Love & Other Carnivorous Plants

by Florence Gonsalves

  “Well, we can start now.”

  “What if I don’t want to be your friend?” I ask. This time the tears are presenting themselves on my lower eyelids but I have no consolation for them. There’s everything to be sad about.

  She gets out of the tub and dries herself off. When she turns around her face is blotchy and my mascara is running down her cheeks.

  “What about being Trappers?” I ask. “What about all the things we haven’t gotten to do yet?”

  “It’s postponed for a while,” she says, and I’m so upset I’m not consoled by what she says next. “Haven’t you heard that love is like a telephone? If you can’t answer it, you put it on hold for a second.”

  I should say something, I know I should say something, anything, but my brain is solidifying like bacon grease. I feel myself drifting into outer space. She leans over the tub and kisses me on the forehead, then walks out of my life in the six steps it takes her to cross the bathroom. When I no longer hear her receding footsteps, I touch the place where her lips were, half expecting to find a scar.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  That week, after doing a quick inventory, I realize I have nothing left. Nothing except my $600 hospital bill, which my parents fully expect me to pay them back for. In a way, a breakup is like a death but worse, because you could still technically touch the person, if only they’d let you. Even though Bugg texts me in a friendly way asking how I am, I ignore her because it’s too confusing to talk to ghosts. I spend the days drifting like a balloon that’s lost most of its helium, feeling very sorry for myself beneath the layer of emotional frostbite that’s numbed my entire system.

  I don’t bother looking for any more internship opportunities. My one self-imposed duty each day is to get fresh flowers to bring to Sara’s grave, which I buy at the supermarket with my parents’ credit card, except today I failed to do even that because I couldn’t choose between the baby’s breath (which, mind you, looks nothing like any exhalation I’ve ever seen) and the carnations, which were corny.

  This is why I’m in my room with a ski hat on, simulating the polar regions via the AC when I get a phone call and suddenly remember—of course, I’m not entirely alone in the world!

  “Stephen,” I say, probably too eagerly. “What’s up?”

  “Hey, how are you doing?”

  I picture him in scrubs walking to his car after a long shift as the most caring volunteer on earth. “Oh, you know,” I say, trying to silently unwrap a Twix bar so that I can rewrap it in prosciutto. “So-so.”

  “Well, hey, I don’t know if you have any plans tonight, but my parents decided to leave for a few days and I have this embarrassing fear of staying home overnight alone. So if you wanted to get away for a little while, I thought maybe you could come stay with me.” I mute the phone so I can take a bite. It’s too good to resist. “We have a guest bedroom,” he adds quickly, then, “Um, hello?”

  “Hi, sorry, I’m here,” I say after I’ve swallowed.

  “So what do you think?”

  I try to get a read on my body, but all the mechanisms that generally keep it functioning have entirely shut down due to the aforementioned emotional frostbite. Still, it’s not like I have anything to lose by going.

  “Yeah, okay. Let’s do it.” Then I add, “Like, let’s hang out.”

  He laughs. “I knew what you meant.”

  After we hang up I wait to feel something, but I’ve officially become Cardboard Cutout Danny. It’s pretty fine really, except who knew cardboard cutouts could be so hungry? When I tell my parents I’m going to see Stephen, they sound less than thrilled about it. I think they were planning to ground me or something after the hospital fiasco, but once I relate to them how hard it is to be in this town-slash-world without Sara, they take pity on me and let me go.

  “Don’t you look nice,” my mom says when I come into the living room. My lip is still swollen but I finally brushed my teeth and put on a little mascara. “Is this boy your boyfriend?”

  I don’t know why I do this, but I tell her, “Yes. Yes he is.” I guess I want something to be easy without needing any sort of long-winded explanation.

  “Well, good. You deserve something special in your life. It’s been such a hard few months.” She gathers the mail not so discreetly in front of me, where a letter from Harvard sits on top.

  “It has been hard, hasn’t it,” I say, kissing her on the cheek and deciding to ignore Harvard until later. “But Stephen is a wonderful…” I can’t decide if I should call him a boy or a man. Neither sounds right. “…guy? Well, see ya later!”

  “No drinking,” my mom calls, but I’m already out the door. Besides, I’m so hungover from my pity party last night (sponsored by Grey Goose) that I can’t even smell hand sanitizer without my stomach turning.

  In the car I play the country music Sara liked so much, which kind of makes me feel like she’s cheering me on. She’d been hoping for this for a while—it’s all she would talk about after she got drunk on my birthday—so I figure it’s the least I can do. You know, for Sara.

  An hour and a half later I pull up to the address Stephen gave me feeling a lot less confident than I’d been earlier. “Maybe he doesn’t even want to hook up with you,” I remind myself. “You’re not winning any beauty pageants over here.”

  I respond to myself in the visor mirror. “Yeah, but why else would he wait until his parents are gone to invite me over?”

  He comes out of the house, which forces me to stop second-guessing myself and to get out of the car. When he hugs me I notice that he smells weird, like sports deodorant—except Stephen doesn’t play sports. We at least have that in common.

  “What happened to your mouth?” he asks.

  “I fell in the shower. I’m so clumsy. Face-planted on the side of the tub. Who knew ceramic could be so dangerous, amirite?” I tug down my smock and try to figure out if it feels tighter than it did when summer started.

  “That’s terrible,” he says, leading me into the house and asking me to take my shoes off at the door. “Well, I made carrot soup for dinner, so hopefully it won’t hurt too much to eat. Don’t worry, it’s vegan,” he adds.

  “Oh, phew.” I kick my sandals off and smell my breath for hints of the cured pig parts I ate for lunch.

  Over some of the blandest soup I’ve ever tasted (like, if I put twigs in hose water it would’ve tasted better), Stephen and I talk Harvard stuff. I don’t mention that I have seventeen hours to register for classes or else I can’t come back in the fall. Instead I tell him I’m doing swimmingly, excited about my class selections and very eager to get a fresh start. By “fresh start” I mean I’m praying for a case of selective amnesia to wipe the last six months from my poor, tortured memory.

  “You must miss Sara,” Stephen says quietly, talking mostly into his soup. “It’s funny ’cause when she came to visit she was never who I would’ve pictured your best friend from home to be.”

  “Yeah.” I’m eager for the chance to put my spoon down and stop eating this orange sludge. “She’s not nerdy at all and I’m not athletic at all, but I think that’s what made us so close. We weren’t ever competing for the same things, so it was easy to want each other to slay shit.”

  Stephen finally looks up at me, but his thick eyebrows are furrowed together like he’s about to ask me for my kidney. “I’ve been curious about this,” he starts, and I hold my breath and nod. “Why did you guys fight when she came to visit?”

  I exhale with relief, not sure what exactly I thought he’d be asking, but this is easy enough. I stir circles into my soup that disappear each time another stroke interrupts the last swirl. “I guess on the surface it was about me ditching this plan we had and going to a different college than she did. It wouldn’t have stung so much if I’d gotten into Harvard when decisions first came out, but getting in off the waitlist after Sara and I had spent a whole month before graduation picking out furniture for our dorm room sucked. That and I was a mega asshole
about it and didn’t tell her for another whole month after I found out, which was shitty. I don’t know. I think we were both scared of being apart and growing up.” I rest my spoon down and the soup settles.

  “I’m still scared to grow up,” Stephen says, and I can tell he feels a little embarrassed talking about it. Our conversations are usually deep, but in a cellular sense: mitochondria, not mighty feelings.

  “Ditto, but I’ve basically hit pause on all that anyway. I think if I come back in the fall, I’ll still be a freshman.”

  “‘If’?”

  I curse him for being too perceptive for his own good. “I mean, ‘when,’” I correct myself quickly, but if I’m being honest with myself, that Freudian slip felt pretty damn good.

  “Do you even want to come back?”

  “Of course I want to come back. Harvard is one of the best colleges in the world. How could I not go back?” I’m looking at him too probingly. It’s not a rhetorical question. Maybe if he could give me a step-by-step response, I could consider not going back.

  He puts his sweaty boy hand on mine. “Well, I’m relieved to hear it. We’re going to have a great year together. Do you want to try this after-dinner drink I’ve been wanting to make?”

  I nod and the hot itchy feeling makes itself known in my stomach. I pray that the thought of alcohol hasn’t turned my face a light shade of green, but the alternative is to sit back while the hot itchiness takes over my body.

  Stephen takes a fancy bottle and two glasses from the dark wood chest in the corner of the dining room. While he fixes our fate I take in the chandelier and the wall of family photos. Each one proves time has passed and the smiling faces have aged some. It spooks me thinking there won’t be any new pictures of Sara to add to Janet and Cal’s wall collection.

  My thoughts are interrupted when Stephen hands me a glass of brown liquid that smells like it could tranquilize an elephant. “Here you go.”

  “I thought you were going to make, like, a martini sundae,” I say, trying to talk myself into this whole night.

  His face falls. “I’m sorry, I don’t think I have any chocolate liquor.”

  “Don’t apologize, I’m sure this is delicious.” I smell it again and my eyes nearly cross. “What is this exactly?” I take too big of a sip and my chest lights on fire.

  “Cognac.”

  “Delicious,” I pant. “Just delicious.”

  The silence feels charged, but only 12 percent sexually.

  “Want to go upstairs and listen to my dad’s old record player?” he finally asks. It’s better than listening to each other breathe, so I follow him upstairs. The only problem is that it feels like we’re on a second-grade play date, but with booze. I’m sure the choo-choo train wallpaper in his bedroom isn’t helping any sexy causes, but it’s more than that.

  Hope you’re happy, Spirit of Sara, I say in my head. It’s completely unfair that I can’t tell her about any of this. She would know how to make it hilarious. Stephen puts a song on the record player and I bob my head like every other terrible dancer trying to survive in the modern age. “This is my favorite song,” I say, downing the last of the elephant tranquilizer.

  “Is it really?”

  “No, I’ve never heard it before.” I like his face best when he smiles.

  “You’re hard to read, Danny.” He offers to refill my glass by holding up the entire bottle. I nod and he sits closer to me on the bed. I study the stubble of his beard and wonder how often he has to shave to keep it that length. “I never know when you’re telling the truth. Just when I think I’ve figured you out, you say something that throws me off entirely and I second-guess myself.” He tucks my hair behind my ear and I get goose bumps in spite of myself. “You’re my favorite mystery.”

  “I’m not a mystery.” I pretend to have an itch on my leg to avoid outwardly cringing at his rom-com-worthy line. “What you see is pretty much what you get.”

  “No, you’re complicated, maybe a little unavailable, but I know who you pretend to be and I think I know who you really are. I like you both ways.” If only I knew who I really was, then we’d be in business. He inches his hand toward my thigh. “And after Sara’s funeral, I knew I wasn’t imagining something between us.” Fluffernutters. “I wanted to kiss you then but it seemed wrong, and I want to kiss you now but I feel like it’s still wrong. Will it hurt your lip?”

  It’s undoubtedly shitty to have deliberately led him on while it was convenient for me, and while I don’t feel the sexual pull I feel toward Bugg toward Stephen, for the first time ever I do feel a little curious about him. This granule of curiosity probably has more to do with the elephant tranquilizer than with any legitimate sexual chemistry, but isn’t that why people drink in the first place? To enter a different kind of reality?

  “This is what I mean,” he says, and I watch his eyes move back and forth, trying to read me. “You’re being so quiet right now, but I know there’s a lot going on in there.” He taps my head like I’m a robot who’s been floundering around on earth only pretending to be human.

  “Try it anyway. Kiss me,” I finally say. Then recalling what Bugg said to me, I add, “If it hurts too much, the code word is ‘ouch.’” I close my eyes and he comes on a little too strong. “Ouch.”

  “Oops, sorry.”

  “How about a little less like you’re trying to break into my mouth. No offense,” I add, and it’s better the second time.

  I lie on top of him, which I hope doesn’t collapse his lungs (he’s kind of a skinny dude), and even though it’s sort of nice, I can’t stop thinking that my mouth is the same mouth that Bugg’s tongue touched, and the tongue in my mouth is the same tongue that touched Bugg’s mouth, except it’s also Stephen’s tongue and Stephen’s mouth, which makes it feel way too crowded here in my mouth.

  “Let me finish my drink so it doesn’t spill,” I say, even though the glass is safely on his nightstand.

  “I’ll have the rest of mine too.” He holds up his glass to me. “You don’t know how long I’ve wanted this. To us,” he says.

  Dear lord.

  “Cheers,” I say miserably. It goes down easier than it did at first. “How about one more? For good luck,” I offer.

  He grins. “I’ve never seen party-Danny before.”

  “What can I say?” Bugg’s voice floats into my head. “‘I contain multitudes.’”

  Everything that happens next happens very quickly, which is the nice thing about being drunk. It’s like existing in time-lapse. We finish our drinks, make out a bit, then try to, you know, do it. We give it such a valiant effort, we really do, but he doesn’t know how to touch me and the whole time I keep wondering what all the fuss about boys is. I haven’t been missing anything. One time in second grade I got strep throat and I couldn’t go to the zoo and Sara sat with Jenny Cho on the bus ride there and the bus ride back, and that still feels like a greater loss than not having done any sexy business with boys up until, well, this very instant.

  “Um.” I don’t think I’ve quit anything in my life, except maybe T-ball and my second semester at Harvard, but this won’t do. “Hey, Stephen,” I whisper, but he can’t hear me over his animal sounds. “STEPHEN.”

  “Shit, yes, what’s wrong? Are you okay, baby?”

  My body recoils. I hate how that word sounds in his mouth.

  “No, I’m not okay. Nothing about me is okay.” I try to blend in with the sheet as he rolls over. I talk to the thirty or so Stephen King books on his shelf to avoid having to look at him. “I’ve been seeing someone but then this person broke up with me and I thought that maybe if I gave you and me a shot, it would fix everything and we could, like, go to med school together and have a stethoscope-themed wedding, but now I think that was a bad idea. Not to freak you out,” I add. “But I had a lot of time to think things over in the past few pumps and, well…” I try to find an inoffensive spot on his body to make eye contact with, but his eyes are too hurt and the rest of him is just as naked.
“Look, I don’t want to do any more naked activities together. I have someone to do that with already, or at least I did, until she broke up with me, but I think I can fix that. Actually, I’m sure I can fix that.”

  And in my cognac haze it seems totally likely that if I clean my act up a bit, Bugg will be so inspired that she won’t have to go to treatment at all. She’ll come back and pick me up right where she left me, on the longest and loneliest metaphoric road.

  “‘She’?” Stephen asks, and he sounds all sorts of confused because I’m a drunk idiot who can’t even keep her own secrets a secret. Again. “You’ve been seeing a girl?”

  I feel my cheeks flush and then suddenly all the tears that have been playing hooky on me for the day show up at once. My eyes are barely big enough to hold them all.

  “Oh, shit, Danny, why are you crying?” he asks, sitting up and awkwardly patting my head.

  “It’s not you,” I wail. “It’s everything.” I pull the sheet up around my chin. It smells like Cheer, but I’m too upset to laugh at the irony. “I went to college with a very clear idea about who I was. But then life went and bulldozed my entire plan, and now I’m standing in the dirt without a single slab of sorry cement under me. Do you know how scary the bulldozed place is, Stephen?”

  He pats my head harder, and it gets kind of annoying.

  “I have no foundation anymore. And I really wish we would both put our clothes back on.”

  He sighs, so I scramble to collect our dignity and then we sit side by side on the bed together, but not in a sexy way at all this time.

  “Well, do you want to tell me about her?” he asks, but he doesn’t sound that pleased about it.

  He gets up, pours another drink, downs it in a mouthful, and makes a face. I wonder how much he hates me.

  “Her name is Bugg.” Even though he probably doesn’t want to hear this at all, I have to say it out loud to keep her real. I could tell him that she went to Brown, but it doesn’t define her the way it defines everyone else who goes to schools like that, how she’s the type of girl who can’t disconnect one type of wanting from all the others. When she craves a piece of gum it could easily become an afternoon of making out upside down on her bed, or smoking a cigarette or eating potato chips because all the things she wants at any given time extend like a cord from her deepest center, but aren’t really about the thing at all, if that makes sense. She’s just a wanting type of person, exactly everything I couldn’t imagine letting myself be.