The Art of Feeling

by Laura Tims

  Eliot brings the blankets and pillows back upstairs and remakes Gabriel’s bed. I lie exhausted on the couch, exploring the edges of the gulf inside me, seeing how far down it goes.

  It feels like I’m carrying something heavy and warm, but not warm like Eliot’s skin on mine. Warm like blood.

  The blankness wasn’t really nothingness—it was this. Everythingness. I just wasn’t looking at it.

  I didn’t know I could cry for so long and still be able to stop. Or that someone could hug me so hard I could feel his indents in my skin after he lets go, new grooves in me made for him, waiting for us to be fitted back together.

  That night, he lingers for a long time in Gabriel’s doorway even after he turns off the lights. He’s fighting his own force field again. But now that he’s gotten past it once, I know eventually he’ll be able to do it again, even if tonight all he manages is closing the door.

  Gabriel’s room is clean and white, like the inside of an egg, empty except for the bed. I could easily detach myself again, let it all fade back into blankness. But I’ve been hauling this around with me like an unused lump of coal. Now I’m going to let it smolder until the last ashes cool. I curl in the glow of it, tears slipping steadily out of the corners of my eyes and pooling in the curves of my ears.

  It’s burning, but it’s not burning me up. I’m feeling it, but it’s not killing me.

  I think about how powerful it is, and how strong that must mean that I am.

  When I wake up the next morning, the first thing I remember is the face of the other driver.

  It’s too much to sort through, everything contained in this piece of information. I almost go back to sleep. But I don’t want it to weigh me down any longer than it has to, so I climb out of bed, grab my crutches, and swing into the hall, where I trip over Eliot.

  He was slumped against the wall, asleep, with my notebook on his lap.

  “Were you out here all night?” I ask.

  “No,” he lies.

  “Did you read it?”

  “I was going to.” His voice is tired and nervous. “But I figured you’d want me to ask.”

  I nod. Once. Then I ask where his shower is.

  At first I turn the knob as hot as it will go, and then the other way, until the searing cold makes me aware of every inch of my skin.

  I know who was driving.

  I handle it carefully. It’s so large. There are so many places the fallout could land once I set it off.

  When I go downstairs, flushed from being scalded then frozen, Eliot is dumping the charred pieces of an attempt at pancakes in the trash. I sit down, and he slides unbuttered toast onto the table instead, next to my notebook.

  He stares at it with a heavy expression.

  “You really remembered who it was?” he asks after a second.

  Saying the name is the key that will set it off. Whatever the fallout touches is my responsibility.

  As soon as I say it, his face changes, taking on the rage I should be feeling, but it’s like I’m teetering at the precipice of the same torrential river that’s ground Rex down like driftwood, and I’m afraid to get in.

  The river sweeps Eliot upright. He says in a genuinely frightening voice, “I’ll handle this.”

  He slams his pan in the sink and leaves the house.

  I chase him, my leg throbbing, but he’s already so far ahead of me on the sidewalk, and I can’t stop long enough to take a pill. This time, though, the broken glass is so dull it barely cuts me.

  At first he doesn’t realize I’m following. I shout his name until finally he stops. “Where are you going?” I pant when I reach him.

  His eyes are lightning, not the kind that strikes at random but the type Zeus smites with. “To her house.”

  “I was . . .” I don’t say going to call the police, because I wasn’t, not until I had a chance to look at her. Maybe I made a mistake.

  “She’s been at school this whole time, passing you in the hall, listening to the sound your crutches make on the floor like she had nothing to do with it.”

  He’s pale, trembling.

  “I don’t want you to go in there and yell—”

  “I don’t yell.” He turns and starts walking again.

  Her house is only a few blocks down from his, but it’s much smaller. There’s a brilliant spray of familiar pink and white flowers by the front porch. I almost don’t remember where I saw them before.

  “Eliot,” I say, but he’s already knocking.

  Trez answers, and immediately I think, This is who killed Mom, but it still doesn’t become real. She’s not a tsunami or an earthquake, just a scared-looking girl in slippers and pilled fleece pajama pants.

  “What are you doing here?” she asks, and adds like she’s a little kid, “My parents aren’t home.”

  I focus on her feet. The slippers are patterned with faded snowflakes.

  If it had to be a human being, not an insentient, all-powerful force of nature, it was supposed to be a stranger.

  “We’re coming in,” says Eliot.

  I expect her to tell him to fuck off, but she just stands aside.

  Despite the fact that her house is in a wealthy neighborhood, the inside is dusty and dark, the kitchen table propped on one side with a dictionary. At my house, the fridge door is thick with report cards and photographs, but hers is dominated by an unfriendly chart covered in things like Vacuum, Rake the yard and a column labeled Consequences.

  “Do you want water, or . . .”

  Her voice dies. There are deep circles under her eyes from yesterday’s mascara. The blond of her hair shows through at the scalp.

  “You were driving that car,” I say out loud.

  She makes a little choking sound, and then she meets my eyes for the first time, I realize, since the accident.

  Which is also when she and Anthony broke up, when she stopped coming to school, when she turned unrecognizable. Wearing black all the time like she was in mourning.

  I fall into the river so suddenly it’s like I was pushed.

  Eliot moves closer, cornering her. “As soon as we’re done here, we’re calling the police, and you’re going to jail. That’s what’s happening to you now.”

  She’s still looking at me, not him. “I don’t care what happens to me now.”

  “You don’t know what isolation is, everyone thinking you’re inhuman. From now on, your entire existence is a punishment. You don’t think you care. Maybe you hate yourself, maybe you believe you deserve it. You should, and you do—you know you’re wrong inside.”

  I can tell that he’s saying the cruelest things that occur to him, but she just hugs herself and fixates on me, straining like she’s staring into the sun.

  “Stop it.” I want her unable to face me; I want to see her tears and horror so I can know if her pain is as bad as mine. “Why aren’t you crying?”

  “I don’t get to cry,” she explains. “I’m the one who . . .”

  But then a tear does roll down her cheek, and she grits her teeth so hard her jaw cracks.

  “What do you think she owes you?” Eliot asks softly. “You’ll never be able to give back what you owe her.”

  “Please be quiet.” His words are poison gas, clouding my brain.

  He scowls, confused and hurt. “Don’t you want her to hear what she’s done?”

  There’s a threshold of viciousness where you’re no longer supposed to say your thoughts out loud.

  I remember everything I said to my family.

  “Wait for me outside, okay?” I ask.

  His eyes flicker, but he leaves the kitchen. I hear the front door shut.

  “You have a guy who’ll do anything for you.” Trez wipes her face over and over, until it’s raw. “That’s good.”

  “Tell me why it had to happen,” I whisper. “Why?”

  “First, remember that it was my fault. Don’t feel sorry for me once I’m done.”

  I can’t make sense of that, so I ignore it.
>
  “I wasn’t supposed to hit you so hard,” she says hoarsely. “All I was trying to do was sideswipe your mirror.”

  This makes no sense either.

  “Supposed to?” I echo numbly.

  “He . . . he’s had a thing about you and Rex since we first started dating. You tease him about the old days, call him No-Moore. . . .”

  I can’t breathe.

  “He was afraid that if you kept reminding everyone of how he used to be, they’d treat him like before. He was obsessed with not going back to that. . . . That’s why he got your brother expelled, when we were freshmen.”

  Rex was right.

  But his teasing was affectionate, an attempt to remind Anthony that he’d liked the old version.

  “Why are we even talking about Anthony? This is about the accident.”

  “He left you alone because you were quieter, until you joined lacrosse and started telling the girls stories. But you didn’t have a reputation like Rex. You’d have said any drugs weren’t yours, and they might’ve cut you slack. He was right to worry—when I put that weed in his locker . . . he gets straight As. He’s going to Yale. They didn’t care what was in his locker.”

  Dimly I remember giggling with Kendra about Anthony sneaking Tito home in his backpack, pretending he was a dog so they could be brothers. Sweet memories, not mocking ones, but I was still cashing them in. And maybe I was tired of people believing his stupid act.

  But to want me expelled?

  Her words spin out faster, a whirlpool I’m drowning in. “He decided a cop had to find it. Not a lot, nothing serious, but the school couldn’t ignore it if cops were involved. So he hid it in your sports bag before your game when your family was out. He knew where you kept your spare key—he said not even the dog would bark at him.”

  I’m underwater, everything distant and warped.

  “I’d wait for a red light and tap your bumper. I’d say my parents told me to call the cops if I was ever in an accident, and once they came, I’d whisper that I’d smelled marijuana. Anthony said I had to be the one since your parents knew him, but it was just a little bump. . . . He asked . . . what I’d be without him, who I’d have. There wasn’t someone better, not for me. I thought it wasn’t a bad trade-off, having a life and friends in exchange for staying with him and doing what he wanted. . . .”

  He made me feel guilty for not being there for him.

  How could he have hidden hate like this?

  “He gave me something for bravery, but it slowed me down. I couldn’t cut in behind you, but he’d said I had to do it before you got to the school, so I looped in front at the last minute. I thought I’d sideswipe your mirror, but I wasn’t used to the wheel—it was Anthony’s friend’s car, a big one that wouldn’t dent. I lost control.”

  She talks the same way that I’d written in my notebook yesterday, sobbing like I sobbed, reliving it, too.

  “I think I blacked out. The car was more than dented, but I guess it drove, because somehow I got to Anthony’s, and he made sure I wouldn’t tell. He has anger he never shows at school. . . .”

  This can’t be all Mom died for—a boy scared of losing his image, a girl scared of a boy.

  I know how it feels to be trapped in the worst day of your life, to accept unfair trade-offs, to believe a boy is the only reason you’re special. But I don’t want her to know how she feels when she needs to be a monster.

  But the way she picks pilled fabric off her pajamas until she’s standing in a cloud is human. The way she’s squeezing one wrist like she wants to stop her own pulse is human.

  For a second, I can’t remember her name or why I’m standing here. All I remember is fifth-grade Anthony stuffing Tito in his sweatshirt. Eleventh-grade Rex giving him a noogie. Eighth-grade Trez, a silent shadow. The Trez on her kitchen floor feels like just another ghost.

  “You deserved to know sooner,” she chokes. “Call the police, I’ll confess, I’m ready now. Anthony won’t, and he’s had a long time to figure out his alibi, but you’ll know one of us suffered.”

  That was what I thought after the funeral, that someone should suffer, and it seemed safer to do it myself than to trust it to someone else. Suffering was the only way to tell the universe I wouldn’t accept the new world.

  I imagine the police and their questions storming back into my life, the wound reopened right when it was starting to close.

  “I have to think. I’m going to go,” I say, even though I can’t think and there’s nowhere to go.

  I stagger out of the kitchen and outside, past the exotic flowers. Rays of sunlight are lancing off mailboxes and car fenders like arrows shooting in all directions. There’s air everywhere but inside my lungs.

  Eliot pushes off the fence and chases me down the sidewalk.

  “You need to take out your anger on her,” he says decisively. “Make it hers so it doesn’t have to be yours. That’s why it’s called taking it out.”

  But I can’t surgically extract it from my body and implant it in hers, or even split it between us. I’ve been suffering, and Rex, and Lena, and Dad, all of us lashing out at each other, trying to off-load something that can’t be off-loaded, only reproduced.

  Maybe Trez’s mom will hit somebody because her daughter went to prison. And that person will hit their dog because someone hit them. And since people usually cope with pain badly before they cope well, the suffering will spread until everyone is miserable. If there’s a cosmic debt to be paid, the interest is too high.

  “She’s not invulnerable to pain like you,” I gasp.

  “Good,” he says. “Now what are you going to do?”

  You’re someone who always does the right thing.

  I don’t know what the right thing is.

  My family deserves a say, but their say would be calling the police, which only hurts Trez, because Anthony will have made sure she can’t prove he was involved. He’ll always be golden, untouchable. He’s going to Yale on the pass that the universe writes for people like him, for his smile or his money or his maleness or his whiteness.

  I count Eliot’s chest rising and falling, proof that there is some steadiness left in the world, until we get back to his house and he can drive me home. He keeps looking at me in the car, but this time I don’t know if it’s his force field or mine holding us apart.

  If he says good-bye, I don’t hear it, because I close the door too fast.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I PLAN ON APOLOGIZING TO MY FAMILY THE next morning, but I don’t. Then the following day, but I don’t. And that just sort of keeps happening.

  I can’t go to school, because I’d have to ask Anthony why he indirectly killed my mom, and he’d just tell me Trez is crazy. But he already proved she’s not by trying to convince the whole school she was. Eliot’s first assessment of her seemed like it was genius, but he’d just bought the subtle story, Anthony’s extra layer of protection: a psycho ex-girlfriend seeking revenge.

  I’ll never really know why, because the only one who knows is Anthony, and he will never tell me the truth.

  So I decide I have the flu.

  Obviously I should stay in my room and banish my family whenever they knock, because it’s contagious, the flu. It’s for the best, now that they handle me like a ticking bomb. This way I’ll be the only one blown up.

  Finals are coming, and school is all review for things I can study from home anyway. I already missed the fall semester—what’s a few more days?

  It’s okay if I don’t text Eliot back, because we should both be studying. At first he accepts that I’m sick, but when I stop responding altogether, so does he. He doesn’t try like Kendra did.

  It’s like he expected me to drop off the face of the earth and never speak to him again.

  I don’t mean to never speak to him again. I’m going to reply in an hour, or that night, or the next day.

  The worst part about falling back into old habits is that you’ve learned what you’re doing is bad, but her
e you are again anyway, and the reason must be that you are either very stupid or very weak.

  Staying in my room does strange things to time. Even though the sun rises and sets outside my window, it’s like being in a cell with no night or day.

  Suddenly it’s been a week. Then two weeks.

  And that just sort of keeps happening.

  On one of the uncountable nights, I dream about my phone ringing, but then it wakes me up.

  I grope for it in the dark, knocking over empty Coke cans and bags of Famous Amos I’ve been stockpiling so I won’t have to go downstairs.

  As soon as I pick up, Rex begs, “Help me, Sam.”

  It’s past two. “What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

  “I need a ride, I can’t drive, I’m at Anthony’s friend’s place.”

  Drive. I sit up. “Dad’s at his night shift, and if you took the truck, the only car here is Lena’s, and she sleeps with her keys under her pillow—”

  The line goes dead. He either dropped his phone or hung up.

  Anthony’s friend’s place, where Anthony might be.

  But Rex is my brother. Since I flipped out at my family in the living room, Rex has knocked on my door more than once, and I’ve ignored him every time.

  I throw on jeans and rush downstairs in case Lena forgot her keys in her coat pocket, but her hypervigilance hasn’t faded. I could wake her up, except then everything would be hell forever.

  I go outside to clear my head. I’m struck by that reverence for nature you get when you’ve been inside for too long, the world twice as crisp as you remember. The neighborhood trees rustle, gently moving shadows. I want to clasp the breeze to my cheek.

  I scroll through my phone for someone to call, but the only contact I’ve added in months is Eliot.

  Flu symptoms typically last for around a week, according to the internet, but it’s deceived me before. (11:52 a.m.)

  Gabriel’s here, so if you want to come over, let me know so I can poison him in advance. (5:35 p.m.)

  I hope it’s okay that I’ve still been walking the animal. You haven’t stopped leaving him in the doghouse. (9:02 p.m.)

  We’ve developed a form of nonverbal communication for late-night conversations about existentialism. (2:00 a.m.)