Smooth

by Matt Burns

  After a few hours, we met up with the girls for lunch. They wore sunglasses and hats and towels tied with these elaborate knots I’d never figure out, as put-together and grown-up as I wasn’t. I braced myself for the onslaught, waited for them to shout “Our song!” at me in a snottily voiced chorus, then corner me in a shower stall and hurl tampons at my mouth, chanting, “Plug it up! Plug it up!”

  But they didn’t. They just laughed and joked with each other and the guys, and none of them even really looked at me. As everyone else finished eating lunch and I threw away the cardboard tray of fries I hadn’t touched, Alex and Emma said they were going to ride back home with Jen in another hour or two. “Cool,” Luke said. He turned to me, Sam, Patrick, and Will. “Now we can stay till the park closes and ride everything twice.”

  We walked back to Cliffhanger and while we stood in line on the ninety-foot-tall, wet, wooden staircase that seemed designed to collapse, it dawned on me that the girls didn’t actually care that any of us guys were there. We weren’t at the water park as a singular coed group of friends. The girls had probably planned the trip on their own, and then the guys decided to go, too, and just offered to give Alex and Emma a ride. These were two separate groups, and everyone was here for their own sincere, childlike enjoyment of the rides. I was clearly the only guy thinking about the girls, and I bet none of the girls were thinking about any of us — least of all me.

  So maybe the girls weren’t making fun of me behind my back. I should’ve been relieved, but I was kind of disappointed. Even if it was negative, some part of me wanted to believe they were thinking about me at all.

  I launched myself down the nearly vertical slide with a blank expression, feeling empty. I stepped out at the bottom and Patrick shouted “Woo!” into my face, and I limply high-fived him. The guys sprinted to the next ride and I lagged behind. The girls had all seemed so mature and carefree. And there I was, a wet, squinting twerp whose retinas were being destroyed because none of us guys had thought to bring hats or sunglasses.

  I spent the rest of the day wishing a kid would take a dump on one of the slides and they’d have to send everyone home. Unfortunately the kids all held it in.

  Despite convincing myself that afternoon that the girls didn’t give a shit about me, as I was lying in bed that night, the conversation with Emma wouldn’t stop replaying in my head. It was canonized in the constantly expanding blooper reel of stupid things I’d said and done. I was paralyzed by the certainty that not only had Emma told the others about the “our song” comment, but they were at that very moment laughing about me while they all sat around a crackling firepit.

  I remembered her blank face when I reminded her we watched Can’t Hardly Wait in the hotel room. She hadn’t known what I was talking about. This life-defining event that I had thought about every single day since it happened had barely registered as a memory for Emma. Sometimes I feel like every single moment in my life is like that — so significant to me, but no one else cares at all.

  Maybe the girls weren’t actually talking about me, then. Maybe I hadn’t earned a place in any of their memories of the day. They’d immediately forgotten everything I’d done, my face going blurry like in a photograph in The Ring. The good moments in my life, like the night in the hotel room with Emma, and the bad ones, like when Alex read my writing in January, were all equally meaningless to everyone but me.

  If that was true, then maybe I should have tried harder with Emma and Alex both. Maybe I should have been more up front about my feelings. Sure, if I told them I liked them and struck out, the embarrassment at the time would have sucked, but if they were going to forget it had ever happened the second I walked away, then who cares? And maybe telling them how I felt would’ve worked.

  Wait, no. Who was I kidding? The reason I wasn’t going out with Alex or Emma wasn’t because I hadn’t been up front about my feelings; I’m sure girls are aware that the leering mouth-breathers loitering near their lockers are into them without hearing a speech. I wasn’t going out with them because I was a hopeless daydreamer who misinterpreted every normal interaction, crossing his eyes to force a magic image to appear from nothing, misreading romance in meaningless head nods. No girl should have to deal with a guy like me, with wires so fucked-up that “Hey, Kevin” got translated into “I love you” between my ear and my brain.

  I started to wonder if “girls” was a hobby I should give up on. I was desperately attracted to them, but I’d blown so many attempts I figured it was time to get out of the game. I felt like a little kid who loved basketball but never made a shot in his life slowly accepting the fact that his time was better spent sitting on the bench watching pornography.

  What an insane process the whole thing was, of having crushes in high school. You’re supposed to stew in your own midday pit sweat nurturing these absurd fantasies for years, getting your hopes up that someone may actually enjoy your existence, without knowing who may have a crush on you back, so everyone’s randomly hurling darts in the dark, hoping to hit any target at all, never mind get a bull’s-eye. There were about five hundred kids in my grade, and you figure each person had four or five people they could stomach the thought of sitting beside silently in a dark movie theater for two hours. So there must be at least a few perfect matches — storybook romances destined to last until the couple dies simultaneously holding hands watching a Hawaiian sunset — that never see the light of day because no one wanted to risk making an ass of themselves at this goddamned casino called high school where the only things on the line were your reputation and your happiness. Why couldn’t we all just make a list of people we liked on the first day of ninth grade and then feed them into a computer program that would cross-reference all the lists and spit out a simple chart showing all the perfect couples in the grade? Problem solved! And if you weren’t matched with anyone on the list, no worries! Enjoy four years of beating off all you like while not wasting your time daydreaming about girls who don’t give a shit about you, and try again in college! You’ll probably get into Harvard with all the extra time you’ll have not imagining yourself making gingerbread houses with a girl who accidentally smiled at you one time.

  No matter what I did, I always wound up in the same place: sweating in my bed at two thirty a.m., shackled with paranoia. Everyone else from White Water was sleeping soundly, bundled up in cozy memories of not being a world-class dumb-ass. Maybe it was time to admit I wasn’t cut out for adolescence, weigh down my cargo shorts with old video game controllers, and walk into the ocean.

  Was that a suicidal thought? Technically yes. But it made sense.

  I stayed in my room for most of the rest of spring break.

  I couldn’t bring myself to talk to Emma or Alex at school. I kept my head down when I walked past their lunch table on the way to mine, and hoped that since I couldn’t see them, they couldn’t see me. But Alex would always say hi to me, and Emma would sometimes wave. I tried to tell from the tones of their voices or the angle of their waves if they were actually mocking me, but I couldn’t be sure.

  I wondered who else knew about my “our song” comment at this point. The whole school? The entire internet? It some ways it didn’t even matter. Even if no one else knew about that moment, I did and I’d never forget it.

  I fell back into my routine and barely felt alive. In the mornings and at night I’d take my pills and wash my face and inspect every zit on my jawline. Were they getting smaller? Were there less of them? Had any of the scars healed? Most days it seemed like nothing at all had changed about me. It was impossible to tell when I’d check my face several times a day, this masochistic ritual of glancing in mirrors just long enough to remind myself I looked gross. I started to wonder if the pills had done anything at all but mess with my head.

  It was warm and I couldn’t wear my black hoodie to school every day anymore. I wanted to blend in and disappear, but most of my T-shirts had stupid graphics that drew attention and tried to claim an identity based on phrases I d
idn’t come up with and had never said. So I’d rotate the two solid-color T-shirts I had, over and over. Blue and gray paired with khaki shorts. Generic guy camouflage.

  I no longer brought anything to conversations with the guys. I’d stand there listening to Patrick making the guys and girls laugh at his bland story about how embarrassed he was when a waiter told him to enjoy his meal and he said, “You, too.” Come on. A few months ago I probably would’ve pointed out that that was amateur stuff — the kind of conversational mishap that only mortified a fifth-grader. You want to talk humiliating? Try telling a girl you like but who sometimes forgets you exist that a song everyone knows is “your song.” That’s how we do it in the big leagues. But instead I just stayed quiet. Sometimes I’d see a video online I knew they’d think was funny or read something about a movie we’d all watched but I wouldn’t bother telling them about it. What was the point? I knew how they’d respond. It felt like I’d already had all the conversations I’d ever have with them. I didn’t want to get stuck in an endless cycle of conversational reruns, so I’d limit myself to the predictable deadpan sarcastic comments they expected from me. They’d all laugh at my dark jokes and never think anything was different about me. I was a house being demolished on the inside, but the front yard looked the same.

  I spent weekends in my room staring at my computer, compulsively refreshing movie forums for new posts and stalking kids from school online. By then, Alex’s online persona had entirely fused with the God Squad. She switched to her real name online. Whatever separation had existed was gone; this was the one and only Alex. I’d flick through albums of them on road trips through south Georgia and at some country music concert in a field somewhere. She was wearing cowboy boots and a large hat. It felt like looking at Christmas cards from a distant relative I’d met once when I was five.

  My April Accutane appointment happened. Mom drove me and I sat in the waiting room alone. There were five jaundiced people there, wasting their time waiting for the drug tests they were clearly about to fail. I sat with my eyes shut and felt relieved that I didn’t have to pretend to care about Alex, whose interests were clearly polar opposites of my own, or worry that she was secretly thinking about the “our song” comment while we sat side by side in stony, judgmental silence.

  Nights started getting warm in early May and I’d sit outside on the deck by myself after dinner. It was dark and mostly quiet out there. I’d play music, but sometimes I’d turn it off but keep my headphones on so my parents wouldn’t bother me, and just listen to the crickets.

  My parents and Kate would sit on the couch watching TV in the living room and I could see them through the blinds. We were all together, if you could ignore the brick wall between us.

  One night I brought an old notebook out there with me, mostly as an excuse to give my parents if they asked why I was sitting outside doing nothing like a potted plant. I opened to a page that said MY LIFE SUCKS. I HATE MOM. Huh. There was a date on the page that placed it in seventh grade. I had no recollection of what had inspired it, but something must have really pissed me off. I tried to remember for a while but couldn’t think of anything that had happened to me in seventh grade that was that bad.

  I closed the notebook and considered trying to pursue some other kind of expression I hadn’t failed at yet, like painting or forming a band. But what was the point?

  It wasn’t like I had anything to offer the world. I was just a collage of songs I’d heard and movie logos I’d drawn in my notebook, all other people’s ideas. An 8-by-11 sheet of printer paper of a person whose main skill was wasting time trying to convince himself he was more interesting than everyone else, despite having done nothing but sit around inert, consuming media. I was pretty sure I didn’t have a personality.

  I took a sip of cold tea and was staring out into the trees, lost in my head, when Mom opened the deck door and scared the shit out of me. I made some guttural noise and leaped out of my chair an inch, spilling brown liquid on my T-shirt. Mom laughed.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to scare you. Just wanted to check if you needed anything.”

  I didn’t turn around to look at her. “Nope.”

  She couldn’t stop laughing. I imagine she wiped a tear from her eye. It might have been the funniest thing she’d seen in a decade. “I’m sorry, sweetie. It just reminded me of Dad. I swear, the same thing happened when we were first married. He was standing on a chair changing a light bulb and I opened the door and he screamed and fell flat on his back. Slammed on the ground. A picture fell off the wall. Once I realized he wasn’t dead, we laughed for about an hour.”

  I laughed a little.

  “You get your focus from your father. You both have that intensity. It’s funny how much I see of him in you.”

  I nodded, not sure I agreed.

  She closed the door behind me and I looked at the back of Dad’s head through the blinds. He was watching baseball and had been for hours. I didn’t get it. How could he devote so much of his time to a game that is basically the same thing every time?

  I shrugged and felt my phone vibrate with a text. It was Luke. He and Will, Sam, and Patrick were on their way to pick me up to go sneak into our middle school. Goddamn it. They’d been talking about that incredibly dumb plan all week at school and I’d been ignoring them. I assumed I wasn’t invited, just like I hadn’t been to most of the events they’d gone to on weekends the past few months. I wouldn’t go with them. I’d made the mistake of spontaneously going with them to White Water and I wound up making an ass of myself. I wouldn’t do that again.

  Before I could text them a lie, Luke honked from my driveway. Shit. I sprinted through my house before my parents could get off the couch and told them it was just Luke picking something up.

  “Dude, dude, dude, dude, dude!” Patrick shouted through the shotgun window as I walked across the driveway, slapping his hand on the side of the car. “Let’s go, go, go, go, go!”

  “Yeah, hey, I, uh . . . Nah. I’m just, uh . . . Nah.”

  “What are you talking about?” Luke said. “Come on. This is, like, the only interesting thing that’s gonna happen all year.”

  “I’m just, I mean . . . we have finals coming up and . . .”

  “There’s, like, three weeks of school left,” Luke said. “It’s practically summer. Nothing matters. Come on.”

  Patrick said, “Dude, you’re making this hard. It’s very easy. The window around the back by the cafeteria doesn’t lock. Everyone’s been in there. It’s a rite of passage. You can’t move away from here to go to college without sneaking back into middle school.”

  “Seriously, dude,” Sam said. “They won’t let you graduate if you don’t. If you haven’t done it, when you try to get your diploma the principal chucks a baseball at your head and you have to start ninth grade again.”

  I took a deep breath. I thought about going. I really tried to picture myself slinking through that back window with the guys, tiptoeing across the tiles in the hallway where we used to play crab soccer in gym class. I got stressed out just thinking about it, picturing security cameras catching us, alarms blaring, me saying something stupid and embarrassing myself in front of everyone again.

  I knew I should have been the Doritos Dude: Get your flat ass off your beanbag chair and roll with the fun, you goddamned idiot. But when I’d daydream about being a life-of-the-party guy who just doesn’t care, no one in the daydream sees me that way; they know I’m only pretending to be laid-back. I shout, “Get in the pool!” and then I cannonball in and when I surface, I’m all alone in there and my bathing suit has come off and everyone looks down at my mediocre penis.

  “Look, I just can’t.”

  They all stared at me for a second. Patrick said to Luke, “I told you he wouldn’t. There’s no point in trying anymore.” And then they drove away.

  I walked back inside and my parents asked if the guys were there to surprise me the night before my birthday. The guys had no idea
my birthday was tomorrow, and I didn’t feel like telling them. I said no, they were going to a football team party. Most kids lie to their parents to sneak out at night; I lied to my parents to stay in my room.

  Mom, Dad, and Kate decided to give me my birthday cards that night. They must have felt bad for me or something. My parents’ gift was some cash inside a store-bought card because Mom said she really didn’t know what to get me.

  Mom asked me if I wanted to watch a movie or eat ice cream or do anything special. I said thanks, but I was tired and just wanted a calm night at home before my driver’s license test the next day.

  I went up to my room, aimlessly browsed the internet for hours, then looked at porn, masturbated, said, out loud to myself, “Happy sweet sixteen, dude,” and shut off the light.

  I got my driver’s license on Saturday morning and I didn’t look at the photo on it. I just took the license from the clerk and stuffed it into my wallet and tried to forget about it. I told my parents I had homework to do in my room, and I really did for a while. But as soon as I took my first break to browse the internet, I didn’t get anything done for the rest of the day. I sat there for hours scrolling through pictures of everyone who’d snuck into the middle school the night before.

  None of my friends were stupid enough to upload pictures of themselves breaking and entering on state property, but they were in the background of some of the shots uploaded by dumber members of our grade. Luke, Will, Sam, and Patrick were standing in the cafeteria, hanging around where Luke, Will, and my old lunch table was. There must have been thirty kids there. Emma and Alex were there, standing with some juniors and seniors. They were laughing. Some of the older guys were holding cans that were probably beer.