The Best Kind of People

by Zoe Whittall

  “Everyone just accepted that it was okay for me to take a break. I’ve never taken a break from anything in my whole life. I have had after-school activities every day since as far back as I can remember. But I just can’t give a shit about exams or how much bulk saran wrap we can sell to finance the grad trip to Spain.”

  Eleanor nodded. “You’ve always been bright, and motivated. So how come this new interest in … marijuana?”

  Sadie blushed, picked up one of the plush toys, and stroked its blue fur like it was a cat. “I’m not sure. It slows me down. I’ve been feeling like a hamster on a wheel, you know?”

  “A hamster on a wheel?”

  “Like I can’t stop thinking and whatever, right? My brother Andrew smoked it all through high school. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t tried it. I mean, Elaine is a bit of a hypocrite making me come here. Her boyfriend smokes pot every night, it’s how I get high, right?”

  Eleanor wrote something down.

  “That won’t get him in trouble, will it? He doesn’t give it to me — I steal it,” she said.

  Eleanor raised her eyebrows.

  “I feel bad, don’t worry. I’m not a criminal,” Sadie said. “God, what if I am? What if I’m losing my sense of right and wrong?”

  “Slow down, Sadie. You’ve experienced a huge trauma. It’s normal to be feeling stress and anxiety and to seek out ways to cope. You’re not a criminal.”

  Sadie exhaled, sat further back in the chair, wishing she could curl up and go to sleep.

  “I have a boyfriend. We’ve been together a long time — almost eleven months now. But lately I have a new crush, and I feel like I can’t stop it from happening.”

  “It’s normal to have crushes,” Eleanor started. “Sometimes relationships when you’re young don’t last all that long. It’s okay. Your feelings are valid.”

  “Well …” Sadie debated telling her that it was Kevin, how much she thought about him during the day, tried to co-­ordinate her schedule so that she’d run into him around the house. Didn’t she have enough problems? “It’s been a few months since I realized it, and I’m not going to do anything about it. I don’t know why it feels so urgent these days,” she said, though she knew the answer. Kevin had been unusually attentive to her, asking her questions about her life. She was almost sure the crush was mutual at this point.

  “You’re a teenager, you’re going to keep having regular teenage problems, even while your life is inundated with adult realities,” Ms. Rockbrand said.

  when she got home, Jimmy and Elaine were sitting around the table. Elaine was proofreading one of Jimmy’s papers. They were arguing over semi-colon usage.

  “Semi-colons aren’t just intuitive, Mom,” he said, frustrated. His paper was covered in Elaine’s red pen markups.

  Kevin was at the stove, tapping a wooden spoon on a soup pot. Sadie found it difficult to look at him. Her body felt magnetically drawn to him. Could everyone see that? It seemed impossible that they wouldn’t. She tried to remember back to when she found him annoying, a kind of faceless adult who got in the way of their teenage freedom, but she couldn’t. He had become an entirely new being. He’d bleached out his honey-brown hair so he actually looked a little like a surfer from a movie they’d watched about Californian surf culture.

  She still loved Jimmy, of course. This was just some crazy thing her body was doing as a product of the stress of her life, she rationalized. “This is undoubtedly some Daddy-complex Freud bullshit,” she’d written in her diary. Every other man even half his age was totally asexual and repellent to her. It didn’t make sense. She was trying not to feed the insanity by indulging in it any more than she had to. She practised her facial expressions in the bathroom mirror: betray nothing. The line of her lip perfectly straight.

  Plus, when Kevin was writing, he was very easy to avoid.

  Elaine seemed amused by Kevin’s offer to cook. “Don’t poison us, honey.” Elaine and Kevin had been fighting lately. They were trying to hide it, but she and Jimmy had noticed. But they seemed to be acting okay again.

  A half-hour later, Kevin ushered them away from the kitchen table and into the never-used dining room, where they were greeted by a table set with fine china, plates of grilled salmon, roasted baby potatoes, and corn on the cob. “With coriander, lime, and sea salt!” he said, grinning, passing out sprigs of green parsley-like herb.

  “Wow, you’re really trying, babe,” Elaine said dryly. Sadie noticed the tension between them again. Nonetheless, she looked impressed. Kevin went to kiss her on the mouth, but she turned away and he caught her cheek instead.

  “So, why are you in such a good mood?” asked Jimmy.

  “I got accepted to go to a writers’ retreat in Iowa. I was wait-listed, and they just called today to let me know I got a spot. For the whole month. I’m mentoring some young writers, and then I have half days to write. I get paid to be there, right? Awesome.”

  At 7 p.m., the phone rang. It was Joan. Sadie’s father mostly called between 4 and 6 p.m. on Wednesdays, and her mother every night at seven unless she was at work. Her mother had also become less averse to texting and had recently started to use emojis. This meant a series of unicorns or smiley faces were always waiting for her when she looked at her screen.

  Kevin made a big show of jumping up to check the call display, but he knew it was her. They left it up to Sadie whether or not to answer it.

  Joan had been very angry that week. Sometimes it was about the hounding media or Bennie or how Andrew wasn’t processing things emotionally or how Clara was heartless. She didn’t want to answer, but she did. Sadie missed her.

  “Hey, Mom,” she said, sitting on the tall white kitchen stool cradling the cordless. Kevin looked up from the table and winked at her. Winked. Jimmy had corn in his front teeth when he smiled at her. He was being so nice to her that she could hardly look at him sometimes.

  “Hello, Sadie,” she said. “I miss you.”

  “I miss you too, Mom. You sound … less angry than yesterday.”

  “I am. I haven’t been to see your father in a week, and I’m happy about that. I need some space!” She had that somewhat hysterical voice that actresses like Goldie Hawn got in movies when they find out their husbands are cheating on them. All her sentences went up at the end in a fierce soprano.

  “Well, that’s good, Mom. It’s about time you started thinking about your needs.” How much space can she need? He’s in a jail cell. But she knew what she meant. Sadie wasn’t one to talk. The more she didn’t go visit her father, the worse she felt, and the more the guilt made her want to crawl in a hole.

  Kevin was still staring at her, listening intently. She turned away, curling her toes under the lowest rung of the stool, and pressed her head against the refrigerator. Maybe he also has a crush on me. The thought made it hard to hear what her mother was saying. She fully checked out for a few seconds, and came back to the sound of her concluding, “And so I think it’s time to sell the fucking house.”

  Joan did not say fucking as a rule. Not to her daughter. And she had never seemed to love any other house more than the Woodbury house.

  Sadie felt as if she’d been hit.

  “No, Mom. You can’t.”

  “Sure I can. The house is legally mine now, entirely, until your father gets out of jail. I get a smaller, less show-offy house, and it saves us money and you have more money for college next year. You won’t have to use the money your grandparents left for you.”

  Sadie burst into hot, involuntary tears. “I love that house.”

  “Oh, Sadie, I’m sorry. I thought you would be all for this. You are, after all, choosing not to live here.”

  “Maybe I’ll come back!” she said. Elaine and Jimmy turned to look at her.

  “Of course I would love that. Even if I do decide to sell, it wouldn’t sell for a while. Not a lot of people
have this kind of money.”

  “Mom,” Sadie said, standing up, “we need to talk about this in person.”

  “Okay, well, I’m working tens tomorrow.”

  “You’re back at work?!”

  “I’m not recovering from a stroke, Sadie. I can’t spend my whole life managing your father’s … incident.”

  “Great. I’ll meet you in the doughnut shop in the hospital atrium at 9 a.m.”

  “Deal.”

  “Deal.”

  “You’re not really into me anymore, are you?” Jimmy asked after dinner, when he tried to pin her behind the couch when Elaine went up to refill the popcorn bowl. She concentrated on the ugly pink lilies on the wallpaper behind him, dug her feet into the plush white carpeting and cracked her toes.

  “No, I’m just not into sex right now … given … everything.”

  She knew that she was lying as she said it. It was a convenient lie. She forced herself to believe it was true, though. She was fucked up about her dad. She was. It made her question all of her intimate relationships. She just didn’t know for certain it was actually the reason she was starting to find Jimmy a bit repulsive. What if you just had no control over how your body reacted to someone, and you woke up repelled by the person whom you used to find overwhelmingly attractive? This was something she hadn’t considered possible. She felt as though something as random as the wind controlled her emotions.

  “It’s been months now, and we’ve only had sex that one time a few weeks ago. I thought we’d be all over each other when you moved in here.” He pressed himself against her stomach, leaned down, and started to kiss her neck. The Jimmy she thought was so different from other boys was turning into a parody of the adolescent male. There was nothing more unsexy than someone asking for sex all the time. It was like someone had given Jimmy a handbook on all the best ways to turn somebody off.

  He pressed one hand against the small of her back, continuing to kiss her neck and ear. He knew she usually responded well to this, but this time it made her stomach lurch. She contemplated just pulling him into the garage and blowing him to get it out of the way. But that was not in her character. Sex should be mutual, she believed, you should both want it. Jimmy generally believed this as well. Or at least he used to.

  “I didn’t move in here so you could have instant sex any time you want. I’m not a vag vending machine,” she hissed, pushing him off her and rubbing the back of her hand against the wetness on her neck, grimacing.

  He gave her a look of pure humiliation. She felt as though she’d kicked a puppy.

  His mom padded downstairs with the popcorn and said, “It’s time for Criminal Minds!” She tried to pretend she hadn’t interrupted anything, as Jimmy ran up the stairs and slammed the door on the way outside. “What’s with him?”

  Sadie shrugged and got cozy on the couch, grabbing a handful of popcorn.

  Elaine raised her eyebrows but said nothing.

  sadie decided to sleep in her own bed in the guest room that night.

  “Maybe you should take some space for yourself,” Eleanor Rockbrand had suggested during their last session.

  It didn’t solve her insomnia. When she couldn’t sleep, and heard the sounds of Kevin’s typing coming from his room, she snuck downstairs and watched tv, just to blur the sounds of her own worries. She worried about getting into college, about not getting into college. She worried about Jimmy and her not being together, about this nagging feeling she had that she wasn’t in love anymore. That his incessant hovering was going to make her snap.

  When Kevin came downstairs, he was startled to see her. “Oh, I saw the light and thought I’d left the tube on,” he explained. Though clearly he’d come down to the basement to take a hit off his bong, which he had in his hand, and she’d busted him. This was the second or third instance of accidental-not accidental running into each other between midnight and dawn.

  “Can I have some?” she asked with a smile. She arched her back the way she’d seen girls do at school, and stepped closer, daring him. The feeling was thrilling.

  “Well, you see, Sadie, when Elaine found out that we smoked that one time, she wasn’t very pleased with me.”

  “Really?” she said, as though hearing it for the first time, as though she hadn’t just been sent to therapy for this very reason. “Elaine is so chill.”

  Kevin laughed. “Yes, well, she is, yeah, I guess she is mostly,” he said, as though considering it for the first time. “I guess she thought it was irresponsible of me, and crossed some adult–child boundaries and stuff. And that you are going through so much, and you don’t need adults in your life to act like children.” He sounded as though he was repeating word for word the lecture he’d probably received from Elaine. “You need, you know, role models.”

  “Well, that’s very simplistic.”

  “Trouble is,” he said conspiratorially, and clearly not actually hearing her, “I’m kind of a kid myself, still. Obviously. Like I’m a goofy, harmless kid. No matter what I do, I’m still this way.”

  “You’re a fun guy, Kev.”

  “Ha, see, for most adults, that wouldn’t matter to them. But I like that you said that, that I’m a fun guy. I am, right? Plus, you’re stealing it anyway, right?” He chuckled and lit the bong.

  “No! Okay, yeah. Maybe sometimes,” she said, coming closer to him.

  He handed her the bong and said, “Fine, you little … pusher.” He winked and walked towards the couch.

  The wink hit her like one of those cartoon cupid’s arrows. She took a hit, holding it deep in her lungs, trying not to cough. She exhaled a victorious stream of smoke, and passed it back to him slowly.

  “I won’t tell anyone,” she teased.

  “Good,” he said. “So, how are things with your dad? Have you been for a visit?”

  “Nope. Not since that first time. I don’t like going there.”

  “That makes sense.” He nodded. “Prison is not exactly pleasant. Are you angry because …” He looked to be choosing his words very carefully. “Are you mad because … your dad ever … you know?”

  “Fuck no! No, no, no, never. god. I’m so tired of getting asked that question.”

  “Oh, sorry, I just wanted to know, you know, ’cause we’re friends and all.”

  He said we’re friends. I’m not just some guest in this guy’s house! Her heart felt, as Amanda would say, all “melty.”

  Kevin is making me stupid. Making me use words that aren’t real words.

  “So … what are you writing right now?” She was trying to think of something to keep him there. “Still the teenagers? The canoers and the detective?”

  “Yeah,” he said absently. “Speaking of, I gotta go write! I’m on a roll.”

  She was sad that he wanted to leave her stoned all by herself in the basement watching a bad movie.

  “Stay with me!” she said, putting on a fake pout.

  “Ah, you sure are tempting, but really, I’ve got to keep the magic going.”

  He called me tempting.

  Tempting.

  This was an anecdote she would circle later in stupid hearts and stars in her diary.

  after a few moments, she decided to go upstairs and capitalize on the feeling of being in her body, and feeling weightless and calm. She crawled under the covers with Jimmy, and ran her hands along his chest, tracing his tattoo. He startled and then smiled. She ran her hands through his hair. He rolled on top of her and kissed her mouth, parting her legs with his knee. At first the kissing felt good, and the floating feel was pleasant enough, but as soon as he started fucking her, the revulsion returned. The street light through the window allowed her to see his face above her too clearly. She closed her eyes tight and wished he’d just hurry up.

  After, he gathered her up in his arms and said, “I love you so much. That felt so good. I fe
el so connected to you. I feel like we’re one body.”

  She briefly worried about how she should respond but realized his breaths had slowed and deepened and he was fast asleep. She pulled on one of his T-shirts and crept out of the room. Kevin was actually sleeping in Elaine’s room, making it easy to smoke his bong in the basement, where she eventually fell asleep, knowing she’d have to move out as soon as she could. The haven Jimmy’s house had provided had turned far too real.

  twenty-two

  the hospital food court was the bowel of a wayward ship, no natural light and few nutritious options. It was possible to look around and forget what season it was. Overtired health care workers hunched over fire-engine red tables, spearing limp salad and texting their families. Visitors shared doughnuts, buttered terrible bagels, and drank coffee, best described as an adequate facsimile, heavily sugared to make it tolerable. Joan generally avoided the area, preferring to bring food from home.

  She saw Sadie pushing through the crowd, arms crossed, heading towards her. As soon as Joan had tabled the possibility of selling the house on the phone the night before, she had felt regret. Why had she called up her daughter and told her she’d be taking away the site of her childhood — and all related stability — at such an unstable time? The guilt overwhelmed her.

  She observed Sadie’s walk, her demeanour, trying to assess for signs of ill health, a manic or depressive state. She’d been obsessed with George’s health, combing through her recent memories for signs of a shift. Had he said or done anything out of character? What about his strange obsession with baking, with playing squash? She read research papers about men who suddenly acted differently, falling victim to brain tumours and resultant loss of impulse control. If he had a sickness of some sort, and wanted treatment or to become rehabilitated, then things could work out eventually. She’d begun to toy with the idea of reconciliation, even if he was in fact guilty, and to think about the role of second chances, the possibility of him going through enough therapy to truly change in a fundamental way. Then, after having that thought, she would get angry again. She would picture the earnest look on Tammy-Lynn Harrison’s face. She felt as though she existed on a see-saw, swinging from one irrational thought to another.