Tell Me Three Things

by Julie Buxbaum

  Of course, this could be a disaster. Maybe we’ll have nothing to say to each other in person. He’s probably not Ethan. I realize that now as I sit here with sweaty palms and wet armpits. Some things are too much to ask for.

  My hair was down and now it’s up, and I think I should put it down again. I spent much of the night debating what to wear.

  Dri said: Be casual.

  Agnes said: Be fabulous.

  I decided in the early hours of the morning that it would be weird to wear anything but my normal clothes, that I don’t want to look like I’m trying too hard.

  Scar said: Be yourself.

  But now my stupid jeans and T-shirt feel too normal. I should have put on more makeup, done something—anything—to make me feel prettier. What if SN has only seen me from afar and is disappointed when he’s sitting across from me? Am I one of those girls who misleads at a distance?

  I sit here, cataloging my flaws, hurting my own feelings. My chin is broken out. My nose is dotted with blackheads. My thighs expand on this plastic seat. No, this is not helping my nerves.

  The waitress brings me a cup of coffee and I rip the lids off all the creamers in the bowl, make a pile of wrappers that I knock over and restack. I consider getting up and walking out. I don’t need to meet SN. Let us continue as we are. Keep him as my phantom best friend, albeit one I like to flirt with.

  Dri: GOOD LUCK! And if it turns out SN is Liam, then…go for it.

  Me: Seriously?

  Dri: Yeah. I just have a crush. Whatever you and SN have is real.

  Me: I’m scared. I don’t think he’s Liam, though.

  Dri: Me neither.

  Me: You’re a true friend.

  Dri: Don’t you forget that when you and SN are madly in love and don’t have time for anyone else, okay?

  Me: Ha!

  Dri: Is he there yet?

  Me: No.

  Dri: Is he there yet?

  Me: No.

  Dri: Is he there yet?

  I’m about to type back No again—I like this game, it’s distracting and kind of funny—but then he is here and my stomach is in my feet. I feel my throat get tight, and tears wet my eyes, and I feel bad that I feel this way. I don’t want to feel this way, but I do. How could I have been so wrong?

  It’s Liam.

  Okay.

  SN is Liam.

  I try to recover, make sense of this. At least he’s not Mr. Shackleman or Ken Abernathy. Liam is a good guy, coveted by the most beautiful girl in school. Surely this is a good thing.

  He doesn’t see me yet. He’s at the cash register, grabbing one of those free loose mints, the ones that supposedly have high concentrations of fecal matter on them, but I recognize him from behind. Liam.

  Liam is Liam is Liam.

  He turns around, and his face transforms when he sees me. He smiles, so bright that I wonder what I’ve done to earn his good cheer.

  All this time: Liam.

  “Fancy seeing you here, stranger,” he says. “Mind if I sit down?”

  I am mute. I want to take out my phone and type to SN: Sure. Go ahead. And this: I don’t understand. I resort to a nod. At least I know Dri won’t be mad at me. At least there’s that.

  I want to type You are not Ethan. I wanted you to be Ethan.

  But I know that’s cruel. Like if he said to me I wanted you to be prettier.

  “It’s nice to see you,” Liam says, and folds himself into the booth across from me. He’s graceful today, the way he is onstage: confident and fluid. Human origami.

  “Yeah. You too,” I say, and try to smile back. It doesn’t quite reach my eyes.

  “This is totally awkward and maybe not the right time for this, but I’ve been meaning to ask if you want to, you know, have dinner with me sometime?” And there it is: Liam is asking me out. For real. In real life. Not SN on the page, but SN in the flesh.

  But all I can hear is Ethan’s voice, his words, which were also spoken out loud: I think you should say no.

  Still, that was before SN was Liam and Liam was SN. That was before the last ten seconds, when everything changed. And what if this is what’s real—me and Liam, not me and Ethan? Maybe, again, I’ve had it all wrong. So what that it’s sometimes awkward at the store, that I don’t feel like Liam and I have much to say to each other? So what that he dated someone like Gem? People make bad decisions all the time.

  “I—” I take a sip of my coffee, look deep into the cup, push down the terror that is rising inside me, the desire to flee this booth. I need the extra time that my phone affords me. Even just a few seconds to organize my thoughts. I try to picture what I would type right now. Typing would make this easier. Using thumbs instead of my mouth. Yes, I’d write. Or maybe Sure. Or Cool. Or…

  But before I can figure out what to say, I feel a shadow fall over our table. My first instinct is that Gem is here and she’s going to punch me, and that’s how all this will end. Me knocked out on the floor. Which is ridiculous, because it’s not Gem. And punching is not her style. She’s subtler than that.

  It’s Ethan.

  Ethan is Ethan is Ethan.

  Ethan’s here too, and now I’m confused and I don’t know what to do. He sees Liam sitting across from me, and his face darkens and then goes blank. I want to see his smile, hear him say those six words one more time: I think you should say no.

  Surely that will help me make sense of all of this. That will give me a good reason to walk away from SN, walk away from “three things” and delicious midnight conversations and everything that has kept me going for the last few months.

  SN is Liam. Liam is SN. A simple equation. Remedial math. Time to accept it.

  “Hey,” Ethan says, and there is pleading in his eyes. He’s saying those six words without saying those six words. And so I don’t answer Liam—not yet, anyway—and I turn to Ethan. Buy time another way.

  “Hey,” I say. Then I’m sure I have this all wrong, that I’m actually dreaming, because all of a sudden Caleb is here too, right behind Ethan, and of course all three of them would be here for the great SN unveiling. This is a dream. It has to be, because the three of them can’t be SN, and I’ve had dreams like this before, when they’re all there—Liam, Ethan, Caleb—morphing into each other, swapping shirts.

  But no, Caleb is in gray. Ethan is the Batman. And Liam is wearing a button-down, because unlike his friends, he rotates his wardrobe. One point for Liam there.

  If this is a dream, next they will break out into song. Serenade me with “The Girl No One Knows.”

  No one is singing.

  This is not a dream.

  I dig my fingernails into my palms, just to be sure. It hurts.

  “Howdy,” Caleb says, and looks from Liam to me and back to Liam and smiles, as if to say Go for it, dude. Do he and Ethan both know that SN is Liam, and they’re here to see what happens? Or maybe they’re all in on it, have shared the SN password and taken turns writing to me. Has this whole thing been one big joke? Is that the lie? There are three of them?

  I flash back to my dad’s offer to take us home to Chicago, wonder if that’s where this is all headed. Me, on a plane, humiliated and heartbroken.

  “Wait,” Ethan says, and takes a step forward and then one backward. It’s an awkward dance, and his face reddens. “You’re early.”

  “Dude, we’re in the middle of something here,” Liam says, and looks at me again, as if to re-ask his question. Right. Dinner. If I weren’t so disappointed, it would be cute, SN starting our first conversation by asking me out on a proper date.

  “Liam,” Ethan says, and puts his hand on Liam’s shoulder. Liam shakes it off angrily. I am so stupid. It’s obvious these two have a problem with each other. There was drama there for a while, Dri said once. Liam replaced Ethan’s brother in the band.

  I think you should say no.

  I’ve taken it all the wrong way: those six words had nothing to do with Ethan wanting me. He just hates Liam. The realization is crushing.
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br />   “Why are you always throwing shade?” Liam stands up to face Ethan. Months, perhaps years, of pent-up aggression are spewing forth, and I’m unfortunate enough to get caught in the middle.

  Liam’s hands are curled into fists, as if he is ready to throw punches right in the middle of IHOP, which is of course a dumb place to fight. There are children here, and polyester booths and smiley-face pancakes. Multiple kinds of syrup. Some of the drinks even come with maraschino cherries.

  Caleb steps between Liam and Ethan, and Ethan puts his hands in the air. He has no interest in swinging or being swung at. Maybe he has no interest in me.

  “You’ve got it all wrong, man. It’s not like that,” Ethan says, puts his hands down and into his pocket. He pulls out his phone. “Just give me one second.”

  Ethan’s eyes are on me, not on Liam, and he’s talking to me without talking to me. I don’t know what he’s saying. I just know I want to keep staring at him. Again, everything is too fast for me to understand, and also too slow, because I can hear the thump of my heart and the blood rushing in my ears, can feel the warmth of the coffee cup in my trembling hands.

  My phone beeps. I have a message. I look down. I pick it up.

  SN: it’s me.

  I look up again. Ethan is smiling nervously at me. He’s typing without looking.

  SN: me. not him. me.

  SN: let me say this in caps: ME.

  “You?” I ask, out loud, without hands, the words right where I need them. Finally, finally, realization dawning. My eyes are locked with Ethan’s. I can’t help it; I’m grinning. “For real. It’s you?”

  “Me,” Ethan says, and holds up his phone. “You were early. We had an Oville meeting in the back that ran too long, and then he got to you first.”

  I look at Liam, who is rocking on his heels, confused and still angry. Watching our conversation but not getting it at all. How could he? I barely understand.

  Ethan is Ethan is Ethan.

  Ethan is SN.

  “Liam, I’m sorry. I can’t. I mean, it’s Ethan. It’s him,” I say, which makes no sense at all, but it doesn’t seem to matter, because now Ethan is sitting down across from me in the booth. And we are smiling at each other, goofy and giddy, and it’s easy, so much easier than it should be.

  Liam looks more confused than upset. Caleb shrugs and then rolls his eyes toward the door, as if to say Give it up, man. She’s not worth it.

  “Whatever,” Liam says, taking Caleb’s cue, the words casually thrown over his shoulder as he walks out the door. Caleb shakes his phone at me and Ethan, apparently his generic goodbye, as he runs to catch up with Liam.

  “You?” I ask Ethan again, because I need it to be said one last time. To be sure that I’m not just jumping to conclusions and that I’m not dreaming.

  “It’s nice to meet you again, Jessie, Jessie Holmes. I’m the weirdo who has been messaging you.” Ethan looks nervous, a question in his eyes. “Today so didn’t go the way I meant it to.”

  I laugh, because what I’m feeling is something so much bigger than relief.

  “What? You didn’t expect to almost get into a fistfight?”

  “No, no, I did not.”

  “I can’t believe it’s you,” I say, letting out the breath I didn’t even realize I was holding. My phone beeps.

  SN: are you disappointed?

  Me: NO!!!

  SN: can I come sit next to you?

  Me: YES!!!

  Ethan switches sides of the booth, and now his thigh is up against mine. I can smell his Ethan smell. I bet he tastes like coffee.

  “Hello,” he says, and reaches up and tucks my hair behind my ears.

  “Hello,” I say.

  —

  After we’ve talked for a while, it’s like all those other times I’ve hung out with Ethan but also totally different, because we’re not working on a project, we’re just together because we want to be, and I now know him, like really know him, because we’ve spent the last two months talking with our fingertips.

  “Why?” I ask. He closes the gap, puts his hand in mine. We are holding hands. Ethan and I are holding hands. I am not sure I ever want to give his back.

  “Why what?”

  “Why did you email me that first day?”

  “Since my brother…I feel like I’ve forgotten how to, like, how to talk to people. My dad made me go to this therapist, and she said that it might help to start writing instead. And when I saw you on the first day of school, there was just something about you that made me really want to meet you. You seemed lost in a way that I totally get. I decided to email. It felt safer to be undercover.” He shakes his head, as if to say Yes, I’m strange.

  “Have you written to anyone else?” I ask.

  “I mean, a few times here and there. I like to watch people. I’ve told some kids stuff in the nicest way possible. I told Ken Abernathy that Gem was cheating off him in calculus. With you, it was different. Ours was a two-month-long conversation.”

  “So what you’re saying is you’re kind of like Wood Valley’s Batman.”

  He grins. Looks down.

  “Not really. This is my brother’s shirt. It’s silly, but whatever.”

  “I like being able to ask you questions and you answering them.”

  “I like you asking me questions.”

  “Tell me three things,” I say, because I love our three things. I don’t want them to stop even though we can now say them out loud.

  “One: contrary to popular belief, I do not do drugs. Terrified of them. Won’t even take Tylenol. Two: I memorized the first part of ‘The Waste Land’ just to impress you. Normally, I play Xbox in the middle of the night or read when I can’t sleep, but I thought it would make me seem, I don’t know, cooler or something.”

  “It worked. It was totally dreamy.” My voice is smiling. I didn’t even know it could do that.

  “Three: my mom’s in rehab as of yesterday. I am not naive enough to be optimistic—we’ve been to this rodeo a few times—but at least it’s something.”

  “I—I don’t know what to say. If we were writing, I’d probably emoticon you.” I squeeze his hand, another way to talk. No wonder Ethan can’t sleep; his family life is even more screwed up than mine.

  “Your turn. Three things…”

  “Okay. One: I was really hoping it was you. I was sure it was, and then I was sure it wasn’t, and for that second, I thought you were Liam and I wanted to cry.”

  “Liam’s not so bad. I need to be nicer to him. Especially now. Oh man, he’s going to break my legs.” Ethan smiles. He’s not scared of Liam at all.

  “No he won’t. He’ll go back to Gem, and they can be prom king and queen or whatever, assuming you even do that here, and it will be fine. It’s too bad, though, because I so want to set him up with Dri.”

  “By the way, how right was I that you and Dri would be friends?”

  “You were right. You were right about a lot of things.”

  “Two…”

  “Two…” I stall. What do I want to say? That for the first time in as long as I can remember, I feel like I’m exactly where I want to be. That I’m happy to sit still. Right here. With him.

  “Two, thank you for being my first friend here at a time when I had no one. It really…made a difference.”

  Now it’s his turn to squeeze my hand, and it feels so good, I almost close my eyes.

  “Three? I don’t have a three. My head is still spinning.”

  “I have one.”

  “Go for it.”

  “Three: I want to kiss you, like, very much, please.”

  “You do?” I ask.

  “I do,” he says, and so I turn toward him, and he turns toward me, and even though we are in this random IHOP and our table is full of the bizarre array of uneaten foods Ethan has ordered to allow us to keep our table for the past three hours—pancakes, of course, but also pickles and apple pie—everything falls away.

  It is just him and me, Ethan is E
than is Ethan and Jessie is Jessie is Jessie, and his lips touch mine.

  But sometimes a kiss is not a kiss is not a kiss. Sometimes it’s poetry.

  Dear Reader,

  In Tell Me Three Things, Jessie, my main character, keeps constant count of the number of days it has been since her mother died. Like Jessie, I also lost my mother at fourteen, and of course I’m not going to be coy and pretend that’s a coincidence. It’s not. And I used to do that too: the counting. I still do it, in fact, but now I count in years instead of days. I’m at twenty-four. Twenty-four?!? How is that even possible? With Tell Me Three Things, I was finally brave enough to take a look at a period in my life that I long ago boxed up, put away, and marked with a big red label that read “Too Painful.” I wasn’t interested in exploring my specifics, necessarily, but I very much wanted to delve into those feelings of first loss and their immediate aftermath. To look back at what it was like to be teenager and to have the worst thing you can imagine happening actually happen.

  But at the same time, I very much did not want to write a dead mom book. Instead, I decided to combine the loneliness of first loss with something much more magical and universal: the beauty of first love. Jessie is not me—she’s so much cooler and more together than I ever was at sixteen, or even am now, for that matter. But she’s a version of me, an alterna-me, in the way that all of the characters I create somehow are. Tell Me Three Things was an opportunity to gift that me-but-not-me, to gift Jessie, with the one thing I most wanted at sixteen: To feel truly seen. To feel known. Enter Somebody Nobody.

  One of the most amazing things about young adulthood is that it’s a time that’s chock-full of firsts. Some wonderful and some…not so wonderful. At one point, Jessie says of her mother, “She will never see who I grow up to be—that great mystery of who I am and who I am meant to be—finally asked and answered.” Now, twenty-four whole years after my mother’s death, a lot of my own questions have been asked and answered, even if my mom wasn’t here to see it all unfold. Writing Tell Me Three Things reminded me of what it felt like when my world was forever widening.