Smooth

by Matt Burns

  But I knew that if I had gone, I’d be stressing out at the movies, too, wishing I was alone in my room.

  No matter what path I chose, it always led to me being stressed out and anxious. I started to doubt that the solution to my problems was a clear face. I think what I really wanted was to be one of those guys who just doesn’t care about anything. I fantasize about being a teenage guy from a Doritos commercial, the kind of dude who wakes up at two p.m. lying upside down with his head dangling off the foot of the bed. The kind of guy whose room is wrecked with guitar picks, video games, and dirty clothes all over the place — jeans draped across his drum set. He’s got a big TV just sitting on the carpet and as soon as he wakes up, he pulls a Mountain Dew out of his band-sticker-covered minifridge, doesn’t give any thought to its nutritional content, and chugs it while firing up his PlayStation. He finds a bag of Doritos under his skateboard and eats what’s left of it just before his phone rings. It’s his buddy Dirty Tom and he’s on his way to the mall and he’ll swing by the Doritos Dude’s house. The Doritos Dude pauses his video game, leaves his TV on, pulls on one of his dozens of pairs of shoes, and leaps down the staircase. He hops into Dirty Tom’s Jeep and they cruise down the highway in hot pursuit of more spontaneity.

  At no point does the Doritos Dude wonder why he’s going to the mall, if he really needs anything, or even what he’ll do when they get there. At no point does he wash the Doritos dust off his hands, take a shower, brush his teeth, or wash his face. He doesn’t think about wasting electricity by leaving his TV on. He doesn’t consider what he’s wearing or why. He doesn’t rehearse conversations in his head with every person he might run into at the mall. And yet, despite all his insane inconsistency, he nails his guitar solo when his pop-punk band plays that night and he winds up talking to a midriff-revealing girl at a bonfire, casually making her laugh while taking a bite of the only constant in his life — a spicy, crunchy, cheesy Dorito.

  I had to see my dermatologist for a checkup after my blood test at the end of March. She inspected my face like produce at the grocery store, turning it around to let the light shine on every side. The redness on my cheeks was fading to pink, but I still looked like I’d been stepped on by someone wearing lawn-aerating shoes.

  She read through that same massive list of possible side effects she’d given me last summer and sat at her computer, clicking in my answers: Itching? No. Dry skin? Nothing out of the ordinary. Any rashes? No. Joint pain? No. Back pain? No. Dizziness? No. Dry eyes? No. Feeling depressed?

  What? What a big question to throw at someone. No. Well. I mean — god, no. What was I thinking? If I told Dr. Sharp I was depressed, she’d make me stop taking the pills and my face would get worse again. Not to mention, I wasn’t depressed. Maybe I was bummed out sometimes, sure. But it wasn’t a big deal. I was a kid from a crime-free suburb with no legitimate problems. I was on medicine that I knew might make me feel weird, so if anything was off, it was just temporary. Any sadness or whatever would get flushed out of my system along with the pus from my zits. I just had to ride it out until my face cleared up and it’d be fine.

  “Nope.”

  She didn’t even turn her head to look at me. She just clicked and kept going down the list.

  Nosebleeds? No. Changes in your vision? No. Hair loss? Nope.

  “Great,” she said, turning to me. “So we’re at the end of the standard course of treatment. I think there’s been a gradual — ”

  “Wait, what?” I still had red lumps all over my face. I wasn’t even close to the clear skin I’d been promised. “I mean . . . I don’t think I should stop. Right?”

  She tilted her head at me. “Well, you can’t be on this forever. Normally I’d recommend taking a break for a few months before starting a second treatment.”

  And just like that, my dreams of having good skin by the end of tenth grade vaporized. I stared blankly at the floor and saw my bumpy reflection on the shiny tiles.

  “But your blood work has always come back fine, so I’d be open to extending you for a little while, at a lower dose. What do you think? Or do you want to go off it? Up to you.”

  Obviously I wanted to stay on it. I told her so and she wrote me a prescription for another three months. Even though technically I’d won, I left that appointment feeling even shittier about my face, which I hadn’t thought possible.

  On the first morning of spring break, I made the unforgivable mistake of staring at the kitchen counter for thirty seconds after I finished my bowl of cereal.

  Mom walked into the kitchen, stopped in her tracks like she’d caught me with a pistol in my mouth, and said, “How are you doing, bud?”

  Bud? She hadn’t called me that since fifth grade.

  “Fine . . . ?” I knew I sounded defensive, but she was clearly convinced something was wrong even though I was just sitting there. God forbid I take half a minute to have a thought. Nothing freaks a parent out like a teen sitting quietly. Next Halloween I should sit on the couch for an hour, hands in my lap, smiling. My parents would shriek in terror and alert the media, and our home would earn a spot on a list of the country’s ultimate haunted house experiences.

  “You sure you feel okay? You look pale.”

  “Yeah,” I said, choosing my words carefully, each one like pulling a wire out while dismantling a bomb. “I . . . feel . . . completely . . . fine.”

  She nodded at me, staring me down in a standoff. I nodded back, and while we held eye contact, my left hand slid toward an issue of Entertainment Weekly I’d been flipping through earlier. I pulled the magazine toward me and opened it to a page I’d already read. Mom smiled, then walked back into the laundry room, and I exhaled. I wondered if those girls who always carry around novels at school ever actually read them, or if they’d just discovered that pretending to be a voracious bookworm is the easiest way to get adults off your ass.

  I got up to put my bowl in the dishwasher, and Luke texted me that he and the guys were on their way over to pick me up to go to White Water. Wait, what? When they’d talked about that plan in front of me at school, I assumed I wasn’t invited, since they didn’t directly ask me. I couldn’t go. It was way too spontaneous. There wasn’t enough time to run through every hypothetical scenario in my head and plan for all the —

  Mom walked out of the laundry room and caught me staring into the sink. “Bud?”

  Jesus Christ. I couldn’t deal with that all day. Okay sweet I’ll be ready, I texted Luke, then said to Mom, “Luke’s coming to get me to go to White Water.”

  I rushed upstairs before she could comment or question, went into the bathroom, rinsed my cheeks and forehead with charcoal face wash, then patted dry and smeared on SPF-30 moisturizer with a cotton ball, rubbing it in until I stopped shining. I put on my bathing suit and took off my shirt and scanned my body in the mirror. Neck-down I was pale to the point of transparency. Neck-up I was red-pink. I couldn’t help comparing myself to the guys from Alex’s pictures online last fall, with their zit-free, nontranslucent skin. I looked like I belonged in a textbook about the circulatory system, not at a water park. Maybe this was a terrible idea. Maybe I was better off staying at home trying to dodge Mom’s absurd concerns about me.

  Ugh. No. I’d freak out and start hurling furniture through windows if I had to deal with her all day. I mean, really, how bad could it be? I pictured all of us at the water park. Luke, Will, Sam, and Patrick whipping towels at each other and acting like idiots. Alex and Emma walking around casually in their bathing suits. Alex and Emma lounging in the hot sun in their bathing suits. Alex and Emma adjusting their bikini bottoms when they got out of a pool . . .

  I started to get a boner. Goddamn it. I looked like I was smuggling a strong-beaked bird in my swimsuit. I flipped it up into my waistband, but that time-tested solution to all schoolyard boner crises was no good with my shirt off.

  The clock ticked. Luke was speeding toward my house at a thousand miles an hour, blasting past stop signs and red lights, plow
ing over mailboxes. There was only one option: put my years of training to use by cranking one out in less than a minute. There’d be no enjoyment in it, no pleasure; a purely functional stroke, a task that had to be done not just for my own good but for the well-being of everyone around me.

  I locked my room door and the door to the bathroom, got on my computer, slid into incognito mode, located pornography in a quarter of a second, and went through the motions automatically like I was a computer running my own virus scan.

  Sixty seconds later it was like my boner had never existed.

  As I walked to the toilet, I thought that I could have been a Revolutionary War minuteman. Only as I was walking out my front door toward Luke’s mom’s SUV did I start to feel like a repulsive pervert. The girls would see it in my eyes. One look at me and they’d know I was a no-good, dirty masturbator who’d just mainlined some objectively grotesque video content. But, hey, it had worked. I’d thrown myself on the grenade and saved us all from a horrific afternoon guest-starring my erection.

  I took the seat behind Will in the middle row. Luke had the windows rolled down and awful pop-country music blaring, and I reminded myself that I was just here to get out of the house. I wasn’t actually expecting to enjoy this day I’d be spending surrounded by hundreds of shirtless, jacked guys objectively better than me. Just let the music play and the filthy water wash over me.

  Luke pulled into Sam’s driveway, where Sam was laughing with Patrick, Alex, and Emma. The girls were wearing shorts and giant T-shirts and held big beach bags. I nodded at them while avoiding eye contact, certain they knew I’d just beaten off. Sam and Patrick rushed into the middle row next to me. Alex called Sam and Patrick assholes and laughed; then she and Emma crawled behind us into the way-back row.

  I was crammed against the door, and Patrick’s shoulder dug into my neck. He and Sam started punching the roof and grunting, “Water park! Water park!” Alex laughed, but I didn’t hear Emma react. Maybe she found their desperate displays of masculinity as obnoxious as I did. I twisted my neck to the left as far as it could go, right up to the point where Patrick’s shoulder completely blocked my air supply, and I could sort of see Emma behind me. “Hey, Kevin,” she said, and I made eye contact with her while my nose bent ninety degrees against Patrick’s neck. “I’m glad you came.”

  Wait, what? She was happy that I was there? She wanted me to be there? My brain slingshotted into an image of us discussing which bathroom tiles we’d want in our first home on House Hunters when she added, “What’s your favorite ride?”

  “Uh,” I stalled, smashing back to the present. “The one with the least urine in it,” I said without thinking, and she laughed. Oh, shit. She’d sought me out. She was glad I was there. She liked my piss joke. If I hadn’t bombed trying to talk to her that day in Spanish class, I might take this as proof she liked me. When a girl talks to you and laughs at your jokes, how do you know if she’s into you or just being nice?

  I stared out the window, reviewing that awful day in Spanish. I’d always felt like it was my fault for blowing it, but thinking back, Todd Lancaster had been the one who ruined that moment by distracting everyone with his broken desk. Sure, Emma didn’t recognize the band logo on my shirt, but if Todd hadn’t thrown everything off, maybe I could have stayed in the zone and had that conversation with Emma, making her laugh with all sorts of references to urine.

  I was trying to decipher the amount of romance that had been in Emma’s laugh when Sam cut in: “Sucks Todd’s not coming.”

  I was so surprised to hear Todd’s name that it took me a second to respond. “Wait, Todd Lancaster was coming?”

  “He was gonna, but he sprained his ankle bowling last night.”

  The words sprayed out of me, all carefree delight: “Hell, yeah.”

  Sam looked confused for a second, but then a new country song started playing and he and Patrick screamed the lyrics.

  I saw Emma’s reflection in the window beside me. She was looking out her window, ignoring the other guys, smiling. Maybe she was still thinking about my joke. I had a chance to talk to her again today. No Todd Lancaster, no school distractions. We’d step out of the group and forget about the world around us: me and a girl who was happy I was there.

  Just be normal, keep cool, don’t overreact.

  We stood near the plastic lounge chairs while the girls put all their stuff in lockers. Without warning, Emma pulled her big T-shirt over her head.

  Jesus Christ. She had on this pink-and-white-striped bikini and, like, there were her boobs. She slipped off her shorts and there were her entire legs. And then she turned and her butt was right there, too. As she rubbed sunscreen on her legs like she was being directed through a radio earpiece by the members of Mötley Crüe, it took all my strength to keep my tongue from unrolling onto the ground in the shape of a staircase.

  Shit. Be cool. I took a deep breath and tried not to think about getting to second base with her behind a maintenance shed.

  I was staring into the concrete ground, reckoning with the fact that I was probably more of a stereotypically breast-obsessed teenage hound than I’d previously believed, when a tube of sunscreen smacked into my chest. “Moisturizer and sunscreen,” Alex said. “It’s rule one.” She was in a black one-piece and I knew that if I looked directly at her, my nuts would pop like bottle rockets.

  It’d been almost an hour since I applied sunscreen at home, so I figured I needed another coat. The sunscreen felt repulsive on my face. Some of it got into my hair and I knew I looked like a melting candle, all hot, dripping wax. There were no mirrors at White Water, but my fingertips rubbed across my face and confirmed how many lumpy zits were on it. It was braille for slimy troll boy.

  When I opened my eyes again, the God Squad was there. No one had told me they were coming. Five more girls who fused into our group, laughing with Alex and Emma. They peeled their T-shirts and shorts off, morphing from random kids whose presentations I didn’t listen to in health class into nearly nude babes. Caterpillars evolving into Kelly Kapowskis. They all seemed so confident, like they were ten years older than me. I couldn’t help wanting them to like me, but they must have been confused to see me. What’s that kid from my math class doing here? I didn’t ask to see his nipples. Why do I have to look at his nipples? I can just tell he masturbated an hour ago.

  A playlist on someone’s iPod shuffled through Rhianna and Carrie Underwood and I sat there nodding, trying to look like someone who never masturbates. Blink-182’s “Dammit” came on and my eyes shot over to Emma. She was talking to Jen Evans, telling some story with big hand gestures. I waited for her to react to the song. Was it dumb to get my hopes up? Their conversation stopped, and Emma turned toward me, and I saw it — just barely, but in perfect time, her lips mouthed the chorus.

  Holy hell. She knew it. She remembered.

  The signs were adding up. First she’d said she was happy I was coming today. Then she laughed at my joke. And then I found out Todd was supposed to come but couldn’t because he’d injured himself in a wonderfully embarrassing way. And now the exact same song from our night at the hotel was playing? The bases were loaded and that was the pitch, slow and straight; all I had to do was swing.

  I smiled, stood up, and took a step toward her. Her eyes met mine, like she’d been waiting for me. “Hey,” I said. “This, uh, this song, right?”

  “It’s good,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah . . .” I repeated. She wasn’t lighting up at the memory. “You remember, right? It’s, uh . . . Remember when we watched that movie? The one about high-schoolers on graduation night?”

  “Oh, right. At Luke’s house last year?”

  “Er — no. When we were in the hotel? On the class trip?”

  “Oh, yeah,” she finally said. “Yeah, I don’t remember what it was, either.”

  It was definitely Can’t Hardly Wait with Jennifer Love Hewitt. I’d spent hours researching
it online. “Right, uh . . .” I said. “I mean, this is, like, totally our song.”

  The words echoed back to me: Our . . . song . . .

  Oh, no. Holy shit. Shit. Shit. Sh —

  “What?” She looked confused. “Our song?”

  My armpits liquefied. My face ignited. I wanted a lug nut to shoot off a slide like a sniper’s bullet and take me out.

  Our song.

  Why the hell had I said that? We’d once watched the TV edit of a movie that had a popular song in it while lying like discarded mannequins on either side of a fully made bed. Why did my brain try to make a joke about that being the start of some romantic connection between us? She didn’t even know I liked her, for god’s sake.

  “Huh?” I said. I considered sprinting into the woods, hoping I’d stumble onto an undetonated land mine. Instead I mumbled at my feet. “Don’t worry about it. It was just a joke. Obviously it’s not, like, our — ”

  Veronica Wesson shouting at some guys near a trash can cut me off. “Huh?” she yelled. “Don’t you know how to read? Recycle, you ape! The bin is right there.”

  The guy and his friends hurried away, and Veronica spat on the ground behind them. The girls burst out laughing. Jen called over, “Hey, Emma, let’s go.”

  “I guess I’ll see you guys later,” Emma said to all of us, then walked to the girls, who all disappeared down a hill toward the rides. I was left there at the lockers with Luke, Will, Sam, and Patrick.

  Luke said, “You boys ready?” He nodded toward the most intense ride in the park — away from where the girls had gone.

  “Wait, are we, like, not going with them?” I felt sick, wondering what Emma would tell the other girls about me when I wasn’t there.

  “They’re doing the shitty rides first.”

  “But are we gonna . . . meet up with them, or . . . ?”

  Luke shrugged. “I don’t know. Come on.”

  Sam and Patrick started yelling and led the way. We sped from one ride to the next. Half were group rides, for two or four people to share tubes. Luke went with Will. Sam and Patrick called each other. I said I preferred stretching out on my own tube. On the four-person rides, the lifeguard would stick me with groups of three children from the line, who’d look at me like I lived in a swamp. But I didn’t really care. All I could think about was how stupid I’d been with that our song comment. Was Emma telling everyone I’d said it? I was in shock and barely spoke the rest of the morning.