by Jennifer Yu
“Nothing,” I say. It’s a reflexive answer. Usually—well usually, there isn’t anything new with me, and the answer is so ingrained that it’s left my mouth before I realize how ridiculous it must sound to two people who I’ve been blowing off for nearly a month.
“Well, that’s obviously not true,” Lin says. “Considering we haven’t seen you in eons.”
From the backseat, I can’t see Lin’s face, so I can’t tell if I’m imagining the strange tone in her voice right now.
“I see Katie every day in history class!” I say.
Katie rolls her eyes. “Yeah, me and the eighteen other people in our history class. Sitting through lectures on the prolonged dick-measuring contest that was Cold War–era global politics doesn’t exactly count as quality time.”
It’s a good point.
“I mean, I really haven’t been up to very much,” I say. “I’ve just been hanging out with Kevin a lot and trying not to fail my classes.”
Katie nods. “I texted you to see if you wanted to come out with Bobby and me last week,” she says. She doesn’t need to say the rest of the sentence: ...but you never responded.
“Oh, yeah,” I say. “I guess I just...forgot.”
No one says anything.
“I feel like you guys wouldn’t want to go out with me and Kevin, anyway,” I offer. “We’re not very...social.”
“Clearly not,” Lin says.
The weirdness in her voice is harder to ignore that time.
“Have you heard from Brown?” I ask.
“No, I haven’t,” Lin says. “Which is stressful, because I’m dying to know, but also kind of a good thing, because I’m terrified to find out. I think I’m just pretending I never applied and it’s not happening and I should think about everything and anything other than whether or not I’m going to be moving to Providence in less than a year. Nothing soothes the nerves quite like fierce denial.”
Those sentences are so completely Lin-like, so normal and familiar, that a flood of relief washes over me. It’s a strange experience: being consumed by relief when I didn’t even realize I had a reason to be nervous.
“Well, in that case,” I reply, “I won’t ask you when you’re supposed to find out.”
Katie snorts. “December 10,” she says. “I know this because Lin talks a good game about staying calm and pretending she never applied and all, but then lunch hits and it’s back to Did putting chess club on my résumé turn me into a walking stereotype? And, Oh, God, I should have written my common application essay about my parents instead of you two bozos.”
Katie’s imitation of Lin’s panicking-about-college voice is spot-on.
“What did I do,” Lin says, smiling despite herself as she pulls onto the Bridgemont campus, “to deserve such supportive friends?”
“Hey, I support you,” I say. “I know you would never say the word bozo. You would use something much more sophisticated. Like imbecile. Or cretin. Or ignoramus, that one is nice and Latinate.”
Lin snorts. The three of us clamber out of the car and swing our backpacks over our shoulders, so familiar it’s almost synchronized.
“Whatever happens, on December 10,” I say, “we’ll go to Joe’s that weekend. To celebrate. And if not to celebrate, to commiserate.”
“That’d be really nice,” Lin says, looking touched.
“I’m always down for an omelet from Joe’s,” Katie says.
“I have to run to homeroom,” Lin says, as we walk through the parking lot and into the building. “But I’ll see you two at lunch?”
“Definitely,” Katie says.
Katie and Lin turn to look at me.
“Uh,” I say. And wince. “I have to finish this paper at lunch today,” I explain. “It’s due seventh period, and I totally should have just finished it last night, but I just—well, that’s not important. But tomorrow—I promise.”
Lin nods, expression inscrutable, and then disappears around a corner. “Well, I’ll see you in history,” Katie says.
“Yeah, I’ll see you.”
There’s something really, really unsettling about this situation. It’s not that we’re talking about anything particularly awkward, and Katie, as far as I can tell, is exactly the same cheerful person she’s always been. What’s making me feel weird, I realize, is that I’m even thinking about the possibility that things between us might be uncomfortable. When you’ve been friends with someone for as long as Katie and I have been, that stops being a thing you worry about. And the fact that I feel weird enough to think that there might be something weird between us—well, it’s jarring.
Katie spins to walk away—the tips of her hair flying off her shoulders—and then seems to change her mind and turns right back.
“One more thing,” she says.
“What’s up?” I say.
“I’m really happy that you’re happy with Kevin, Stella,” Katie says. She bites her lip.
It looks like there’s something else that she wants to say, so I don’t respond. But then the seconds tick by—one, two, three, four, five—and she’s still silent, and it’s pretty clear that even if there is something else that she wants to say, she’s not going to say it.
So I say: “Thanks.”
Katie nods.
And then she heads to her locker.
It’s the beginning of December, and if you were to ask me who my best friends in the world are, I’d say Katie and Lin before you even finished asking the question. But I don’t know that either of them would answer with the same lack of hesitation anymore. And I guess what I’m trying to say with all of this is that I don’t know if I could really blame them for that.
I’m not trying to defend myself here. Believe me, I think I was as stupid for not listening to Karen and Katie and everyone else in the world just as much as you do. And I don’t know if I’ll ever really get over the regret of throwing away Lin’s friendship over a guy. Everyone was right. I fell too hard, too fast, too blindly.
Of course, I didn’t think about these things when Kevin and I first started seeing each other. I didn’t think about how my best friends were my best friends for a reason, so maybe I should listen to them, or how Karen was a licensed therapist, so maybe she had a good point, or how maybe all along I was just romanticizing the idea of finding someone as fucked up as I was. At the beginning, I was just caught up in the feeling of finally being with someone. Someone who made me feel smart, and understood, and safe.
And you know what? Even all this time later, even knowing everything that I know now, I still get that.
Because it was nice to feel that way. It really was.
21.
The second time Kevin kisses me, we’re sitting in his car, parked on the side of the road in front of my house. I’ve just gotten out of cross-country practice, and Kevin—who often stays after school on Tuesdays to have long, postclass conversations with Dr. Mulland—has offered to drive me home. We haven’t talked at all about the conversation we had at Katie’s on Friday. We also haven’t talked about what happened after the conversation we had at Katie’s on Friday, after he cut me off midsentence, after he leaned in, in, in—
Stop this, I tell myself, and try to focus on the actual words that Kevin is saying instead of the way that his lips move when he talks. The only time when that’s possible is when I’m not looking at Kevin (and his lips, and the way his hands are resting on the wheel, and the line of his arms up to his shoulders, and the color of his eyes) at all, so instead I turn my gaze out the windshield—at the dark brown leaves carpeting the ground, the washed-out gray of the sky.
“What I really like about Dr. Mulland is that he’s not just interested in my thoughts about philosophy,” Kevin is saying. “He asks me a lot about life in general. My family. My plans for the future. I’m going to ask him to write one of my recommendations for Colu
mbia.”
Kevin pauses, and I take the moment as an opportunity to steal a furtive glance at him. Unfortunately, my furtive glance proves to be not particularly furtive, because Kevin is looking right at me. We make forceful, fleeting eye contact for three seconds, which, of course, immediately floods me with mortification. I jerk my gaze back straight ahead, where it lands on the thorny, bare branches of what used to be Mrs. Holloway’s rose garden.
“You okay?” Kevin says. “You seem nervous.”
I force myself to turn my head and look at him. “I’m not nervous,” I say.
Kevin nods. “Okay, then. You’re not nervous.”
“I don’t really get nervous,” I say. “I’m not really a nervous person. I think it has to do with the fact that I’ve pretty much resigned myself to the fact that no matter what I do, my life will be futile and awkward and embarrassing, and once you’ve accepted that as an inevitability, well, there’s not much reason to be nervous anymore.”
Oh God. I’m doing that thing again, that thing that I do when I get nervous. Babbling. I’m babbling.
“How very existentialist of you. Sartre would be proud.”
Kevin is smirking. Which makes me nervous. Which makes me defensive. Which makes me babble more.
“Yeah, I can’t say that I really get Sartre, Kevin. First of all, I can’t fucking pronounce his name. Second of all, Being and Nothingness was a doozy. And third of all, while I haven’t actually read Nausea yet, even you have to admit that it’s not a very promising title.”
“You should read it,” Kevin says. “It’s a quick read, and I think you’d like it.”
Kevin leans into the space between our two seats, looking bemused.
“A quick read relative to what? To Being and Nothingness? Because that’s not saying very much.”
Kevin adjusts his body so that we’re at eye level, then reaches out with one hand and cups my chin.
My breath catches.
“Are you nervous?” Kevin says. A hint of a smile on his face.
“No,” I say.
A few inches closer.
“What about now?”
“No,” I repeat.
“That’s reassuring,” Kevin says. And then, before I can respond, he kisses me.
It’s different this time. The first time Kevin and I kissed, on Katie’s balcony, there was this urgency, this desperation, like if we didn’t do it right there, right then, we might miss our moment completely and it would never happen. It was intense, and overwhelming, and disorienting in the best possible way.
The second kiss is definitely still intense, and being so close to Kevin—close enough to smell him, to feel his body next to mine, to be able to run my fingers through his hair—still leaves me dizzy and flustered, feeling off balance even though I’m sitting down. But it’s also easier this time, like we’re getting to know each other instead of praying that it isn’t too late to try. This time, Kevin kisses me like we have all the time in the world.
“Let’s go on a date,” he murmurs, seconds or minutes or perhaps hours later.
“When?” I say. He trails his lips down the side of my neck, which sends involuntary shivers through my body.
“Tomorrow,” he says.
“Tomorrow?” I say. I push him away, somewhere between giddy and incredulous at the suggestion. “Tomorrow’s Wednesday. We have school, Kevin.”
“After school,” he says. Then he goes back to kissing me, which interrupts the flow of thoughts in my brain for another solid ten minutes.
“What about homework?” I manage eventually.
“We can do it afterward. C’mon, Stel,” he says, pouting, and I wish I were a strong enough woman to resist how goddamn adorable it is. “There’s an art museum in Hartford that I’ve been dying to go to. I’ll drive.”
“You want to go on a date to an art museum. Tomorrow. Of course you do.”
“There’s a collection of black-and-white photographs on exhibit,” Kevin says, as if what he’s proposing right now isn’t utterly absurd. “I think you’d like it, Stella. It’s supposed to be very...noir. You know, like—”
But Kevin never gets around to explaining the intricacies of noir, because I’ve just glanced at my phone and realized that we’ve been parked outside my house for over an hour.
“Jesus,” I screech. I turn around and grab my backpack from the backseat. “Can you pop the trunk? I need to get my track bag.”
Kevin blinks. “I wasn’t aware you had such strong feelings about photography. They also have a collection of ceramics on display, although I must admit that ceramics have never really—”
“It’s not the photographs,” I say. “It’s the fact that it’s 6:13 and my dad’s going to be home soon.”
“Oh,” Kevin says, looking slightly taken aback. “Sorry. Sometimes I forget about stuff like that.”
“Stuff like what? Like having parents?”
“Stuff like having parents who care,” Kevin says. “My parents—well, my mom, since they got divorced ages ago... Let’s just say that she is an ardent subscriber to the laissez-faire method of parenting. She’s a painter, you know, all about independence and the beauty of solitude and all that.”
Suddenly, I am incredibly thankful to be taking my boring, tedious European history class, because that class is the only reason I know what laissez-faire means when Kevin says it.
“Well, that’s lucky, right? What teenager doesn’t want hands-off parents?”
“I mean, sure,” Kevin says. “It’s great for those nights when I want to go out and smoke a joint with Yago, I guess. Not so great for those days when one of my tires goes flat halfway back from school or, God forbid, I need help with a homework assignment. But hey, enough joints with Yago and you forget that any of those things are important. So maybe I am lucky.”
Kevin smiles and rolls his eyes the second the words have left his mouth to try and cover himself, but what he doesn’t realize is that I’ve done the very same thing so many times that I see right through it. No, there’s real bitterness there, real hurt, real vulnerability.
“Whatever,” Kevin says. “First-world problems, right? Surely nothing compared to the suffering our poor, cynical Nietszche endured. I can only imagine what he’d say if given the chance to hear me griping over my mother...”
He’s trying to distract me with theatrics now, a half smile curled across his face, but like I said—I know the moves too well to let them slide. I reach out, touch his arm and forge past the rush of embarrassment when he cuts off and looks up at me sharply. I feel a jolt as his blue eyes meet mine.
“Hey,” I say. “It’s okay, you know? Like...if you’re bitter or angry about your mom. You don’t have to pretend that it’s not a big deal and you couldn’t care less, if it is, and you could, and you really do.”
The expression on Kevin’s face is inscrutable.
“We also don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to,” I add hastily. “I know it’s kind of...personal.”
One second of silence stretches into two seconds of silence stretches into three seconds of silence stretches into me contemplating if Kevin is about to lose his shit and throw me out of his car.
“Thanks,” he finally says. Half word, half exhale. His eyes flicker to and away from mine, as if he can’t decide whether or not to look at me.
I offer up a wry smile, try to hold his gaze. “No problem.”
Another beat of silence. He’s still not looking at me. And then—
“Okay, well, text me about tomorrow. I really think that you’ll like the exhibit. The New York Times called it—”
I unlatch the front door and kick it open, step out of the car and then turn around to look at Kevin, this ridiculous, unbelievable boy who is now smirking at my exasperation like he’s won some kind of chess game.
�
��Yes,” I say. “Yes, I’ll go to the art museum with you tomorrow, even though it means I have to come up with an excuse to be home late for the second day in a row. I’ll meet you in the parking lot after I get out of practice and you can explain everything you know about noir photography to me on the ride over. All right?”
“Sounds good,” Kevin says. He smiles—like, really smiles—at me, and that is almost, almost enough to get me to climb back into the car and start kissing him all over again, angry fathers be damned.
22.
When Kevin asks me to go to the Hartford Museum of Art with him to look at a photography exhibit, I figure it’ll be a fun, if slightly pretentious, way to spend an afternoon with a boy that I really like. I do not, however, anticipate that the photographs on display will resonate with Kevin as much as they do. I do not anticipate that Kevin will spend the rest of the week giving long, impassioned speeches about their raw, unflinching honesty, their cold assessment of life in 1950s America and their pathos, oh, their pathos. And I definitely do not anticipate that our cute date to the art museum will so inspire Kevin that he wants nothing more than to spend the next few weeks visiting literally every single art museum within two hours of Wethersfield.
So that’s how I end up at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, spending my Saturday afternoon staring at a wall-size rectangular canvas that has been painted gray.
No, I’m serious. The paint is lumpier in some places than others, but it’s...literally just the color gray.
“This is very...interesting,” Kevin says. He squints a little and runs a hand through his hair. The tone of his voice makes me want to punch him in the face, and then drag him into a closet and make out with him.
“It’s very textural,” he adds.
“Shut up, Kevin,” I say.
“Textural,” he repeats thoughtfully. “Tactile. Synesthetic, one might even say.”
“Might one say that? Might one really?”
“Perhaps,” Kevin says. “If one were looking at this work expecting it to be a primarily visual experience—under the assumption, of course, that the power of painting as an art form is routed through the sensory experience of seeing—then yes, one might be surprised to find oneself reacting to the textural interplay of this piece of artwork in a physical way.”