Things I can’t Explain

by Mitchell Kriegman

  I wonder if everyone my age feels this way. I wonder if we all have to make a superhuman effort to keep moving forward toward all those things we’re supposed to achieve in life.

  It was Friedrich Nietzsche who rattled off that inspirational little tidbit: “That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” Personally, I think what doesn’t kill you almost does. So I don’t see the upside. I’m sort of half empty on that what doesn’t kill you thing. Go ask someone with PTSD, I’m sure they’ll agree.

  What Friedrich forgot to mention is the corollary: That which we don’t kill can come back around to haunt us and make us miserable. Which is why I should have buried Genelle Waterman the night of her reunion party.

  Genelle Fucking Waterman. I don’t know if that’s her real middle name, but I like to think it is. She is definitely one of those high school–specific memories you hope you never have to deal with again, like rainbow meat, cliques, lockdown, drama bitches, and bullies.

  For four years, Genelle and I quietly (and sometimes not so quietly) loathed each other. Oddly enough, this animosity was not inspired by any single cataclysmic event—she didn’t pelt me with maxi pads in the locker room shower or dump pig blood on me at prom, so it certainly could have been worse. She did plenty of bitchy things, mind you, and I confess, once in a while I succumbed to my darker instincts and gave as good as I got. But mostly we just tormented each other at a PG-13 level by saying nasty things about each other. Why girls endlessly torture each other in high school, I don’t know. When exactly does sisterhood kick in? As I get older, I wonder why, truthfully, girl-on-girl social abuse never seems to stop no matter how old you are. I’ve always tried to find my peeps, my safe pocket.

  Thank God Facefuck, I mean Facebook, wasn’t big in those days or the war between Genelle and I would have been way worse. Sure, the occasional term paper or hair scrunchie mysteriously went missing, but mostly it was just annoying, harmless bullshit that took place on school premises, not online. Outside of Thomas Tupper, our Venn diagram of life very rarely overlapped.

  But on the night of Genelle’s lame one-year reunion party, she totally crossed a line. Actually, that night I crossed a line, too—one just for me—and Sam did, as well—but it was a very different kind of line.

  I wore this cool flowered yellow-and-blue dress over my jeans and my nicely weathered Doc Martens (for good luck and old times’ sake). The party was a streamer-and-balloon-bedecked bash with more kegs than I could count and nobody was twenty-one, so I had no idea how Genelle got around her dad. The honorable Councilman Louis Waterman had a strict no-booze policy. Hell, I thought her mom was in the Temperance Union (yes, it still exists).

  Clifford Spleenhurfer was DJing and I have to admit, he had become pretty good at dropping the beats. He certainly had a shedful of turntables, crossfaders, and ginormous speakers.

  I don’t know why, but it felt like every guy there had a condom tucked into his wallet. I know that every girl had shaved her legs, armpits, and certain other nether reaches of her female anatomy. And there was the sudden appearance of multiple tattoos and piercings. Not to mention a plethora of weed.

  I had tried marijuana like everyone else, but didn’t personally partake, maybe because there wasn’t as much floating around the newsroom as, say, a college dormitory. The predominant self-medication of choice at the Daily Post was alcohol, and old boozers were not an attractive enticement to drink.

  Then there was the traumatic childhood New Year’s Eve incident where Ferguson and I had secretly stayed awake until midnight. When Ferg and I ran into Marshall and Janet’s bedroom yelling “Happy New Year!” at the top of our lungs and found them buck naked tugging on a joint, it was vastly too weird an experience to assimilate. I still shudder at the thought. So does Dad. It kind of cured me of the desire to smoke pot. I mean, I know my parents used to be hippies and all, but it wasn’t an image I wanted in my brain.

  That night people came to Genelle’s party full of agendas as if they wanted to reset the record on high school. Everybody (with the notable exception of me) had recently finished his or her first year of college and were two months into their sophomore year. I guess they were over their freshman jitters and at “peak recklessness,” all ready to show the old gang that although we may have been innocents when we left Springfield, higher education had changed that forever.

  Genelle’s agenda was simpler: Get Sam back.

  Yes, once upon a time in high school, Genelle and Sam were an item. They had dated for two months, three weeks, four days, and thirty-five minutes back in our junior year. Unfortunately, I remember every minute of it. Sam and I talked about it on a play-by-play basis. She was cuckoo for his Cocoa Puffs, although sometimes I wondered if she was just trying to piss me off by forcing him to divide his time between us. She definitely decided within the first week that as much as she loved Sam, the one thing she needed to change about him was me.

  I took great satisfaction in knowing that he never climbed a ladder into her bedroom window. But still, they held hands in the lunchroom, made out in her car, talked on the phone, and did that whole ridiculous “you-hang-up-first-no-you-hang-up-first” thing for almost the entire time they were together. I can’t tell you how many times I had to listen to that one. I’d pull my tongue out with fire tongs before I’d tell Sam or anyone to hang up first. It’s just too stupid.

  Anyway, after that disturbing knee bump under the table in New York, I felt awkward when I saw Sam at the reunion. For the whole party, I couldn’t stop looking at his mouth when he talked. Don’t ask me why, it was totally sexing me out. Like I was noticing for the first time how his lips formed words and it made my knees weak.

  Our bone marrow–deep friendship had morphed. I knew it, he knew it, and as soon as we ran into Genelle, she knew it.

  She threw herself at him as if they were long-lost lovers, and Sam looked so uncomfortable I felt sorry for him. Genelle escalated her efforts while getting plastered out of her gourd. All she got out of Sam was a polite, “Good thing this is your party, because you’re way too wasted to drive home.”

  Then Sam startled me by grabbing my hand and giving me a look with those warm brown eyes of his and said, “Let’s get out of here.…”

  The heat from his hand made my whole body warm. Why hadn’t we ever held hands like that before? He certainly didn’t have to ask me twice and the confidence in his voice put any doubts out of my mind. After all, he’s the cautious one between us.

  I felt Genelle’s death squint boring into the back of my head as Sam and I left the party together. His dad’s red pickup truck was parked outside. I’ve always loved that truck and I always will. As we drove away, I glanced back and saw Genelle standing on her front steps still watching us, the party behind her shifting from rowdy to raucous.

  A few blocks later Sam pulled over into the parking lot behind Reveille Church, and the sexual buzz was so thick it seemed like the composition of the air around us had changed. I was trembling, shivering. His hands drew my hips toward him, sliding me closer across the red pickup’s comfortable bench seat. We grabbed each other, gasping and hungry for each kiss, his fingers pulsating, pulling at the edge of my jeans. Every smell and taste overwhelmed the next.

  Tearing one more kiss from my lips, Sam paused, pulling back to look at me. Our eyes met unflinchingly, raw and unfiltered. Was there any question? Any doubt? It felt like he was looking into my soul. Slowly, he began again. His little kisses to my neck turned into bites, a whimper of pain escaping me. More kisses behind my ear and in the corners of my mouth became long, searching slow ones. He had his answer. There was no hurry anymore, just certainty about what we were going to do.

  Soon his fingers were tightening in my hair, drawing my open mouth toward his, sucking on my tongue, nearly biting it. As his hand made its way down my spine to my waist, he leaned back, pulling me down with him, still kissing, and bringing me farther on top. I dug my hands through his hair, biting his lips. I pulled off my dress
and threw it in the back of the cab as he unbuttoned my jeans and I unbuttoned his.

  With one thrust he was inside me, consuming me. I gave myself up to his arms, to his body, driving deeper, smooth and hard, shuddering uncontrollably as he let go. There was something amazing about us coming together so simply, so naturally, and so completely without talking or saying anything.

  Afterward, we lay naked on the seat and our bodies fit together, two halves of a whole, our breathing long and slow. To find Sam in my arms was heaven, momentous, earthshaking. It sounds too simple to say everything in our lives had led up to that moment, but it felt that way. Neither of us knew what to say, even though I’m sure all kinds of thoughts were clouding our minds. I lay there in silence, drifting in and out of a delicious sleep.

  “I’ve never done that before,” he said, his soft voice waking me. I opened my eyes and leaned up on one elbow.

  “You mean with me?”

  “No. Never at all.”

  “What? Really?” I didn’t believe him at first.

  “Yeah.”

  I had to lift my head up farther to look at him to see if he was kidding. He responded with that low-key Sam kind of shrug and smiled.

  “Coulda fooled me,” I said, lowering my head to his chest. “Never?”

  “Nope.”

  “Why not?” I asked, still breathing him in.

  “Came close, did lots of other stuff, but didn’t want to until now,” he said.

  “Don’t go saying you saved yourself for—”

  “I’m not. Just didn’t,” he said. I could tell he was a little defensive. “You?”

  “Not … like this. Suffice it to say I’ve never done it … before … in a red pickup … with you,” I said, snuggling closer, but suddenly wondering if that was okay with him. I wanted to say more about everything I felt, how being with him eased my rumbling mind and soothed my tired body, my soul, but I didn’t.

  “You never said anything about it,” he said.

  “Yeah, I know. It wasn’t so great.” I immediately worried if that made me sound like someone who slept around a lot, but I decided to let it rest.

  We fell softly asleep, easily intertwined in each other, his arm around my waist, mine curled across his chest, his breathing warm on my neck until we were stirred by fire engine sirens in the distance that seemed to be growing closer. But even then we didn’t give it a thought. The windows were fogged up with condensation and we were cut off from the world in our own cozy sphere of tenderness and warmth that I never wanted to leave.

  It wasn’t until the knock on the window that we jumped, scrambling for our clothes before the door opened. The fireman was pointing a flashlight in our eyes.

  Sam was mortified. I was worried, too. At least the fireman had the courtesy to knock.

  “Sam Anders?” he asked and Sam nodded. “Clarissa Darling?” I nodded dutifully. “We’ve been looking for you.”

  It took a while to piece together what had happened. Our first clue came later the next day when we were walking downtown. Every classmate we encountered gave us a wink or some kind of snickering smile. Nothing like your entire high school knowing that you had unambiguously hooked up with your closest best friend. Fortunately, most everyone thought it was pretty rad except you-know-who—Genelle Fucking Waterman.

  Jody filled me in later on what occurred after Sam and I left the party. Genelle did three more Jell-O shots, muttered something about “not letting that Clarissa bi-otch have what was rightfully hers,” then triggered the fire alert on her parents’ house alarm system pad—a direct line to the Springfield Fire Department. Considering Mr. Waterman is a councilman, every division in Springfield responded.

  Former high school classmates in various degrees of intoxication scattered. Kegs were rolled to safety, bongs were hidden in oversized purses. Most people panicked and tried to get out of there as fast as they could. Poor Clifford was struggling to get his DJ gear out of the joint as the fire department arrived. Jody tried to help Genelle hide the last few kegs in the garden shed when the G-Bomb passed out on the lawn. No one in the history of Springfield, Ohio, had ever heard of someone calling the authorities on their own party, but Genelle is a pioneer in her own way.

  Our stalwart defenders of public safety saw pretty quickly that there was no fire, but when they tried to revive Genelle she kept mysteriously muttering about—guess who?—Sam and me. So with nothing else to do but solve the mystery, the erstwhile firemen of Engine Company No. 5 of the Fire and Rescue Division set out on a search for us that ended with a polite knock on the cab of Sam’s dad’s red Ford pickup.

  News of me kissing Sam for the first time (I mean really kissing Sam for the first time, not the other first kiss that I don’t count) spread through Springfield like the house fire that never actually happened. But everyone was mostly unsurprised. The number one response was, “Weren’t they doing it all through high school?”

  Talk about an epic fail. Genelle was humiliated. If she didn’t hate me before that moment, she sure as hell hated me after. Even though she was the one who called in the first responders, I felt sorry for her. Almost.

  My phone buzzes again and there’s another text from Genelle.

  “I really want to meet up for a girl chat!!”

  Oh God, a girl chat with my least-favorite girl.

  “I’ve got big news!!”

  Okay, really. What is wrong with her? Why she would want to share big, medium, or even small news with me is impossible to imagine. Why she thinks I care is unfathomable.… You know, on a level of trying to understand one of those Doctor Who episodes.

  I text back a very polite generic brush-off, something about being busy with work, and “Thanks for getting in touch.”

  I guess I’m a little curious, but this time, I’m using all my energy to make a concerted effort to move forward and ignore the great big bungee cord of life.

  High school had its wonderful moments, but I’m not going to let it pull me back. I’ve got bigger things ahead. And even though it takes major willpower not to remember things like Sam’s amazingly soft lips and my fingers running through the soft brown curls of his hair that night in his dad’s red pickup, I need to stick to the path.

  If only I can find it!

  CHAPTER 18

  For the next few days, I hunker down at the computer and work on my article. But what the piece really needs is “legwork,” as Hugh used to say—not of the Wikipedia or Google variety, but firsthand and in person.

  So here’s the bad news: I have to hang out with Norm and schlep to South Williamsburg where his manufacturing operation is headquartered. Let me rephrase that: Where Norm and three baggy-pants slacker dudes doodle on rolling toys for grown-up boys whose favorite movies are of the Jackass kind, and who consider wise-ass MTV reality stars Rob and Big their role models.

  Okay, so maybe Norm’s setup is a little more sophisticated than that. I have to admit that Norm is really giving it a go and there is money actually changing hands, going in and out of the company in what looks like an actual flow of supply and demand. He’s gotten some serious business and accounting advice—I guess from “that Bezos dude.” I interview Belinda, his accountant, who is a no-shit numbers lady, and I’m impressed that she has the purse strings firmly in hand. This is validating for me, considering I took a total leap into the unknown pitching the story to Dartmoor and MT. I get a wee bit of credit for good instincts. Lots of credit for thinking on my feet and surviving.

  Norm has also cooled out on the stalker tendency because of MT and their mutual fascination, opening up a potential new line of business for me: “Matchmaking for Stalkers.” Think about it—how many stalkers and stalkees would live better lives if you could hook them up with someone who really wanted them and likes that kind of attention? Actually sounds like a line of business for Ferguson more than me. The good news is that despite Norm’s pronoun problem, he seems to be able to actually talk about the business.

  I spend a few
hours asking questions, jotting down notes, and taking some photos. Surprisingly, Norm is all business. Somebody has talked some sense into this guy. I also notice MT’s business card pinned with a nail to the plywood board that passes for his desk. Luckily he’s got this frizzy-haired geeky kid in charge of “manufacturing,” i.e., the Gorilla Glue part of it all. I consider mentioning Janet’s ToFlue Glue but think better of it.

  I take all kinds of pictures for the piece—some are pretty cool and make ol’ Norm look like a movie star. Central casting, anyone? Around four o’clock I leave the industrial All Decked Out warehouse. Despite the short deadline Dartmoor managed to throttle me with, I opt to catch my breath, take a break, and look for a bite to eat. It’s nice to get lost in Williamsburg for a while.

  I stop by Grumpy’s for a coffee (okay, are you detecting a pattern here?) and look over my notes. It’s pretty deserted except for a few production assistants with clipboards and stopwatches and even one of those movie clapboards from a television studio nearby shooting some HBO show.

  Then I head south down Kent Street past Brooklyn Brewery, stopping by the El Diablo Taco Truck for a carnitas, finding a very cool storefront exhibition space filled with shelves and shelves of sketchbooks crowdsourced by every crazy kind of artist, writer, and performer, and finally stopping at Mast Brothers Chocolate next door. I’m pretty happy. Coffee, tacos, and chocolate. My kind of diet.

  On the way to the subway I saunter by a cool-looking building with a funky arch over the door fashioned out of rusting bicycles welded together. Then I see the sign:

  HeadSpace.

  Shit. This is Nick’s music studio. Every uncomfortable memory and longing comes slamming in even though I figured I’d forgotten about him.

  Frozen in my steps staring at his front door, I’m simultaneously dreading and praying that he might come walking out from under that funky arch made of bikes. Was I inevitably drawn here by some unseen force set in motion by my parents arriving that morning and my coffee spilling? If only I had used the spilling antidote to that omen of bad luck, as I had known I should.