by Jennifer Yu
“It was very...overwhelming,” I start. “Like, I know that it was just a kiss, and people kiss other people all the time and have totally forgotten about it by the next day. But I had been thinking about this for so long, you know, and I’ve been talking to you guys about Kevin for months now, and there have been so many times when this could have happened but didn’t, or when I wanted it to happen but couldn’t make myself do anything, or when he obviously wanted it to happen but I told him I would rather get with Brady Thompson. And then, last night, it just felt like it was all happening at once, like there was so much waiting and angst and excitement all leading up to that one moment, right there, and then it was so...natural. It was so easy. And it was so easy to get lost in.”
Silence from Lin and Katie. Lin is biting her lip. Katie has this expression on her face that almost looks sad, which is both confusing and slightly concerning.
“Did that sound stupid?” I say. “See, this is why I didn’t want to get into it. Because I knew I would start talking and sound ridiculous and now I’m completely embarrassed and—”
“No!” Katie says. “That wasn’t embarrassing at all! I just didn’t know what to say because—well, because I don’t know if I’ve ever actually felt that way before. When I’m with Bobby, I’m happy, obviously, and I think he’s a cool guy, and I’m very attracted to him, but it’s nowhere near that level of—what’s the word...”
“Intensity,” Lin says.
“Yeah! I’m into him, but there’s very little panic and angst and craziness,” Katie says, waving her hands in the air to punctuate the words. “When we make out, I mostly just feel...fun. I feel fun, and I feel flirty.”
“Fun and flirty,” I repeat. “What’s that like?”
Katie throws her pillow at me. “Don’t act like you can’t be fun and flirty, Stella! Otherwise, we’ll have to call up Titus and ask him to serve as a reference for—”
The rest of her sentence is cut off because I’ve thrown the pillow back at her face.
“It’s not even really about me,” I say, over the sound of Lin and Katie laughing. “It’s Kevin. It’s Kevin and his whole...”
I squint my eyes and tilt my head to the side, trying to imitate that look that Kevin gets sometimes. Like the meaning of life will become clear if he just ruminates hard enough on whatever happens to be in front of him at the time.
“The point is,” I say, when my impression gets nothing more but raised eyebrows from Katie and a puzzled look from Lin, “the two of us could be playing Scrabble and it would probably feel momentous and emotionally loaded. Because it’s Kevin, and that’s the type of person that he is.”
“Uh-huh,” Katie says. She pauses. “And do you...like that?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Makes things interesting, I guess.”
The one thing I haven’t shared with Katie and Lin is the whole Kevin-being-depressed thing, because I still don’t know what to make of it, and it doesn’t really seem like my secret to share. If there’s a time to say something about that, it’s probably now, while the conversation is still serious and we’re already on the topic of Kevin and his emotional constitution. But then I hesitate—because do I really want to bring this up?—and Katie starts talking about how she and Bobby might go on a double date with Victoria and her boyfriend next weekend, and then Lin mentions that she and some senior on the debate team really hit it off last night, and then Katie spends the next hour grilling Lin about this guy. The next thing I know, it’s midafternoon and we only have an hour and a half to clean the entire house before Katie’s parents get home from their two-day trip.
So I put the rest of my thoughts and feelings about Kevin’s thoughts and feelings on the back burner, figuring we’ll have a chance to talk about all that another time. It’s been an eventful enough Halloween, anyway.
So there’s one thing that I have to say.
I know that what comes next must all seem very silly, and unnecessarily dramatic, and perhaps even predictable. I know that the red flags were there from the very first night, up there on Katie’s balcony, if only I had been able to really look at Kevin instead of being blinded by every look he threw my way. And I know that love stories between people so recklessly desperate to write a love story with each other very rarely end the way they do in the movies.
But I only know all that now—only in hindsight. At the time, I’m...well, infatuated. I’m caught up in the rush of stumbling into someone like Kevin when I had planned to spend the rest of my time in Bridgemont avoiding everyone and hoping college would be better. I spend all of my time lost in his words, or his eyes, or his touch, and every time I’m pulled back into reality, I want less and less to do with it.
Which I guess brings us to the one thing that I can’t say. Which is that no one tried to warn me.
27.
I’ve missed my last three therapy sessions, and, unsurprisingly, Karen is not happy.
“Help me understand this, Stella,” she says, on the blustery Thursday afternoon I finally drag myself into LiveWell after she leaves voice mails on my home phone, my cell phone and my father’s work phone. “You just...haven’t ‘felt like coming in’ for the past month?”
Karen’s gotten a haircut since I last saw her, and replaced one of the pictures of her kids on her desk with a new one. The quote on the bulletin board behind her desk now reads:
Always Remember That You Deserve Happiness.
“It’s not that I haven’t felt like coming in,” I say. “It’s just that I’ve been...happy. Really happy. And do I really have to come to therapy if I feel happy?”
Karen takes a deep breath. Then she puts her pen down on the table very gingerly and folds her hands.
And that’s when I know that I’m screwed.
“Stella, of course I’m grateful and relieved to hear that you’ve been feeling happier lately. But therapy isn’t just about coping with sadness. It’s also about understanding yourself more. Building healthy relationships with other people. Learning how to manage your emotional responses so that when you’re not as happy, you’re empowered to make good decisions.”
“Uh-huh,” I say.
Karen makes a face. A couple seconds of silence tick by. I can tell that Karen is trying to get me to say more, but I stay pointedly and resolutely silent. I’ve been in therapy long enough to recognize the ol’ draw-them-out-with-silence tactic, and I’m not falling for it.
After half a minute, Karen gives in and changes the topic. “How are things with your parents?” she says cheerfully.
“Oh. I mean, they’ve been fighting with each other so much that half the time I don’t think they realize that I do, in fact, still reside in the Canavas household. So I guess things are worse, but also kind of better—no one’s yelled at me about my chemistry grade in, like, two months.”
“What do they fight about?”
I roll my eyes. “What don’t they fight about? Money. Groceries. Who’s supposed to drive me to cross-country practice. My dad has started going to these poker nights with a bunch of his friends from work, so they also fight about that. And then they fight about whose fault it is that they fight so often.”
“Have you had time to give some more thought to the idea of having a family session with you and your parents?” Karen says. “Because I really think that—”
I groan before I can stop myself. “I really think that... No,” I say.
Karen pauses. “And why’s that?” she asks.
“Because,” I say. I try to think of a reason that isn’t Because I don’t want to.
“Your mom expressed interest in having one in our discussion a few weeks ago,” Karen says.
“Of course she did,” I say. “And my dad will think it’s a colossal waste of time, and they’ll never come to an agreement about it. It’ll just get tacked on to the list of things for them to scream at eac
h other about after dinner.”
Karen purses her lips and then switches to another tactic. “Is it hard to be caught in the middle?” she says. “I imagine it must be very draining.”
“Not really,” I respond.
Which is definitely not the answer that she’s looking for.
“I mean, it’s not great,” I add. “Sometimes it bothers me, especially when it’s late at night and I’m trying to sleep, or when things get so heated that I can hear that my mom is trying not to cry.”
I pause and try not to picture it too clearly. Because I’m not heartless, you know? There’s something about it that’s incredibly sad—who wants to lie in bed listening to their mom cry?—and if I think about it too much, I start to feel overwhelmed and emotionally shaky.
“But it hasn’t been too bad. I haven’t been in the house as much, anyway.”
“Oh?” Karen says. “And why’s that?”
“Oh, you know,” I say. “I’ve been doing drugs every day after school in the parking lot. Amazing, how easy it is to kill time when you’re high as balls.”
I learned long ago that sarcasm doesn’t fly very well in therapy, but it hasn’t stopped me from trying.
“Uh-huh,” Karen says.
“Yep,” I say.
Karen tries the silence thing again. When that doesn’t work, she sighs and says, “Stella, let’s try to be serious.”
“Well, I have cross-country practice. And sometimes I stay after school to go to office hours for calc help, because I have to get my grade up to a B+ before the semester ends or my dad will make me quit the team. And I’ve been spending a lot of time at Kevin’s.”
“Kevin?” Karen says.
“Oh,” I say. “I guess—wow, yeah, I guess you haven’t heard about him.”
Even though I understand it logically, there’s still something about that fact that seems incredibly weird to me. It’s been less than a month since Halloween, but it already feels like Kevin has become this defining, central part of my life. We’re with each other so much now that it’s hard to imagine what I did with all of my time before the two of us started dating.
“I’ve started dating this guy,” I say. “His name is Kevin. He goes to Bridgemont.”
“Ah,” Karen says.
“He’s really cool,” I say. “I mean, not in the way that Katie is cool, because most of the people at Bridgemont who are cool in the way that Katie is cool are terrible human beings. But Kevin is cool in like a real, nonsuperficial way—do you know what I mean?”
Karen nods slowly. “Ah,” she says again.
“He’s a senior, and we actually only know each other because we’re in this philosophy class together. Kevin is really, really into philosophy. It’s strange, and it used to throw me off whenever we were just hanging out and having a normal conversation and he randomly started talking about the nature of existence or the meaning of humanity or whatever. But now that I’m used to it, I think it’s actually really admirable. I mean, so many people at Bridgemont only seem to care about passing their classes or carefully tracking the social hierarchy or when they can next get drunk. And it only takes half a conversation with them to tell that they are totally, totally fake. But Kevin—he would never try to fake someone out, you know? He just is who he is, even if who he is doesn’t make sense to most of the people we go to school with.”
Now that I’ve finally started talking, I’m expecting Karen to be a little bit more enthusiastic about the conversation. After all, this is what she’s been trying to get me to do for the entire thirty-five minutes that I’ve been sitting in her office. But instead, she just furrows her brow a little bit and says, yet again: “Ah.”
“That’s it?” I say. “I’ve finally dragged myself out of the pit of misery that is my existence, and all you have to say is ‘Ah’?”
“At the beginning of this session, you mentioned that you haven’t been coming to therapy because you’ve been happy,” Karen says, completely overriding my question. “Is this why?”
“Um, it’s definitely part of it,” I say. “I’m also happy because, you know, Katie is really happy with Bobby—that’s her new...um...well, I don’t really know what they are, but whatever it is, they’re happy. And Lin is so much less stressed now that she’s submitted her Brown application. So I’m happy that they’re happy. But I guess if I had to say what it mostly was...it’d be Kevin.”
Karen looks very focused. And sounds very silent.
“I don’t know,” I say, feeling the need to explain myself even though I’m not sure why. “It’s just... It’s nice to be able to be real with someone, you know? I’m never afraid to tell Kevin what I’m really thinking. Or to tell him how I really feel. And I don’t know if that’s ever really happened to me before. Of course, I tell Katie and Lin about everything remotely notable that happens to me, which is not very much. But I’m always slightly worried that Katie’s going to decide that I’m way too much of a freak to be friends with her, or that Lin’s going to realize that I’m really not smart enough to understand half the things she says. With Kevin, I just tell him things. And he agrees, or he disagrees, or maybe he drags Camus into the conversation. But I always feel—what’s the word I’m trying to find here?—I always feel safe.”
Karen nods. “I see,” she says.
The two of us sit there for a bit.
“Well,” Karen says, “we actually only have a couple more minutes. I want to say that I’m glad you felt comfortable sharing that with me. And I’m so happy that you’ve been feeling happier lately, Stella. The fact that you’ve found someone that you feel safe with—well, that’s really something valuable.”
She takes a deep breath.
“But I also want to caution you. Relationships can be a wonderful thing, Stella, and they can really enrich a person’s emotional life. That’s partially because they create such a wide range of powerful feelings. But that’s why it’s especially important in a relationship to be in a good place emotionally when you’re on your own, and to really know yourself and trust yourself and trust your feelings. Does that make sense?”
“Uh-huh,” I say.
“I’ve seen this pattern of behavior quite frequently with young men and women this age, where they think that the solution to all of their problems lies in this other person. And it’s—well, it’s worrisome to me, Stella, I’ll be honest with you. You want to love someone because they complement you and make you a better person, not because you need them or because they’re distracting you from other issues in your life or because they fulfill a need that’s going otherwise unfulfilled.”
“I don’t think Kevin is the solution to all of my problems,” I say. I understand that Karen is my therapist, and it’s literally her job to bring up stuff like this. But does her job have to be so goddamn annoying? “I don’t think Kevin is the solution to any of my problems—well, except maybe my embarrassing lack of experience with guys. Kevin is just what makes it worth it to get out of bed in the morning to deal with all those other problems.”
This, unsurprisingly, does not go over very well with Karen.
“I want you to think about what you just said, Stella,” she says, “and think about why it might be worrying.”
I roll my eyes. “I thought we were almost out of time.”
“We are,” Karen says. “But think about it. For next time.”
“Okay, Karen,” I say.
But I don’t. In fact, I don’t even make it to my appointment the following week. Because Kevin and I decide to take an impromptu after-school trip to the movies, and, well, who needs to go to therapy when everything in their life is going fine? I’m happy, and Kevin’s happy, and Karen probably has better things to do than spend time with someone who doesn’t have anything to talk about, anyway.
30.
It’s the beginning of December: one week after
the first snow leaves all of the sidewalks and roads lightly coated in white, like they’ve been dusted in powdered sugar, and it’s two weeks before the first nor’easter rips its way through New England and causes mass power outages throughout Connecticut. If someone were to ask me to name my best friends, the two people I trust more than anyone else in the world, I wouldn’t miss a beat. “Katie and Lin” would leave my mouth the second I fully processed the question, because Katie and Lin are my best friends, just like they’ve always been.
My answer would be so automatic that I wouldn’t have time to think about how I haven’t been spending very much time with my self-professed best friends. I wouldn’t really think about the fact that Kevin has been driving me to school for the last three weeks, because it only seems natural for the senior you’re dating who has his own car to pick you up in the morning. I wouldn’t really think about how I’ve been spending more and more of my lunches in the library catching up on work that I didn’t do the previous night, because when you first start dating someone, of course you spend entire afternoons cuddled up on the couch watching movies instead of doing your homework. I wouldn’t realize that I’ve been going days at a time without seeing Lin and Katie, because something about those early weeks with Kevin pulls me into a separate universe, one where my best friends, my classes at school and my relationship with my parents all seem like distant aspects of a life separate from the one I’ve suddenly been transported into.
It all happens so quickly, is the thing. I’m so giddy and enchanted by this universe Kevin is pulling me into that I don’t even realize I’m leaving something behind.
But the real world, as always, asserts itself sooner or later. Kevin comes down with a cold toward the end of November, forcing me to text Lin and ask her for a ride to school for the first time in nearly a month.
“Hey, stranger,” Katie says, when I climb into the car that morning. Her hair is so long now, down to the small of her back, and the purple sheen is starting to fade. “What’s new with you?”