Smooth

  I spent thirty minutes thinking about the right thing to say back, then decided it would be weird to respond after such a long delay, so I didn’t.

  I wasn’t mad at her. Just annoyed at myself for denying reality for so long. She wasn’t just out of my league. We were playing different sports. The disappointed look on her face as she read my writing made me feel like I was five and she was twenty-five. The gap between us widened and confirmed my crush on her was absurd and unattainable, a crush on a movie star or a babysitter, a childish dream of being an astronaut. She wasn’t a speedboat pulling me forward in a tube behind her; I was an anchor holding her back from a life with better friends.

  I was one of dozens of kids she talked to at school. I wasn’t her boyfriend; I wasn’t her crush; I wasn’t her perfect match, her anything. I was just some kid at her school.

  I sat at my computer but couldn’t write anything. There was no point.

  I had to force myself to even show up to school the next morning. I walked in on Alex and the God Squad laughing together in the hallway before first period, building a wall of inside jokes between them and the outside world. My locker was within eavesdropping distance, and I put my books away as slowly as possible and heard Alex say, “A Walk to Remember is, like, my favorite book. My friend at homecoming was weeping during the dance because she’d just finished it. It was hilarious.”

  Veronica Wesson laughed. I was confused. Last fall Alex had told me about her friend crying about a novel at homecoming. But it had been meaningful literature, not some mass-marketed garbage novel for twelve-year-olds. Hadn’t it? How could that possibly be her favorite book? I’d seen her reading Anna Karenina, for god’s sake. It didn’t make sense. None of it added up and my mind raced, trying to put —

  My chemistry textbook slipped through my fingers and slapped the tile floor. The hallway went silent while everyone stared at me. I swear to god I heard all my teeth grow an inch longer. I felt like I had a mouth full of crooked two-by-fours.

  I picked up my book, which seemed to give everyone else permission to resume talking. I shuffled closer to Alex and mumbled, “Hey, but, uh, you’re into, like, Anna Karenina and stuff, too, right?”

  Alex shrugged. “I didn’t really finish that . . . . It was assigned at my old school and I read half of it. Or, like, a quarter of it. I didn’t hate it or anything. I just didn’t have time.”

  Shit. Shit shit shit.

  Jen Evans started singing a song I vaguely recognized from Kate’s A Walk to Remember phase, and Alex laughed with her, then waved at me, turned around, and walked with them, singing with the other girls. I was confused for the rest of the day, wondering which version of Alex was real: the one I’d met in the waiting room or the one I’d seen pictures of online. I wanted her to be the shy, nerdy, premakeover Rachael Leigh Cook in She’s All That, but at school she had the outgoing confidence of a postmakeover Cook. I wondered if I’d been wrong about her from the start. Had I ever been right about the movies and music I assumed mattered to her? I’d heard her listening to Elliott Smith at our first appointment. But what if that was an accident, a glitch in her playlist, and because of it I started listening to him and watching movies that used his music and reading forums where other lonely guys like me suggested more sad singers to listen to? I’d trapped myself inside this web of musicians she never cared about, listening to breakup songs that reminded me of a girl I’d never gone out with in the first place. I’d chased a mirage into the middle of the desert and now I was alone.

  Maybe the reason I’d never let myself ask her for her contact info last fall was that some part of me, deep down, knew my dream version of her was too good to be true and the real version of her was always out of my reach.

  That Friday afternoon I overheard Jen and Haley mention a sleepover at Emma’s that weekend. From what I’d eavesdropped on, it wasn’t clear if Alex was going or not, and I thought that what she’d decide to do that night would prove which version she was. There was a chance she’d lie to the other girls that she was busy and would stay in her room reading and listening to real music, a chance she was the Alex I knew, and that at school she was performing being outgoing to fit in, doing what I’d tried and failed to do at driver’s ed.

  Saturday night I texted Luke that I was busy and couldn’t make it to his house, and once it was dark, I mumbled to Mom about meeting up with Luke, then took my bike from the garage and pedaled through the cold night toward Emma’s house. I knew I could have just texted Alex to ask what she was up to, but I was paranoid she’d lie to me. I just wanted to see for myself.

  Emma lived two neighborhoods down from me, and I cruised over in the darkness like a badass noir private eye. I’d do a quick drive-by to confirm Alex wasn’t there, and that everything would be back to —

  Motherfucker.

  All of them. The whole God Squad plus Alex was in Emma’s room with curtains open and lights on, music blasting, dancing in unison to “Bye Bye Bye.” A synchronized expression of joyous pop music bullshit.

  My front tire slammed into the curb, ripping a hole through the rubber and spilling me onto the asphalt. Fuck! My arms slammed into the ground and my forehead banged against my wrist. I was all scraped up and curled into a ball. I must have looked like a trash bag. Jesus Christ.

  From the hard, cold ground, I stared up at the girls and watched them dance. They were carefree, floating above everything. They looked like angels. Weighed down by nothing. All light and freedom, swishing their baggy T-shirts like wings. A vision of heaven in a suburban bedroom, and my name wasn’t on the list.

  I lay there watching them and they never noticed me. I could have lain there forever and they wouldn’t have looked. They were on another plane.

  I limped out of Emma’s neighborhood, hunched in the darkness, pushing my useless bike. I had to accept that Alex’s hand had officially slipped out of mine; the hurricane of high school had pulled us apart. She’d been raptured, and I was stuck on the dirt. She didn’t need me. I offered her nothing.

  When I made it back to the garage, I leaned my busted bike against the wall, then shuffled through the kitchen and climbed upstairs into the bathroom — where Kate saw me, spat a mouthful of toothpaste onto the mirror, and shrieked at me like I had a forked tongue and cloven hooves. I looked past her at the mirror and I saw I did indeed look like the devil himself, with a face covered in dried, red-brown blood. A cluster of ripe zits had exploded when I went down, spewing blood all down my forehead, cheeks, and chin.

  Mom sprinted upstairs and knocked on Kate’s door asking if she was okay.

  “We’re fine!” I shouted to Mom, and told her I was just bleeding a little from a small accident I had on my bike.

  Kate left the toothpaste foam all over the mirror, backed into her room like she thought I’d take a bite out of her neck, and shut the door. I turned the shower on and stood there, staring into the tiles, completely zoned out, until I couldn’t feel the water anymore.

  When I dried off and sat at my computer, I saw the time and realized I’d been in there for an hour.

  That Sunday I was locked in my room, seven hours into a movie marathon, when I heard Mom and Dad in the kitchen talking to some handyman who’d just cleaned out our gutters. “We have a son who’s very creative,” Mom said. “He’s writing a book.”

  “Really?” the guy asked.

  “He’s writing all the time these days. Not just the book, but I think poems, too.”

  “Poems?” the guy said. “You know, I’ve always had this philosophy: Poetry is a lot like jazz. It’s all garbage and no one actually enjoys it.”

  He erupted with laughter like a car engine exploding. My parents laughed, too, and I had no idea if they agreed with him or were just being polite by joining a stranger in making fun of their son.

  Good. I was glad that guy hated poetry. It wasn’t for morons like him. I bet his favorite literature was an ad for a dumb-ass pocketknife, full of tough-sounding fake words that made dough
y guys with sunburns think they were in the military. He’d never understand the kind of stuff I liked reading and writing, which made me reconsider why Alex hadn’t liked my last story. If she was into A Walk to Remember and NSYNC, it made sense she wouldn’t have liked what I’d last written. Maybe my story didn’t suck. I opened the Word doc and looked through it and didn’t think it was bad. Maybe the issue wasn’t my writing; maybe it was just that it didn’t fit her taste. She was the wrong audience, and you can’t please everyone. Terry Gilliam wouldn’t give a shit about my dad’s opinion of Brazil. If every artist quit after one bad reaction, no one would make anything.

  So I put my earbuds in, cranked up ambient music to drown out the handyman’s laughter, and wrote for the first time since Alex had read my story. The weirder and more obscure I could go, the better — abstract words and sounds splattered the page like blood. I wrote until the guy left, and I felt like I’d won an argument he didn’t know he was a part of.

  I fell back into writing over the next few weeks. More and more files built up — poems and scenes and conversations — and I decided my final project for Meyer would be a mixed-format book, all these elements woven together. Now that I was writing for myself instead of for Alex, the project kind of snowballed. I was looking forward to sharing it with Meyer. He’d love it. He’d send it to that literary magazine to be published. Then he’d introduce me to a world of art and inspire me to carpe diem and break rules. He’d be the first person to give me a beer. He knew how things worked, and he’d teach me to grow up — and the night we’d spend in prison together for trespassing into a symbolically significant graveyard would be worth it for the overly sentimental Academy Award – winning film our relationship would inspire. Meyer was the only interesting person I’d ever met in my entire life. He was the only person qualified to give me advice. He was who I should have been writing for the whole time. He was my path forward.

  I worked on a piece about my blood tests, how I’d opened my veins and spilled blood for a girl and it got me nowhere. There was poetry and dialogue and descriptions that I thought were funny, and it ended with a scene of me at the blood-testing office, where I rip out the needle from my arm mid extraction, then go through a labyrinth in the back, following pipes until I find an Olympic-size swimming pool filled with teenage blood. I dive in and swim laps, staining my skin red, without realizing I’m still leaking from the little wound in my arm, until I pass out and die. It was a funny, weird ending, and I think it said a lot about the risks of opening up.

  Meyer hadn’t given us any creative writing projects, so I knew he’d be impressed when I attached it to the back of my essay about one of the George Saunders stories he’d assigned.

  Two days later he handed us back our essays and I flipped to my story. He’d underlined a few sentences he must have liked. He didn’t write any comments — no criticism, no suggestions for changes. There were only two words in red on the last page: Let’s talk.

  After the last bell rang, I packed my stuff up and went back to his classroom, ready to hear the next steps for submitting the story for awards. I stood in front of him at his desk, thumbs under my backpack straps, stretching my shoulders back. “Hey, so, uh, what’s next for ‘Out of Blood’?”

  He nodded slowly. “Why don’t you get the door?”

  Weird. I walked over and shut his door, then walked back to his desk. There’d been hallway noise before, but now it was silent. He took a deep breath. “You did a nice job describing some strong visuals. Good word choice. And your cadence is playful.”

  “Oh, awesome, thanks.”

  He looked me in the eye. “There are a lot of references to suicide. Jokes about killing yourself.”

  “Oh? Um . . . not a ton. I guess a few? Just like . . . jokes.”

  “Are you doing okay? Is this school year going well for you?”

  Jesus Christ. You hand a guy some words you made up looking for simple, vague praise that will motivate you to write more, but instead you get grilled about your psychological stability and have to lie to his face so he doesn’t file an official report with the vice principal and force you to go to the counselor. How come the entire nation smiles into their eggnog every year when they watch Jimmy Stewart grip the railing of a bridge and come two seconds away from offing himself, but when a teenager writes some creative nonfiction, they get out their binoculars and observe you like you’re a deer in their bushes who could charge straight through their sliding glass door at any moment?

  “Yeah, everything’s really good. I just, I don’t know, I guess I have a dark sense of humor. I’ve been watching a lot of British comedy. The self-deprecating thing must have rubbed off.”

  “Have you shown your parents what you wrote?”

  “Uh . . .” Why the hell would I show that story to my parents? “Yeah,” I finally said, because I could tell it was the only answer he’d accept.

  “Okay,” he said, not believing me.

  “Yep.”

  He folded his arms over his stomach. “I want you to express yourself, and if you have a dark sense of humor, then that’s fine. You’d let me know if something was wrong?”

  I told him that absolutely I’d tell him if I was having issues. Of course I would totally swing by his desk every day after school and describe every stalagmite of worry, fear, and doubt I’d accumulated in the previous eight hours. What a treat that would be for us both.

  My story wasn’t that dark, really. There were just a couple of jokes about yanking needles out of my wrists and spraying I REGRET EVERYTHING in blood on the doctor’s office walls like Spider-Man’s webs, and cannonballing onto hard asphalt from the roof of the mall, and putting a hose in my mom’s car’s exhaust pipe and sipping the fumes like it was a bendy straw in chocolate milk.

  They were obviously jokes. I guess Meyer didn’t know me that well. I hardly ever talked in his class. Maybe that stuff in my story would be kind of weird to someone who didn’t know me. I never should have shown him.

  “We cool?” he said

  “Yeah, cool,” I mumbled. I felt trapped. I would’ve cut my foot off to escape that classroom, but before I could search for a hacksaw, he leaned toward me.

  “Look, I’ll give you the best writing advice I know,” he said. “Be yourself when you write. Be. Yourself. All right, dude?”

  Dude? Jesus Christ. What an asshole.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Sure. Can I . . . can I go now?”

  He nodded. I turned around and walked out of the room.

  Everything I tried to communicate got misinterpreted. Maybe it was a relief Meyer had confirmed I sucked at writing, so I could stop wasting my time on more horribly embarrassing poetry about a fictional character who was obviously me, getting his heart broken by a girl he meets in a doctor’s office, and turning that in as my final project. It was exactly what a weird perv would write and turn in at school, and word would get around about it, and the girl it was clearly inspired by would get a restraining order against him. Why had I come up with any of that shit in the first place? It seemed so horrible now. I didn’t recognize the version of me who’d thought that any of it was a good idea.

  I couldn’t trust myself. My cells were dying and changing more rapidly than I could keep up with. Every few weeks it was like I was another creature on that evolution-of-man diagram, except I never become upright; I just devolved from one deformed, slimy fungus into another.

  The next day at school Meyer wore a fedora and brought in his bass guitar and I knew it was over between us. “What’s happening, cats?” he said with one foot propped up on his chair and his bass cradled on his nuts. “Poetry don’t gotta be just on the page. In the sixties, the beatniks brought it to life. I used to make a little bread slaying this ol’ ax back in the day.”

  He slapped out a few notes on his bass and I felt like I was in one of those nightmares where you’re trying to scream but no noise will come out. Someone should have stopped h
im, but we were all too stunned to intervene.

  Todd Lancaster finally stepped up to the plate. “You made bread with an ax?”

  Meyer said, “Made some cheddar, baby. Cranked out some hot coin with the ol’ four-string.”

  Christine Eller said, “I think he means he, like, made money playing his guitar.”

  “Bingo-bongo, sweet sister,” Meyer said, and then he ripped into this awful bass line that made me sad. It sounded like the men’s bathroom at an Olive Garden during an unlimited alfredo sauce promotion. Burbling, cream-fueled farts.

  Whatever respect I’d had for the man crumbled. He decayed from a role model into a cautionary tale. I was finally seeing him as the weird guy my classmates had always known he was. Had he had that goatee all year? I swear it was the first time I’d allowed myself to notice it.

  There was no longer any reason to try to impress him.

  That night I looked up the Goose Creek Film Festival and the Sopchoppy Review. I’d never heard of a single movie that had won an award at the film festival and had never heard of anyone besides Meyer involved with that literary magazine. All I saw on their websites were dozens of pictures of desperate idiots who looked a lot like me, hoping to be discovered, hoping to be told they were filmmaking and literary prodigies, convincing themselves they’d accomplished something by winning meaningless awards no one had ever heard of. Great. Another goal of mine proven imaginary, another finish line turned to vapor.

  What the hell was the point in doing anything?

  Days smeared together in early February. I’d nod at Alex in the hallways, but she ate lunch with the God Squad, and we never really talked. Everything outside was cold and dead, and Georgia got no snow that year, so there was no physical evidence of time passing at all. Every day was the same shade of gray. My lips turned so dry, they looked white and dusty, so I rubbed Chap Stick on them constantly. My entire face was always in one of two states: powder-dry or dripping with moisturizing slime.

  The thought of writing anything made me wince. I’d hear Meyer’s misguided concern or see Alex’s blank, confused face from that January appointment. Meyer and Alex had independently come to the same conclusion about my writing. I’d been peer-reviewed and the results were in: I sucked. I made a folder on my computer called “Bad Ideas” and moved all my writing files into it.