Me Being Me Is Exactly as Insane as You Being You

by Todd Hasak-Lowy

  4. Darren: “Thanks, uh, you too. On ‘Moanin’,’ I mean.”

  17 Conclusions Darren Reaches on His Way Back to the Auditorium, Which He Walks to Very Slowly in Order to Give His Boner Time to De-bonerize

  1. I liked that.

  2. I am not gay.

  3. Maggie is not gay.

  4. I hope we can do that again, but for about seventy-five times longer.

  5. Eating pie with her and then doing that, for about seventy-five times longer, would be perfect.

  6. Even though she isn’t exactly the most popular twelfth grader, it would still be pretty cool to go out with her.

  7. I don’t really like pie, except for chocolate cream, but so what?

  8. I could even wind up going to the prom with her.

  9. Actually, I think I’d want us to have the pie second and do the other stuff first, because otherwise I might feel gross if I ate too much.

  10. Nate probably won’t believe me.

  11. But maybe he will if I tell him her breath tasted like almonds.

  12. Best of all would be maybe somehow doing the other stuff and eating the pie kind of all at the same time.

  13. I should remember not to tell anyone I just thought that.

  14. I can’t believe I have to drive with my dad to Ann Arbor tomorrow.

  15. Though then I’ll be able to tell Nate in person.

  16. Just the part about kissing her and stuff, I mean.

  17. But he still probably won’t believe me, not even if I tell him about her breath.

  8 Pictures of All-Conference and/or All-State North High Athletes Hanging on the Wall of the Hallway Darren Stops to Look at for No Particular Reason (Except for the Last One) during His Walk Back to the Auditorium

  1. Mike Powell, All-State, Baseball, 1976

  2. Becky Cellini, All-Conference, Volleyball, 1979

  3. Diane Corbin, All-Conference, Volleyball, 1981; All-State, Volleyball, 1982

  4. Carl Simpson, All-State, Football, 1984, 1985

  5. Marge Wallace, All-Conference, Softball, 1989; All-State, Soccer, 1989

  6. Ben Nicholson, All-State, Swimming, 1996, 1997

  7. Kip Webster, All-Conference, Wrestling, 2005

  8. Nate Jacobs, All-Conference, Diving, 2013

  2 Somewhat Surprising Developments or Sudden Realizations Darren Has during the Car Ride Back to His Dad’s Apartment

  1. His mom calls him, which is fine, even good, but then she tells him, “Your dad told me that you played an amazing solo. That’s wonderful!” This means, obviously, that his dad told his mom something that wasn’t absolutely necessary or part of an ongoing or new fight, and does this mean they might be nicer to each other from now on, and why do they even let him get his hopes up?

  2. Maggie is going to go off to college soon.

  3 Ways of Measuring the Amount Darren Finds Himself Missing His Mom While Talking to Her on the Phone, Even Though She Sort of Ruined His Good Mood and Seemed Pretty Distracted Herself, Too

  1. 7.28 on a scale of one to ten, one being not at all, ten being can’t be without her

  2. This much (hands held apart at around shoulder width)

  3. More than he missed her after saying good-bye to her this morning, but less than he misses Nate

  5 Rather Uneven Exchanges between Darren and His Dad That Take Place Back at His Apartment in Front of the Fifty-One-Inch HDTV, Which Is the Only Feature of His Dad’s Apartment Darren Prefers over Its Counterpart from the House

  1. “Have you finished packing yet?” his dad asks during a commercial.

  “Yeah, pretty much.”

  During the next commercial break, after Darren returns from the kitchen with a bag of popcorn, his dad says, “I was thinking we should leave tomorrow around two p.m. I can take you out of school early. That way we can beat rush hour and get to Ann Arbor in time for dinner.”

  “Okay,” Darren says.

  2. Their show is back on, but it’s that very last part of the show that isn’t even really a part, the part that only exists so they can get you to watch the last batch of commercials Darren and his dad just watched. So his dad says, “The concert was really wonderful, Darren. Especially your solo. I had no idea you could play like that! It’s a shame Nate and your mother couldn’t make it. Oh well, their loss.”

  Darren can feel his dad looking at him.

  “Yeah, it was pretty cool,” he says.

  3. And then, during the first commercial of the next show, his dad asks, “I need to visit CVS tomorrow morning. Do you need anything?”

  “Nah.”

  4. This commercial break seems unusually long. Or maybe it’s just his dad, who says, while Darren watches an ad for an airline, “Look, Darren, I know that what I told you this morning was not easy to hear. I’m sorry that . . . I’m sorry that, well, that—that you must confront this now as well. I know it won’t make tomorrow’s ride much fun, but just so you know, we certainly don’t need to talk about it if you’re not ready yet. I just, I—well, I felt like I couldn’t hide this from you any longer, because I love you and lying to someone you love . . . Well, I could no longer lie to you about this. I simply could not. Okay?”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  5. Darren lets his dad kiss the top of his head, then gets up and goes to his room for the night.

  7 Random Memories That Involuntarily Surface While Darren Is Trying to Fall Asleep

  1. The picnic they had one summer when Darren was around five or six in the dunes near Lake Michigan. It was windy and everything kept blowing around, so the picnic didn’t last very long, but it was still kind of fun when his mom and his dad sat leaning into each other watching Nate and Darren climb this one very steep dune that seemed like it was going straight up.

  2. The way Nate was kind of distant and even a little bit mean the day they dropped him off in Ann Arbor for the first time, until he made up some lame excuse when the four of them were getting ready to go out for one last dinner together. Meaning that in the end, just Darren and his parents had dinner together, which, even though it was at Zingerman’s, was incredibly depressing, because everyone was tired and no one could seem to think of anything to talk about.

  3. This fight Bugs sort of had with Marc Burgess on the last day of school in fifth grade, which happened while they were lining up to go inside and wasn’t really a fight; it was just Marc hitting Bugs in the face with his math textbook, which gave Bugs a bloody nose, but that Bugs said didn’t really hurt much at all.

  4. The time they went to Nate’s swim meet his junior year at some school out in Des Plaines. Darren was super bored so he asked to go back to their car to get his homework, which his mom had told him to bring inside with them when they first got there, meaning now she wouldn’t go get it. So Darren went himself, got totally lost in the hallways, and wound up missing most of Nate’s dives, including the first one-and-a-half he totally nailed.

  5. His grandma’s funeral and how uncomfortable he felt when his mom, who held his hand for probably 70 percent of the time they were at the cemetery, gave him this weird smile and sniffled just before two of his uncles, one of his cousins, and Nate brought the coffin over to the giant hole they were standing in front of.

  6. Lying on his back and looking at the stars in this empty field one night at summer camp when he was twelve years old. There was no moon or clouds that night, and his counselor, Lyle, had actually woken up their bunk in the middle of the night and made them all walk in total silence to this field, where he gave them doughnuts, told them to lie on their backs, and then started talking about the stars and how far away they are and the fact that some of them are probably dead by now but that they’re so far away, their light is still reaching Earth.

  This was by far Darren’s favorite experience from camp, which he didn’t like overall, because everyone in his bunk just wanted to play sports all the time, plus the food was heinous, but that night, listening to Lyle’s voice, which was so deep and gravelly Darren thought he could
feel it float across his face, Darren somehow found himself glad to know that the universe might be infinitely large, whatever that means.

  7. Something from when he must have been just three or four, that maybe was actually from a dream, riding in a station wagon, holding an orange ball, and arriving at a park they used to live near, where his mom dropped him off, told him to be a good boy, and hugged or didn’t hug him.

  2. FRIDAY, APRIL 25

  5 Mothering Strategies Clearly Informing His Mom’s Morning Text Message

  1. Be enthusiastic and positive, especially when your child is going through a tough time.

  2. Show your child that you are extremely excited about things he could or should be (but isn’t yet) excited about him- or herself.

  3. Apologize for not being there when you can’t be there.

  4. Make it clear that the lines of communication are open, in part to encourage your child to initiate future communication.

  5. Don’t make your child guess whether or not you love him or her and are thinking a lot about him or her.

  4 Terms for Whatever It Is Darren Is Clearly Suffering from Not Ten Minutes After Waking Up

  1. Anxiety

  2. Nerves

  3. Shpilkes

  4. Weak kidney energy

  7 Manifestations of This Anxiety/Nerves/Shpilkes/Weak Kidney Energy in Darren’s Typically Uneventful Morning Routine

  1. Waking up eleven minutes before his alarm was set to go off

  2. Barely even reading his mom’s brief, predictable text message

  3. Showering longer than normal (mostly standing motionless under the water)

  4. Inability to select T-shirt (eventually settles on black “The Who—Maximum R&B” shirt Nate bought him for his fourteenth birthday)

  5. Difficulty not just paying attention to his dad, but also even pretending he is paying attention to his dad

  6. Hurried consumption of two bowls of Rice Krispies with vanilla rice milk, with one heaping tablespoon of sugar scattered over each

  7. Forgetting around three different times what he was looking for when opening a drawer in his room during the final stages of packing for his trip

  2 Maggie-centric Fantasies Darren Explores Intently during the Bus Ride to School

  1. Darren visits Maggie at school next year (unclear exactly where this will be, but Darren bets she’ll be at an urban campus). Maggie, not surprisingly, will be playing in a jazz quintet. She’ll have a gig the Friday night of his visit, and it will be during this gig that Darren will for the first time realize what a truly fantastic musician she is, since, he’ll understand in retrospect, she was being held back by the overall mediocrity of the North High Jazz Ensemble, even if they’re a pretty solid group as far as high school jazz ensembles go. She won’t be the strongest link in this quintet, not at all, but she will be the youngest, and there will be an unmistakable excitement in the quintet and among the audience as well, stemming from everyone’s awareness of her vast potential.

  Watching her from his seat near the back of the bar, Darren will be overwhelmed by the newly feverish pace of her development, which he’ll somehow realize is not so much her getting better as it is just her allowing herself to demonstrate how good she already is, as if she had been hiding huge parts of her ability until now. And this overwhelms Darren, because even from the back of the room he can’t help but see just how much Maggie there is in Maggie, how much she has effortlessly shed or gotten over all the parts of her that allowed Darren and everyone else at North High to not exactly take her all that seriously.

  Maggie, in short, is going to be ten times the adult than she was a teenager—she already is, such that people meeting her for the first time this evening could not possibly have any idea just how awkward and strange she often appeared only ten months earlier, because she’s radiant right now, maybe even literally. Because, sure, there are bright lights pointed at her, but it’s almost as if she is more than just reflecting the light; it seems like she’s luminous all on her own, because Darren can swear she’s brighter than the rest of the other lit-up musicians next to her onstage.

  And so Darren is overwhelmed, because even though she invited him to get on a plane and fly to New York (of course she’ll be in New York) to visit her (she even coordinated his visit with her roommate’s trip home so the two of them—holy crap—will have her dorm room all to themselves), he strongly doubts that he can compete with the dozens of guys who are surely lining up to date or even just talk to this amazing woman.

  But just as Darren is getting ready to go hide in the bathroom and plan his escape in order to cut his devastating losses, a song ends (“My Funny Valentine”). At which point Maggie walks up to the microphone, where she says, “We have a special guest in the audience tonight. My boyfriend, Darren, flew in today from Chicago to visit me this weekend.” Darren is so terrifically embarrassed just two short sentences into her announcement that his face feels heavy with all the blood rushing up to it. “And not only is he cute and funny”—Maggie sort of laughs here—“but he’s a kick-ass bassist.”

  Darren feels like he might now die, especially once he sees the quintet’s bassist, who is probably twenty-five and has an actual adult beard, carefully set his bass (his massive, hollow, acoustic, stand-up bass) down on the stage, which he then steps off from, smiling. Maggie has her left hand, the one not holding her trumpet, up against her brow, shielding her from the bright lights aimed at the stage. “C’mon up here, Darren, no hiding!”

  Darren is at this point saying and doing all the things a person says and does when wanting to appear intent on declining a public invitation, waving Maggie off with his hands, muttering, “No, no, no,” but of course, this is not a polite act on Darren’s part. He does not in any way want to go up on that stage. But Maggie, the rest of her quintet, and the crowd simply will not take no for an answer.

  Still, the applause and the chanting of “Dar-REN! Dar-REN! Dar-REN!” are not enough. It takes a smiling and mildly exasperated Maggie stepping off the stage, walking all the way to him, reaching down to take his hand, and, most of all, whispering warmly in his ear, “Please, Darren, for me, please,” for him to agree. And it wasn’t even the words of her request, it was feeling her breath on his skin as she spoke that somehow cured him of his fear. As if she blew a magic spell onto him. Or into him.

  So he ascends to the stage, familiarizes himself as best as he can with the instrument, this being the third time he’s so much as touched a stand-up bass, and looks over at the group’s bassist, who nods casual encouragement Darren’s way. Maggie turns to him and says, “ ‘Footprints,’ whenever you’re ready,” and then tells the other guys, “He’ll take eight measures.” And he does, he takes eight measures, and his solo is ten times better than it was in the jazz ensemble concert. In fact, he feels like a real jazz bassist for the first time, because, let’s face it, unless you’re playing fusion or something, you don’t play jazz on an electric bass.

  2. They have loads of sex. Tons of it. An absolutely immense amount of full-on sexual intercourse. All the time. Multiple times a day. Around the clock, even. And a lot of this fantasy isn’t really a single fantasy, it’s just a bunch of images of them doing it, or Maggie in a state of being ready to do it, which means naked or getting naked. For some reason he keeps picturing her sweaty, or glistening—no, it’s sweaty, supersweaty, in fact, like she just finished a long workout at the gym, who knows why. And though it’s tough for Darren to concentrate enough to come up with a single scenario to develop, he finds himself getting pretty interested in a couple of related settings: a grassy field and a forest. Honestly, it’s the forest that really excites him, even though he has to admit it’s not exactly the most conducive setting for really getting it on. For making out, sure, but ultimately—at least, he’s pretty sure of this—you are sort of going to want to be on the ground, and the kind of forest he’s thinking about, with trees pretty close together and fallen braches strewn all over the place, eve
n with a blanket it wouldn’t really work.

  Why in the world logistics are so stubborn in this fantasy but not the other he has no idea, but he’s nothing if not determined. So he creates for the two of them a small forest clearing, an intimate and smooth grassy patch surrounded by massive trees, magically mowed in the recent past, a place that not only offers a little bit of both settings, but also addresses the main shortcoming of the field, which was the way it just sort of had them doing it right out there in the open where pretty much anyone could see.

  1 Additional Maggie-centric Fantasy Darren Has as He Enters School

  1. Holding hands with her and walking quietly down a tree-lined city street. Preferably in the fall.

  6 Particular Places Darren Searches for Maggie during the Eleven Minutes Before First Period Begins

  1. Her locker, even though he doesn’t know exactly where it is, but he’s pretty sure it’s right off the math hallway over by the elevator

  2. Edie Ross’s locker, which is definitely right around the corner from

  3. His locker, because maybe she’s actually looking for him

  4. The English hallway, since he’s pretty sure she’s in AP English, which he’s pretty sure Nate had first period back when he had it

  5. The drinking fountain at the end of the English hallway

  6. The library, and most of its aisles, though he gives up at around 500 in the Dewey decimal system, because what the hell would she be doing looking for a book on magnetism at 8:19 in the morning?

  1 Place He Finally Finds Maggie, Who Might Have Actually Been Holding Hands with Tyler Weintraub, or Whatever the Fuck His Name Is, and Who Then Sort of Tries to Hide This, but Not That Much, Meaning She Doesn’t Really Care if Darren Saw, Which Either Means That It Doesn’t Actually Mean Anything to Her That She Was Holding Tyler’s Hand, or That It Does and So Too Bad for Darren, and He Kind of Gets the Sense It’s the “Too Bad for Darren” One, Since She’s Just Not Being Very Friendly with Darren at All, to the Point That Darren Can’t Even Get Himself to Ask in This Kind of Joking/Friendly/Intimate Way, “Hey, So How Was the Pie Last Night?” Which He Had Been Looking Forward to Asking Maggie Ever Since He Entered the Building, So Much So That He Was Already Picturing It Becoming Some Kind of Inside Joke between the Two of Them, Even If He Wasn’t Sure What Exactly It Would Mean or in What Situations It Would Be Used