The Art of Feeling

by Laura Tims

  “It smelled like it had a literal piece, like a chopped-off foot under the cushions or something.”

  Dad’s smile slips out like a ray of sunlight between clouds. But then our eyes meet, and he closes back up. He doesn’t know how to be honest with me either, not since his easy kid became difficult, too, in a different way from Rex or Lena. “Dr. Brown said not to dwell on the past.”

  The silver Jeep is part of that past, and we can only be safe if it stays hermetically sealed. It’s too late for the police to achieve anything with just that detail. All I can do is try to forget Friday night, and never write Dr. Brown’s stream-of-consciousness exercise again.

  At school, Anthony is back, and it takes about five nanoseconds for everything to go to hell.

  If the news about Eliot being a narc hadn’t fully spread yet, it was only because Anthony waited so he could witness the effect. It’s amazing how fast everyone in Anthony’s network swaps Eliot’s label from mysterious loner to public enemy number one. The worst part is that Eliot cannot be convinced to give a shit.

  “Maybe you should stay home for a couple days,” I tell him at lunch, after the fifth person drops off their dirty tray at our table in a gesture that has apparently been coordinated.

  “I spend enough time in a boredom-induced coma in that house. Why do that when I could be sitting in a boredom-induced coma here?”

  In other words, he’s avoiding Gabriel.

  “The trays clearly symbolize what a narc I am. It’s brilliant. We’ll submit it to MoMA as a public art installation.”

  “I wish you would take this seriously.”

  “Waste of a wish. I hear you only get three.”

  I shove the trays to the side. “I’m worried about you.”

  He starts laughing.

  “What?” I snap.

  He tapers off, still smiling. “Sorry. I thought that was one of those jokes that friendship supposedly involves.”

  I think my lung capacity has increased from all the sighing.

  On Tuesday, someone empties the contents of the sanitary bins in the girls’ bathroom into Eliot’s locker. I try to isolate Anthony long enough to ask him not to be a bag of dicks, but he’s constantly surrounded by a phalanx of his asshole friends. Once, he winks at me in the hall. Furious energy explodes in me and I yell, “Fuck off, No-Moore.”

  His friends are smart enough not to laugh, but Anthony’s shoulders go rigid. Everyone else at Forest Hills High might see him the way he wants them to, like a handsome tiger only refraining from eating them out of politeness, but I knew him in his kitten days. And it bothers him.

  On Thursday after school, I find the results of my outburst spray-painted on Eliot’s Porsche, marring the beautiful hood: ELIOT ROWE GET OUT OF OUR SCHOOL NARC.

  Eliot tilts his head critically, then dips his finger in the still-wet paint and draws commas after ROWE and SCHOOL. “Better.”

  I’m shaking. “That fucking . . .”

  “Oh, I’m upset, too. Horrible grammar.” He smirks.

  “What happens when Gabriel sees this? He said if people started harassing you, he’d—”

  “I’ll take it to the car wash after I drop you off at your house.” He draws a smiley face next to his name.

  “They’re not going to stop—”

  “This really is new to you, isn’t it?” He’s looking at me curiously.

  The fact that it’s not new to him makes me so sad I can barely say anything the entire way home.

  On Friday, I confront Trez Monroe.

  Every so often in high school, people go through a chemical mutation. They change from anime kids to Wes Anderson kids, fan-fiction kids to poetry kids, Christian kids to sex kids. Trez picked the most color-coded one: pastel kid to witch-Goth kid. She used to be a poster child for Anthony’s type: blondes with tiny noses, light on the butt and heavy on the boobs, with a collection of lace sweaters and an Instagram with at least three thousand followers. He’s cheated on her with clones of herself since they first started dating. Now she’s a poster child for Halloween, but she does it in style: black fishnets, black leather boots, black skater dress with a shredded hem. Her breakup and transformation would have been a bigger deal if they hadn’t been overshadowed by my accident, and Eliot moving to town.

  I guess I’m in the middle of a transformation, too. Lacrosse kid to I don’t know what. Eliot kid?

  Trez is in the auditorium, brandishing a clipboard at two freshmen staggering under the weight of a wooden plank painted to look like a ladder. She switched from cheerleading to theater tech, since you have to wear black for that anyway, and she’s already stage manager.

  “Why not get an actual ladder?” I ask from behind her.

  “Because last year somebody fell off one and broke their wrist. Now we just have to make climbing motions—”

  She stops when she turns around. I’m used to that, the pause as the other person mentally scans their previous sentence for anything to do with crutches or car accidents.

  I swallow. “Trez—”

  “It’s Trez.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “You said Therese.” She pronounces it thur-ez. Kendra told me that she submitted a complaint when the yearbook committee spelled it Therese. Her name is just part of the new version.

  “Can we talk in private?” I ask.

  “I’m in the middle of something.” She turns to the freshmen. “Lift it higher!” Their faces, which had relaxed while she was distracted, tighten back up into panic. This isn’t the quiet shadow I remember, trailing after Anthony since middle school. When they broke up, she broke up with her old self, too.

  I take a deep breath. “It’s about what they found in Anthony’s locker.”

  She starts picking compulsively at her jet-black nail polish. “What about it?”

  “Let’s talk in the costume room.”

  She swears under her breath, then addresses the freshmen. “Don’t you dare break that while I’m gone.”

  The costume room is a windowless space stuffed with cheap gowns, frayed capes, and assorted animal ears. There’s a loft for storage in which the lead actors traditionally bang each other after the final performance. Once we’re shut inside, Trez wiggles her fingers through a hole in a musty tuxedo, not looking at me.

  “How did you find out?” she asks.

  “It was more of a guess.” Eliot’s guess.

  “That I just confirmed.” She grits her teeth.

  “Don’t worry, I’m not going to . . .” But I have no idea what I’m going to do. All I know is that telling Anthony the truth means Eliot will be safe, and then he won’t have to move away.

  “Anthony’s a piece of shit. He deserved it, and I’m not sorry,” she tells the tuxedo.

  Definitely not bedridden with a broken heart anymore. “I’m only here because of Eliot Rowe.”

  “He obviously doesn’t care what people think, so why does it matter if they think he did it?” Her voice is cold, but there’s a tremble underneath. “I quit cheer so I wouldn’t have to go to Anthony’s games. We are at zero interaction. Do you expect me to just march up to him and tell him it was me?”

  I expected pleas for silence, not a challenge. But she still won’t meet my eyes.

  “You know what he’s like.” The tremble gets stronger. “He’s always acting like you two are old friends, but I see the way you look at him. You know.”

  “Yeah,” I mumble. “I know.”

  “You know a little. But you didn’t date him for five years.” She wraps a piece of hair around her thumb until it turns purple. “Eliot’s nobody to him. He’s pissed, but it’s not personal. With me, it’d be personal.”

  Her tough persona is new enough to crumble easily, even as she tries to cling to it. It’s like I’m a bully, dangling this over her head. I squeeze my crutches. “What do you think he’d do?”

  “He always knows when there’s someone looking at him, and he knows what he wants them to see. But I’
ve been with him when he thinks he’s safe . . . and there’s nothing there. He’s a black hole. Capable of anything.”

  I shake my head. Anthony might be a douchebag these days, but he’s not a sociopath. “That’s not how I remember him. Why did you date him for so long if that’s what you think?”

  She laughs drily. “We’re in the same grade; you remember what I was like before I got with him. Why bother pretending? I was nothing, too. He was the first person who acted like I wasn’t, and then he got friends, which meant I had friends. . . . You don’t know what it’s like to face going back to nothing after having something.”

  It reminds me of how I felt when Gabriel threatened to move away with Eliot. I can’t shake off a shiver.

  “It’s not like he was horrible all the time, or even most of the time, and he’s good at making you forget what you think you know about him. And I wanted to forget. He’d sound like he meant it when he said he cared, that he was the only person who’d care.” Her fishnets suddenly require extensive rearranging. “He has a thing about loyalty. If he knew it was me who screwed him over . . .”

  She’s right, and so was Eliot. I can’t save him from the tiger pit just to throw someone else in.

  “It’s your choice. Just don’t do anything because you feel sorry for me.” She paves her expression over with stone, a trick she probably learned from Anthony.

  “I’m not going to tell him.”

  She doesn’t thank me. She’s just silent for a second, and then she turns to go. “By the way,” she says to the door, “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  It’s not until she’s gone that I realize she didn’t look at me once.

  Chapter Seven

  GABRIEL LEAVES AGAIN ON SATURDAY. ELIOT sends me a Snapchat of his car rolling away, chipper ukulele music playing in the background.

  Even though all I want to do is bury myself in bed where thoughts of silver Jeeps can’t reach me, I ask Dad to drive me to Eliot’s, telling him it’s where we’re working on our group project. Last night I had a vivid nightmare that Anthony burned down Eliot’s house in the middle of the day. Even though arson’s probably not his style, it’s safest to stay close to Eliot for now. The fear in Trez’s voice when she described Anthony keeps sticking in my head.

  I arrive to find him sprawled on his plastic-wrapped couch in a boredom coma. I log his laptop into my family’s Netflix account, and we spend the afternoon marathoning 30 Rock, the show punctuated by twanging from the ukulele and Eliot’s grumbled criticism of mainstream comedy.

  “Why do people on TV like it when someone shuts them up by kissing them?” he groans after the scene where Floyd does it to Liz. “You’d think they’d be perturbed.”

  “It’s called a shut-up kiss. It’s supposed to be cute when a guy cuts off your nervous babbling.”

  “A shut-up kiss,” he repeats scathingly. “We should experiment. I’ll do it to you, and you can tell me if you think it’s romantic or if it makes you want to punch me in the face.”

  He rolls his eyes, and my brain chooses that moment to register how much his lips look soft and full. But since Eliot is always joking unless proven serious, I snort and we go back to the show.

  It’s dark by the time we’re done. I drag Eliot to the kitchen, determined to teach him how to cook at least one thing he can make for himself when Gabriel’s gone, except it turns out I don’t know how to cook either. We end up dumping the burned pasta sauce glop on the lawn.

  Eliot drapes himself back on the couch, filling the room with the crinkle of plastic. “What sad attempts at revenge do you think Anthony’s friends will pull next week? Let’s take bets.”

  “No. Also, get up for a sec.”

  He obliges. “What’s the point of having a friend if you can’t use your superior knowledge of human nature to win bets and take their money?”

  Once he’s standing, I strip the clear plastic off the couch and toss it in a corner. “That was the first thing that needed to be done tonight.”

  “And the second?”

  “I just realized that watching Netflix all day is a depressing way to spend a Saturday. We’re going out.”

  A real friend would distract Eliot from the hell waiting for him at school on Monday. And unless I keep things more interesting than Netflix marathons, there’s always the possibility he’ll drop me like one of his hobbies. “Plus we need food.”

  Our burned dinner is still sending up tendrils of smoke as we cross the lawn. I’m the one who knows where we’re going, so I take his keys and drive. It makes my skin feel a little crawly, but that’s all. Maybe I’d have a worse fear of cars if I remembered the accident. “I’m sorry in advance if I crash your car,” I say lightly, just to show that I can.

  “It’s Gabriel’s. Feel free.”

  We grab hot dogs at the gas station and eat them on the fifteen-minute drive to the lake. It’s man-made, not a real lake, but there’s a sandy bottom. It’s a senior tradition for the class to come jump into the water together in September, in the first month of the last year. I was in the hospital at the time.

  “Are we going fishing? A perfect cure for boredom, the one sport that’s literally just sitting still for hours,” Eliot says as I park in the lot and climb out into the cool air. “And they say I’m the genius.”

  “You’re the only one who says you’re a genius.”

  “My opinion on the subject is the only one that matters.”

  The night is chilly but not windy, and the moonlight tops the lake with cream. The rickety dock is abandoned, water licking at the faded wood. “I just thought we needed a break from your living room, and this would be a pretty place to hang out.”

  Jacketless in the cold, Eliot leans against the car hood and yawns. During the day he looks out of place, but at night he belongs. “Prettiness achieved. Now what?”

  I’m boring him. Suddenly I’m convinced I’m seconds from losing him unless I do something fascinating this instant. “Let’s jump in. There’s this thing called the Plunge that seniors do here where they all go in together. It’s supposed to be a metaphor for graduating. It was in September, so we missed it, but we can do it now. We’ll get right back out. Everyone else did it.”

  Everyone else is full of endings and beginnings, and I’m made of sameness. I haven’t gone to any of the senior events: senior dinner, senior night . . . I won’t go to graduation parties, or help plan the senior prank, or cheer at the last sports games. But maybe it’s okay that I can’t hit milestones with everyone else if I can hit them with Eliot. All anyone needs is just one person, right?

  He scoffs. “Everyone else is an idiot.”

  Everyone else, including me. I flush. “You’re right. Never mind.”

  He looks at me and rubs the back of his neck. “Well, hold on.”

  “No, it was a stupid idea.” Other people can pull off spontaneity. I should stick to Netflix. Even when Kendra and the team asked what I wanted to do, I was always so paranoid that everyone would hate my suggestion that I’d be paralyzed by indecision.

  “Would you wait for two seconds?”

  I open the car. “Let’s go home. We’ll pick a new show to watch. I’m sorry—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake.” And suddenly he’s stripping off his jeans and T-shirt until he’s ivory in the moonlight, his scars gleaming like a school of silver fish. Then he sprints away from me and takes a running leap off the end of the dock.

  “Jesus, Eliot!” My crutches clatter on the boards as I chase him. For a second, the surface of the water is still and dark, and then he shatters it, piercing the calm with his harsh breathing. His hair is painted down over his face. He looks ethereal, like a beautiful creature in a fairy tale that might help you or kill you, you don’t know which.

  “Are you okay?” I gasp.

  “Water’s great. Come on in.” He tilts his head back so that his hair floats out like a crown made of seaweed.

  I was worried the water would be freezing in March, but what do
I know? A big, stupid smile twists my lips and I sit down, abandoning my shoes next to my crutches but keeping my clothes on. I’m not ready for him to see my scars in the moonlight.

  Eliot beckons, treading water. I stand up on one leg and leap in.

  He lied—the cold is like a fist through glass. I break into a thousand pieces but reassemble when I explode through the surface, feeling like I’ve been put back together better. “Fuck!” I yell at the moon.

  “This aggression toward the moon is unwarranted.” Eliot is so close to me, beads of water clinging to his lips and hair. He’s as pale as an ancient river deity, but he’s not even shivering.

  “It’s freezing!” I wail. I grab his shoulders, propelling him underwater. He bobs up, cackling, and slips out of my grip like a fish. We’re both laughing now, and there’s water in my nose, and I’m so violently fond of him, of his snarky comments and his dramatics and his unexpected moments of kindness. I’m cold and so warm at the same time.

  “I’ve never done anything like this before, with anyone,” he says matter-of-factly. His breath is the only source of heat in the world.

  “I-I’ve never . . .” I can’t. I dive underwater and pop back up. “Been this f-fucking cold! H-how a-are you not shivering right now?”

  “People with my condition can’t sense extreme temperatures. We don’t shiver or sweat. We’re prone to hypothermia and heat stroke,” he says, still matter-of-fact. At my expression, he backpedals in the water. “Calm down. I’ll get out—”

  I practically hurl him onto the dock, and then I roll out after him, seizing my crutches. No way it’s the moonlight tingeing his lips blue. The rest of him is so white I can almost see the blood darting in his veins, thousands of tiny, delicate rivers.

  Once we’re in the car, I switch on the heat full blast. If he dies of hypothermia, it’s my fault.

  “Stop freaking out. I’m fine,” he says impatiently.

  “Just because you look fine doesn’t mean you are. You need to take care of yourself, or you could die! You can’t keep forgetting you have this condition.” For once, I barely notice my leg twinging with the cold.