by Matt Burns
It was her. She looked younger, but her eyes were the same and her face was the same shape. Her skin was clear and she was smiling, sitting on a sofa beside another girl in some basement.
It was definitely Alex, but the name Alex June appeared when I hovered over her. She’d hidden herself with a fake last name, made it a challenge to find her. The only thing she’d written in her profile was the year she’d graduate, which confirmed she was the same age as me. It felt like stumbling into a hidden treasure. I bit my lip to hide a smile. Holy shit.
My legs bounced in place and my arms twitched with all the adrenalized blood shooting through them like I’d tripped into an electric fence.
I hovered over the button to request her as a friend, but I clicked into her photos first. She’d posted fourteen pictures scanned in from her school’s last yearbook. Some were those full-page collages the seniors get. She was always with this same group of kids and she was always smiling with this wide-open mouth, like she was having so much fun she was yelling about it. They played soccer in pouring rain. Picked apples at an orchard. Stuck their tongues out while wearing big floppy hats and giant T-shirts on a beach at spring break. Double-buckled with each other in the back of a minivan on some road trip. Held signs for their team at a football game.
Huh.
It didn’t add up. Who were those older friends she had? Was she still friends with all those kids? She seemed so happy in the pictures and my stomach hurt.
I got annoyed at my annoyance. Why was I so dismayed to find out she had friends? Wasn’t that a good thing? Didn’t that mean she was probably a nice, likable person?
Alex was allowed to have friends. I had friends, technically. I should have been happy for her that she had a nice big group of tall, outgoing, friends with defined jawlines and sculpted hair who knew how to be spontaneous and have a wild and carefree time at the muddy soccer field.
I clicked through more pictures, hunting for something that would match the images in my head. All I needed was one shot of her alone in her room. Just one shred of evidence of her reading a book or listening to music would be all I needed to convince myself there was still hope of —
Shit. It was like I’d stepped on a land mine: There she was, tagged in a picture her friend posted from homecoming, just a few weeks before. Five couples lined up. Her smiling in a blue dress. Some tall asshole standing behind her with his arms around her waist like a lasso.
Goddamn it.
I clicked away as fast as I could.
I thought she told me she hadn’t gone to homecoming. Or had that part of the conversation just been in my head? Shit. I couldn’t remember.
I kept telling myself she was allowed to have a life. But she seemed different to me now. Alex in the waiting room and Alex in the pictures didn’t match. Something changed. It was like when that young woman turns into a rotting old lady in The Shining. There was no picture of her in her room with Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Sylvia Plath, Sofia Coppola, and Elliott Smith. Instead it was her flashing peace signs on a roller coaster with Tommy, Danny, Sadie, Shannon, and Eddie.
I looked at my phone and knew Alex wasn’t waiting on the other end. Even if I had her number, there’d be no point in calling. She was busy celebrating Thanksgiving with her pack of friends on the dock of some older kid’s lake house, climbing into a human pyramid and smiling for a photo while her hands gripped a swimmer’s massive back muscles. It didn’t feel right to send that version of Alex a friend request.
Mom knocked on my door and it startled me like glass shattering. “Kevin?”
I instinctively closed out of my browser, even though I wasn’t looking at anything questionable. “You can come in.”
She stepped inside, eased the door closed behind her, took a deep breath, then frowned. “Why’s the computer in here? Did you move it?”
“Oh, uh . . . yeah. There was a virus and I decided to, uh, fix it up here.”
She nodded for a second, then shook her head and refocused on whatever she came up there for. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah.”
“We’re all downstairs.”
“Yeah, I have homework to do.”
“You kind of embarrassed me earlier. When Sharon was asking about the script you’re working on.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“I just want you to know I’m proud of you. I think you’re very impressive and smart, and sometimes I tell people, okay? It’s what moms do.”
“Yeah.” I wanted to add that it was objectively ridiculous to think I was any more impressive or smart than thousands of other nearly identical kids at thousands of other nearly identical high schools.
In the singsong voice you’d use with a toddler, she said, “Positive mental attitude.”
I got even more annoyed than I usually did when she brought up that stuff, since the dissonance from the two Alexes was still pounding shock waves through my skull.
“Okay,” I said to my desk.
“Will you come down soon?”
“Um, yeah. Sure. I just have to finish some stuff.”
She nodded and went downstairs.
I walked into the bathroom, turned on the light, and stared at myself. I was a scab.
Mom thought I was an asshole. My friends had moved on to cooler guys and didn’t even bother to tell me. Alex was a stranger who only knew I was alive when I sat three inches away from her, once a month. She was too busy with her friends to think about me outside of the waiting room.
I had nothing to be thankful for. I wondered how the world would be impacted if I ceased to exist. If I just disappeared, would anyone seriously care? Would it change anyone’s lives at all? There would be a lot of shrugging at my funeral.
Were those suicidal thoughts? Not really. They were more like postdeath thoughts, agnostic about the cause. Rational responses to being a friendless fifteen-year-old pepperoni.
I wasn’t looking forward to seeing Alex at my blood test at the end of November. She was a confident, well-adjusted, homecoming-attending girl, and I was an awkward dunce who wanted to resign from life and drive around on an electric scooter wearing a black sleeping bag and a motorcycle helmet, a larva who communicates exclusively via text message.
The instant I opened the door to the waiting room, I became aware of my brown jacket that was too big, the one Kate said makes me look like a drug dealer, and knew my dry, puffy, bushy hair made me look like someone’s aunt. I did not look like Alex’s friends.
I stared at the floor when I walked in and sat a couple seats away from her. She was reading a book. She nodded at me and I nodded back. I stuffed my hands into my pockets, trying to hide my entire body inside them. I couldn’t get those homecoming pictures out of my head, and I wasn’t sure what to talk to her about. Maybe if I’d asked her the right questions at our first appointments, I would have known she was out of my league and could have saved a lot of time daydreaming about loitering in bookstores with her. But I blew it and stuck myself in a no-man’s-land with a crush on a girl who used to make me feel safe but now reminded me of how lame and pointless I was.
I caught her looking at me out of the corner of my eye. I couldn’t not look back at her. She got up and moved into the seat beside me.
She said, “It’s you.”
“Uh, yeah. Yes. It is me.”
She bit her thumbnail. “How are you?”
I shrugged. “Fine.”
“That bad, huh?”
“Eh. Fine.”
“Fine usually means bad.”
I smiled.
She said, “What happened? Talk to me.”
That’s all it took to shatter the ice around me. A direct question fired point-blank. I told her about Aunt Sharon asking me why my face is so red, and about sitting at the kids’ table, where my sister and cousins ignored me so completely I’d nearly convinced myself I was dead. “So I took a plate of food up to my room and had Thanksgiving dinner with the audio commentary on the Chasing Amy DVD. So, you know, normal,
cool stuff.”
She leaned her head back against the wall. Looking at the ceiling tiles, she said, “Yeah, mine was kind of like that, too. We did Thanksgiving at my mom’s new place and I know holidays make everyone crazy, but she’s, like . . . like, just a lot to deal with. I was already feeling bad anyway about dumb friend drama, so I went to the bedroom that’s supposed to be mine and just kind of waited for the day to end.”
She closed her eyes and a new possibility blossomed in my head: She’d gone to homecoming reluctantly. She hated her friends and everything annoyed her, just like me. You wouldn’t know it from pictures of us that the guys I hung out with bothered the hell out of me constantly. She could have been in the same situation. Everyone knows pictures people post online are bullshit, so maybe the version I knew was the real her, and the version of her online was the fake one. I had solid evidence she liked Anna Karenina, Elliott Smith, and Before Sunrise. Triangulated proof she was more interesting than most kids. Maybe she’d even moved on from her friends. All those kids in the photos were just old acquaintances from middle school she’d decided to cut loose but hadn’t been able to shake yet, leeches waiting to be pulled off.
“Do you want to, like, I don’t know, go somewhere after this?” I mumble-blurted. What? Where did that come from? How did I go from vowing to ignore her to asking her out? Although I don’t know if what I said even technically counted as asking her out. I think I actually had just asked her outside, which seems different, like I just wanted to show her an unusual bird’s nest.
She tilted her head. “You mean, like, to show me your movie script?”
“Oh, uh, yeah, right, right, for sure,” I said as forty pounds of dense sweat oozed from every pore on my body like Play-Doh pushed through the spaghetti holes. “I was hoping you could help me, like, apply some of the structure from, uh . . . from Anna Karenina?”
“Oh,” she said. “Yeah, okay. I could try.”
“Cool, cool, um, so, uh, if . . .”
“There’s this other book, too, that might be good,” she said. “Shoot, I can’t remember the name. It’s really sad. My friend Chloe cried at homecoming because she’d just finished reading it. It turned into this whole scene where people thought something bad had happened to her, and we all were consoling her, but some song just reminded her of the book and it made her so sad, she started bawling. It was funny once we figured it out. Ryan and Mitchell were hoping some guy had said something mean to her so they could fight someone.”
“Wait, who?”
“Who what?”
A sickening dread crawled from my stomach to my head and all I could wheeze out was “Ryan? Mitchell? Who . . . ?”
“Oh. Ryan’s Chloe’s boyfriend. And Mitchell’s my boyfr — ”
The world turned to static. Her lips kept moving, but all I heard were garbled, underwater sounds.
But one phrase penetrated: “We made out a little.”
We made out a little.
She and Mitchell had made out a little.
My brain shut down the auditory system after that.
I nodded over and over, forcing a smile so fake it made me feel deranged. Her lips kept moving while I imploded. I fantasized about someone stuffing me into a cannon and shooting my limp body directly into a brick wall, hard enough to make my bones shatter like fluorescent lightbulbs.
Of course she had a boyfriend. Why had I tricked myself, out of some pathetic self-defense, into thinking the guy holding her waist in the homecoming picture was just an acquaintance? How dumb was I to think that?
I don’t even know what I’d been thinking when I asked Alex to do something after our blood tests. What would I have said to Mom? She was out there in the parking lot waiting for me. Would I tell her that I was going to hang out with this girl she’d never heard of, and that girl’s parents would drop me off back at home later? Would Mom insist on driving us somewhere? Would she take us to a bench, park directly in front of it, shine her high beams at us, and pretend to do a crossword puzzle while reading our lips through binoculars?
Well, luckily for me, the date, or hangout, or talk, or whatever it would have been, wasn’t happening.
What would someone like Alex want with someone like me? She was a stress-free queen who made out in public. I had a better chance of being drafted into the NFL than I did of making out with a girl on the homecoming dance floor. She’d have to be a contestant on Fear Factor choosing between kissing my crusted lips and eating a yak’s testicle, and even then it wouldn’t be a sure thing.
I didn’t want to get her phone number anymore. I had no use for the secret code to a stranger’s bedroom. Besides, Mitchell would probably answer. And I didn’t want to talk to that asshole.
A nurse stepped into the waiting room and called for Alex. She stood up and said something to me and I nodded.
She made this weird face at me and walked through the door with the nurse. I left her confused. That seemed to be my signature move. Some people leave others wanting more. I stare at walls, mumble into carpets, and leave ’em confused.
Sometime later — it might’ve been ten seconds or twenty minutes; it was all a haze — the same nurse called me to the back and I sat down, out of breath, and watched her tie the rubber strap around my bicep. I shut my eyes and saw Alex making out with that six-foot-three porn star of a boyfriend of hers. I felt sick. I opened my eyes — which was a big fucking mistake. At the sight of my black-red blood spraying into the vial, my emotional roller coaster sped into a corkscrew and my stomach blasted a hot, solid shot of vomit into my mouth.
I caught it with my teeth. My cheeks bulged out and the nurse looked at me, disgusted. I averted her gaze and tried to suck my cheeks back to normal, some ridiculous instinct to pretend nothing out of the ordinary had just happened. I watched the vial fill up like I was waiting for a bomb to detonate, and as soon as she sealed it off and stuck the Band-Aid to my arm, I lunged out of the chair and hurled the entire contents of my stomach into the sink, spitting chunks of stringy puke all over the metal while my red eyes leaked tears.
I wiped the sticky mucus off my dry lips with a hard brown paper towel and mumbled, “See you next month.”
The nurse said, “Why don’t you sit down for a minute?”
I waved her off. “I’m totally fine. It’s just a stomachache. Don’t worry — it’s cool.” I burped and stumbled into the hallway. All I wanted to do was collapse into the passenger seat, fall asleep, and let Mom drive me home.
But Alex was in the waiting room when I went back. Shit. She stood up and nodded toward the exit. “You ready?”
I stared back blankly into her eyes, tasting sour puke in my mouth.
“To go work on your script? Like we talked about?”
“Oh.”
“Come on. I want to hear about it.”
She looked directly at me and there was nothing I could do to resist.
I followed her outside onto a sidewalk that took us behind the building to this little courtyard with some bushes and picnic tables. She picked a table between a garbage can with that biohazard symbol on it and a doctor sitting at another table by himself, tearing into a roast beef sandwich like an animal.
We sat down across from each other and were both silent for a while. I wanted to talk to her, but it felt weird. I was certain Mitchell, shirtless and ripped, would pop out of the trash can and fire a lacrosse ball into my neck. Just be normal. Have a conversation. Quantitative questions. How long have you been going out? How many times has he disappointed you? What about him annoys you, and where does he fail emotionally? Is his penis bent like a candy cane? How lopsided are those balls?
Alex broke the silence. “So, your movie script? You wanted to talk about it?”
“Oh. Right. Yeah. I mean, it’s really just a class project, and . . . whatever. It doesn’t matter. It’s a mess.”
“Why?”
“My friends are just, like, making it more complicated than it needs to be. It’s fine. I don’t n
eed to bore you by complaining. It’s nothing. It’s dumb.”
“It sounds like things are still frustrating with your friends.”
“Uh,” I said. “I guess, yeah.”
“Are they still hanging out with those new guys? The ones from the football team?”
“Oh, uh, yeah. Yeah, we all roomed together on this trip for school, and . . .” I trailed off. What could I tell her about the trip that didn’t make me sound like a lame, unfun idiot?
“So your problem is that you now have too many friends.”
“No, it’s that these guys just aren’t, like . . . They’re just different from me and my friends, and now my friends are trying to be like them, or . . . I guess they’re changing, too.”
“Changing how?”
“Well,” I said, “I had the movie all mapped out with all the stuff we talked about at our last appointment, but Luke and Will keep adding in all these plot points and characters that don’t make sense, and Sam and Patrick are telling them that their bad ideas are cool, and there’s too much stuff to cram in and I have no idea where to even start. I’m the only one actually working on it, so I’m not sure they should be contributing ideas to it at all. We’re already way behind on everything and the schedule’s all screwed up and — ”
“Can I see what you’ve written?”