by Wendy Brant
Tomorrow.
I skip our lunch together and hide out in the library instead. I know this is getting out of hand and that he is going to realize I’m blowing him off. But I still don’t know how to handle this.
I think I’ve bought myself one more day when I make it out of school without seeing him, but then I hear him calling me across the parking lot.
He’s walking toward me and I realize for real why I’ve been trying to put space between us: because I have zero willpower when it comes to him. I am pulling toward him like a magnet.
“Hey,” he says, slightly out of breath. Like the first time we met.
“Hey,” I say back.
He stands close to me now, closer than he did before we kissed. He doesn’t ask me where I was at lunch. He doesn’t give me the third degree. He just looks down at me with those eyelashes and I fold like a paper airplane. He raises an eyebrow, lifts one corner of his mouth. He tugs at the shoulder strap of my backpack lightly. Oh, screw it. I’m doomed.
He glances at his phone. “I have to go to work,” he says, and he doesn’t even try to hide the regret in his voice. I want to reach out and touch him, but he’s wearing that damn army jacket.
“Tonight?” I ask him, all resolve gone. “What time do you get off?”
“Seven.”
I pick the first place that comes to mind, a place where I know we can be alone to talk. “Meet me at my church? Around eight?”
“At your church?” I nod and he doesn’t question me further, just says, “Okay.” There is no kiss, but there is this incredible moment where he looks at me — no, scratch that. He sees me, with those stormy eyes and those fantastic eyelashes and he tugs playfully at the end of my braid and I feel like I can barely breathe. “See you tonight.”
Chapter 27
I tell my mom that Charlotte and I are working on a group project and that the only time we could get together is tonight. She tells me not to stay up too late, but I know she’ll be dead asleep by the time I get home, no matter when that might be. I head off with no idea what I’m going to say to him. I know I probably should end it. It’s just too weird and soap opera-y and my mom would freak out if she ever found out that Zenn is Michael Franklin’s son. I should end it and just focus on the task at hand: a college, a scholarship. In the long run, that’s what really matters.
Right?
But it’s not fair. I finally find someone amazing, and we like each other, and I can kiss him and touch him (and he actually seems to want to kiss and touch me), and I have to let him go because of something neither of us had anything to do with. This feels like my one chance. This feels like it. What are the odds I’ll ever find a guy like him again? What if I never figure out my condition and I’m alone for the rest of my life?
God, this sucks.
I don’t let myself fuss in the mirror with my hair or makeup. I wear what I wore all day and the only vain thing I let myself do is brush my teeth. No sense in my breath smelling like my mom’s mac and cheese. I head out, heartbroken but determined.
Zenn is sitting on the church steps when I get there, his long legs stretched out in front of him. He stands when I approach and raises an eyebrow when I open the door with my dad’s keys.
“Are we going to get in trouble?” he asks quietly, even though we’re completely alone.
“What’s the matter, Bennett? Not much of a rule breaker?” It comes out a little flirtier than I intended. I’m supposed to be gearing up to end things, not flirting.
He shrugs. “Well … it is a church. Isn’t God watching us? Or something?”
“It’s okay,” I say, holding up my other hand with my fingers crossed. “God and I are like this.”
I knew no one would be here tonight and that we’d have privacy to talk. But I may have also chosen this place because it feels safe. In spite of all my skepticism about God and religion, church has always been a safe place for me. I close the door and lock it behind us.
He follows me to the nursery, the playroom where the quads spend a good part of their Sunday mornings. I flick on the fluorescent lights overhead, but the sudden brightness is so jarring that Zenn reaches past me and flips them back off. For some reason, I find this incredibly sexy.
Pull it together, Eva!
When my eyes adjust, I gesture to one corner of the room that is stacked with pillows and we sit on the pile next to each other. He’s being very polite and patient. I realize I need to speak first.
“So …” I start, my voice quiet and serious. “I need to talk to you about something.”
“It’s the scholarship, isn’t it? You are mad.”
I shake my head quickly. “No! I’m not mad about that. At all.”
He looks so confused that I can’t help smiling, which makes him grin back at me, relieved, his face lighting up like I’m sunshine or … candy. Something that he can’t resist. I’ve never had a guy look at me like that before.
I can’t ruin this. I can’t. And he’s right there, just inches away and I still remember the soft vanilla taste of his mouth.
“I’m sorry I blew you off this weekend. And didn’t meet you for lunch today,” I say, pulling at a thread that has come loose from the pillow I’m sitting on. “I can see why you’d think I was mad. But I wasn’t. I was just feeling … a little overwhelmed.”
He still looks confused.
“I’m kind of new at … all this.”
He places one of his hands on mine, stilling it, and I hold my breath, just in case. But no fractal.
“It’s kind of new to me, too,” he says.
I shake my head, wanting him to realize without me saying it. It’s more than just the fact that I’ve never had a boyfriend.
I look at him but the words pile up in my throat. And before I can get them in order again, he leans closer and his mouth catches my lips. Gently at first, and then more firmly like he’s making a statement with his kiss: I missed you and maybe I want you. Like he’s telling me that he doesn’t care if I’m virginal and inexperienced. Like he’s telling me that no matter what secrets I’ve uncovered, he’s willing to make this work. Though he can’t make that promise. He has no idea what I’ve uncovered.
I try to resist. I really do, but he tastes and smells and feels so good that I quickly forget all about what I need to tell him and my lifelong aversion to touch and wrap my arms around him. I deserve this. Everyone deserves this: to love and to touch. Why should I deny myself what everyone else has?
It’s funny how, after years of guarding my hands so carefully, they reach for him instinctively. It’s also funny how, after years of getting fractals when I touch just about anyone or anything, this fractal actually startles me. For once in my life I’m not ready. I gasp a little, open my eyes and pull away. No. None of this shit, not from him. Not now.
Then I realize I’m touching his jacket again. That damn army jacket of his dad’s.
Now that I know the fractals belong to his dad, I touch the jacket again out of curiosity, but the fractal is too strong, too dark. I realize that the terror and fear are maybe less from any war and more from the accident, because he must have been wearing it that night. The fractal is like the spiderweb of a shattered windshield. God, I can’t think about that right now. I remove my hands from Zenn.
“What’s wrong?” he asks.
“Can you take this off?” I ask. He looks surprised and more than a little intrigued by my request, but he obeys without question, sliding it off and tossing it aside. He kisses me again and now I can once again touch him with no consequences other than my own hammering heartbeat and liquefying insides.
Almost immediately Zenn pulls away. “Hey, I never asked you. What was that thing the first day we met?”
“What thing?”
“Remember? How I caught you picking my jacket up with your foot?”
Oh, crap. Yeah. How to explain that? How to explain any of this?
The truth? The truth about my fractals seems easy compared to the
bigger, harder truth hanging over my head.
He’s studying my face, his hand on my thigh, his thumb stroking gently. Fractal or no fractal, I can barely think when he’s touching me.
“What is it?” he asks again. He probably expects my answer will be something silly, like I’m a peace activist and have an aversion to military clothing or something, but he sees from my expression it is not.
Well. I guess I have to tell him something.
“So … I have this thing.”
He nods, listening.
I clear my throat. “When I touch … anything, really … I have this … reaction.”
“Reaction?”
I nod.
“Like an allergic reaction?”
“Not exactly.” I hesitate, thinking of how to best describe my fractals. “You know those paintings you do? The fractal art?”
He nods, barely following.
“It’s kind of like that. But, like, in my brain.”
“In your brain,” he repeats. He sounds skeptical. “You see … fractal art? When you touch things?”
I wag my head in a kinda-sorta motion. I’ve got to give him credit — he doesn’t look entirely incredulous. I mean, I realize how crazy it sounds.
“Seeing is maybe too literal. It’s hard to describe. I just get this … sense? I guess it’s kind of visual, but it’s also a feeling? I don’t know ... but I understand things.”
“Wait. You get this when you touch anything?” He lets his hand drop, as if he’s hurting me. This is what I was afraid of.
“Just about. Except …” I hesitate to tell him, because it sounds weird and romantic and possibly a little creepy. “Well, except you.”
“Except me?”
“Yeah.”
“You can touch me and you don’t get them?”
I nod.
He looks down at my hand and lets it sink in for a minute. “Well. Lucky me,” he says. I think he thinks I’m joking.
“I’m serious,” I tell him. “I’ve had them ever since I can remember. But with you … I don’t.”
As if to try to prove it, I lift my hand and place it on his cheek, directly on his warm skin. Nothing, except for that fluttering in my stomach.
“I don’t know why.” My voice is almost a whisper. He stares at me for a minute and then he takes my hand from his face and holds it, palm up, in his hands.
“You’re serious?” he asks.
I nod.
“Have you gone to a doctor?”
“Tons.” I nod. “And psychiatrists. And even, like, an exorcist.”
“What!”
I laugh a little. “Well, not an exorcist, exactly, but like a psychic healer? Don’t tell my dad. He’d freak out. My mom took me one time. Didn’t work.”
“You don’t know what causes it?”
I shake my head. “It might be something I was born with or …” I plant the seed for a future conversation: “I was in an accident when I was little and I had, like, a minor head injury or something. But I’ve had MRIs and CT scans and all that stuff since then. They haven’t been able to find anything unusual. At this point my only hope may be to figure it out myself. At MIT, Northwestern, Stanford …”
Zenn is still looking at my hand, his fingers now tracing up and down mine like he’s feeling for the reason. “It’s like my paintings?”
I nod and close my eyes, enjoying his touch. Simple, innocent stroking of his fingertips along my palm. It’s even better than I imagined. “I call them fractals because … there are, like, patterns? Repeating patterns. Remember how we talked about Mandelbrot? The mathematician?”
“Mmmm hmmm.” Now he lines up our hands, our fingers, palms pressing against each other. I open my eyes and see that his fingers are longer than mine by nearly a whole segment. He could almost bend the tips of his fingers over the tops of mine.
“Mandelbrot had this idea that things that typically appear as rough or chaotic, like waves or shorelines, actually have a degree of order. There is a geometric repetition on all scales.” I realize I’m sounding a little technical and nerdy, but I’m not sure how else to explain it. “No matter how close you look, the patterns never get simpler.” I let this sink in for a second. I can tell he’s listening because he’s looking at me now, focused and intent.
I continue. “When I touch people or their stuff, I get these glimpses into their shit. The stuff that they struggle with. Which, in some ways could probably make me a great therapist or something someday. But the problem is, the patterns never get simpler. In fact, in some ways they get more intense each time. And when I start to think I can solve it, that I can help or do something, the pattern is always there. Like Russian nesting dolls that go on forever. Perfect little miniatures of one another that never end.”
I close my eyes again.
“They make me feel useless. I want to help but I can’t. And then I know this stuff about people — these very private problems — and I can’t unknow any of it. So I’ve always just avoided touching people. And stuff in general. It’s why people think I’m, like, a germ freak.”
Now his fingers slide between mine and we make a little prayer of sorts with our two hands.
“You get it from touching things, too? Not just people?”
I nod. “It’s why I want people to bring their calculators when I start tutoring. Because the calculators soak up all their math frustrations. And … well … it’s just math, so I can figure it out pretty quick and it helps me get to the core of what they’re struggling with.”
“Seriously? That’s the secret to your tutoring genius? You cheat?”
He’s kidding. “I prefer, ‘use my God-given gift.’”
“Did you get anything from my calculator?”
I shake my head. “Nothing.”
Maybe he’s proud that he stymied me?
“Do you think you’re a math prodigy because of the fractals? Like, maybe your brain works differently in general?”
I shrug. “I don’t really know. Since we don’t understand why I have them, it’s hard to know which came first, the math stuff or the fractals. I sort of think” — I bite my lip, hoping this won’t sound too weird — “that the fractals are the way they are because that’s just how my brain works. Maybe if I were a creative person, like you, they’d be different. But math is my language so they are kind of like math. With patterns and stuff. Of course, if the fractals came first, then maybe I’m good at math because of that. Or maybe they’re both related.” I sigh and shrug again. “Short answer is, I really have no idea.”
“But wait. If you don’t get these fractals from me, why do you get them from my jacket?”
“Because it was your dad’s jacket. Right?”
“How did you know?”
“Um … well … they’re clearly his fractals.”
A look of mild terror crosses his face. “No wonder you wanted me to take it off.”
“I suppose if I got fractals from you, then the jacket would eventually take on your own personal shit from you wearing it. But since you seem to be sort of neutral, all your dad’s shit is still right there. And maybe … some of your mom’s?”
He still looks worried. He hasn’t told me anything about his dad and I suppose he’s wondering what I might have learned.
“It’s, like, nothing specific,” I reassure him. “At first. My fractals, I mean. The more I touch one person, or their stuff, the more I can see over time. But at first it’s all just kind of a mess.”
He looks relieved. Can’t say that I blame him. I think of how complicated my mom’s fractals can be — laden with all her guilty regret for the things she gave up when she quit school to raise me, with her intense grief, with her constant exhaustion — and they are nothing compared to his dad’s.
“Can you show me?”
I’m confused. “Show you?”
“Like, touch something and tell me what it feels like?”
I hesitate. Do I really want to prove what a freak I am?
But how else do I make him believe me?
“Yeah. I guess so.” I look around. “But not in here. It’s all kid stuff in here and I don’t get them from kids.” I catch myself. “Well, sometimes I do, but they’re different. Happier. And the younger they are, the fewer I get.”
I get up and he stands, too.
“Maybe you don’t get them from me because I’m some sort of stunted three-year-old,” he suggests.
He’s already heading out of the room to the sanctuary. I follow him to the front of the church and he picks up a hymnal from one of the seats.
I shake my head. “That won’t work.”
“Why not?”
“It’s too generic. Like a shopping cart or a doorknob. Too many different people hold it for too short a time. Plus, it’s paper.”
“Oh.” Like that makes perfect sense. I see a square of white fabric on the floor near the communion rail. I pick it up and find it’s a crisp white handkerchief. Here we go.
He watches me closely. I’m not sure what I look like when a fractal strikes. I’ve never sat and looked in a mirror while I had one, and I’m too distracted by the colors and patterns and feelings anyway. But I don’t think there are any outward physical signs, except for when a bad one makes me sweaty and nauseated. It’s too late to worry about appearances now because the fractal is already sweeping over me. It’s not a horrible one. I can still think, still talk.
“It belongs to a woman,” I say. “An older woman —”
He cuts me off. “How do you know?”
“Well, it’s a handkerchief, and no one younger than sixty carries a handkerchief.”
“How do you know it’s a woman?”
I refocus. “I don’t know. The colors are … muted? Like, mauve and light blue? They’re not young colors, not masculine colors.”
“You see colors?”
“Usually.”
“What else?” He leans against the communion rail and crosses his arms.
“She’s divorced? Or widowed, I think? The patterns are … I don’t know … slanted? Sad? Lonely.”