The Art of Feeling

by Laura Tims

  -trez

  My leg starts throbbing.

  The hallways are abandoned, too, even though they’re usually peppered with people waiting for rides. Did the zombie apocalypse happen while I was unconscious?

  I pop an ibuprofen and walk faster.

  Eliot’s not waiting by my locker as usual. Or reading in the library. Or smoking in the bathroom.

  Finally I go outside, where the sun gleams off the glass doors, blinding me like it did on the day we met. I loiter helplessly on the steps. He’s not answering my texts, which has never led to anything good.

  Then Kendra appears behind me, her ancient floral backpack dangling from one shoulder.

  “Hi, Sam,” she says politely, and maybe a little coldly.

  “Hey.” I try to sound calm. “Where is everyone?”

  She shrugs. “I was making up the Calc test.”

  “Have you seen Eliot?”

  “Isn’t he always with you now?”

  Definitely a little coldly.

  “Is there something going on?” I ask.

  I’m talking generally, but she must think I’m referring to the situation between her and me, because she sighs a particular sigh that means she’s upset.

  “It’s no big deal, Sam. I swear I’m happy for you. It’s just that I tried to reach out to you for months, and you kept shutting me down—which is fine, if being alone was all you needed. But suddenly you have a boyfriend, and you’ve made it very clear that you didn’t need to be alone; you just didn’t want to be with me or the team.”

  I stand there with my mouth hanging open like an idiot.

  “We worked our asses off, is all. We signed that giant card for you and had that benefit bake sale.” It keeps spilling out of her like blood that won’t stop pumping now that the wound is open. “Erin thought you didn’t really like us, that you were only hanging out with us because of lacrosse, but—I thought you were cool, Sam. I wanted you to like me for more than lacrosse. But you dropped us as soon as you couldn’t play anymore.”

  She turns bright red and looks as if she might cry.

  I’m speechless. I hadn’t imagined that losing me could hurt these girls, because I thought that they only hung out with me because of lacrosse, too. That we were all under the same impression that I didn’t quite fit.

  After a moment, Kendra covers her mouth and lets a muffled “Oh, God” escape into her fingertips. Then she drops them and blurts, “Anyway, it’s fine. Let me try to find out what’s going on.”

  Her shoulders hunched, she starts texting frantically.

  “Ahh . . .” I’m strangled. “Kendra . . . I’m sor—”

  Her phone buzzes.

  “Oh, shit,” she says suddenly, staring at the screen.

  “What?”

  Her forehead knots up, and she shoots me a frightened glance.

  “Erin says that Eliot challenged Anthony to a fight. Everyone’s over behind the gear shack by the senior lot.”

  I’ll end it, he’d said.

  I start swinging toward the senior lot, fast enough that my leg stabs at me, my mouth sharp and dry with broken glass.

  Anthony’s finally so fed up with Eliot’s lack of reaction that he himself is going to attack until he gets one. What neither of them understands is that no reaction doesn’t mean Eliot isn’t hurt.

  Dr. Brown was right in her book—people only help someone when they show pain, which means no one has ever tried to help Eliot.

  The senior lot is all the way across campus, half-hidden behind the sports equipment shack. It’s so far that the faculty rarely police it, so it’s the second-best place for drug exchanges and the best one for fights.

  Half the school’s population is clustered on the pavement—not just Anthony’s friends, but people from groups who never got involved in their war. Anthony must have marshaled as many witnesses as possible to make a final example out of Eliot.

  I wedge apart the crowd with my crutches until I spot them.

  In the middle of the circle, Anthony is calmly shedding his jacket, handing it to a girl who looks like prebreakup Trez. Eliot yawns and checks his phone, his brow furrowing slightly as he reads the texts I’d sent.

  I’m about to tackle him when a hand grasps one of my crutches. It’s that asshole who tailed us to the parking lot, Anthony’s friend Jaden. His breath smells like Cheetos.

  “Eliot gave me fifty bucks to stop you from getting involved,” he says simply.

  “Eliot did?”

  He shrugs. “He didn’t pay me to lie.”

  They only leave you alone once you prove with finality that they can’t hurt you.

  I hate him.

  In front of us, Anthony winds up and breaks Eliot’s nose.

  I should probably be used to it by now.

  Jaden grabs my other crutch, to steady or trap me, I don’t know. “Get off,” I scream in his ear, but he’s busy yelling his head off in support of Anthony.

  Eliot wipes his nose, smearing the blood across his cheekbone like a comet, and waits.

  Either Anthony’s too focused to question why Eliot’s not defending himself, or he’s just used to everything being easy. There’s a scary confidence in his eyes, like he’s done this before and doesn’t mind at all that he has to do it again. He drives his fist into Eliot’s stomach. I flinch more violently than Eliot does. Eliot cocks his head as if to ask what, exactly, Anthony’s trying to accomplish.

  I know what Eliot’s trying to accomplish.

  I inhale deeply, about to make so much noise they’ll have to register me, but Jaden covers my mouth with Cheetos-dust fingers right as Anthony hits Eliot again, this time in the jaw. Eliot’s head snaps to the side. He faces front again immediately, blood streaking upward from the side of his mouth.

  “Did the fight start yet?” he asks loudly, nasal from the broken nose.

  A few people laugh, but most are frozen, in horror or fascination. Some have their phones out. Anthony’s grinning, like this is all part of the performance he planned, but it’s a tight grin. I stare at him desperately, but he doesn’t look back.

  He’s just No-Moore, isn’t he? Just an insecure jerk acting big. But I know how small he used to be. He won’t really hurt Eliot.

  Two more punches to the face, knocking Eliot down. Anthony kicks him in the chest so hard he’s thrown onto his back, but Eliot just crosses his arms under his head like he’s napping in the sun.

  No one’s laughing now.

  “What’s wrong with him?” someone mutters near me.

  “Let me go or he’s going to die,” I rasp into Jaden’s palm, but he has a rigor mortis grip on my crutches. Even though he’s not yelling anymore, this time I think he legitimately doesn’t hear me.

  Anthony’s confidence is gone, and now his eyes are just scary, his fury whole and radiating. Eliot isn’t sobbing like he anticipated, not begging or embarrassing himself. He’s embarrassing Anthony. In front of everyone. He glances furtively over his shoulder at us, like he’s afraid I won’t be the only one who remembers how small he was.

  Eliot checks an imaginary watch. “Does anyone want to hold my arms behind my back?”

  His voice slices through me. Nobody answers him.

  “No?” He crosses his wrists behind his back and sneers at Anthony. “Will it help if I keep them like this?”

  Anthony flexes his bloodied, shaking knuckles.

  “Everyone’s looking at you,” Eliot says quietly, but loud enough for us all to hear. “What do you think they see?”

  The break happens in Anthony’s face, in the whites of his eyes.

  He punches Eliot again and again, until the pavement is splattered with blood and broken glass.

  No. No broken glass.

  But Eliot will smirk until the moment he dies, because he literally won’t fake a reaction to save his life.

  Then Anthony gets his hands around Eliot’s throat.

  I thrash against Jaden, but he’s glued to my crutches like he needs them
to defend himself.

  Even as Anthony’s biceps rope with how hard he’s squeezing, his expression melts from rage to nothingness. But Eliot’s lips are white beneath the blood, his face stricken. Pain or no pain, he still needs to breathe.

  No matter how much he jokes that he won’t make it to thirty, he’s obviously never believed for one second that he could die.

  I’m losing him, just like I lost Mom, my mobility, my friends, my sport. I’m going to lose everyone who defines me and everything that makes me special until I dissolve into nothingness.

  I can’t save the person I picture to lessen my pain, and it’s a Can’t, mountains tall, oceans deep, a fact of the universe.

  It just is. It just is—

  But Jaden’s not holding on to me. He’s only holding on to my crutches.

  I lunge forward pain another step pain three steps PAIN and my knees buckle, but I’m falling right. I crash into Anthony and Eliot. The three of us tangle, and it’s strangely intimate, the sweat on Anthony’s cheek marking my shoulder, my elbow scraping Eliot’s ribs, all our staccato heartbeats.

  I seize Anthony’s wrists, and for a second it’s like both of us are strangling Eliot. Life drains by centimeters from his half-closed eyes, and some faraway part of me wonders if that was what Mom looked like as she died.

  But I’ve broken the seal over the crowd. Two guys help me haul Anthony off and push him to the ground, where he lies gasping and motionless. Eliot regains consciousness almost immediately, rolling over and hacking so deeply it’s like it’s coming from underground.

  The second they’re apart, everyone backs away. I swim through panic and pain, focusing on Eliot’s chest, moving up and down with all the life still in him.

  He staggers to his feet. The bruises on his neck are already blackening.

  “See?” he shouts hoarsely at all of us, not seeing me, just the enemy. “None of you can hurt me! None of you can fucking do anything to me anymore!”

  Chapter Twelve

  Dear Gabriel,

  I think it’s time to move Eliot to a different school. He’s so good at convincing the world he can’t be hurt that even I fell for it, but

  Dear Gabriel,

  Eliot’s doing well! I’ve been looking out for him at school, and

  Dear Gabriel,

  Most of the time I feel like a stranger inside myself. I couldn’t tell you who I am, because I don’t know.

  But Eliot gave me a personality type. He acts like he’s above everything, but he’s not above me. They say you have to love yourself before someone else can, but Eliot liking me makes me wonder if maybe there’s something to like—he’s a logical guy, and that’s the logical conclusion. But I’m not sure what that thing is, and I’m not brave enough to ask.

  You’d take him away if I told you what happened. But what’s the point of moving him from place to place when his problem isn’t a place? People are, and they’re everywhere, so he’ll have to learn to deal with them eventually.

  He’s starting to get the hang of dealing with me. So keeping him here might be better for his safety in the long run, right?

  Dear Gabriel,

  You suck. Your stupid long-distance methods of caretaking suck. You say it’s for his sake, but I think it’s so you can relieve your guilt by looking after him without actually having to look at him. Have you considered that your guilt isn’t the most important thing in this situation?

  Deleted messages: 4

  Eliot doesn’t come to school for three days.

  He ignores my texts, except to say Yes when I ask Are you alive? If you don’t answer I’m calling an ambulance.

  I add: You better text me every hour while you’re refusing to see me, so I know you’re alive and not passed out on the kitchen floor again, or I’m calling an ambulance.

  Alive. (1:02 p.m.)

  Alive. (2:02 p.m.)

  Alive. (3:04 p.m.) . . .

  Every night I steal Rex’s truck, drive to Eliot’s house, and whack on his door with my crutches until my arm goes numb.

  “He just needs time,” I tell Tito once I get home and he trots out of his doghouse to greet me.

  Because he’s a good dog, he doesn’t point out that when I’d needed time before, it had turned into forever, which I now realize must have sucked a lot for Kendra if it felt like this.

  Which it might not have, because I wasn’t her only person like Eliot is my only person.

  If you’re hiding from me because you think I’m mad, I am mad, and this is making me madder.

  Alive. (11:04 a.m.)

  At school, everyone avoids me, like Eliot’s problem is contagious. Nobody mentions an obscure congenital condition that I hear of. The general consensus is that Eliot was psychopathically high on six different drugs—so not only is he a narc, he’s a crazy addict.

  “Which explains how weird his eyes always look, right, like he’s freezing the inside of your brain. . . .”

  Anthony’s version is that he was doing a good deed, trying to teach the dangerous nut job a lesson. He acts like he’s the most Anthony he’s ever been, flirting with teachers in class and swaggering around with his tiger smile, but people still talk.

  “Did you see him lose it? I was scared. . . .”

  Maybe that’s why no one reports the fight to the principal.

  I don’t reward Anthony by acknowledging him, but when he leans against my locker on Tuesday with a sigh and an “Are we still not talking?” I do spit in his face.

  Alive. (4:06 p.m.)

  Alive. (5:09 p.m.)

  How does one put out a medium-to-large kitchen fire? (6:36 p.m.)

  For the first time since the accident, I speed on the road, Rex’s truck bouncing over potholes. My leg aches with each jolt, and I hear the tinkle-explosion of breaking glass; but I keep going, because it figures that I leave Eliot alone for less than a week and he sets himself on fire.

  The front door of his house is unlocked, and the hallway is thick with smoke. I open windows as I go.

  “Where are you?” I call.

  “Kitchen,” he calls back. “And you were going fifty in a thirty-five, judging by how fast you got here. Very illegal.”

  It doesn’t sound like he’s on fire, and that means I get to be pissed at him.

  I stick my head into the kitchen. Black smoke billows from the microwave as Eliot ineffectually flaps a pot holder. He nods at me like absolutely nothing horrible has happened recently.

  “The microwave’s smoking, and I know how you love to tell things not to smoke.”

  His face is a mask of bruises, his neck a nightmare. I force myself to speak. “Are you okay?”

  He takes out his phone and types. Mine buzzes with a text.

  Alive.

  I want to hug him, or hit him. “This is my second-least-favorite way I’ve found you in this kitchen.”

  “I was cooking, which is supposedly what you’re supposed to do in a kitchen.”

  “It smells like death.” And he looks like it. “Go stand by the window so you don’t suffocate.”

  I squint into the microwave, my eyes watering. An evil-colored lump smolders behind the glass.

  “What was that before you killed it?” I ask.

  “Cake,” he says briskly.

  “ . . . Cake.”

  “I mixed the things in the cupboard together and put them in a bowl and heated the bowl up.” He flourishes his pot holder. “Cake.”

  It’s hard to know if this is strange behavior or just Eliot.

  Miraculously I find a pair of salad tongs in a drawer. I carry the cake and melted plastic bowl outside, depositing them both on the gravel, where they should ward off any neighborhood demons.

  Then I go back inside and inform Eliot, “If you set your house on fire, you in fact die. Smoke inhalation also exists.”

  “Obviously. I was inhaling it earlier.”

  In the living room, there’s a mountain of cigarette butts on the table, and the once-white couch is gray. E
liot lolls on top of it. Something about the sight bothers me, but I shrug it off and confiscate his cigarettes.

  “Smoking in the house is a fire hazard and a lung cancer hazard. You’re going to kill yourself.”

  “I’d be lucky to live long enough to have the option of killing myself,” he quips. “It’s kill or be killed, isn’t it? In this case, my body is my nemesis. At least by committing suicide my brain gets to participate in my fate.”

  I refuse to let him wring shock from me.

  “Are you okay?” I ask. “And I’m not asking if you’re alive—I know you’re alive. I’m talking to you.”

  “You are. Highly unusual—typically people avoid that.”

  “Are. You. Okay.”

  He sighs. “I both love and hate that question.”

  “Great answer! I especially like how helpful it is, and how it’s a totally adequate response to what I asked!”

  “Do you think grocery stores deliver cake?” he inquires at the ceiling.

  “Why did you even text me? You didn’t need me; all you had to do was open a window.” I slam my hands on the coffee table. “You ignore me for days, and then for some reason you pick this random moment to call me over and play weird mind games?”

  “Isn’t this what you’re supposed to do today?” he mumbles. “Invite your friends over?”

  “I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but since you like to be aware of things—you’re not making sense.”

  He gives himself a little shake. “I wasn’t ignoring you. I texted you hourly. I’ve never done anything hourly in my life.”

  Now that I have visual confirmation he’s alive, my desire to kill him has returned. If he was acting at all like a human being who’d gone through what he had . . . instead he’s acting high.

  “You paid that asshole to hold me back,” I spit. “That’s what pisses me off the most, that you knew I’d want to stop it, and you made sure I couldn’t. Why the hell did you think fighting Anthony was a good idea? What’s wrong with you?”

  “Ahhh.” He lies back and steeples his fingers. “What’s wrong with me. The eternal question. The answer depends on who you ask, you see. My doctors say congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis; everyone else says it’s the fact that I was born.”