by Matt Burns
“Hungry.” She shrugged, heading downstairs.
She’d made me realize I was hungry, too, and I found her in the kitchen, standing in front of the open fridge, zoned out. The same way I’d stand there when there was something in my head I couldn’t get out, and Mom would yell at me that I was wasting electricity. Seeing Kate do it, I saw what Mom was talking about. Close that door before you ruin the milk, young lady.
She sighed aggressively and slammed the door, almost like she’d been waiting for me to watch her do it.
She stomped over to the island and yanked the silverware drawer open loud enough to wake Mom and Dad.
“What’s your problem?” I said.
“I’m hungry.”
“You’re obviously mad about something. Just tell me.”
She sighed, closed her eyes, and spoke into the drawer. “Am I a bitch?”
Oh, no. “What?”
“Courtney’s going to orchestra camp in two weeks and I’m not going because I’m not in orchestra.”
“O-kay . . .”
“So Courtney found out Priya Leghari is going to the same camp, and we barely ever even talk to Priya Leghari, but all of a sudden they’re best friends and they said they drank a beer at Priya’s mom’s house last weekend and they’re making all these plans and talking about how it’s gonna be the best summer ever and so I didn’t give Courtney the birthday card I made for her and she found out and got mad and called me a bitch in front of everyone.”
“Wait — you made her a card? For her birthday?”
She looked up at me. “Yeah . . .”
“Huh,” I said, confused by such blatant displays of affection between friends.
“How come you and Luke and the other guy never fight?”
She had an interesting perspective on the perpetual pseudo-feud between me and my supposed best friends. “We do,” I said. “It’s just . . . different, I guess.”
We stood facing each other for what felt like three hours. It was by far the longest amount of time I’d ever spent in a room with Kate by ourselves.
“So?” she said impatiently.
I jumped. “So what?”
She rolled her eyes. “So what should I do? About Courtney?”
“Oh. I guess . . . Why don’t you, uh, just find some random other girl and start making plans with her, real loud, when Courtney walks by?”
Kate narrowed her eyes at me.
“Just say you’re gonna, like, go on a life-changing cross-country road trip with this girl to meet whichever celebrity your grade thinks is cool. Then Courtney will be, like, ‘Goddamn, I should’ve kept hanging out with Kate this summer. Priya Leghari’s the worst.’”
Kate’s face soured. “That’s your advice?”
I shrugged. “Wait, do you still have the card?”
“Yeah. Why?” she asked suspiciously.
“You should just give it to her. You have the card made for her, so what else are you gonna do with it? It’s pretty much just trash to anyone except her if her name’s on it.”
“My card’s not trash.”
“No, no, no, no, no,” I said, holding my hands out to tame her like she was a lion. “I just mean you can’t do anything else with it, right? So just give it to her and you’ll be the better person. Take your emotions out of it and take the high road.”
She balled her hands into fists, grunted, “Ugh!” and stomped past me upstairs.
Jesus. Sorry for trying to help. I took a Pop-Tart from the pantry back to my room. I scrolled through more forum posts, but after a while I was only thinking about Kate
What had I told her? “Take your emotions out of it and take the high road”? I’d said it without even thinking, factory-produced nonsense that had infected my mind from movies or books or made-for-TV movies based on books. A preprogrammed script like “What’s up? Not much. You?” that our brains use to coast through life. Realizing the advice had spilled out of me the same way it would from an unprepared substitute teacher freaked me out. How much longer until I loaded up more of these manufactured slogan bullets and suddenly I’m an adult sleepwalking through workweeks while my esophagus burst-fires, How are you? I hate Mondays. It’s hump day. I’m working for the weekend. Thank god it’s Friday.
What the hell was I doing giving advice, anyway? The highlight of my week was receiving an email from Amazon about other DVDs I might enjoy.
I licked the last Pop-Tart crumbs off my fingers and vowed to stay out of Kate’s middle-school business.
On Friday, Will offered to drive us all to a movie after school. But the idea of packing into Will’s car and letting him drive in after-school rush-hour traffic freaked me out. Every way I imagined it, we’d be smashed up and sprawled out in bloody heaps on the side of the road. The more I thought about it, the concept of driving seemed insane. We let any jackass who stayed awake long enough to get a driver’s education certificate blast around in two-ton chunks of gasoline-filled metal, ten inches apart, on narrow, unlit two-lane roads? Honestly, why aren’t lanes forty feet wide? There should be wrecks all the time. It’s a miracle anyone ever makes it to the grocery store alive.
At lunch I just told the guys I had a family thing and couldn’t go. They walked past me in the carpool line that afternoon. Mom would drive me home, nice and slow.
By six forty-five that night I was in my uniform, pajamas and earbuds, stationed at my post in my room behind the keyboard, cruising through the internet. Kate had been in her room with the door shut all afternoon. When she hadn’t come down earlier to get the pizza Mom ordered, I started wondering about her. She shared a lot of my DNA, so there was a good chance she was lying on her floor, listening to music, and soaking in her own misery. But she was younger, and a girl. Maybe it wasn’t the same. I’d spent every night of my life sleeping twenty feet away from her, but I felt like I barely knew her and didn’t understand her. I’d never really taken her seriously. I still felt bad about giving her terrible advice the other night. If someone had said that to me, it would have annoyed the shit out of me. And she was probably still torn up about her friend drama, but she’d never open up to me again. If she was like me, she was probably stuck in a storm of self-hatred, and I felt sick about that.
I walked over to her closed door and hesitated. I wanted to knock on it and reach out to connect with her, but I had no idea what I was doing. Beside her door was a trash bag filled with junk for Dad to take to Goodwill. Maybe there was something in there that’d connect us. I dragged it back into my room, eased the door closed, and rooted through.
There was a bunch of horse-related garbage. Thank god, that phase was ending. There was a sweatshirt from some acting camp I had no recollection of her attending. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants movie soundtrack. A bunch of plastic rings. Did those mean something to her? Had she loved everything in this bag at some point, or was it just trash?
At the bottom of the bag were a bunch of books — all by Judy Blume. Kate had been obsessed with these books when she was in third or fourth grade, and all the girls in my elementary school had read them, too. Maybe if I consumed the media she did at a formative age, I could start to understand her. It was worth a shot — and it’s not like I had anything else to do. I sat against the wall on my bed and started reading.
Huh.
I got sucked in.
Hours passed. Every few chapters I’d look up to confirm I was alone, nestle deeper into the covers, and fall back inside the minds of young girls.
I rushed from one book to the next as soon as I finished. I read Deenie and Blubber and Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.
Man. The girls in those books go through some serious stuff. Margaret worries about stuffing her bra and thinks she’s weird for not getting her period when her friend does, and she has the balls to question her parents’ religion. In Blubber, Jill realizes she’s a bully, then gets bullied back and has the sack to stand up for herself. Deenie has scoliosis and defies her mom, who wants her to becom
e a model. Plus, not that it’s the point of the book or anything, but Deenie strokes off like she’s captain of the varsity masturbating squad, which is the kind of detail anyone can enjoy.
Girls have it so much worse than guys in middle school. Their puberty is on full display. Everyone at school can see how big their boobs are and compare them to the other girls’ instantly. What a goddamned nightmare that must be. If it was normal for guys to wear spandex bicycle shorts all the time and everyone could see how tiny our dicks are in sixth grade, every boy would be openly weeping in the hallways, begging for mercy, going to the bathroom in groups to console each other, telling the other guys their shirts are cute because we’re desperate to have someone say something nice back to us. Girls can’t just exist; they’re also on display. They have to be beautiful and smart and caring and sexual enough to not be labeled strange but not so sexual they violate the dress code. If I had to face the added pressure girls do, my body would have compressed itself into a walnut years ago. Every girl should be given a medal on the last day of each grade from sixth through twelfth for the accomplishment of not leaping to her death from a cliff.
I tore through pages of those books faster than I ever did when I read what Meyer had given me — the short stories that were poetic allegories and metaphors mixed with opaque social commentary and had won awards no one had ever heard of. Ugh. Why couldn’t those writers just get to it like Judy Blume does? It wasn’t just that those books were a window into all the secret things girls have to deal with, though. It was the clarity those narrators had about their own feelings that floored me. They could grasp what was like vapor to me.
I thought about myself when I was Kate’s age and how emotionally stunted I’d been. Seventh-grade me was a blob that rolled around from my house to the bus to the classroom, searching for snacks and the sounds of other guys making jokes about penises. I didn’t know anything about what went on inside my friends’ heads the way Kate knows and constantly rambles about every emotion Courtney’s ever felt. Middle-school me was a human corn dog incapable of making decisions, whose strongest memories are the times kids accidentally farted in class.
In seventh grade, Luke, Will, and I made Rebecca Kleene cry. We were just bored in class one day, and she sat next to us, and we saw her write her name on a worksheet. Luke said, “Kleenex.” Will and I started saying it, too. “What’s up, Kleenex?” She turned red and walked out of the room, sniffling back tears. I had no idea what had happened. I just thought we were being dumb and saying something stupid for no reason. After it happened, we never talked about making her cry. We didn’t feel like we’d done anything wrong.
But Rebecca Kleene had feelings. It didn’t matter that we were just messing around about her name and not actually making fun of anything specific about her. We’d made her feel like shit. If she hadn’t moved to Montana three years ago, I would have tried to apologize.
Goddamn it. What else had I done that I should feel terrible about? I felt like up until then the only feelings I understood in myself were anger, self-loathing, and frustration. I had the emotional breadth of a Limp Bizkit album. I’d gone sixteen years without truly addressing my emotions like a developed human being. In the book, Margaret develops boobs over her year. I was starting to develop basic emotional intelligence. I needed to stop being such a coward and stare down my feelings like Margaret did.
I pulled up the texts Luke, Will, Alex, and Emma had sent me on Tuesday, asking me where I was and how I was doing. I’d been mad that they cared about me? I was annoyed they acknowledged the most notable thing that had happened in my entire life, and were confirming I wasn’t dead?
How much of my shitty year was my fault? I pictured everything I’d done all year from Luke’s and Will’s and Sam’s and Patrick’s and Emma’s and Alex’s perspectives. Alex and Emma waved and smiled and talked to me all spring, and I barely reacted. I was paranoid they were secretly making fun of me or that they pitied me or something. I didn’t let myself believe they might actually just be being nice.
How many times had Luke and Will tried to invite me to things and I’d turned them down? How many times had they made an effort to include me, and I’d blown them off? And what had staying home alone gotten me? I’d only made myself sadder.
Objectively I had a good life, and I was wasting it wallowing in self-pity. Sure, I had bad acne. But who gives a shit? Plenty of kids around the world have bad acne and are fleeing from war. I had high-speed internet in my room. And it’s not like acne was the only reason I didn’t have a girlfriend. I didn’t know anything about girls, or how to be a decent human being around them. I remembered the time a few weeks before when I’d sat at my desk looking up religions and fantasizing about having Emma “help me choose one.” I was such a clueless dumb-ass. I thought I could try on faith like it was a baseball cap. And what the hell was I doing putting on a Blink-182 T-shirt to attract Emma, like a peacock showing off his colorful butthole to a potential suitor? My grand plan after she fawned over my T-shirt was to teach her about more obscure bands? What kind of pretentious dick would I have been, lecturing this uninterested girl about Sunny Day Real Estate? And why couldn’t I just admit I genuinely loved Blink-182? Why couldn’t I bear the idea of admitting I liked a band everyone else liked? How’d I benefit from denying myself all the things I had in common with other people?
And what was wrong with me that I thought Luke couldn’t go out with Alex because of some nonexistent rule about having dibs on her? Alex was never mine and she wasn’t Luke’s, either. This wasn’t the 1700s — girls didn’t belong to anyone. I bet Luke didn’t think Emma was off-limits to me just because they’d dated last year for three months, and I bet it never crossed his mind that someone would think he had dibs on a girl just because he’d supposedly met her at a writing class before anyone else met her. No wonder Alex preferred Luke over me! He treated girls like human beings, not like trophies in some unspoken contest with his friends. Plus, he didn’t vibrate with stress like a fucking tuning fork 24/7 — and he didn’t spend hours sitting around trying to come up with the perfect TV shows to compare real people to in these metaphors no one should ever know about. Had I really compared Alex to The Simpsons and Emma to Scrubs? Jesus Christ, those were the thoughts of a dangerous, deranged virgin.
I’d assumed I was better than other guys my age because I wasn’t obsessed with porn-star-looking babes, but how was fetishizing Alex’s taste in music and movies last fall any different from ogling some supermodel’s massive rack? My eyeballs blasted out of my skull at Alex’s imagined reading habits the same way Luke’s did at his mom’s Victoria’s Secret catalogs.
How well did I even know Alex, anyway? She’d had more of an influence on my life than anyone, but how much did I actually know about her? I knew who her friends were and some movies and music she liked. I knew that she had bad skin and she’d transferred schools. The more I thought about each fact I knew, the more hollow it all felt — an unfinished connect-the-dots outline of her. I’d been too stuck in my head at all of our appointments trying to think of ways to impress her to actually get to know her.
For months I’d been scrutinizing my face to see if the Accutane was having an effect, but what if the thing it had been changing was my mind? What if the reason I couldn’t get out of my head and engage with her was the medicine?
The list of potential side effects was so long and so broad, anyone could see themselves in it. It was like a horoscope. Were my mood swings, anxiety, and dark thoughts because of the pills, or were they all just side effects of being sixteen?
Had I been sad before the pills? I’d written those words in my notebook in seventh grade about my life sucking and hating Mom, but I didn’t describe any specifics or bother to address those feelings beyond writing my own dumb clickbait headlines that linked to nothing. I didn’t have the courage to think my anger through. I used to stay home from school with fake stomachaches, telling myself I just felt like lying in bed all day because it
was fun. But it was never fun; I was just trading stress for loneliness. How many times had I convinced myself I wanted to be invisible, and then felt disappointed when no one looked at me? Was something off about me, years before I ever had acne? How many feelings had I been in denial about, from when I was a kid up through the car wreck?
As soon as those words crossed my mind, I pushed the thoughts of the car wreck out of my head again.
No. Stop being a coward. Think about it. Let the memory back in. Hold on to it.
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath and put myself back in the car the night of the wreck. All week I’d convinced myself the car wreck wasn’t a big deal. But both cars were destroyed beyond repair. How bad had it actually been? And why was I afraid to confront it?
I breathed harder. I felt the airbag punch my face, scrape my arms. My hands quaked. The airbag dust stank like eggs and felt like sand on my lips.
I rewound the memory, trying to focus on the moments just before the crash. The other driver had gone through the stop sign. He’d made the mistake. Legally it was his fault. But why didn’t I see him and stop? I knew people ran through that stop sign all the time. I’d done it. If I hadn’t been so stuck in my head, obsessed with my own thoughts . . . if I’d taken driver’s ed seriously and remembered to not drive when angry and distracted . . . I knew everything I needed to know to avoid that wreck, but I hadn’t used it. Why?
Was that the question I was scared of? What I hadn’t wanted to acknowledge all week? Had some part of my brain taken over my body, distracting me with awful thoughts about myself, hoping I’d get in a wreck that looked like an accident?
If that other driver hadn’t hit me, would I have kept driving until someone else did? Would I have taken my hands off the wheel and let the car drift off the road and into a tree?
I choked up and squeezed my eyelids shut. Those were more than suicidal thoughts; they were subconscious suicidal plans.