by Amy Reed
I know I should feel bad about cheating, but the weird thing is that I don’t. I just feel scared. But I’m not even sure about what. Maybe it’s scared of getting caught, or Trevor finding out. But I don’t think it’s that, really. I think I’m scared of not knowing what I’m capable of, scared that I am someone who would sneak out and get drunk and have sex with a guy whose name I don’t even remember just because I liked his shirt. I’m scared that I could do even worse. I’m scared of this feeling I have inside like bad electricity, like something burning, and it’s making me someone else, someone unpredictable, someone scary. I could care less about cheating on Trevor, but I am terrified of this girl because I don’t know what she’s going to make me do next.
I feel like if you were here you could calm me down, like your presence alone could get rid of her and bring me back.
Help,
Iz
From: condorboy
To: yikes!izzy
Date: Wednesday, December 28—4:52 PM
Subject: Re:
Dear Isabel,
I don’t know what to say. You say I’m principled, but why do you assume that also means I’m judgmental? I don’t judge you for cheating on Trevor, and I definitely don’t hate you. I could never hate you. But now I have to ask you to not hate me for what I’m going to ask you. Can I talk to my mom about you? About the kind of stuff you’re going through and how you’ve been feeling? Because I’m worried. And I care about you and want you to feel better. My mom’s a really good therapist. She’s helped lots of people.
Love,
Connor
From: yikes!izzy
To: condorboy
Date: Wednesday, December 28—8:03 PM
Subject: Re:
Connor,
Is that really the best you can do? Go running to your mom when I get too difficult to handle? Every fucking email, it’s “my mom” this, “my mom” that, like you’re fucking in love with her or something. She doesn’t even know me. How could she possibly help? Just because you can’t figure me out doesn’t mean I’m crazy. How could you even say something like that? What the hell is wrong with you? Fuck you and fuck your mom and fuck your stupid dog, too. What kind of stupid name is Señor Cuddlebones? She’s not even a boy or Mexican.
Iz
From: condorboy
To: yikes!izzy
Date: Thursday, December 29—10:27 AM
Subject: sorry
Dear Isabel,
I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry. I didn’t realize how upset that would make you. I thought that since my mom is a therapist, maybe she’d have some insight that could help. I guess I just panicked when you started talking about how scared you were, and I didn’t know what to do. It scares me when you talk like that. I don’t know how to help you. How do you want me to help you?
Love,
Connor
From: yikes!izzy
To: condorboy
Date: Friday, December 30—7:33 PM
Subject: Re: sorry
Connor,
I don’t know how I want you to help me. I really don’t. I’m sorry I got so mad. Can you swoop down and save me from all the crazy thoughts in my head? Can you do that? God, I’m so tired. But no matter what I do, I can’t sleep. I think God is trying to punish me. I must have been a tyrant in my past life. I am so sick of hearing myself think. Tell me a story. Please?
Iz
Friday, December 30—7:34 PM
condorboy: are you there?
yikes!izzy: maybe
condorboy: do you still hate me?
yikes!izzy: no i don’t hate you
yikes!izzy: you’re just always trying to be so helpful and sometimes it drives me crazy
condorboy: sometimes it seems like you want my help
condorboy: like when you specifically say “help” in an email
yikes!izzy: i don’t know what i want
yikes!izzy: tell me a story
condorboy: what kind of story?
yikes!izzy: the entertaining kind
condorboy: happy or sad?
yikes!izzy: either one
yikes!izzy: as long as it’s true
yikes!izzy: which i guess means it’ll be sad
condorboy: ok
condorboy: stay tuned
yikes!izzy: ok
condorboy: ok
[yikes!izzy is offline.]
From: condorboy
To: yikes!izzy
Date: Friday, December 30—10:04 PM
Subject: a sad, true story for a sad, true girl
Dear Isabel,
Okay, you asked for it. Here’s probably the saddest true story I know from personal experience. I really don’t understand how you expect this to make you feel better, but I have learned it’s better not to question you.
Once upon a time, two Christmases ago, instead of our usual day of volunteering at the food bank, my mom decided we’d spend my entire winter break in a little village in Ecuador. At first I was excited, assuming we’d be in some beautiful tropical place on the beach, but that was not the case. We were way up high in the Andes mountains and it was freezing and we had to sleep in a tiny room of a dirt-floor hut, and all we ever got to eat was boiled potatoes and rice and, if we were really lucky, guinea pig. I had a pet guinea pig when I was little. Her name was Hammy and I loved her, so you can imagine it was difficult eating her relatives. Believe me, I wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t been so hungry.
My mom thought it was the greatest thing ever, of course, but it was really hard for me to see it that way when I was constantly freezing and starving to death and I read through all the books I brought in the first week. We were volunteering with some organization that builds schools in little villages, so that’s pretty much all we did. All day long. We woke up at six thirty to eat boiled potatoes and drink instant coffee. Then we’d work until noon, when we’d stop for a half hour to eat more boiled potatoes, plus some rice and a mysterious stew. Then we’d work until five, have an hour or so before dinner to read or cry or bathe using the freezing-cold spigot outside our hut (the family we lived with was considered rich because of this spigot).
I don’t want to sound like an ugly American and just complain about the food and cold water. But that’s what I’m doing so far, isn’t it? I feel good about the work we did, and the people we met were wonderful. It was an amazing experience, blah blah blah. Fuck, I do sound like an ugly American. Shoot me now.
Really though, it wasn’t all hard work and questionable stew. Nights were actually usually pretty fun. The little village we were working in was a couple miles from a larger village that had a big plaza and some restaurants and a couple of bars. My mom would go out for dinner with the other volunteers, and I would wander around town with my host brother, Manuel. He was fifteen and didn’t like me very much, but he let me follow him and his friends around while they made fun of each other and whistled at girls. Not much different than here, really. Only instead of smoking pot in the Safeway parking lot, the kids there drank cheap rum in a colonial town square with the snowcapped Andes in the background. It was definitely a much more scenic environment for losing brain cells. I tried to follow along as best I could with my Spanish 3a skills. Basically, they just talked about girls, same as here. Sometimes they asked me about life in the US, but I don’t think they were very impressed with my answers. Something I didn’t notice until later (and this will become relevant in a second) was that no one ever really talked about their plans for the future. It seems like the only thing anyone ever talks about these days is college and what they’re going to major in, where they’re going to live and travel, the crap they’re going to buy, what they want to be when they grow up. But these guys in Ecuador didn’t talk about stuff like that.
I remember the topic of conversation for three nights in a row was this one family’s new truck. They owned the most popular restaurant in town, and the truck was brand-new and big and probably the shiniest thing for miles around. The
guys were talking about it in this very reverential way, and then one of them said something like “I’m going to get a truck like that someday,” and then everyone got real quiet and awkward, like he had just done something totally unacceptable and everyone was too embarrassed to acknowledge it. Finally, someone said Sí and everyone else let out a big, relieved breath, and there was nodding all around. And then someone changed the subject to a particular classmate’s boobs, and the truck was never mentioned again.
This leads me to the next phase of my story. There was this one guy, Esteban, who I always saw when I went down to the plaza. I think he was nineteen or twenty, and he was almost always drunk when I saw him. He was someone I recognized, but I never actually talked to him until about a week into our stay. I was sitting at the Plaza being ignored as usual by Manuel and his friends, when Esteban came weaving over and sat down right next to me. He exchanged holas with the guys, then they all started back with the previous conversation, except that Esteban didn’t want to talk to them, he wanted to talk to me.
He started asking me about school, about what I like to do for fun, what I want to study in college, what I want to be when I grow up, and he kept nodding his head earnestly like I was proving some important theory correct, and even though he was drunk and his eyes couldn’t focus too well, he was looking at me with this kind of intensity that was almost scary. At one point he whistled and shook his head. “Art,” he said. “You can go to college to study art.”
When he was done asking questions, he got very serious and almost seemed sober for a minute. “I’m the smartest one for miles around,” he said with a big sweep of his arm that knocked over a rum bottle, which he saved with supersonic reflexes before it even spilled a drop. I chuckled for a second until I realized he was totally serious.
“They couldn’t believe how smart I was,” he continued. “I could do all the math problems without writing anything down.” Then he poked me hard in the chest. “You,” he said. “Are you good at math?”
“No,” I told him.
He nodded and closed his eyes. “Art college,” he said, and I waited for him to continue. He just sat there for a while with his eyes closed, not saying anything, swaying a little like the wind was pushing him.
“You come here talking about college,” he said, without opening his eyes. “All you nice people who come here to build things. You ask us what we’re going to do when we grow up.” He opened his eyes and threw his arms out wide. “This is as grown-up as I’m ever going to get.”
I remember sitting there and feeling more out of place than I’d ever felt in my entire life. Like I was doing something shameful just by existing. Esteban must have noticed, because he started patting me on the head like I was a dog or a dumb child, a little harder than was necessary, which I hoped was the result of the alcohol and not hostility. “You’re nice people,” he said. “All of you, such nice people,” and I knew he meant all sorts of things by “nice” that I would never understand.
And then he started crying. You’d think being raised by a therapist, I’d be somewhat comfortable with tears. But I don’t think anyone can ever really be comfortable with watching someone fall apart in front of them. Even professionals like my mom need an extra glass of wine after a particularly hard day of listening to clients. And there was this man weeping in front of me, the smartest man for miles around, with nowhere to go. I didn’t know what to say, so I told him I was sorry. He didn’t respond. So I said it again in Spanish. He looked at me almost like he felt sorry for me. “Of course you are,” he said.
He stood up and held out his hand. I stood up and took it. We shook solemnly, and he said, “Buena suerte, artista.” He took his rum bottle and started walking away. After a few steps, he started jogging. And then he started running wildly. A few people turned their heads to watch him, but I suppose they were used to his antics by then and they lost interest pretty quickly. I was the only one still watching as he disappeared into the shadows, and I kept listening until I could no longer hear his footsteps on the cobblestone street.
I think I might have been the last person who saw him before he died.
The next day, things happened pretty much like normal. And that’s what I feel worst about. That I didn’t wake up thinking about him. That I didn’t worry or wonder where he ran off to. We hammered nails all day and ate our boiled potatoes and mystery stew, then I followed Manuel down to the plaza. And that’s when I realized something was wrong. No one was laughing. No one was whistling at the group of beautiful girls walking through the plaza. The group of beautiful girls was crying.
Esteban had been found that afternoon, facedown at the bottom of the nearby waterfall. He had taken off his shoes before he jumped, set them neatly at the edge of the cliff.
We went to the funeral. All of the volunteers, even the ones who had never met him, like it was some kind of tourist activity included with the cost of the program. Muy auténtico. People wore their $200 hiking boots and fancy Gore-Tex jackets as we walked the solemn procession through town, as we listened to the final, hollow sound of his casket being pushed into the cemetery wall. We saw his pale, puffed body and unrecognizable face as he was laid to rest painted up like a clown, cheap makeup being the local undertaker’s only tool to make him presentable to God. And we listened to his mother’s screams echoing and trapped between the village’s funerary walls. “M’ijo, mi hijo!” she wailed. “Ay, Dios, why did you take my son?”
There we were at Esteban’s funeral, crying along with all his relatives. But it was like we were crying at a movie, like we were using it as some kind of entertainment, like the more we could cry about it, the bigger our egos could get. Like all those times we shuddered at his mom screaming—we could use them to tell ourselves we were a little more human than we were the day before. Maybe my mom could let go of a little of that White Guilt she’s always talking about. She could feel satisfied that we saw the “real” country, that we weren’t your regular tourists. Then we could go back home to our little utopia and pretend we’re saving the world whenever we donate $50 to UNICEF.
It didn’t matter that after we left, the volunteers kept coming, continuing the conveyor belt of monthlong stays in the villages. They take day trips to the same waterfall where Esteban was found facedown; they swim in that river, they splash in the cool water and remark how clean it is. They continue to ask the local kids about their plans for the future. They take their photos and tuck them safely away in scrapbooks they’ll only open every few years. They have the time of their lives, and then they go home and forget.
Good night, Isabel. I hope your dreams are happier than this.
Love,
Connor
From: yikes!izzy
To: condorboy
Date: Saturday, December 31—1:57 PM
Subject: Re: a sad, true story for a sad, true girl
Dear Connor,
Fuck you. That is the saddest fucking story I’ve ever heard. But it worked somehow. I must have cried myself to sleep last night. I can’t even remember. Real sleep, too. Like straight through the night sleep, twelve whole hours. I don’t think I even dreamed. I’m a new woman, and I have you to thank. And Esteban, I suppose. But I don’t want to think about him anymore. And I’m sure that makes me an asshole, but I don’t care. I’m done with feelings. Tonight is New Year’s Eve and I will celebrate the New Year by sleeping through it.
But something’s bothering me. Tell me—was I not supposed to cry about him either? Am I a big phony like your mom and all the volunteers who didn’t know him? Am I claiming some piece of his life by being moved by it, a piece I am not entitled to? Would it be better if I felt nothing at all? Am I an asshole American for caring?
Is this your big complaint about your mom? That she cried at a stranger’s funeral? Yeah, Connor, she’s a real monster. Should she have been sad some other way? What’s the right way to be sad about it? Would you prefer that she didn’t give a shit at all? It’s fucking sad, Connor. And
let me remind you that I’m supposed to be the cynical one, not you. I don’t know, maybe she shouldn’t have gone to the funeral. But I think it’s admirable that she wants to feel things even if they’re uncomfortable. Most people spend their whole lives trying to avoid feeling anything at all.
You complain about it, but this is the best thing she gave you—your ability to feel the stuff everyone else ignores. I think my lack of sleep disrupted my usual flow of snark, but I’m being totally serious. You’re not normal, Connor, and I mean that in the nicest way possible. Boys are not supposed to be this sensitive. And this is why I love you.
Love,
Isabel
From: condorboy
To: yikes!izzy
Date: Sunday, January 1—11:13 AM
Subject: question
Dear Isabel,
What did you mean by “I love you”? Like, I love you like a friend, or I love you like something else?
(Love),
Connor
From: yikes!izzy
To: condorboy
Date: Sunday, January 1—5:49 PM
Subject: Re: question
My dearest Connor,
Does everything I write have to be dissected and given so much meaning? You should know by now I’m full of shit. Don’t ever take anything I say or do seriously.
Isabel
From: condorboy
To: yikes!izzy
Date: Sunday, January 1—8:33 PM
Subject: Re: question
Isabel,
So you don’t love me?