Smooth
Page 13
“Um . . . I’ve got some scenes planned, like this band is on tour, but . . . I don’t have, like, the full thing written. It’s all just a massive, unorganized tangle of notes right now.”
“You haven’t written anything yet?”
“I mean, the outline’s really long.”
“Maybe forget about the huge script for now. That’s probably what’s freaking you out. Just start with something small. Go one step at a time. When Mitchell and I were going out, we built these bookshelves in his room and it seemed impossible at first, but — ”
“When you were going out?”
“We broke up after homecoming.”
Good thing I’d already vomited, because if there had been anything in my stomach I would have blasted it all directly into her face, a pure shot of romantic excitement.
She said, “I told you that, like, fifteen minutes ago.”
Goddamn it. I’d been too shell-shocked to hear. The Mitch Man was her ex-boyfriend. Micropenis Mitch, with his pea-size testicles and inexplicably gray pubic hair, was out of the picture. I couldn’t imagine having an ex. It seemed impossibly mature, like smoking a cigar while deciding not to impulse-buy a DVD.
“Right. Yeah, yeah. I was, uh . . . Wait, sorry, what were you saying?”
She laughed a little. “Just that you should start small. Write something short I can read. I want to read a story by you.”
I stared at the table, trying to hide my smile. “Yeah?”
“Uh, yeah. You’ve been telling me you’re a writer. Bring me something you wrote next time. It doesn’t have to be a movie.”
“Okay,” I said, feeling my heart race. “Okay, yeah, yeah, sure.” I felt excited and eager. Motivated. I finally had something to do that excited me. A goal I actually cared about.
My phone vibrated and I opened the text from Mom: r u ok.
“Shit, my mom’s waiting,” I said. “What about you? Is your mom waiting?”
She reached into her hoodie pocket and pulled out car keys. “Licensed to drive, as of two weeks ago. Now my parents don’t have to argue about driving me everywhere.”
“Oh, wow, sweet,” I said. My phone buzzed again. Mom: r u hurt. Then an immediate follow-up: im coming in.
Goddamn it. “I gotta go. Sorry. See you next time.”
As I was speed-walking into the parking deck, it dawned on me that I’d barely asked Alex about her life and how she was feeling. Shit. There was so much more I wanted to know about her. There was still a chance she was annoyed with her friends and all she had was me. Still a chance that our backstories were different, but starting with the moment we made eye contact at that first appointment, our lives converged. We were two wavy lines on a graphing calculator that intersected and became one, stretching into infinity. The past didn’t matter because we had each other now.
I walked up the concrete stairs and considered how she had a license and I had a phone, and I should have texted Mom that Alex would drive me home. We could have kept hanging out all afternoon. Jesus Christ. We could have lived out Before Sunrise together, but instead I was having my mother drive me back to my room so I could browse the internet. Goddamn it, I was an idiot.
If I brought her the right story at our next appointment, I could give some made-up excuse to Mom so Alex and I could stay out all night driving through our town together. At two a.m. we’d connect the dots between Walmart, QuikTrip, and Waffle House. Errands would feel like adventures when we’d do them at night. We’d bring a laptop in her car and watch a movie in there, our own space, our alternate universe when everyone else was asleep and the world was just us. The only thing I needed to do in December was write a story she’d love. I could ignore everything else. It felt great to have a clear goal.
I got to Mom just as she was getting out of the car, and I took the keys from her and drove her minivan back home, feeling so good that I didn’t even get stressed out when she screamed at me for rolling straight through that bullshit stop sign in our neighborhood.
Luke hosted a LAN party at his house in December with a bunch of guys from the football team and I didn’t go. At school the Monday after, Sam and Patrick talked about a horrendously unfunny prank call Todd Lancaster had made to the number on the Proactiv commercial. The premise was just that his face was really gross and he looked like he had the bubonic plague. Todd Lancaster is probably the dumbest person I’ve ever known. He’s the kind of idiot who refers to any shape of pasta as spaghetti. The more they talked and laughed about the call, repeating lines about nasty zits and pus, the more I realized they were making fun of me. They’d wanted to say that stuff every day all year, and they finally found a way to do it without saying it directly to me, a hidden underground passageway to calling me disgusting.
I had no regrets about lying to Luke that I’d had to stay home that night to help my dad pressure-wash our driveway.
Stress from finals made me want to squeeze out every whitehead. At school I had to condition myself to not touch my face. In all my classes I kept a pen in my right hand and I sat on my left hand. If training myself to not rub my oily fingers on my chin meant looking like I literally had my thumb plugged in my ass during math class, then so what? I really didn’t want to give myself any more breakouts to inspire some not-funny joke Todd Lancaster would amuse himself thinking about.
On the back of the test packet for Meyer’s final was an extra-credit question: How is your group progressing with the Tell Us a Story project for next May?
Ah, shit.
Ever since Alex had asked me to write her a story, I’d been actively trying to not think about the movie. Luke and Will hadn’t even mentioned it in the past few weeks. I tried to picture the messy notes document from my computer and remember any of the bullet points about the musician.
I leaned over to read what Will was writing and saw his outline for a horror movie about Japanese gangsters.
Then I sat up to look over Luke’s shoulder and read his notes about an inbred farmer stalking a high-school football team.
The bell rang. I felt a pit in my stomach. Why were Luke and Will ignoring all my ideas and the effort I’d put in? Both of their ideas involved dozens of characters and car chases and explosions. How the hell would we film any of that?
When I handed in my test, I mumbled to Mr. Meyer that I wanted to talk to him if he had a second.
I nodded at Luke and Will when they left, and after everyone else filed out, Mr. Meyer spun a chair around to sit in it backward. I wondered if that was a move they teach you in teacher school to appear casual to the youth. “What’s up?” he said.
“It’s, uh, the story project,” I muttered. “I thought we were doing one thing, but now me and Luke and Will all have different ideas. They don’t work together at all.”
“It’s not due for another six months. Don’t stress about it.”
Don’t stress about it. Great idea in theory. Absolutely no practical application.
I stared at the floor for a while. Some genetic thing prevents guys from asking directly for life advice, so we have to get it in roundabout ways by pretending conversations are about some project. When guys are in Home Depot asking other sunburned men how to build a shed, they’re really desperately searching for any idea of what happiness is and how to get it.
I finally got the words out: “I need help. I know what I want to do, but I don’t know what to do about . . . them.”
He leaned back and stroked his chin. I couldn’t figure out if he was a wise, inspiring teacher who would someday be the basis of a feature film or if he was just a regular dope impersonating a wise, inspiring teacher.
“Your friends? This project is getting between you?”
I nodded and shrugged, playing it off like it was no big deal. I was just a normal, cool, laid-back teenage dude asking his teacher how to maintain his friendships.
“This project’s not worth losing friends over. Can you write the story you want to tell as prose and do it yourself?”
I’d have to break the news that I was abandoning them, and they might be pissed because I was the only one who’d actually been doing any work. But a lot of the reasons I’d been annoyed with them were because of this project. It would be good for us. The most fun we’d had together all year was that night in the hotel room on the south Georgia trip, when none of us had brought up the project.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve actually been thinking about writing, like, stories instead of a movie lately, so I think I’ll work alone and start from scratch with just my ideas and see what happens.”
Meyer smiled. “You know, I also volunteer as a reader with the Sopchoppy Review, a literary magazine down in Florida. We’re always looking for submissions of short stories and poetry.”
My face lit up. “Oh, wow. That’s cool. That’s awesome. Yeah.” Meyer had so many connections outside of our dumb school, outside of our dumb town, outside of our dumb state. He could help me publish a story. It wouldn’t be just a pointless class project like everyone else was doing. It would be a real thing.
“Oh, so, can I add an extra-credit answer now that I know what I’m doing?”
“Do you think you earned extra credit?”
“Uh . . .”
“Did you make progress today on your project?”
“Yeah.”
“Then you did great.”
“But, like, how many points will it add to my grade?”
“If you feel good, then you did great. Remember, no one ever gets any answers, but we all find our own solutions.”
I nodded and walked into the hallway, not sure what he was talking about. Mr. Meyer was a weird hippie and I suspected he made his own candles, but I liked him.
I found Luke and Will by their lockers. “Hey, Mr. Meyer just told me I have to work by myself for the rest of this story project,” I lied. Was I a coward for blaming it on Meyer? Probably. But I’d never suspected I wasn’t a coward at any point in my life, so it was fine.
Will said, “Wait, what?”
“Just, like,” I said, “because of our extra-credit answers. We have different ideas of what to do. We’re not in trouble or anything, but he told me I should just write my own thing and you guys can do, like, a movie or whatever about the football team slasher yakuza whatever. You guys can write it and cast all the people and set up the lighting and test the special effects and choreograph all those car chase scenes however you want to do them. It’s totally up to you now.”
Luke shrugged. “All right. We’ll figure something out.”
Will said, “Yeah, it’s fine.”
I nodded and said, “Cool.” I was annoyed they didn’t make any attempt to stop me, that they didn’t realize they were screwed without me and crawl on the floor to beg me to stay with them. That would have been nice. They didn’t care at all. “Well. Okay.”
“Yeah,” said Luke.
“All right,” added Will.
“I guess I’ll go to math,” I said.
“Cool,” said Luke.
Will brought our intellectual discussion to a rousing conclusion with an “Okay.”
For the rest of that week in school, while we finished taking our other finals, I saw Luke and Will every day, but something felt off. Before first period, I’d stand in our circle with them, Sam, and Patrick. But without the project to link us together, I felt like I had no reason to be there and mostly stayed silent. They’d talk about movies I didn’t care about and other kids in our grade I barely knew. Sam and Patrick repeated stories about the driver’s ed class they all took together over Thanksgiving break. Will would laugh at their jokes. I just sort of stood there. We were like Venn diagrams that had rolled apart.
My plan to excise the project from our relationship like it was a tumor hadn’t fixed anything. Instead of Meyer’s project being the thing getting between us, had it been the only thing that was keeping us together? Without being officially bound together into a group, were we just not friends anymore? I wondered if the subconscious reason I’d decided to do such a ridiculously complicated, time-consuming project was that it would force us to hang out together all year. That it would force us to have fun making a movie like we used to. It didn’t work at all. I was like some out-of-touch divorced father in a movie who makes his biological kids go with him to see a movie they all hate when the kids just want to hang out with their cool new stepdad who takes them to football games.
I tried to remember why we’d become friends in the first place. I started being friends with Luke in fourth grade when Mrs. Owens had us all mark our houses on a map of our town and Luke’s was closest to mine. My parents picked our house because there is a magnolia tree in the side yard. If a gust of wind hadn’t pushed that seed into that spot fifty years ago, who knows who I’d be friends with now? We were friends because of proximity and decisions our parents made, the platonic male equivalent of an arranged marriage. Will showed up in middle school with the same generic interests as us, and the two of them were still putting up with me mostly due to inertia. We were all too lazy to make it stop. The project wasn’t what had been killing us — I was. I was just a disease Luke and Will had been stricken with from middle school through ninth grade, and Sam and Patrick were the cure helping them flush me out of their systems forever.
A few years ago some kid wrapped his car around a tree, so his parents pressured people to pass this state law that requires every kid to sit through three days of driver’s education classes before getting a license. When Luke and Will had said they were doing driver’s ed with Sam and Patrick over Thanksgiving break, I’d told them I was doing it later without clarifying when or why. I couldn’t stand to be the fifth wheel in their group 24/7. I needed a break.
Everyone at school always talked about driver’s ed like it was the biggest pain in the ass in the world. To me it seemed like an opportunity to get away from everyone. Press reset and try to have normal conversations with new people who didn’t know me.
I’d go in there for those three days pretending to be confident and outgoing and personable, able to freely ask everybody questions because I’d never see anyone in there again in my entire life. No risk. If I discovered that acting like a normal, socially engaged person made me feel like a phony dipshit, then I could go back to being uncomfortable and maladjusted. I’d be trying on the persona of a well-formed human being like it was a coat. Maybe driver’s ed wouldn’t be so bad if you treated it like experimental theater.
So far, all I had was Dad’s terrible advice about asking number-based questions. If I was going to succeed at approximating a functional human being, I needed better instructions. I eyed the stack of manners books Mom had given me every Christmas since fifth grade. I’d vowed that I’d never read them because they were objectively stupid, but it turned out that by avoiding them, I’d become the clueless, desperate idiot those books were written for.
I made sure my door was locked, then opened one of the books to a section called “The Gentleman Says the Right Thing.” That seemed appropriate. It said I should be able to strike up a conversation with any pleasant person I encounter by asking a positive, noncontroversial question that does not bring attention upon myself.
That seemed like some decent advice. Similar to Dad’s advice, but instead of grilling people for cold, hard facts, I’d just ask generic, boring questions. The next page in the book was a scan of an article from a British magazine originally printed in 1779 called “The Art of Pleafing in Converfation.” It was from that era when printers hadn’t yet realized the letter f wasn’t an s. This part stood out:
&nb
sp; There is not a man of common sense who would not choose to be agreeable in company; and yet, strange as it may seem, very few are; not arising from the want of wit, sense, or learning, but for want of the proper judgment of applying them. Too much eagerness to shine often makes a person intolerably dull; misapplied wit becomes impertinence, and even learning, introduced improperly, sinks into pedantry. Conversation may metaphorically be styled a well-seasoned stew, in which no one ingredient should predominate, but be made palatable to all the guests present. Much attention should be paid to the complexion and disposition of your companions.
Had whoever wrote that watched me mumble at Alex through a two-hundred-and-fifty-year-long brass telescope? Had morons like me really been blindly bumbling their way through one-sided conversations for centuries? Back then, people openly fired diarrhea onto public streets and slept on mattresses made of their dead relatives’ teeth. They’d dust their chests with crumbs at night and invite swarms of rats to be their blankets, and anyone with acne was hurled onto a funeral pyre to roast with the witches. So much technological progress had been made between then and now, but casual conversations remained our species’ albatross.
My stomach growled. Mom, Dad, and Kate were downstairs laughing at some shitty TV special of the “World’s Funniest Commercials.” They’d called me down to come watch it with them a few times and I told them I was busy. Mom had said the other day we don’t have any Christmas traditions and she wanted to start one, but I’d rather have no traditions than a horrible one of literally watching advertisements. Besides, I thought I had my own tradition of hanging out in my room most of Christmas break, making my parents think I’m masturbating. They can never truly know. I’m a human physics paradox. Simultaneously jerking off and not at the same time. Schrödinger’s masturbator.
I went downstairs to make a PB&J and I tried to think of a positive, noncontroversial question to ask my family that wouldn’t bring attention upon myself.
After thirty seconds of me standing there drawing a blank like a slack-jawed idiot who forgot his lines on the opening night of the school play, Mom told me to close the fridge door.