Tell Me Three Things

by Julie Buxbaum

  Caleb will not see my disappointment. I mirror his casualness. Shrug, like it’s no problem. Keep the smile from dripping down. Act like I don’t feel the small, hard knot in my intestines, as if someone has reached into me and plucked them into a hideous bow. I grin through the pain—an actual, literal, visceral pain.

  “You know, because of Liam,” Caleb says, and now he’s gone fuzzy and I don’t understand at all. He’s speaking a foreign language I’ve never heard before. One overly punctuated and aggressive, nasty simply because of the sounds of its hard, cruel letters.

  “Liam? I mean…Wait, what?”

  “I just think he’ll get the wrong idea. And he’s my best friend, so, you know,” he says. But I don’t know. What does Liam have to do with my getting coffee with Caleb?

  “I still…I mean, I’m confused. What wrong idea? What does Liam have to do with anything?” Again, my brain is stalling. Maybe Caleb is right after all: let’s keep everything in words on a screen, where they are so much easier to let out. Where they are clear and can be saved so they can be returned to later in case of a misunderstanding.

  “You know he broke up with Gem, right? Because of you.” Caleb’s tone is so matter-of-fact, as if this is basic Wood Valley knowledge. And also as if it has little to do with him.

  “Um, no. I didn’t know they broke up, and if they did, I had nothing to do with it.” I swallow, start again, hear that I sound defensive, though I don’t know what about. “I mean, she’s a huge bitch, and maybe he saw that she’s been, you know, so mean, so indirectly, I guess it could tangentially have to do with me. But wait, what?” I’m rambling because I’m nervous. I stop, let my brain play catch-up. He’s not saying what I think he’s saying, is he? No. Liam couldn’t have broken up with Gem because he likes me?

  No, that’s not possible.

  Oh God. I finger the paper in my pocket. My ticket back to Chicago. Tomorrow cannot come soon enough. I need to get far, far away from this place. I think of Dri hearing this somehow, through that weird Wood Valley network I’m not at all clued into, and her thinking I’ve betrayed our new friendship. She knows I have no interest in Liam, right?

  None of this makes sense. Gem is the kind of girl who makes men, not just boys but men, do double-takes. There is no universe in which someone would break up with her for me. Unless…Is Liam somehow SN? Do we have some sort of intellectual connection that would make him want to bridge that impossible gap between Gem and me?

  No. Liam’s an only child. No dead sisters—real or otherwise. And it’s not like we really connect when we talk in person. At least, I don’t think so.

  Liam did tell me the other day at the store that I was “easy to talk to” and a “really good listener.” They seemed like throwaway words, the right thing to say to someone who is a little shy. Honestly, I am not that good a listener. I am just good at letting other people talk.

  No, Caleb must have the story wrong.

  “All right, whatever. But I can’t get involved,” he says, and starts to walk away.

  “Wait,” I say, wanting to ask a million questions but realizing I should probably just IM him instead. More direct and efficient.

  “What?” Caleb looks back. He’s shaking his stupid phone again, like that alone should satisfy me: the promise of a future message.

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

  SN: excited for your trip?

  Me: CANNOT WAIT TO GET OUT OF HERE.

  SN: day was that bad?

  Me: I just. You know what? Never mind.

  SN: anything I can do?

  Me: No, not really.

  So I was wrong. It’s not easier to write the words, to spell it out: You hurt my feelings today. I don’t like Liam. My fingers are tired of this. It was just coffee.

  Or this: How can you like me so much in words and care so little for me in person?

  Or maybe even this, just to be one hundred percent sure: You are Caleb, right?

  I lie back on my bed. It shouldn’t be surprising that SN doesn’t want to hang out in real life. Even before I stopped talking to him, my own dad barely wanted to speak to me.

  The self-pity creeps in, slow, stealthy, hungry, the monster under my bed. I try not to think of my mom, so handy in these moments as a cheap, easy trigger. A way to justify feeling sorry for myself: the loser with the dead mom. A shortcut that is as demeaning to her as it is to me.

  Dri: OMG! OMG! OMG!

  Me: ?

  Dri: I was right! Gemiam is SO OVER.

  Me: Wow. Cool.

  Dri: Methinks this occasion deserves more enthusiasm. And get this: HE BROKE UP WITH HER.

  Me: Huh. Guess he figured out who she really is.

  She hasn’t heard the second part yet. Maybe Caleb is wrong. Maybe I have nothing to do with anything. Maybe I misunderstood what he was saying. That would make a hell of a lot more sense. Either way, I’m not going to be the bearer of this ridiculous gossip, especially because I’m hoping it isn’t true.

  A mere two months ago, when I was eating lunch by myself on that lonely bench, the idea of a senior, any senior, asking me out would have been not only inconceivable but thrilling. More than just flattering: the stuff of my dork-girl fantasies. He’s the lead singer of the coolest band in school, after all. But now Liam could screw up everything: my friendship with Dri, my job, maybe even things with Ethan, who always gets weird when Liam comes up in conversation. And, of course, Caleb, who now has found a convenient excuse to keep our relationship online only.

  This new Jessie, the California Jessie, lives on unstable ground. I need Dri and SN and even Book Out Below! Dri worries about being invisible. My worry is its distant cousin: that without those three things that add up to my life out here, I might just disappear.

  Dri: HOW WAS COFFEE? Sorry took me so long to ask. Was freakin’ over L and G.

  Me: Didn’t happen. He canceled.

  Dri: So sorry. You okay?

  Me: It is what it is.

  Dri: How very Zen of you.

  Me: I am one with the universe and the universe is one with me.

  Dri: Screw him.

  Me: That too.

  CHAPTER 27

  My phone is turned off, tucked into the zippered pocket of my duffel bag. And though it’s been only a few minutes, I miss it. Have to fight the reflex to reach for the screen. Instead, I look out the window, watch as LA gets smaller and smaller, a collection of buildings and houses and cars on the freeway that from up here look harmless and neutral, like any other place in the world that isn’t home. My PSAT prep book sits open on my lap, but I can’t bring myself to read it. In T minus four hours, Scarlett will pick me up from the airport and drive us straight to DeLucci’s and we will order two slices of pizza each and Diet Cokes in big frosted glasses, and all of our shared history, our lifetime of inside jokes, will come alive again across their dingy folding tables. My two months away erased. I will tell her about the mess I’ve made of things, how my new life feels on the verge of unraveling, and she will tell me how to fix it. How to keep my friendship with Dri, how to make Caleb want to, you know, actually be with me in person, how not to lose my job. How to rid myself of my ridiculous unrequited crush on Ethan, who by all accounts is damaged and possibly dangerous, and also unattainable.

  And she’ll remind me that everything that is new always feels tenuous, that a lot of this, maybe even most of this, is in my head.

  In T minus four hours, I will be home again. Even though my mom won’t be there, at least, finally, I will be someplace I recognize.

  I’m so relieved that I let the tears fall now that there’s no one here to see. I even let them blur the words on my vocab list, let them bleed their fat, wet stains onto the page.

  —

  Later, in the car, I sideways glance at Scar. She looks different, older somehow, like her features have set. Her hair is short now, a messy, asymmetrical bob. She never mentioned she’d cut it. I wonder if she made a Pinterest board of option
s first, like we used to, or if it was a spur-of-the-moment decision. Either way, she rocks it. Scar taps the wheel of her parents’ battered old Honda to the beat of some song I don’t recognize. Both the music and the heat are blasting. My coat and scarf are necessary outside, but in the car, dressed for Chicago and with my seat belt on, I’m overheating. I should have taken them off before I got in.

  I think of the weather back in California, how I never need to check the forecast. Blue skies, short sleeves, every day. A breeze so slight, it tickles.

  “I feel like I just got out of prison,” I say, and crack open my window and lower the radio so we can talk. I smell the familiar smell of Scarlett: coconut and mango from her lotion and something unidentified and peppery. “For reals.”

  “I guess if you define prison as living in a huge freakin’ mansion in Beverly Hills and having a maid and a personal chef, then sure. You’re totally out of prison,” Scarlett says, and I can’t decide if I hear a hint of something new in her voice. A lack of patience with me.

  “First of all, I don’t live in Beverly Hills. You know it’s not like that.”

  “Relax, I’m joking,” she says, and fiddles with the radio. Not as loud as before, but still annoying. “So what do you want to do while you’re here?”

  “Honestly? Just hang out with you. Eat pizza. Talk. Laugh. I’ve missed, you know, us.”

  “Yeah. It’s funny I didn’t realize how much of our time we used to spend together until you left.” She keeps her eyes trained on the road, and again I can’t tell if I’m being paranoid. Is Scar mad at me for something? Of course we used to spend all of our time together. That’s what best friends do.

  “I love your hair. It looks really cool.”

  “I needed a change,” she says, and turns the radio way up again.

  —

  Over pizza at DeLucci’s, which at least is one thing that is as good as I remember it, I catch her up on everything in LA. Tell her the whole story, from beginning to end. My figuring out SN is Caleb. Liam and Dri. Even what Theo said about Ethan being a drug addict, which at first I’m scared to tell her because I want her to like him, even if they will never meet. But I tell her anyway because I’ve never been able to censor with Scar. I ramble a bit, am nervous. The caffeine, probably. Had a cup of coffee on the plane. Black, a pathetic tribute to Ethan.

  “So what should I do?” I ask, because Scar always knows what to do. She’s one of those wise old people trapped in a young person’s body. Her middle name is actually, I kid you not, Sage.

  “What do you mean?” she asks, and sucks on the lemon from her Diet Coke. “Some guy broke up with his girlfriend and wants to ask you out? Sounds like a high-class problem.”

  “Well, I just…I don’t want—”

  “I think you’re kind of overthinking it all, J.” She takes a moment to look me up and down, to see the ways in which I look different from two months ago, weighing and measuring the changes. My hair is longer, because I haven’t bothered to get it cut, and I’m a few pounds thinner, mostly because Rachel is not fond of carbs. Other than that, I look exactly the same.

  “Maybe. It’s just—”

  “By the way, Adam is coming over later. And so is Deena.” Scar interrupts me midsentence.

  “You’re friends with Deena now?”

  “She’s not so bad.”

  “Okay.” I bite my pizza, avoid her eyes. Scar knows I’ve always hated Deena. She tried to sabotage my friendship with Scar back when we were freshmen. Told her I was talking shit about her behind her back, when of course I wasn’t. And she’d always make these comments to me that were jabs disguised as jokes. Not elevating bullying to the art form that Gem has, but still on the mean-girl spectrum.

  “You know, you’re not the only one this has been hard on.” Scar puts down her Diet Coke, and it splashes onto her plate. She hasn’t taken a single bite of pizza. “I mean, I had to make all new friends too.”

  For a moment, I switch things around: think about what it would have been like if Scar had been the one who took off and I’d been the one left behind. What it would have been like to start all over with the people we have known forever. All of those people we had already chosen, for one reason or another, not to be friends with. Until now, it has never once occurred to me that my leaving happened to anyone but me.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t really think about it.”

  “Yeah, no shit.”

  “Scar!” I look into her eyes, try to gauge what’s going on. Are we fighting? Scar and I have never fought. Our friendship isn’t like that: we don’t do that teenage-girl moodiness or jockeying for positions. We’ve always just been each other’s favorites. This is new, and the shock of it, Scar being angry with me, maybe even having moved on from our friendship, makes me ache with loneliness. “What’s going on?”

  Her eyes fill, and so do mine. I wanted so badly to come home, to sit in this booth that we’ve sat in hundreds of times, to just relax for maybe the first time in months. And instead, now, suddenly, I want to be anywhere but here.

  No, the truth is I don’t want to be anywhere at all, because wherever I go, I still come with me. I’m stuck in this brain, in this body, in this ugly swamp of humanness.

  How do I manage to screw everything up?

  My first instinct is to IM SN, to unload and tell him how badly it’s all going here, how everything is flipped, how home doesn’t even feel like home, but then I remember yesterday and how he wouldn’t even drink a cup of coffee with me.

  “Nothing. Forget about it.” Scar busies herself with the pizza—scatters powdered cheese, red pepper, salt.

  Still doesn’t take a bite.

  “Scar.” There is pleading in my voice: Let’s start over. I don’t have the energy to fight this one out. No, energy is not the problem. Courage is. I can’t bear the thought of us yelling at each other, dissecting each other’s weaknesses, saying out loud the things those who love you the most are never supposed to say. Things like what she just implied: You only think about yourself. I can’t bear the thought that we might not be friends in the aftermath of those kinds of words.

  “Let’s just not talk about it, okay?” Scarlett bites into her lemon again, and a drop of bitter juice slides down her chin. I hand her a napkin.

  “Okay.” I finish off my two slices, but Scar just picks hers up, dressed and uneaten, and dumps them in the trash.

  —

  Scarlett sits next to Adam on the couch, her legs dangled over his lap. Deena’s brother, Joe, who is a freshman at the local community college and as annoying as his sister, has brought a case of beer, perhaps the new price of admission to Scar’s parents’ basement, and Deena passes cans around even though they’re warm. Adam’s best friend, Toby, is here too, and though we’ve known each other since preschool, I’m not sure we’ve ever had an actual conversation.

  Everyone looks different but the same. Adam’s face is clearer—Scar was right—and he seems less gangly and boyish, like it’s not as ridiculous a proposition that he could be somebody’s boyfriend. That Scar would choose to hook up with him. I picture Adam lifting weights he ordered from the Internet in his basement, which is exactly like the one in my old house—linoleum-covered and low-ceilinged and the perfect locale for that sort of self-conscious project. Deena seems older too, but maybe it’s just that she’s standing straighter, her scoliosis less pronounced, and she keeps whispering things into Scar’s ear and then laughing. Okay, I get it, I want to say. You guys are besties now.

  “What’s LA like?” Adam asks, and then the room turns its collective attention to me, and though just a minute ago I felt stuck on the outside, I suddenly feel too much like the center of attention. Talking about LA might make Scar even angrier at me, especially when the questions come from her—boyfriend? friend with benefits?

  “You know,” I say, and swig my beer. “Sunny.”

  “Scar says that you, like, live in a palace and shit,” Toby says, and clinks his beer against m
ine, as if my moving to LA was some sort of personal coup, like getting into my first-choice college.

  “Yeah, not really. I mean, it’s a nice house, but it’s not mine. I miss it here.” I try to catch Scar’s eye. She’s not looking at me because she’s too busy snuggling with Adam. I think about Rachel’s house—the walls of windows that beg you to look outward—and then I look around this basement. Remember that we are underground.

  “She said that you go to, like, some fancy-ass private school, where all the kids are super-rich and are followed by paparazzi.” Toby’s voice surprises me; it’s deeper than I imagined. I can hear his Chicago accent, which I’ve never thought of as an accent at all until right now. Is this what I sound like to everyone at Wood Valley? All low, growly “da’s” instead of “the’s”?

  “I don’t know. The kids are definitely different.” All this time, did Scar think I was humblebragging whenever I described my plush new world? She and I have always spoken the same language. Surely she must have understood that I’d so much rather be here, in this basement, maybe not drinking warm beer with Deena and Adam and this strange crew, but eating popcorn and watching Netflix with her. That the stuff that makes Wood Valley sound interesting and cool is exactly what makes it so lonely. I’m not impressed by tall hedges and Kobe beef.

  I picture my new friends hanging in Chicago, wonder whether they could slip into my old life the way I’ve tried to slip into theirs. Despite their excessive coffee-spending money and their after-school SAT tutors and the fact that they’ve never set foot in a Goodwill, Dri and Agnes would happily help themselves to a can of Schlitz and chat about whether Scar should let her hair grow out again. Caleb could hang here too, because he blends. Sort of. They’d all adapt.

  Ethan is the only one who I can’t superimpose on this image, but maybe that’s because I have trouble picturing Ethan anywhere but in his hideouts. He’s more like me, I think: burdened with the realization that what goes on in his mind is somehow different from what goes on in everyone else’s. Even those closest to us.