The Exact Opposite of Okay

by Laura Steven

  I then proceed to stare at the back of Danny’s head for forty-five minutes. Again, maybe it’s the lack of sleep, but it feels like I’m looking at a stranger’s neck; like our kiss somehow transformed his physical vessel into something I no longer recognize. His pale skin, covered in a thin layer of pale peach fuzz and tiny moles, is strange and unfamiliar.

  Guilt presses in on me from all angles, and I’m in real danger of bursting into tears all over again.

  The bell rings and it reverberates right through my skull, and the shuffling of bags and squeaking of chairs over the linoleum sparks a fresh wave of anxiety. When he turns to me, I plaster the most absurd grin on my face.

  He looks tired as hell. Forget bags under his eyes, they’re damn shopping carts, and they’re indisputable evidence that he’s been obsessing just as hard as I have.

  “Iz.” He shuffles from one foot to the other, rubbing the back of his stranger’s neck.

  “Hey.” And right then my unfaltering [ahem] situational judgment kicks in, and I innately know this is not the place to have it out, so I add, maintaining the ludicrous axe-murderer smile, “Let’s talk at lunch?”

  He smiles back, probably relieved not to have to spill his guts all over room 506B. Ajita sees the temporary truce and moseys over to us.

  “Hey, kids. Wanna run lines on the way to drama?”

  We then skip (sort of) to the theater side by side, reading from our Great Gatsby scripts and obnoxiously crashing into lockers/students/water fountains/Mr Rosenqvist as we channel our Academy Award-worthy thespian technique. It’s insane really, and I know I’ve taken it too far when I add a Jamaican accent, but it makes them laugh and honestly, that’s the only thing in the world I care about right now.

  Like Carson Manning, lunch comes too fast.

  Ajita grabs our usual table and enough fries for an entire battalion, then sends us outside to talk it out. There are some woods behind the sports hall, and in our bid to get far enough into them that nobody will hear us, we pass a few fourteen-year-olds smoking a squashed pack of cigarettes, as well as our phys ed teacher jumping through the trees like a chimp to build his functional fitness. I think he’s one of those CrossFit douchebags; I don’t know.

  Eventually we stop in a little clearing, and I’m so exhausted I just flump to the ground and lean back against a tree trunk. “Did you sleep as terribly as I did last night?”

  He smiles, despite the fact this situation could not be any less funny. “If by terribly you mean not at all then yeah.”

  I sigh and let my eyes flutter closed, partly because looking at him is hard and guilt-inducing [not hard-inducing, now is not the time for boners], and partly because I’m hoping I can squeeze in a little nap between now and the next sentence.

  “Danny, I’m so sorry. I thought I wanted . . .”

  “I thought you did too. Otherwise I wouldn’t have . . .”

  I grimace. “Our sentence-finishing abilities never cease to amaze me.”

  He sits down next to me and flashbacks from last night play in my mind. He tugs a handful of long grass from the ground and starts tearing it to shreds. The earth smells damp around us, and the only nearby sound is the phys ed dude grunting manically as he does chinups like his life depends on it. Maybe it does. I don’t know his circumstances.

  “Hey,” Danny says. “Remember when we were kids and we used to find hours of entertainment with just a pack of white chalk?”

  I smile, despite the situation, tilting my head back so it’s leaning against the tree trunk. “We’d go out onto the sidewalk and draw miniature towns on the concrete.”

  “Yup. Then populate them with completely bonkers characters, and act out full-blown soap-opera scenes.” A funny little snort. “I’ll never forget the misogynistic old storekeeper you role-played all the time.”

  “That guy was a dick,” I reply, indignant. “He thought all women owed him something. I’ll never forgive him for how he treated his imaginary wife.”

  We both sit silently for a moment, reliving our screwed-up childhood. Well, mine was screwed up. I just dragged Danny along for the ride.

  Weighing his words carefully, he adds, “You’re like a sister to me, Iz. Always have been. Which is what makes this so confusing.”

  I feel like now would be an inappropriate time for incest-themed Lannister jokes, so I stay schtum.

  His throat sounds thick as he says, “You know how I feel about you.”

  “Yes,” I whisper.

  “I didn’t want to pressure you.”

  “You didn’t.” I mean it too. I knew exactly what I was doing, and need to own my share of the responsibility. I can scarcely ask the next question, but I know I have to. “What now?”

  He runs his hands through his ridiculous hair. I want so badly to hug him, but I can’t tell whether that’d make it worse.

  Quietly he mumbles, “I know how I feel, but I also know how you feel. And that’s okay. I didn’t plan for this to happen, and I won’t let it ruin our friendship. It’s only a matter of time before you do something disgusting and ruin it for me. It’ll pass, I’m sure. Like a kidney stone. Might be painful, but it will pass.” Another smile, but there’s not much strength behind it.

  We stand up, and we hug, and we do the only thing we can do: we move on.

  Ajita is relieved as hell when we make it back with both of us tear-free and relatively unscathed. “Oh, thank God. For a moment I was genuinely concerned our tripod was about to lose a leg. Now please, eat some cheese fries. Drink some soda. Rub ketchup on your naked chests. It’s going to be a-okay.”

  Tuesday 20 September

  4.41 p.m.

  The life-changing email comes through in the last period of the day, and I squeal like a pig having a bikini wax. [Do pigs even have pubes? These are the important questions, folks.]

  The teacher doesn’t notice, but Ajita looks at me quizzically, which is fair given that I don’t normally sound like a farm animal maintaining its hair-removal regimen. So I fire off a text riddled with excitement-induced punctuation discrepancies.

  I made the screenplay competition longlist!!1!!1!!11!!!!

  Seeing her little face light up across the room is the best feeling ever. I did that! My accomplishment made another human being happy!

  Shut the front door! Dude!! I am so proud of you. That is not something I ever thought possible, because you are a mess and a joke in every facet of existence, but it’s true. I’m proud. What happens now!? xo

  I’m grinning harder than a grinning machine in turbo mode at this point.

  I receive feedback from the judges, who are like, super-duper hotshot producers and script developers, then I get a couple weeks to make changes. Then I send it back and they decide the shortlist from there! Then another round of feedback! Then the finalists are announced – and those lucky three get MEETINGS WITH AGENTS AND MANAGERS AND GAHHH! Who’d’ve thunk! My dumb sense of humor is actually translatable to real marketable screenplays!

  Ajita smirks as she’s typing her scathing response.

  It definitely would not have even crossed my mind to thunk. In fact your terrible sense of humor has rendered me completely unable to thunk in any way whatsoever. You are the single least funny person in the northern hemisphere. xo

  This may sound horrible and not supportive at all, but our century of friendship has taught me that she makes very little sense when happy and excited. Her confusing usage of the incorrect past participle of the verb ‘to think’ leads me to believe that actually she might not hate me as much as she says she does. Bless.

  Celebratory drinks tonight?

  A split second later:

  Hell yeah. xo

  As soon as the final bell goes, I practically sprint [well, jog, because I think my legs might just eject themselves from my body in sheer shock if I attempted to sprint] to the staffroom and knock on the door.

  Mr Wong, our math teacher, answers. “Miss O’Neill. How can I help you?”

  I barel
y have time to register his attempt at banter because I’m ready to burst with excitement. “Is Mrs Crannon around?”

  A few seconds later she appears at the door, wrapped up in a raincoat and clearly ready to rock and roll her way out of the building.

  Breathless, I manage to say, “I made the longlist!”

  “Izzy! That’s wonderful!” She throws her arms around me, which teachers are absolutely not supposed to do nowadays for fear of being accused of sexual assault, but neither of us particularly care in that instant because we’re just so goddamn happy that something in the world is going well.

  It feels good. It feels really, really good.

  10.18 p.m.

  Betty gives us the green light to have a few tipples at mine, which might sound like lax parenting, but you forget that I am a tragic orphan, so Ajita and Danny traipse over at around eight and we merrily crack open a couple of beers and toast my completely unexpected and quite frankly baffling career success.

  We’re all piled onto our mangled couch, Ajita in between Danny and me to prevent any awkward bodily contact, and sharing a bag of chips. I’ve been chewing the skin around my nails too much – nervous habit – and the salt and vinegar flavoring makes the broken skin sting like nothing else, so my chip consumption is nowhere near as formidable as usual.

  Licking her fingers with her freak tongue, Ajita sighs. “I wish I knew what I wanted to do in life. You’re so ahead of everyone else, Iz. It’s awesome. But I’m kinda jealous.” She sighs again, rummaging in the bottom of the chip packet. “I just don’t understand. How the hell are we supposed to have it all figured out by the age of eighteen? We don’t even know who we are yet, and still we’re expected to choose what we want to do with the next fifty years. It’s madness.”

  The way she says “who we are” makes me wonder whether she’s thinking of her sexuality – whether she’s still trying to figure it all out for herself.

  Danny shifts on the sofa, and the whole thing groans despite his meager body mass. “We’ll figure it out though. All of us. We have each other’s backs, right? Jeets, if you wanna hash out some career ideas sometime, I’m all ears.” I smile. I haven’t heard him call her Jeets, her old nickname, in a while. “I know your parents pressure you and Praj like hell, but there’s gotta be something you love doing just for you. We can build on that, okay?”

  It’s actually really nice to see Old Danny resurface for a while. He’s always been a sweetheart when it comes to encouraging Ajita and me. Even though his complex feelings toward me have somewhat damaged the dynamic between us, it’s good to see him be genuinely decent and supportive without wanting anything in return. I’ve missed this version of him. Maybe hanging out with Praj has been good for him – he doesn’t have many other guy friends.

  “Thanks, D,” Ajita says. “There are a couple of things I want to look into, but I think if I told my parents I might want to go into fashion they’d just expire there and then.” A sad sort of smile. Again I wonder if she’s thinking of other things she has to tell them. “Anyway, maybe we won’t have to do anything for ourselves,” she adds. “Izzy’s gonna be so rich she’ll buy us a mansion each.”

  While Ajita is mid-rant about the potential benefits of having a world-famous comedienne as a best friend, most of which involve her getting free stuff, my phone bleeps with a text message from an unknown number.

  Hey, Izzy, it’s Zachary. Vaughan. Heard about your scriptwriting thing – ’grats! Remember me when you’re famous, won’t you?

  Slyly, so that Danny doesn’t see me engage with his sworn enemy, I reply:

  Thanks! Word travels fast. Hope everything’s good with you!

  Two seconds later, bzz bzz.

  Things are awesome, thanks. Can’t stop thinking about last weekend.

  AND HE ATTACHES A DICK PIC. I shit you not. An actual photograph of his erect penis. I nearly drop the phone in horror and disgust. [All right, you nosy bastards. It’s above average in length, below average in girth and bends slightly to the left. Are you happy now??]

  I honestly do not know why guys think unsolicited dick pics are a turn on. Like, have they ever seen a penis? Do they really look at their own genitals and think, “Yeah, that looks good.” No. Exactly.

  At first I think Danny picks up on my absolute horror and disgust because something odd flickers across his face, but thankfully he and Ajita have moved on from the mild success of their sex-crazed best friend and are now discussing a sketch idea based on a surfing shark who’s terrified of humans. So I’m guessing they don’t notice me turn a delightful shade of salmon.

  It takes a few seconds to regain composure, but before I’ve even mustered a halfway humorous response, he messages me again.

  Your turn ;)

  Like I know triple-texting is an accepted thing now, which I am very glad about due to my incredibly needy nature, but surely when one of those texts is a photograph of a penis, we should re-evaluate protocol?

  I am slightly buzzed from the couple of beers I’ve necked like a giraffe [I am aware this simile doesn’t quite work], but my inhibitions have not been adequately lowered as of yet. So I simply say:

  Thank you for the splendid dick show. Really. You should start charging for admission to this world-class event! I confess this would price me out of action due to the fact I am a poverty-stricken orphan, but as your business advisor this is a risk I am willing to take.

  Not sure what possesses me to go all Richard Branson on him, but I’m not in the habit of questioning where my “jokes” come from, and I am not about to start while embroiled in a disturbing dick-pic fiasco.

  God, you’re weird. But also very hot. Just one pic? ;)

  Then three milliseconds later:

  I’ll make it worth your while . . .

  Teenage boys really do have precisely zero chill when it comes to nudes.

  I leave him hanging for a little while, because I’m very evil and enjoy the idea of him sitting on the couch next to his Republican senator of a father, indiscreetly checking his phone five times a minute, and trying to disguise his lopsided boner with a goose-feather cushion, or whatever posh people use to shield their aroused penises from each other.

  But then, once Ajita and Danny have stumbled out the front door like moderately intoxicated baby deer, I retire to my bedroom, whip off my clothes and take the damn picture, hitting send before I have time to talk myself out of it.

  [Yes, gasp, sigh. But are you even surprised at this point?]

  Wednesday 21 September

  7.20 a.m.

  I fall asleep before Vaughan replies, but it’s no great loss because he only manages to say “fuck” before I assume making a mess of the goose-feather cushion. And that’s that.

  11.57 a.m.

  Morning recess is spent freaking out in the bathrooms and trying not to get kicked outside by the power-hungry prefects who take their jobs as school police more seriously than the actual US police force. We have to go outside and get fresh air during recess periods, for no other reason than the school authorities want us to be miserable. Fresh air is number three on my top ten list of overrated things in life, which, although constantly evolving, currently looks like this:

  1. Sliced bread. It’s undeserving of its eponymous cliché “the best thing since sliced bread”. Give me a crusty baguette any day. Maybe the cliché-makers chose sliced bread because “the best thing since a French stick” sounds vaguely sexual.

  2. The Super Bowl. Its only redeeming quality is the way we as a nation come together to eat chicken wings and yell at the TV, but you can do that any day of the week, without the inconvenient sportsball.

  3. Fresh air. Outside = weather, insects and the chance that at any given moment you may be hit by a car. I also think people who love camping should never be trusted.

  4. Shower sex. A logistical nightmare from start to finish.

  5. Smoking. At some point it became synonymous with cool. Why? It tastes gross. It makes you smell gross. It coat
s your lungs in ash. [I’m not sure if that’s medically correct. Remind me to ask Ajita.]

  6. Reading in the bath. You have to dry your hands every thirty milliseconds in order to turn the page, and you live in constant fear of dropping the book spine-first on your bare foofer.

  7. Shakespeare. I personally find it unreasonable that he has the monopoly on inventing words. [For example, I’m sure my copyeditors are going to flag up “foofer”.]

  8. TV talent shows. But maybe I’m just bitter about having a face for radio.

  9. Yoga. Specifically the way in which it is marketed as a relaxing pastime. There is nothing relaxing about twisting yourself into a pretzel and saying “om” a lot.

  10. Dubstep. I don’t feel this requires further explanation.

  Thankfully, word doesn’t seem to have gotten out about my controversial sexcapades at the weekend. Earlier in the week, the threat of exposure and ridicule felt very real, but, like the rumored Friends reunion, it didn’t really come to anything. Sexmageddon remains a secret.

  But of course, the universe is a hormonal son of a preacher man at times, and I’m well overdue a generous helping of bad karma, so inevitably I meet both Vaughan and Carson in the hall at the same time on my way to fourth period. They’re strolling along together, Vaughan carrying a textbook and Carson a basketball, probably chatting about defense tactics or some other sportsball-related subject I have no hope of understanding.

  Despite the flurry of activity around the lockers, they both clock me burying my face into my upside-down copy of Wuthering Heights. Ajita smirks dirtily and ushers them over, which is almost definitely a fireable offense as my supposed best friend, but at this point I just have to be thankful that Danny has double AP chemistry this morning and isn’t here to witness such an unfortunate coincidence.

  I mean, they are on the same basketball team, so I should really have anticipated this kind of hideous confrontation, but thankfully it doesn’t seem like either of them are aware that I banged the other. These are their reactions to seeing their latest conquest out in the wild: