Tell Me Three Things

by Julie Buxbaum

  “I’m not sure that’s any of your business,” I say, and then instantly regret it. Recent circumstances with my dad notwithstanding, I don’t do confrontation. When someone bumps into me in the hallway, my reflex is to say sorry.

  But maybe I’m not sorry. Who is she to get involved in this? I didn’t marry her.

  “You’re right. That’s between your dad and you. I just wanted to give you this. Well, we wanted to give it to you, but your dad thought since it was my idea, I should be the one…Just here.” Rachel hands me a folded piece of paper.

  “What is it?” I ask, wondering if it’s an eviction letter or something. A quick glance makes clear it’s not a check. Damn. That could have been useful.

  “Open it,” she says, and so I do. A flight itinerary: LAX to ORD for next weekend. Round trip.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “We thought you might want to go home for a visit. See Scarlett, hang out with your old friends for a few days. I heard you were homesick,” she says, and she picks up the photo, a conscious decision to look at my mom and me and to let me know she’s looking. She examines our details: how I held on to my mom’s leg, like an anchor. Or maybe Rachel is not looking at me at all but is trying to get a sense of my mother, of her husband’s first wife. I want her to put it down—I don’t like how her fingers are leaving tiny smudges.

  “Who said that I was homesick?” I ask, which is a stupid question. Of course I’m homesick, the longing sometimes so overwhelming that I’ve even marveled at how accurate the word is, how the feeling comes over me like the stomach flu. Violent, unforgiving. No cure, just waiting for it to relent.

  “Scarlett’s parents called your dad,” Rachel says, and finally, finally puts down my photo. It takes all my willpower not to move it so it’s facing the bed, not the door. To wipe the glass clean with some Windex. Erase her fingerprints. Reclaim it as mine. “But how could you not be? This has been a huge adjustment. For all of us.”

  Is that regret flickering across her face? Does she wish she never married my father, that there was an easy way to undo their joint mistake?

  “Wait, what?” Scarlett’s parents called my dad? Did they tell him about my plans for their basement? What did Scarlett tell them? I’m not sure if I should be angry or thrilled, because right now, I have in my hand a plane ticket, an actual plane ticket that will take me from here to home, to Scarlett and to a life that’s familiar, in under six hours door to door. We didn’t fly out here when we moved. Instead, Dad and I caravanned our two cars through too many states. The world flat and devoid of life: miles upon miles of nothing but dust. The occasional stop at McDonald’s to eat and pee, a gas station to refill, a cheap motel to sleep. My mind as blank and empty as the roads. As numb as SN feels playing Xbox.

  We barely talked, my dad and I, on the trip. He might have tried, I don’t know. Only once did Rachel come up, over lunch at an Arby’s, as if he were answering a question I hadn’t even asked.

  “Rachel’s an extraordinary woman. You’ll see. Don’t worry, you’ll see,” he said, though I hadn’t said I was worried. I hadn’t said anything at all.

  “Apparently, Scarlett’s mom said she was concerned about you. And frankly, so am I,” Rachel says now. “Go. Enjoy. And then come back to us refreshed. Your dad has…well, he saved my life. He’s totally real and normal and understands what I’ve been through, and I couldn’t be more grateful for that. We’re so different, but together we’re stronger. Whole. But I don’t want you to think that I don’t realize that this—all of this—has come at a cost to you.”

  She’s matter-of-fact. Her voice a normal decibel for once.

  “Everyone in this house understands how hard it can be to start over,” she says.

  I look at my ticket. I leave Friday morning, get back Sunday night.

  “What about school?”

  “Theo will email you notes and stuff, and we’ll let your teachers know it’s an excused absence. You deserve this.” Rachel pats the bed next to her, invites me to sit. I’ve been pacing, I realize now, midstep, on my second lap around the room.

  I sit, stare at the ticket. Coffee with SN/Caleb on Thursday, his mask unveiled, I hope, and then I’m off. I’ll miss my weekly “Waste Land” meeting with Ethan, but he’ll understand. Scarlett and I will watch bad television and pop microwave popcorn and eat real pizza, not this whole-wheat-crust crap they have in California. I will talk and she will listen, and there will be no need to explain everything or have anything explained; we’ve known each other too long for all of that. I even want to drink that green tea her mom always brews, the one I used to think tasted like pee but that now makes me think of home.

  “Thank you,” I say, and force myself to look Rachel in the eye. My dad didn’t do this, I realize. Big gestures are not his style, or at least, they weren’t before he married Rachel. And a plane ticket was never something that could be so casually purchased. “I…”

  My eyes water, and I stare straight ahead to get the tears under control. Not here, not now. The tears only seem to come when they are least wanted, almost never in the quiet depths of night, when the emptiness is so real, it feels like a phantom limb. When tears would actually feel something like relief.

  “No problem,” Rachel says, and stands up. “But just so you know, there is one condition.”

  I wait for it. What could she possibly want from me? Rent money? For me to make up with my dad?

  “You have to come back.”

  Me: OMG! OMG! OMG! 2 sleeps!

  Scarlett: Woot! Woot!

  Me: What did you tell your parents? Obvi they freaked.

  Scarlett: They were talking about turning the basement into a gym. I said maybe they should wait to see if you were moving back, and they were all like: WHA?

  Me: Whatever. I’m coming home! I’m coming home!

  Scarlett: Cannot wait. BTW, you don’t mind if we hang with Adam while you’re here, do you? I had plans with him on Saturday, and…

  Me: Um, sure. Yeah, course.

  Scarlett: Maybe I should host a welcome home party.

  Me: You know I’m not much of a party person.

  Scarlett: Not a party-party. More like a get-together.

  Me: SQUEE. I’m coming home!

  Me: Guess what?

  SN: chicken butt.

  Me: ?

  SN: sorry. what?

  Me: I’M GOING HOME. For only three days, but still.

  SN: !!!! so happy for you. but?

  Me: But what?

  SN: YOU ARE COMING BACK, RIGHT?

  Me:

  SN: smiley faces are cryptic. say: “I am coming back.”

  Me: I am coming back. FWIW, I’m not sure why you care so much. It’s not like we couldn’t IM from Chicago.

  SN: not the same. and I like seeing you every day.

  Me: You see me every day?

  SN: you give good face, ms. holmes.

  Me: Hey. Need to reschedule Friday. Going home for the weekend.

  Ethan: “Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden / Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not / Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither / Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, / Looking into the heart of light, the silence.”

  Me: That’s my favorite part. I get that. Not being able to speak. Not feeling alive or dead.

  Ethan: Me too.

  Me: Maybe if you slept more…

  Ethan: Ha! You must be so psyched to go.

  Me: I am. Beyond.

  Ethan: Good. Eat a slice of deep dish pizza for me.

  Me: Will do. Can we meet next week to make up the assignment?

  Ethan: Course. Monday after school?

  Me: Sure. You’ll probably have the whole thing memorized by then.

  Ethan: Already do.

  Would a drug addict take the time to memorize poetry? Theo has to be wrong. Ethan is not on drugs. Ethan is an insomniac and maybe damaged, whatever that means. Except I do know what that means, because who’s kidding who
? I am damaged too.

  CHAPTER 26

  I can’t eat lunch. Too nervous. In just a few hours I’m meeting Caleb for our first date, though it’s not really a date, and I’m not sure it can even be called a first, since we talk online all the time. Last night, we IM’d so late, I fell asleep with my computer on my lap and woke to his words dinging on my screen. Three things, he said: (1) good morning. (2) I have keyboard marks on my face. slept on the “sdfgh.” (3) you leave in 24 hours, and I’m going to miss you.

  “I’m not buying that Caleb is SN,” says Agnes, when I refuse her fries for the fifth time on grounds that I’m worried I might throw up. “I mean, Dri is right, he’s weird like that, but I dunno. He’s not, you know, shy. He’s like the most direct guy I’ve ever met.”

  “But I told him where I worked and then he showed up there. I totally saw him texting at Gem’s party at the exact same time we were writing. And whenever I talk to him, he does this weird phone shake thing, to say like, ‘I’ll write you,’ and then a second later he always does. And he quoted me back to me. It has to be him,” I say.

  “It’s definitely him,” Dri says. “And I’m impressed that you made the first move. Ballsy.” Dri is not looking at us. She’s staring at Liam, who is sitting on the other side of the cafeteria, nowhere near Gem. “You think they broke up?”

  “No idea,” I say, and shrug. “Nor do I care.”

  “You may have actually brought down Gemiam.”

  “Gemiam?”

  “Gem and Liam. Gemiam.”

  I roll my eyes at Dri.

  “I want to talk about Jessaleb. I just feel like I would have heard if his sister had died,” Agnes says, and my stomach clenches.

  “You said he never really talked about her.” Dri multitasks: she talks to us and watches the Liam show at the same time. I’d worry about her being too obvious, except Liam is clueless. I just hope Gem won’t notice. “And there were rumors.”

  “I mean, yeah, I had heard she was a total cutter, and she had a major eating disorder, so who knows. But I thought her parents sent her off to some mental hospital on the East Coast, not that she, you know, offed herself or anything like that,” Agnes says. Her tone is so casual, as if we’re talking about a character in a book, and not someone’s actual life. Whether a real person, in the real world, is alive or dead. It strikes me how callous we all are, how comfortable we are belittling other people’s problems: Total cutter. Major eating disorder. So easy for us to say.

  I wish I had never mentioned his sister. Now I feel like I’ve betrayed Caleb, spilled secrets that weren’t mine to spill. I’m glad I’ve never said anything about his mom.

  “Maybe he meant it metaphorically? Like it felt like his sister died,” Dri offers, but I shake my head. Caleb wasn’t at all vague. “Or maybe he just said it to connect with you, you know, about your mom?”

  I take Agnes’s french fry, nibble it slowly and deliberately. I will ask Caleb later, if I have the nerve. I’ve never really wished anyone dead before, but it would be so not cool if he made the whole thing up. No, Caleb has lost someone close to him. We are a select crew, the dead family club, and I think I can tell who is for real. He counts the days, you know, since, just like me.

  No one could make up counting days.

  —

  In English, Gem takes her seat without looking at me. I just see her straight back, her ponytail swishing its disapproval, the side of her arched brow. Her beauty is so classic, so generally agreed upon, that it’s almost impossible not to stare. I hate myself for it, but I long to look like her, to cast spells without even having to open my mouth. To have a body like hers, assembled from lean, proportionate parts, as if dreamed up and arranged by the fantasies of all the men.

  I wonder if Ethan is staring at her too. If he can help it.

  If, at night, Ethan thinks about Gem the way I think about him.

  I try not to. Think about him, I mean. I’ve tried to do a bait and switch, put Caleb where Ethan’s face appears, but it never works. I may spend my evenings IMing with Caleb, but I spend my dreams with Ethan. In them, he’s awake, his hands eager, his eyes on mine. In them, I’m not scared of sex, of intimacy, of anything at all. In them, I don’t feel ugly or compare my body to Gem’s. I feel beautiful and strong and brave.

  In the morning, I wake up flushed, sad, when the feeling gets wiped away by the reality of day. When I wash my face in the mirror, see whiteheads, red splotches, round baby cheeks.

  “Ms. Holmes?” Mrs. Pollack asks, and I wonder how long she’s been calling on me.

  “Um, yeah?”

  “Care to answer the question?” I remember suddenly that she’s been going around the room. I had ample warning, knew I was next up, but still I somehow got lost in thought. I look up at Mrs. Pollack; she’s attractive, might have looked a lot like Gem when she was in high school. I bet she’s never had a pimple.

  “I’m sorry, I—” The whole class looks over, Gem and Crystal snicker in duet, and my face flashes hot. A bead of sweat threatens to streak down my right temple. I flick it away, try to calm my beating heart. Back in Chicago, English was my strongest subject. “I mean, I wasn’t paying—”

  “That scene with Raskolnikov at his house with his mother and sister. How he’s able to act like everything is normal, even though he’s actually going crazy inside,” Ethan breaks in, and though I have no idea what he’s talking about, his comment satisfies Mrs. Pollack, who moves toward the front of the room to write something on the blackboard.

  “Exactly,” she says, giving me one last look, which catches me by surprise. Because it’s not mean. It’s not even pity. It’s something else entirely. Empathy.

  —

  “Thanks,” I say to Ethan after class, once we are safely in the hallway. “You saved me.”

  “My pleasure, Tuberlicious.”

  “I hope I don’t ruin your grade with our project.” I fiddle with my bag, which feels too heavy on my shoulder. “Especially after I kind of made you work with me.”

  “I’m not worried.” He smiles, so I force myself to look him straight in the eye, to bathe in the blue. No, not like a serial killer’s, like I first thought. More complex than that. Like a gathering. I hear Theo’s warning in my head and check for dilated pupils, but they look normal-sized to me.

  “Good,” I say. Not clever. Not flirtatious. Not anything. Maybe in an hour, I’ll come up with a better line. Something funny and light to punctuate my exit.

  But now: nothing.

  Ethan rubs his head, as if trying to wake up his hair. Smiles again.

  “Have a safe trip tomorrow.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t forget about us,” he says, and before I can even articulate a question—What does he mean by us? Wood Valley? LA? Him and me?—Ethan is gone, out the front door and halfway to his car.

  —

  I wait for Caleb near the school’s entrance, stand idly by the stairs. He said we should meet at three o’clock, and now it’s three-fifteen, and I pretend not to be nervous that he won’t show. I stare at the screen of my phone as if I’m deep in thought, as if my life depends on this text I’m typing. But I’m not really texting anyone, because the person I normally write to at times like this is Caleb. So I’m just thumbing over and over with my fingers: Please don’t stand me up. Please don’t stand me up. Please don’t stand me up. I wonder how long I’m supposed to wait and at what point it will become obvious to me that I’m an idiot.

  Gem walks by, because of course if there must be a bystander to witness my humiliation it will be her. For a moment, my stomach drops with the thought that SN may be Gem, that he has been a joke all along at my expense, but then I catch myself and let the thought go. No, Gem has better things to do than to text me late into the night as part of an elaborate practical joke. My friendship with SN is real, even if Caleb is not yet ready to face me.

  “I wish you’d just go back to where you came from,” Gem says as she skips down the st
airs, words thrown over her shoulder as sharp as darts.

  “Me too.” I say it low enough that she can’t hear.

  “Me too, what?” Caleb says, and now he’s next to me, and I can’t help but grin from ear to ear. He didn’t stand me up. He’s here, car keys dangling from his long fingers, ready to go. We will have coffee and finally talk and it will be as easy as it is with my fast-moving thumbs. As strange as it is to trust him, I do. Three things, I start writing in my head: (1) You understand me. (2) Tell me about Kilimanjaro. (3) Were you scared up there?

  “Nothing,” I say. “Just talking to myself.”

  “Do that often?”

  “It’s been known to happen,” I say. Caleb is so tall that I need to look up to talk to him, my neck arched back at an unfortunate angle. Maybe later I’ll take a selfie to see what I look like to him from way up there, the entire plane and slope of my face. All chin and eyebrows. It can’t be pretty. I’m not Barbie to his human Ken doll.

  “Listen, about coffee,” he says, and the disappointment hits me full force, even before he says the words. This is what you get for being ballsy. Ridiculous of me to be so optimistic and open, to assume this was going to happen. I keep letting myself be lifted and dropped, like a stuffed animal in an old-fashioned claw machine. I’ll never actually be chosen, especially by someone who looks like him. “I think we shouldn’t.”

  “Have coffee? Okay.” I want to pick up my phone again. IM SN. Write what is too hard to say: Why not? Why aren’t I good enough for you in person?

  I think of the whitehead on my chin, which I covered with makeup in the bathroom just a half hour ago. I think of my arms, flabby and pasty, not browned and toned like Gem’s. My eyebrows, which, no matter how long I spend in front of the mirror, always come out just slightly mismatched. My clothes, which are almost as nondescript as Caleb’s, but girls, I guess, are not supposed to aim for nondescript. The width of my nose—which has never bothered me until right now—my chipped fingernail polish; even my earlobes, too loose, like long hanging fruit. And of course my forever-disappointing chest, which somehow manages to be both small and floppy at the same time: stupid, sad, flat funnels.