by Matt Burns
Those mood swings were probably just from the Accutane, right? I knew Alex. She’d introduced me to singers and bands I’d never heard before, thoughtful songs about real emotions. I was no longer an oafish boy wearing AC/DC and Led Zeppelin T-shirts his mom bought him at Kohl’s, forcing himself to listen to lame-ass cock rock because that’s what guys are supposed to like. I was past all that. Luke and Will hadn’t left me behind; I’d left them, and she had led the way.
The afternoon of our December blood test, I still felt a little hopeless about having a normal conversation with Alex, but I felt good about my story. I was decent at expressing my thoughts when I spent hours alone obsessively editing them.
She was in the waiting room when I got there, wearing a giant jacket that made her look like a turtle poking her head out of a big, poofy shell. I sat beside her.
“Did you change something in your face-washing routine?” she whispered. I shook my head. “Oh,” she said. “Well, your skin looks really good.”
I forced the childish smile away and shoved my hands in my jeans pockets. “Did, um, you . . . ? How was Christmas?”
“Eh.”
“Eh?”
“My brother was home from college, so that was good, but he and my dad are just, like, I don’t know . . . They’re hard to figure out. We did a lot of packing at my dad’s house. Then Mike and I went to our mom’s, so I guess we had two Christmases. Both were better than last year’s, since our parents weren’t yelling at each other. First Christmas since they’re, like, officially divorced. Well, maybe better’s not the word. Quieter and weirder. At both I just thought about the parent who wasn’t there. I don’t know. Sorry. I’m rambling.”
I stared at my shoes, trying to process all that. She was opening up to me. You’d only do that with someone you trusted, someone who mattered to you. I needed to prove to her that her trust in me was warranted. I needed to ask her something polite and noncontroversial about her parents’ divorce. Shit. What a complicated subject I knew absolutely nothing about. All the advice from Dad and the gentleman books was no good. What was an appropriate bland, quantitative question about your parents getting divorced? What day was it official that your family was changed forever? How many times per week would your parents yell at each other?
This is what came out: “How, um . . . ? How . . . ? You . . . Um?”
“It sucks, but it’s . . . It had to happen.”
“Yeah,” I said, as if I knew her parents.
She shrugged and shook her head, like she was trying to clear the thoughts off an Etch A Sketch. “So, what do I need to know about your school? You haven’t told me anything.”
“Uh, not much has happened, really. I don’t know. I try not to think about it during breaks.”
“Yeah. I guess all schools are pretty much the same. Your school probably has the same crap mine has, just with a slightly different floor plan.”
“Yeah, yeah, for sure.” I nodded a little too vigorously. I’d had that exact same thought a few months before, which was further proof that we saw the world the same way.
“Have plans for New Year’s?”
I told her about this party Luke and Will had just told me they were going to with the girls from homecoming. “I’m not gonna go, though,” I said. I worried I sounded lame, though, so I tried to come up with some clever explanation — maybe something about how I’d rather stay at home reading Wikipedia pages about the 1999 Academy Awards nominees than have to watch those guys try to impress girls into giving them midnight kisses by wrestling each other or arguing about the best guitar solos or whatever other desperate masculine brutishness Sam and Patrick would start. But those images in my head never congealed into complete sentences that I could actually say.
Luckily she smiled and said she hated New Year’s and all the pressure to have a good time that came with it. She wasn’t doing anything, either.
I smiled and nodded, relieved. I didn’t need to impress her with perfectly written excuses. She got me. A beat passed. Then another. Should I ask her more about her parents? Did she need to get that off her mind, or — No. She didn’t want to talk about it. Shit, what was she talking about now? Focus. Listen.
She was telling me a story about a boring New Year’s party she’d gone to last year. Wait, shit. Did I just miss my opportunity to ask her to hang out with me on New Year’s? There’d be no party, just the two of us watching a movie together. Damn it. I’d missed the opening.
I listened to her as best I could over the noise in my head about blowing my chance, and before I had to say anything back, the nurse called for Alex and as she stood up, she said, “Weren’t you gonna write a —? ”
I whipped the packet of papers out of my hoodie pocket like I was unsheathing a sword. She smiled, took it, said, “Cool,” and disappeared into the back of the office.
They called me back before Alex came out, and I figured I’d have to wait until January to hear what she thought of the story. But when I came back out to the waiting room, there she was, reading the last page. Smiling.
Like, while she read it, she was smiling. She even — Wait, could it be? Could this be real? She laughed. She laughed at something right there at the end.
Holy shit.
The words I’d made up in my grandma’s house, then printed out in my room, then handed to Alex were now shooting into her brain and making her laugh. They were making her happy.
“This is funny,” she said. “Did some of this actually happen?”
I told her that most of it really happened to me, except for all the interesting parts. I said I never really got to drive the driver’s ed car.
“Want to drive mine?” she said.
“I mean, I only have my permit, so I can’t, like . . . My mom or dad have to be in the car. . . .”
She shrugged. “I won’t call the cops if you don’t.”
Right. Yes. What the hell was I doing enforcing the law that would keep me from alone time with Alex? For god’s sake, Kevin, get your head in the game. “Um, yeah. Right. Yeah, let’s do it.”
I called Mom and told her a kid I knew from school was there and they’d drive me home. I kept the pronouns vague. Mom didn’t need to know I was with a girl.
Alex and I snuck out a side exit to the parking garage and walked over to her car. She drove an old green Jeep. I’d never cared about cars before, but it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. She opened the driver-side door for me and waved me inside.
I sat down, squeezed the steering wheel, and before she even got into the passenger seat my pits rained sweat. Pressure gripped me like vulture claws. The last thing I needed was to nervously spin out on a turn, flip the car, kill us both, and be the namesake of Kevin’s Law, which forbids teenage guys from being in vehicles with the primary subjects of their compulsive daydreams.
She sat down, put her hand on my shoulder. “This is gonna be fun.” Her touch melted the stress. I looked at her and we made eye contact. I wanted to live in that moment — buy a house, plant roots, open a small business, and have a family in it.
I backed out of the parking deck, merged onto the road. I didn’t ask her any boring questions. We didn’t need to talk. We lowered the windows and felt the cold air rush into our hair, listening to the wind. The sun set. I drove a boring route around our strip-mall suburb I’d been on a million times, but it was different. Special. Magical. Signs on chain restaurants shone like stars. I’d look over at her when we stopped at red lights as much as I could without being a weird creep, trying to maintain the feeling that the whole world outside the car no longer existed. I wanted to keep going until we ran out of gas and had to spend the night in the back seat.
Eventually she said she had to get home and I drove to my house first.
I parked at the end of my street so my parents wouldn’t see. “Good job,” she said, nodding at the dashboard. “Seems like you learned something in that crazy driver’s ed class.”
I laughed. “Yeah, I guess.”
“Keep writing stories. It made me happy.”
Those four words made me feel so fucking good, I could have been flattened by an eighteen-wheeler and wouldn’t have felt any pain.
She said, “Text me if you’re bored.”
“Yeah? Yeah. Defin — def — def — definitely. Wait. What’s your —? ”
“Oh, right. Here.” She handed me her phone and I typed my number in. She texted me so I had hers: Hey it’s me.
I got out of the car and smiled a real, unforced smile as she walked around and got into the driver’s seat. She said through the open window, “I don’t know why I didn’t give you my number, like, a while ago. Sorry. See you soon, right?”
I nodded and she drove away.
Holy shit.
I sat in my room replaying every moment. My story made her smile. My ideas were worth something. She gave me the push I needed to stop outlining and stalling and overthinking. Just write. I was actually excited for next semester. Nothing at school would stress me out because I’d only care about writing the next chapter so I could give it to her and watch her smile when she read it. We’d make playlists together and press play at the exact same time every morning, connecting us across schools, keeping our heads in the same space until we could talk to each other next. School would become my B story, a subplot interrupting my real life with Alex, our intertwined existence in the waiting room, or talking on the phone, or being together on weekends. I’d write stories for her and Meyer would get them published. I’d be who I’m supposed to be.
We had each other’s numbers. I wouldn’t have to wait a month to talk to her.
She sent me a Facebook friend request that night and I accepted. It felt like an inside joke, like everyone at her school knew Alex June, and only I knew the real Alex Mae, since we didn’t meet at school, we met in the real world. She hadn’t posted anything in months, and she’d detagged herself from the homecoming pictures. My profile was almost entirely blank, too. No one from our schools would know what was going on between us. I liked that. It made what we had feel secret, undercover, pure.
On New Year’s Eve I spent forty minutes drafting this text: I hope you are having a nice night and that your blood is not diseased.
Five minutes went by after I sent it while I analyzed every word, regretting each one individually, worrying that I’d accidentally said something offensive.
She responded: watching TV with my dad. blood feels good. what are you up to?
Me: Hanging upside down in my gravity boots covered in leeches. Trying to freshen my blood for the new year.
Excruciatingly long pause.
Me: I was kidding.
Her: lol are you watching a movie or something?
Me: I’m downloading some old stuff I’ve been meaning to watch. Citizen Kane and Casablanca.
Her: of all the blood test places in all the towns in all the world, you walked into mine
Me: Stumbled in like a lost chimpanzee.
Her: that was a casablanca quote
Me: shit. right.
Her: lol I love that movie
Me: lol let me get back to you in two hours and I’ll probably agree.
Her: don’t make me wait that long I’ll be so booooored
I sat alone at my desk in my dark room, glowing blue-white in front of the computer monitor, having the best New Year’s of my entire life.
I cruised into school the first morning after Christmas break feeling like a new person. My face was a little clearer and less shiny since the cold January air dried the hell out of it. I looked like an old, dusty pencil eraser and I felt great. I was ready to ignore high school and think about writing stories for Alex all day.
Luke, Will, Sam, Patrick, and I stood in our usual spot before the bell rang and I was listening to them discuss what it would be like if our favorite children’s cartoon characters had sex with each other when a hand tapped me on the shoulder.
I turned around and Alex was standing there.
Alex was standing there.
Alex.
Two separate universes colliding, the two spheres of my life T-boning into each other.
Alex was standing there. She had makeup on and was dressed differently, in a blue sweater and nicer jeans or something.
She waved at me. I nodded and my face felt hot. The guys would see us, ask who she was, ask how she knew me, ask why I’d never told them about her, ask what my —
“Hey?” she said.
I nodded at her again like she was as familiar to me as the guy who tears tickets at the movie theater. “Hey . . . Did, uh,” I said, “you, uh . . . like, uh . . . you know?”
“Transfer here?” she said.
“Yeah. Uh,” I said.
She nodded at me while squinting in a way that communicated I was insane. “I told you? Like, two appointments ago? When we were talking about homecoming?”
Shit. Shit, shit, shit. She must have brought it up when I was zoned out, tumbling through the storm of dark thoughts about her ex-boyfriend. Was that why she’d been asking me about my school at our last appointment? Goddamn. How had I survived as long as I had being so oblivious and stuck in my head all the time? I think I’m a good listener, but I’m really just good at staring at people while they talk.
“Right, no, yeah,” I said, “I just . . . wasn’t sure you were gonna go through with it. But . . . you did. Yeah, so . . . welcome, I guess?”
“Thanks,” she said, still looking at me funny. But the bell rang and spared me more follow-up questions. The guys all dispersed and she held her schedule out to me and asked if I knew where her first class was. I pointed down the hallway and told her to take a left and then she disappeared into the mass of idiots and morons I’d known since first grade. It was like watching a diamond ring fall into the toilet.
I zoned out through first period, wondering if Alex had been a mirage. Second period I sat through a world history lecture about the diseases Europeans brought to America, and I kept flicking my eyes over to the narrow window in the door, hoping she’d walk by. She wasn’t in my lunch period and I didn’t see her in fifth or sixth periods. In my last class I got a bathroom pass and wandered down every hallway, looking through classroom windows, trying to find her. I felt like either a cop who rescues kidnapped children or the guy who kidnaps the children. Ten, fifteen, or twenty minutes must have passed — enough time that my classmates were certainly debating in graphic, poetic detail the severity of my constipation and the ill-advised diet that caused it — when I found her.
She was sitting in a math class in the front row by herself. Everyone around her was talking in small groups — ignoring their assignments, catching up on what had happened over Christmas break. No one was talking to her. She was doing the worksheet, alone, leaning forward like she was trying to curl into a ball. She didn’t care about socializing with the uninteresting characters around her. She wanted to get her work done. It was beautiful.
Eventually she looked up and saw me. I tried to act surprised, like I’d been passing by at just that moment and hadn’t been deliberately ogling her for several minutes, slack-jawed like some barnyard animal. She stood up from her desk, got a bathroom pass, and walked toward the door.
“Hey — ” she said.
“H-hey — ” I stammered over her at the same time.
“Do you have a class now?”
“Yeah. I was just . . . going for a walk. Clear my head. Get out of the classroom.”
“You do that a lot?”
“Sometimes,” I lied. I had never done that. She nodded and then pointed to her bathroom pass and said, “Where’s the, uh . . . ?”
“Like, to hang out for a while?”
“More like to . . . use the bathroom?”
“Oh. Right. It’s this way.”
I walked beside her to the bathroom like I was escorting her to a dance.
When she reemerged into the hallway, she looked surprised. “Oh. You waited for me.”
Was
I not supposed to wait? Was that weird and creepy? I changed the subject: “How’s the, uh, the, uh, first day?”
“Kind of annoying. Something got screwed up on my transfer paperwork, so they’re gonna have to change my schedule all around to put me in the right classes.”
“You should transfer into all my classes.”
“That would be nice.”
Holy shit. Freeze those two sentences in amber and paralyze me inside them. You should transfer into all my classes. That would be nice. What a confident slam dunk of an all-star touchdown. She made me feel so confident that sports metaphors entered my vocabulary.
I walked her back to her class and watched her sit down all by herself, surrounded by kids who already had friends. She was starting new. She didn’t have her posse of teen heartthrobs. She only had me.
The version of her I’d fallen for last August was becoming real right in front of me.
I went out to dinner with my family at a sports bar that night and zoned out in the corner of the booth, thinking about how it was like Alex and I were bound together in a storm, holding each other’s hands to ride out the hurricane that is high school. But eventually Kate’s rambling about seventh-grade birthday party drama got so loud, I couldn’t ignore it.
She was going back and forth on her decision to get a horse-themed gift for her friend. Kate was straddling that line all girls face at her age, forced to choose between believing horses are majestic and glorious or accepting the objective truth that they’re nasty and weird. I pictured this big field where thousands of twinkly-eyed twelve-year-old girls mingle with horses near the edge of some crazy cliff. And I’m standing at the bottom of this cliff, shouting and guiding the girls with a megaphone and orange flags to leap over the brink into the horse-free valley and never look back, because those filthy animals are strange and disgusting and a gateway to a smelly and off-putting subculture. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the guy in the vest encouraging girls to lose interest in horses and jump off a cliff and all.
I ate my grilled chicken wrap and watched Dad eat ribs with a napkin tucked into his shirt collar like he was a small boy. He smiled to himself and didn’t say a word while he smacked his lips and licked the barbecue sauce off his face. A boy should never see his father quietly enjoying himself while eating ribs. It makes him appear too sympathetic and vulnerable, far more human than a father should ever appear.