“I’m sorry you’re going through all that,” I said.
“It’s okay, I’ll live.”
“Yeah, I know you’ll live, trust me I know all about that, but it still sucks and I’m sorry.”
“Thank you.” This time she looked up from the water into my eyes, and it was a look that made me feel like she understood what I meant when I said that I was sorry. I wasn’t pitying her at all, I was empathizing with her.
“It’s just my Bleh.”
“Excuse me?” I was totally confused. At first I thought she was clearing her throat, or that it was some Spanish word that fake Spanish people like myself couldn’t understand, so I decided to follow up. “It’s your what?”
“My Bleh. My sadness.”
“Why do you call it that? Did you just make that up?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve always called it that. When you say it out loud it sounds just like how you feel when it visits you.”
“Is it like depression?”
“Depression is a type of Bleh. But depression is some name psychologists came up with to put in a book of disorders. The Bleh is older than that, it existed in one form or another long before there were words like depression.”
“You sound like you’ve given this a lot of thought.”
“Well, when you feel something a lot you kind of have to think about it. It’s always on your mind. I just gave it a sound.”
I’d never heard it expressed quite like that before, but it made total sense. “So does it visit you often?”
“There are different types,” she explained. “Sometimes it’s a mild Bleh, the kind of thing that only lasts a little while, like a mild cold. But other times it’s the flu, and it kind of takes over your whole mind and doesn’t let go until it feels like it. Those are the bad ones. It just depends.”
It was a strange and perfect explanation. And Anna was right. Depression was just a word, but feelings existed long before there were words to describe them, and I understood exactly what she was describing. I wondered what kind of Bleh my mom had. It had to be a bad one.
“But enough about me. Tell me about your drama?”
“That’s a long story,” I said, looking away for the first time.
“I have a few minutes,” she joked. “Plus I want to know. I want to know all about you.”
My first impulse when she asked about my problems was to go to my script—the lines I recited at moments like that—but that impulse lasted only a second or two, because I realized that for the first time in years I actually wanted to talk to someone about it, someone who could understand where I was coming from. “Okay,” I said.
I told her everything I could possibly tell while freezing my ass off on some rocks. All broad strokes: mom’s breakdown, dad walking out the door, me taking on more shit than any teenager should ever have to take on, all of it. She listened closely, never looking away from me, and it was my turn to stare into the water.
“So how is she now?” Anna asked.
“You know how it is,” I said back, not wanting to answer her question.
“Yeah, I know how it is,” she said, touching my face and turning it towards hers. “But I want you to tell me how it is for you.”
“It’s rough,” I said, feeling more than a little emotional. “I’m kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place, no pun.”
“Are you calling me a hard place?” she asked, smiling.
“Absolutely not,” I joked. “It’s like I hate school and I hate being home, and I feel so guilty saying that, but it’s the truth. It’s sad as hell being around depression all the time. She doesn’t get better, I just get worse. It’s like the opposite of what should happen.”
“You’ll be okay,” she said. “You’re strong.” She placed her hands on my shoulder, and I looked up at her. “I can tell that about you already.”
“I know we don’t know each other that well, but I think you’re the strong one between the two of us.”
She smiled again, and I couldn’t help but notice how attentive she was to what I was saying. She was complex, and the more time we spent together, the more I thought about how her beauty was the least remarkable thing about her. She was sarcastic, intelligent, troubled, and as old of a soul as I was. And to think that for an entire year all I saw was the pretty girl. I was a fool, there was so much more to her, and I didn’t know the half of it. I wanted to know everything, and I wanted to tell her everything about me.
“So what are you going to do next year after school’s over?
“Shhh,” she said, putting her index finger to her lips. It was a surreal moment, not only because I can’t remember being shushed before, but also because I let her do it to me. Had it been almost anyone else I would have interpreted that as rude, but she wasn’t anyone else, she wasn’t most people, and the normal rules of who I was didn’t seem to apply to her, especially in a moment where she was being vulnerable with me. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I didn’t mean to—”
“No, it’s ok,” she interrupted gently, “Sensitive topic. I don’t wanna talk about that right now, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude.”
“We don’t have to talk about anything you don’t want to. Weird as it sounds I’m having a good time.”
“Me too,” she said back. “And it doesn’t sound weird at all.” Before I could say anything else she noticed that I was shivering, although I was trying my hardest to hide it. Then I understood that it was a fool’s errand to try and hide anything from her; she seemed to have this eye that reached past any façade or lie I attempted to put in front of her. It was disarming and disconcerting all at once. “Wait, you’re cold?” she asked in a voice that sounded genuinely concerned.
“Nah, I’m alright, it’s really nice out,” I lied. My lies became like verbal quicksand; the more I struggled the deeper I sank.
“No, you’re cold, why didn’t you tell me before?” I told her that I wasn’t about to interrupt her story to complain about a little wind. And plus, I wasn’t as fragile as all that. “Come on,” she said as she picked herself up from the rocks. “Let’s go back to the car.” I tried to protest a little, to let her know that I was fine, and that we could stay there as long as she wanted to, but she wasn’t having any of it. We made our way back to my car and I blasted the heat to its highest setting the second after the key was in the ignition. “See,” she said, annoyed, “you were cold. I can’t believe you didn’t tell me, I wouldn’t have taken you out there!”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t want to ruin the moment.”
“Don’t ever apologize about how you feel. Ever.”
“Is that better?” she asked as I warmed my hands on the heating vents.
“Getting there. I think I’m getting some feeling back in them now.”
“Maybe this will help,” she said reaching over and putting her hands over mine, and I felt electricity that burned hotter than the heat in the car could have ever created. She rubbed both of my folded hands with hers in the most loving of ways, and her palms brought the sensation back to my fingertips. As she held onto me I thought of how the two of us were seen by so many people every day, yet still not really seen at all for who we really were. We didn’t wear our stories on our sleeves, we just looked like your everyday, average teenagers. And we were. But as cliché as it sounded, we were like icebergs; most of who we were was far beneath the surface.
I hadn’t seen Annalise for who she was all of those months I loved her from afar. I was just being superficial, seeing all the dumb things teenaged boys see—her face, her smile, her body—but I hadn’t seen her. She was just like me and nothing like me, all at the same time. It was like we were invisible, sort of. No one saw her just like nobody really saw me, like the world around us was blind.
“Potato,” I said to her as the frostbite feeling left my hands.
“No.”
“Wait, what? Did I use it wrong?” I asked.
“Only I can sa
y that,” she informed me, in no uncertain terms. “You don’t know how to use it yet.”
“Oh, okay. I didn’t know that there were rules?”
“There are always rules, Logan, even if you don’t know what they are, and you just broke one of them. Only I can say potato. You don’t use it right at all. I mean, you can say it, but only if you’re like, talking about an actual potato.”
“So, what are the other rules?” I asked. “Do I need a booklet to explain them all to me?”
“I can’t tell you the rules, silly. You just have to pick up on them as we go.”
“I see. No potato, got it. Should I write these down?” She smiled at me and giggled. “So, you’re not gonna drop out, right?” I asked.
“Yeah, about that, why were you so nice to me about that whole thing?”
“Well, I told you, my mom—”
“Right,” she interrupted, “But why?” I looked at her confused.
“What do you mean?”
“Like, why me?” At that point she was making intense eye contact; the opposite of how she’d been while we sat on the rocks, and it’s like her stare was holding me, and I couldn’t look away. It was distrustful eye contact, as if she were evaluating if I had ulterior motives. “Like, you barely know me,” she continued. “So why?” She had a point, at least from her point of view. In the absence of her knowing about my not-so-minor, yearlong obsession, it probably seemed a little weird that I was being so nice. Plus, I was a guy, and even at our age girls learned that most guys had ulterior motives to their kindness.
“I don’t know, because I care.” It was all I could think to say, I hadn’t expected her to question me like that, and the pressure made me nervous.
“Right, okay, but why? Why do you care? There are a lot of kids with problems at school. Do you care about all of them?”
“Not really, no.”
“So why, then? Why me? What’s so special about me?” Normally if a beautiful girl had asked me something like that I would have assumed that she was looking for a laundry list of compliments to come out of my mouth. Annalise was different, like really different, she seemed to genuinely not understand why I would care about her.
“I don’t know…I care about you. I’ve….I’ve always cared about you.” I have to look away when I say that part. Of all the scenarios I might have envisioned for a moment like that, basically confessing that I liked her wasn’t one of them. But there I was, baring my soul with little more than a prompt from her; this girl was like human truth serum; I felt like I had to answer whatever question she had with complete, unfiltered honesty. I began to look up to see her reaction. Maybe she was freaked out, or maybe I needed to say more to cover my tracks. “What I meant is—” Before I finished my sentence her lips were on mine. I was in such disbelief that I held my mouth in place, like a little baby learning how to kiss. Annalise was kissing me! She pulled back as quickly as she had leaned in, and made that intense eye contact again, and I was transfixed on her gaze.
“Don’t worry, I’m not dropping out,” she said. Before I could respond she curled up into a ball and said, “I’m so tired, I barely slept last night.” I couldn’t think of anything appropriate to say, so I just went with the flow of this odd conversation.
“Oh, I’m sorry, what time did you go to sleep last night?” Small talk. Perfectly normal after the girl you’ve loved for a year took you to some secret rock water place and kissed you in your car.
“I don’t know, like 4:00 am or so, I lost track.”
“4! That was like a few hours ago, no wonder you’re tired. What were you doing all night?”
“It’s irrelevant,” she said. I didn’t even know what that meant, but I went with it because my head was still spinning from that kiss.
“Oh, okay, never mind. I guess I’d be tired, too.”
Without lifting her head, she whispered, “You know, I care about you too. I wouldn’t have ever brought you here if I didn’t.”
“I didn’t even know that you knew who I was.”
“Well I do. I have for a while now.”
“Wait, how?”
“Class,” she said. “School in general, but class specifically. I notice things about people, whether I seem like I’m in my own world or not, and I noticed how sad you looked in class one day.”
I thought about it for a moment and I couldn’t remember when or what she was talking about. “I don’t remember,” I told her.
“You wouldn’t have,” she said back. “I mean, you didn’t look like you were about to hang yourself or anything, you just looked sad. I notice sadness. Maybe no one else sees it because they don’t understand what they’re looking at. I bet people asked if you were tired that day, and you probably told them that you were ‘cause you didn’t want to talk about it, but inside you were sad as hell. After that I just kind of kept tabs on you here and there when I saw you around.”
At that point you could’ve considered my mind blown. I couldn’t believe that she’d been the one to notice me and not just the other way around. I started giggling.
“What’s funny?” she asked me again.
“Life, sometimes,” I said. “I used to do the same thing with you. I saw you all the time, but I was afraid.”
“Of what?”
“Who even knows? Rejection. Fear of the unknown. Maybe you were really a beautiful fire-breathing dragon who I thought was about to say hello back to me, but really there would just be fire that expelled from your mouth and consumed me whole. You never know.”
“You think I’m beautiful?”
Two reactions to that one: first, I forgot I even said that because I was in mid fantasy rant about a fire breathing dragon, and second, it was the most genuine question she’d asked me yet. She really didn’t see it.
“Anna, have you seen what you look like? You’re, like. . .you’re the prettiest girl ever, I think.”
She smiled and kissed me one more time, only this time I was ready, and I kissed her back. The feeling I had at that moment can’t be described here, my humblest of apologies as your narrator, but there are some things that there are no words for, and my first real kiss with Annalise was one. Afterwards she told me that she had something to do that afternoon, and that we should probably get headed back to her house. It took less than a half hour to get home, and I pulled up in front of her place where I’d picked her up not that long ago.
“Thank you for bringing me there,” I said. “Maybe now it won’t just be a place for when you’re feeling bad. Maybe it’ll be like our place. Our place on the rocks.” She smiled back and opened the car door.
“I’d like that,” she said, as she leaned into my open window. “Text me later, okay?”
“There’s a question you never have to ask.”
I said goodbye, and she walked away exactly as she had approached my car when I arrived; shifting weight on long black boots, staring back at the screen of her phone. That strange and wonderful morning ended much like it began: with me watching her walk, admiring her beauty, and thinking that I wanted to remember that dream forever.
Four
Where I tell you some sad stuff about the night It happened.
Get the tissue box ready. I’m sorry, I’m really not trying to bum anyone out, and trust me I’d love to spend another thousand pages writing all about how madly in love I was with Annalise, and I promise that Our Story will continue shortly, but you need to understand a little bit about my home life at the time I met Anna. I’ll tell a joke or something at the end to lighten the mood a bit.
Do you remember that lesson in Bio about evolution? I know, we’ve established how stupid and forgettable high school was, but a few things do stick. I even remember my teacher’s name - Mr. Johnson. Standard issue name for an extraordinary guy. Type of teacher who was an outlier by caring as much as he did. I can see his PowerPoint presentation now, a big picture taken straight from Google images of our boy Darwin, staring at the class with that serious mug he a
lways seemed to have in every picture (seriously, Google the man, he never looks happy). I remember how Mr. Johnson gave us a reading from On the Origin of Species and how he taught us that the nature of evolutionary change is a gradual, almost imperceptible thing, at least while it's happening. It’s kinda like how your relatives from out of town always comment on how big your kids have gotten since the last time they saw them. When you only see change once in a while it seems sudden, but that’s only because we can’t perceive those moments as they’re happening.
Change may be gradual for species, and that all works just fine in a science textbook, but sometimes the evolution of an individual doesn't go down that way. Sometimes change is quick, violent, and as obvious as a thing can be. I couldn't tell you a damn thing about what I was doing the night that everything changed before it actually changed. I don’t remember what I had for lunch, or what show I was watching on TV when I first heard the screaming from upstairs, but I remember everything that followed like that shit happened yesterday. Here’s how it went down.
Memory’s a strange and unknowable mystery sometimes isn’t it? Can't really explain why some things were lost to history and some I’d never forget if I lived to be one hundred and five years old. So the television schedule and other minutiae of that night are gone, ain't ever coming back, but the hushed fight sounds I could recall with vivid clarity. I was used to that sound, heard it my whole life, and formulated entire memories around those days and their resolutions.
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