I do. I want them to know what’s going on in my life.” She shrugged and lay back down on top of the covers beside me and we watched the movie for another minute until she yawned and shut her eyes for a few seconds. I closed mine, too, thinking it might be nice if we both happened to fall asleep beside each other. But she said she was going to try to sleep, so I said I’d do the same thing and would see her later. That was probably for the best. My fantasy made no practical sense. Her roommates would come back, and after that Kyle Hornchuck would’ve found us, grabbed me by the ankles, and shot-putted me through the sliding glass door and into the dumpster in the parking lot.
I got in my bed and replayed the night. Emma had been so open with me, and I’d felt so comfortable lying there next to her. She had layers I never knew about, things I bet Luke never even discovered when they were dating. She actually liked her parents. I don’t know why that was such a big deal to me. When everything about teenage culture is all “fuck adults, fuck teachers, fuck the establishment,” maybe the most rebellious thing you can do is have a good relationship with your parents. And she was relaxed enough around me to let me in on that part of her life.
Was it possible that Emma liked me? She’d invited me into her room when she could have just nodded at me in the hall and shut her door. I’d shown her the kind of wonderfully serene evening, staring at a television, that she could have every night with a guy like me. And she’d told me about her birth control and being bloated and wanting to dump Kyle. Those aren’t the sorts of things girls go around telling just anyone. My heart sped up as the clues piled up.
But shit. I couldn’t ask Emma out, even if she did want me to. Mostly there was Alex. But even without Alex, there was still the fact that Emma was Luke’s ex. If I asked her out, it would violate the unspoken agreement between us to not be weird and go out with girls the other one had gone out with.
I smiled at the ceiling in the dark. This was kind of a good problem to have. How had I gotten myself into a situation where I was suddenly so emotionally close to two different girls? I couldn’t have talked to Emma so openly and directly without figuring out how to do that with Alex. It was working. Alex was making me a better version of myself.
Luke, Will, Sam, and Patrick stumbled back into the room around one thirty a.m., loud and amped up. They shut out the light and Luke got into bed with me, his feet next to my head, since I guess the prospect of us accidentally sixty-nineing in the middle of the night was preferable to making close-range eye contact. “Dude, it was insane,” he said. “You should have been there.”
I smiled, so happy I hadn’t gone.
The hotel breakfast buffet was just like the cafeteria, with kids sitting in the same groups, except everyone was adhering to a dress code of pajama pants, old T-shirts, and slippers that hadn’t been communicated to me. I was the only person fully dressed in jeans and my brown coat. I sat down at a table with Luke and Will while Sam and Patrick got in line for food.
“You should have been there last night,” Luke said. “It was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. Sam and Patrick are insane, dude. They’re the best.”
“Yeah, they’re all right,” I said.
“No, dude, you don’t even know them at all. You’ve never seen them in action. They’re hilarious.”
“It was funny,” Will confirmed.
Sam’s words from last night replayed in my head. Him saying that I should just wash my face with soap. That it really isn’t that hard to have clear, flawless skin. That my own filthy, uninformed habits are causing all my zits. I could see him and Patrick in line, holding breakfast sausages up to their crotches and cracking up. Those guys are jackasses. Unfunny jackasses with a fourth-grade understanding of comedy. “What the hell did they do that’s so funny?”
“Patrick got this bag of flour — ” said Will.
Luke continued: “And we were all out in the back parking lot, right, behind the rooms, and Patrick and me got behind the dumpster and called for Lewis to come around the side, and as soon as he did, we threw huge handfuls of flour right in his face.”
Will laughed. “He was so dusty. They call it antiquing someone.”
I stared at them. I didn’t laugh. Luke and Patrick both thought they were Ferris Bueller, and I felt like I was the only person who knew the truth, that they were just regular idiots. “All right,” I said.
“It was hilarious,” said Luke.
“They threw flour on Lewis. That’s not that funny.”
“You would have had to be there,” said Will. “It was really funny, if you’d seen it in person.”
I was getting sick of hearing them tell me that I would have had to be somewhere to see some stupid thing that wasn’t funny. What a bunch of assholes. All that flour would clog up anyone’s pores and seed a mountain range of pimples.
“We’ve gotta put that scene in the movie,” Luke said. “Maybe t
he villain’s, like, covered in flour all the time. Mr. Antique.”
I sighed and rolled my eyes. “The movie isn’t like that now. There’s no . . . There’s no villain or gory deaths or anything. It’s about real people who meet on a train in Russia and — ”
“Wait, what?” Will said.
Luke said, “Dude, you were yelling at us in your basement about how it was too hard to make fake blood so we shouldn’t do a horror movie, but now you want to, what, like, build a Russian train?”
“It’s . . . yeah, just . . . I’ll figure it out.”
“How the hell are you gonna build a train? And set an entire movie in Russia?”
“Well, part of it. But they flee to Italy and he goes to a hospital — ”
“You’re also planning to build an Italian hospital? Is that the name of your movie now? Italian Hospital? Tony Has Cancer? Where did any of this even come from? I don’t understand.”
“Well,” I said, “maybe if you guys weren’t wasting all your time with Sam and Patrick, you’d be writing with me.”
Luke said, “You just don’t get Sam and Patrick. Their humor. You don’t get it.”
“I get it,” I said. “I just don’t think it’s that funny.”
“No, it is,” said Luke. “They’re hilarious. They’re the funniest guys I’ve ever met. You should have come with us last night.”
My breathing got faster and I felt my face heating up. My hands squeezed into fists and my shoulders tensed. Luke didn’t know what I’d been up to last night without them. He had no idea about Emma and how there was a chance she was into me, but I was too good a friend to do anything about it. He just saw me as this pathetic shut-in loser covered in zits he wouldn’t have if he just washed his fucking face with soap. “Why the hell are you so obsessed with Sam and Patrick? You sound like you’re in love with them. When did you both turn gay for Sam and Patrick?”
They stared at me with wide-open eyes. I’d been loud. Really loud. I think I said it the exact moment the air conditioner had shut off and suddenly there was no background noise to drown me out. Everyone in the room stopped eating. They were all staring at me. Sam, Patrick, the football team, the band kids, Mac, Cheese, all the other girls, the anime kids. It felt like an hour passed. My face turned bright red. I could practically feel new zits sprouting from the stress.
“Dude,” said Luke. “What are you so pissed off about? What did anyone do to you?”
I mumbled, “Nothing. Whatever,” while Sam and Patrick walked over to our table.
“Who’s gay for me?” said Patrick, dangling a sausage through the fly in his jeans onto Will’s shoulder. Will turned and saw it, and they all burst out laughing. Without hesitating, Sam dropped onto his knees and bit into the sausage through Patrick’s pants, and Patrick threw his arms in the air and unleashed an orgasmic “Oh, oh, oh, yeah!” Our entire class lost their minds. Applause. Screams. Thunderous roars of approving laughter for Sam’s fully committed performance of fellatio on his friend’s breakfast sausage. Even the gay kids howled with laughter. Somehow Sam and Patrick were so beloved that no one but me was offended by their disturbing role play. Emma smiled at them and I felt like I could puke.
I got up and walked back to the room. I washed my face again, then put on more redness-reducing moisturizer while I wondered what my problem was. Life was so much easier before Sam and Patrick were in it. Were they the problem? Or was I the weird one?
Was I having mood swings? Was the Accutane screwing with me? If I wasn’t on the medicine, would I have laughed with them and not gotten pissed? I used to be a dick-humor aficionado, but their stunt just made me mad. Was I more mature than they were, or was I mutating into a different person, spiraling off to the side instead of moving forward?
That afternoon we went to a nature preserve where no one retained any information about alligators. We went home after that. Nobody talked to me on the bus. I stared out the window and wished I could have discreetly fallen into the swamp and been devoured by an alligator and no one would notice I was missing until three days later when Mr. Davidson would realize I never turned in the worksheet on lagoon acidity.
We got Thursday and Friday off from school for Thanksgiving and I was glad to be away for a while from everyone who thought I was a buzzkill asshole. Mom invited my aunt Sharon, uncle Joseph, and my twin cousins, who are Kate’s age. In the morning before they got there, it dawned on me that they’d be hanging out in the family room, and I’d look weird if I was doing my usual all-day internet browsing right there on the computer in front of them. So I dismantled the computer and put it back together on my desk in my room. I put my earbuds in, listened to Nick Drake, and read the new message boards I’d found where people discussed the kind of music and movies Alex and I liked.
Once everyone arrived, I had to go down and make an appearance. The cousins and Kate ran straight to the basement without acknowledging me. I was left stranded in the kitchen with the adults. I guess that’s how you know you’re not a kid anymore. Children don’t see you. You’re just a ghost who knows how to fix the TV when video games aren’t working.
So I stood there in the kitchen, pretending to help by mixing things with spoons Mom had left in pots of food she’d already cooked and was keeping warm. Dad brought Uncle Joseph straight into the family room to grill him with questions about the square footage of the last hotel room he stayed in while they watched whatever football game was on. Aunt Sharon whispered to Mom that men only care about football. She laughed. What a groundbreaking observation.
Eventually Aunt Sharon noticed my existence and asked how I was doing. I told her I was fine and good, two solid answers that I thought would close the case on me and allow them to get back to discussing how the twins and Kate were coping with prealgebra. But it took all of two seconds before Mom said, “Kevin is writing an amazing movie script for his class. He’s like our Steven Spielberg.”
“You haven’t even read it,” I said. At least she wasn’t claiming I was writing a romance novel anymore. Or had she ever said that? Had Patrick just been messing with me?
“If you wrote it, I know it’s going to be good,” she said.
“Steven Spielberg directs. He’s rarely credited as a screenwriter.”
“Oh, wow,” said Aunt Sharon. “I remember your mom showed me some of the movies you made last year. They were . . . a good length. Very good.”
I aggressively squinted at her, thinking that calling a five-minute movie “a very good length” was more of a straight-up insult than one of Aunt Sharon’s usual backhanded compliments.
“Kevin is our film buff,” Mom said. “He watches all kinds of foreign and exotic films.”
“Really?” said Aunt Sharon. “Erotic films?”
“No,” I lied.
“Things from France,” Mom said. “Right, Kevin?”
“Uh, yeah,” I mumbled. “I have watched one or two movies from France before.”
“Incredible,” said Aunt Sharon. “So you must be fluent in French? The language of love?”
“I, uh . . .” I didn’t even know how to begin answering such an inane question. It would take days to explain subtitles to her.
“You do speak some French,” Mom added. “You took classes all through middle school.”
“I don’t remember any of it,” I said.
“Well, maybe you can add some to your play,” said Aunt Sharon. “French things always lend some class. Sometimes I like to serve the kids French bread with their spaghetti. To add a bit of culture.”
I nodded and wondered if it was too late to be adopted. There was a long silence until Aunt Sharon said, “Your face looks less red. Oh, last summer it was terrible. I remember thinking you’d been burned. Your mom told me you’re on a pill now. What was it called again?”
I shut my eyes, and after a second I opened them just to glare at Mom.
Then Aunt Sharon added, “You know, the most handsome thing a guy can wear is a smile.”
I
don’t mean this in an offensive way, but all I wanted to do in that moment was throw a chair at my aunt Sharon.
Mom tapped her on the elbow and said, “Let me show you the new curtains we got for the dining room.” They stepped out of the kitchen. I stood there alone and looked to my left: Dad and Uncle Joseph sitting on the couch with a space for me beside them. I looked to my right: the staircase leading up to my room.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and all that. I took the one most traveled.
I shut my door to block out the football noise from the TV downstairs, woke the computer up, and opened my document with all my screenplay notes. Dozens of pages of random bullets points — notes on characters, plot threads, genres, and scenes. There were a few worthwhile ideas, and I highlighted those, but there was a lot of garbage, too. I needed to weed out all of Luke’s and Will’s bad ideas and add more of the parts Alex would like so I could show her at our next appointment.
It was hard to dig through the clutter of ideas. Old slasher-horror notes and new parts about a serious relationship, all these completely different tones. It was a mess. My face got hot and my breathing sped up. Just looking at the seemingly endless document stressed me out. I only saw problems and dumb ideas, a list of mistakes backing me into a corner.
I closed out of the outline, figuring I’d deal with it when I wasn’t so flustered by my grandparents’ other offspring occupying the same building as me. I went online to check on Luke and Will, and saw pictures of them hanging out at Patrick’s house the other night. Emma and the other God Squad girls were in some of the pictures. No one had invited me. I spent nearly all day with them at school and neither one of them had said a word about hanging out at Patrick’s. Goddamn it. They all hated me. I’d looked like such a jackass on the trip when I blew up at them and asked if they were gay.
I clicked through more of Emma’s pictures, wincing at her laughing in basement parties with the God Squad. Was I an idiot for thinking she might like me? She probably didn’t even remember that I existed.
I fell into the black hole, scrolling through years of Emma’s life, all these old pictures she’d scanned and uploaded, crawling all the way back to early middle school, wondering when those parties and school dances and hangouts had happened, and which part of space I’d been floating in alone during them. I dead-ended into her earliest picture, but my finger had momentum behind it and I kept going, clicking on some girl from her church playing a complicated-looking guitar chord. I hovered like a ghost through the last year of that girl’s life at some other school. Everything was so disturbingly similar to my school, but it looked better, like everything was actually fun. I latched on to some guy at some other school with unbelievably white teeth, and I became a formless ghoul haunting his charmed life, frowning at old photos of his friends playing football and eating tacos and — holy shit!