I would like nothing less, but sometimes social duties call. Besides, when I end up failing this class I’m going to need something to guarantee my A.
You’re not getting graded for this, idiot.
Outside, I stand apart from everyone else and drink my lemonade and wonder how long it’ll take Bugg to come over and talk to me. The yard is lush and smells nice, like grass and cherry blossoms, but I’m too nervous to enjoy the world in bloom.
“So what’d you think?” Bugg asks from behind me.
I turn around and she’s standing there in her velvet overalls looking impossibly cool. I probably just look impossible.
“It was interesting.” I smooth out my smock and drain my lemonade. “Definitely not as cringeworthy as I expected it to be.”
She doesn’t say anything for a few seconds, so I start counting the birds in the tree above us. I get to six when she says, “You know, my horoscope said I’d have a coincidental chance encounter that would change the shape of my whole summer. This might be it.”
“I don’t do horoscopes. And this wasn’t a coincidence. You invited me.”
She kicks off her Jesus sandals and has a seat in the grass. “I was thinking about the other night,” she says, plucking one strand of grass at a time and collecting them in her palm. “And I think you should know I’m not a weasel. If you want to pretend St. John’s didn’t happen, then I’ll pretend with you, but I do think it’s messed up.”
“Thanks, Friend Police. But you don’t know Sara like I know Sara. You don’t know the pressure that comes with being her friend.” I crush my plastic cup and a forgotten drop of lemonade falls to the ground. It’s just like Sara to magically befriend the only semi-friend I made without her. I extend my pinky in Bugg’s direction. “Promise to keep it on the DL for now?”
She hooks her pinky in mine and we hold each other to it for a few seconds too long. Finally, she reaches into her leather fringe bag and takes out rolling papers and tobacco, then starts to make a cigarette.
“The list you read was nice.” She works with her thumb and pointer finger, pinching the tobacco from the pouch and sprinkling it evenly onto the paper before rolling it back and forth until it forms the cigarette shape. When she runs her tongue along the edge to seal it, she looks up at me and I get an uncontrollable case of goose bumps.
“Thanks.” I clear my throat a little too loudly. “I liked your poem a lot.”
“You think? I’ve been trying to write it for a few years. I finally gave up a few months ago, and then last week I was scrambling an egg but I didn’t have any clean forks so I had to use a spoon and then it came to me.” She takes a lighter to her finished work, then blows the smoke in my face.
“Ew, can’t you massacre your lungs someplace else? Things that can kill you don’t belong in the sunshine.”
“Of course they do. Death is the most brilliant part of life. And no, I can’t. I’m too comfortable right here.” She tilts her head back and her hair falls into the grass. I nearly have to sit on my hands to keep myself from touching it, which I guess is leftover muscle memory from my ridiculous dream. “Okay, I’ve been thinking a lot about it over the past few seconds, and here’s what I’ve decided: We don’t have to talk about the past if you insist upon it—”
“I insist upon it.”
“But you can’t argue that we had something special. Sometimes fate puts two people together once, and sometimes fate puts two people together twice. Maybe this is our second chance.”
I frown in her direction. “I’m going to gag if you keep talking about fate.”
She bites her lip between drags, and I start thinking about suspension—not the kind where you get to miss school, but the throbbing seconds between two outcomes: This versus That, so-called fate taken or so-called fate missed.
“Come over tonight. I’ll make you dinner.”
I hesitate. But I can tell I’ve already begun to fall.
“Okay.” I hope my voice sounds more confident than I feel. “But I’m a vegan today.”
She gets up and pats my shoulder. “I was a vegan once too, until a piece of bacon saved my life.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
I feel too excited about dinner at Bugg’s to focus on anything, but right now I don’t have a choice. Part of the reason I got to come home from treatment was that I agreed to be “cooperative.” Cooperative means that my parents are in constant communication with my therapist and doctors and dean so that we can all be certain I’m ready to go back to Harvard in the fall. Cooperative also means filling out this stupid survey that came in the mail, which I can’t even do online. Hasn’t anyone at You-Know-Where heard of e-mail before?
I sit down at the kitchen table with the packet, wondering what fun thing Sara is doing with Ethan while I struggle through the prime of my life.
First question:
Pick your unit.
I can do this. I can do anything as long as it’s multiple choice.
a) Eating disorder recovery, b) Mental illness recovery, c) Alcohol & drug addiction recovery.
Well, how many questions are we talking? I flip through the pages and feel a pit growing in my stomach.
How did you find the food? Was there too much free time? Too much support group time? Too much one-on-one time? Would you have preferred a separation of units at mealtimes? At free time?
Jesus, if I wanted to relive the whole experience I’d have asked for a permanent residency. I put the packet down. Thinking about treatment makes me feel like I can’t breathe—not because there’s not enough air in the room, but because I’m suddenly allergic to it. I’m getting itchier and hotter, so I wander into the bathroom and get on the scale for the first time in two months. I don’t mean to take it out of the cabinet and stand on it, but I also never mean to jerk my leg when a doctor taps on my knee. Unfortunately, some reflexes are more harmful than others.
I get off the scale and want to throw it out the window. No, I want to throw up. I don’t even want to. I need to. It’s just a thought; you’re not your thoughts. I can’t throw up. I can’t throw up because a) I haven’t done that in two months and b) I’d like to not spend two more months in the place that got me to stop doing that for two months.
Instead, like the A+ Recovered Patient that I am, I go into my room and try the breathing exercise Leslie, my therapist, has been teaching me. It’s touted for being “simple and accessible,” but it’s nothing more than a deep breath they’ve invented a complicated term for: Three-Part Pause-and-Go Stress Reduction Breath. I lie on the floor like the therapy junkie I’ve yet to become and picture the air filling my stomach, then my ribs, then my chest, all the way up to my collarbone. I pause at the top and notice the parts of my body making contact with the floor: back of the skull, scapula. One, two, three. I exhale slowly. By the time I’m twenty-five they’ll have found a way to sell my own breath back to me.
I still feel anxious, so I open the e-mail Cynthia sent us with the writing exercises for the week. They’re optional—maybe everything in life is—but it couldn’t hurt to do a couple. I take my journal out and write according to the prompt, losing track of time until my dad interrupts me.
“Danny?” he says, opening my bedroom door and poking his head in.
I close my journal quickly. “Definitely don’t knock, Dad. It’s not like I change in here, or, I don’t know, have a basic right to privacy.”
“Sorry, sorry, you were so quiet I didn’t even think you were home.”
He seems too tall for the doorway and he keeps turning the knob nervously, making an annoying rhythmic squeaking. He could’ve at least brought some WD-40.
“Here I am. Home. In my room.” I stand up so we’re at least closer to eye-level, brushing bits of debris from the floor off my legs.
“And we’re so happy you’re home. How are you, kiddo? You adjusting okay?”
I’ve never seen a face want something so much. It makes it hard to be mad at him for going MIA. Not that I needed
him in treatment, but it would’ve been nice to know that he could show up for both my high school graduation and loony bin visitor hours—you know, the good, the bad, and the ugly.
“Yeah, I feel fine,” I say coolly. And I am fine, minus gaining ten more pounds than freshmen usually gain, but finally committing to veganism and regular sessions on the elliptical will take care of that.
“Good. Your mother and I are here for you, Danny. I’m sorry I wasn’t more there physically; it’s hard for me because—”
But I don’t need to hear how jarring it was for him to discover that I’m light-years from perfection. “Don’t worry about it.” I make my way past him into the hallway. “I forgive you or whatever.”
“But—”
“No, really. As much as I’d like to have a heart-spilling session together, I have to go meet a friend.”
I stare him down until he closes my door and the click of the latch tells me I’ve won. “Well, tell Sara I say hi.”
“It’s not Sara,” I say incredulously. “Is it so unbelievable that I’d connect with another human being besides her?” Maybe sensing that he can’t say anything right, my dad resorts to taking off his glasses and cleaning them with his dirty T-shirt. I don’t outwardly acknowledge the pointlessness of this exercise. I have my own menagerie of nonsensical habits to tend to. I walk down the hall into the kitchen, where his car keys hang on a hook sculpted into the tail of a mockingbird. The rest of the bird is stenciled around the hook, I guess to make it seem like the bird is looking back at you, but the mix of two and three dimensions is remarkably unconvincing.
“Is it cool if I take your car?” I ask, but this is a pity-ask. Not only is he into biking these days, but I overheard him telling my mom that he feels so guilty about never coming to visit me that he might give me his car for the summer. And that is the glory of capitalism: the exchange of material objects to cover up our shortcomings.
When I show up nervous and sweaty to the address Bugg gave me, I feel like I should be wearing a ball gown, not the smock in mom-salmon. I think Sara’s house is big, but Bugg’s house looks like it ate Sara’s house and is now pregnant with it. I lean out the window of my dad’s car and press the buzzer that’s located on the sidewalk. “It’s Danny.”
“Coming!” The crinkled sound of Bugg’s voice through the intercom makes me grip the steering wheel harder. The gates open and I drive around the fountain, the fountain, in the middle of the driveway, and Bugg comes running out in her velvet overalls. Not that I know anything about it, but she looks like the antithesis of girls who live in places like these.
“Sorry, I meant to unlock the gates before you got here. They’re so obnoxious.” She leans her elbows on the open window, where my elbow is also leaning. We’re close enough that I think maybe our arm hairs are exchanging follicle secrets.
“They’re not obnoxious. They’re elite.” I turn the engine off and wish my nerves would power down too.
“Exactly.” She opens the door for me. “Come inside. The chili is almost done. And don’t worry, it’s vegan.”
We enter the walk-in refrigerator that is her house, and I take my shoes off. As I follow her into the kitchen, my bare feet make sticky noises on the floor, which doesn’t help my self-consciousness in the least. To drown out the suction sounds I launch into a robot-esque spiel about the importance of veganism. My strongest point, which I try to frame as purely original and immensely profound, is that animals have feelings whereas plants do not. Bugg debunks this immediately while snipping bits of cilantro into the large pot on the stove.
“I call bullshit. Plants sense danger all the time and send distress signals to each other through the dirt or the air or, like, on messenger bees. They totally have feelings, but people don’t care ’cause plants don’t have faces.”
I scowl. What is she, the Jane Goodall of kale?
Bugg puts two bowls of chili in front of us and we sit at the island, or she sits and I try to sit, but the stool is so tall that I have to pull it way out then climb onto it, then grab hold of the counter to scoot close enough to reach my elbows on the marble.
“You got that?” she asks, and I like when she smiles, even if it is at my expense.
“Totally.” My foot brushes hers by mistake and goose bumps start at my feet then creep toward my stomach. “Except now I feel like an asshole eating all these plants.”
She whips her hair around so that all the red curls fall over her other shoulder. It happens for me in slow motion, and I have to remind myself to close my mouth and look away to keep from eye-eating her. “So what’s your deal?” she asks. “I moved to Scituate with my parents in January, but I haven’t seen you around until recently.”
I stir my chili nervously, occasionally holding a kidney bean under the surface to see if I’ll receive its distress signal. Predictably, the only distress signal I receive is my own. “Well, I just got back from You-Know-Where, as you know, and before that I was floundering my way through my freshman year of college.”
“As all freshmen do,” Bugg says knowingly and asks which college.
“Just a small school in Cambridge.”
She rolls her eyes. “I hate when people call it that. If you’re worried about being pretentious, go to a different school.” She looks at me. “Sorry, I can say that. I went to Brown and everyone always tried to pull that same shit: ‘Oh, just a small school in Providence.’”
“Really? You went to Brown?” I hope I don’t look surprised that a tutu-wearing, cigarette-smoking, low-key drug-dealing girl made it to an Ivy. “What year did you graduate?”
She makes a dismissive gesture with her hand, then scrapes the last of the chili into her mouth. “I never got around to graduating. Not that dropping out of a top-tier school is recommended. My parents sort of want to murder me, but only after they disown me.” She smiles, but there’s something in her face that isn’t smiling. “Luckily, they’re traveling this summer so I get their humble abode all to myself.” She grimaces as she looks around the kitchen, and I become aware of a faint burning smell.
“Do you smell that?” I’m always afraid that I’m making things up, which makes it very relieving when someone else is in on my reality.
“Yeah?” She hops off the stool and goes over to the stove. “Damn, I dropped a bean in the flame.” She turns off the gas and waves a towel up and down at the smoke alarm preemptively. The motion gives me a live-action cleavage shot and I find myself looking far longer than necessary at what is clearly a situation under control. The conversation turns back to Harvard, and I tell her the piece of The Plan that includes going to med school, becoming a surgeon, saving lives, making money, blah blah blah.
“So did you like it?” she asks, then points to my bowl and asks if I’m done.
“Yeah, it was delicious.”
“No, I mean Harvard.”
She takes our bowls to the sink, and for whatever reason I don’t feel I have to pretend with her. “No,” I finally say. “It was awful. Like, I was pretty disappointed when I was eleven and realized I was never going to Hogwarts, but Harvard was at least five hundred percent more disappointing than knowing I’m going to be a Muggle my whole life.”
She snorts. “Because everyone was an elitist asshat?”
“Sort of?” I start ripping my paper napkin into confetti. “I think it was more that I wasn’t good at any of the stuff I used to be good at, so studying wasn’t fun anymore. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get anything higher than a C.” It feels good to talk about something real with someone besides my therapist. Especially since I mostly lie to my therapist.
Bugg rinses the last dish and leans on the counter across from me, which brings up the cleavage issue again. “That’s the problem with being a high school all-star. You’re an addict for praise and good grades and all that bullshit. The second you stop getting them you go into withdrawals, and within six to ten weeks, you fall apart.”
I look at my sad pile of ripped-up napk
in, wishing I could reassemble it again, and continue. “Plus, living with roommates is total bullshit. They eat all your cereal, ask you nosy questions that you sometimes get drunk and answer, and if they hear you throwing up, like, one time, they tell your dean, who tells the school psychologist, who sends you off to treatment, like you’re crazy, which I’m not. I mean, a little angsty, sure, but—”
She reaches across the counter and puts her hand on my hand and we have a moment: skin-to-skin contact, eye-to-eye contact, and something else too.
The thing is, I like her. Like, I like hanging out with her.
I move my hand away before my cheeks give away my feelings. “Anyway, I’m rambling. Why did you drop out?”
“I want to be a poet, not another bullshit egomaniac who gets off on being a hamster on an expensive wheel. It made me sick watching everyone compete for consulting jobs, living in their own screwed-up world but pretending everything is great. No one wants to admit that we’re all there out of lucky circumstances. No one deserves to be there.”
“It’s not just luck,” I say defensively, though truthfully I spent the last year thinking they meant to let someone named Shmandelion Burpowitz in off the waitlist, but accidentally sent the letter to me instead.
Bugg chews her fingernails thoughtfully. “All I know is that it screws you up being in a place like that, and I’m plenty screwed up on my own.”
I study the squiggly tattoos on her wrists, wondering why anyone would go through the pain for nothing more than miscellaneous shapes.
“Since I was a kid all I wanted to do was go to an Ivy,” I tell her. “I guess after wanting something for so long it sucks to face the reality of it.”
“And what’s the reality of it?” She inches closer to me, or I’m hallucinating. Honestly, I don’t know which would be more petrifying.
“I don’t know, a clusterfuck of disappointment, confusion, guilt, and all the other shit emotions we aren’t tuned into enough to name.”
Love & Other Carnivorous Plants Page 6