by Ariel Kaplan
“It’s okay,” I said.
“I think there’s leftovers,” she said.
Leftover glop, she meant. “Sure,” I said. “That sounds great.”
I pulled the glop out of the refrigerator. I pulled the tinfoil off the bowl. I pulled out my phone and took a picture, then texted it to Nate.
Save me, my text said.
What IS that?
Dinner, unless you help me. Please help me.
What’s in it?
It’s leftovers of leftovers. I’m not really sure.
Maybe you should learn to cook.
I’ll get right on that.
I’ll give you dinner, he said, if you read my government paper for me.
That was due yesterday!
Look, do you want real food or not?
I’ll do it. Please hurry. I think it just moved.
* * *
—
Nate picked me up half an hour later, and we dug around in his kitchen for leftovers because his parents were at some kind of benefit dinner. Nate’s sister was sleeping over at a friend’s house, and Nate had been left to feed himself. Fortunately, he was pretty good at that.
“I can’t believe I came all the way to your house to eat your leftovers instead of my leftovers.”
“I can take you back,” he said. “You can still have the gloop.”
“Glop.” I took out a bowl. “What’s this one?”
“Baked ziti, I think.”
“How old?” I asked, peeling back the edge of the saran wrap.
“Two days.”
“Oh. Good. That’s safe.” I handed him the bowl, and he stuck it in the microwave. Just as it beeped, the front door opened, and in walked Nate’s parents, his mother in a woman-of-a-certain-age burgundy dress with a matching jacket, and his father in the black suit he wore when a tux was too formal but a regular suit was too casual. His dad was on the phone and disappeared into the other room, giving us a friendly smile and a wave.
“Your grandmother called,” Nate’s mother said, kissing him on the cheek. “Hello, Mischa.”
“Hi, Ms. Miller.”
“How is Grandma?” Nate asked.
“Old,” she said. “She’s had him on the phone for forty minutes. I think she’s moved on from talking about disinheriting your uncle to complaining about her health.”
“Is she sick?” Nate asked.
“No,” she said flatly.
“How was your dinner?” I asked.
Ms. Miller rolled her eyes. “Oh, Mischa. I don’t even know why we go to these banquets; it’s like they’re all being catered by cooking-school dropouts. If it’s not covered with a balsamic reduction, it’s a raspberry glaze, because no one can eat dinner anymore unless it’s coated with sugar. Is this filet mignon or a piece of pie? Honestly, it’s all just so jejune.” She put her doggie bag down on the counter, because I guess jejune leftovers are better than no leftovers.
Jejune, Nate mouthed at me. I smothered a grin in my hand. “Have you considered,” Nate said to his mother, “that it isn’t an apple confit you’re eating, but a jar of Gerber? Maybe next time you should wear a bib.”
“Don’t be absurd,” she said, ruffling his hair.
Absurd, he mouthed, but his mother had already left the kitchen, either to change out of her dress or to try to save her husband from the never-ending phone call.
“Five months,” Nate said. “I will be in Atlanta in five months.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m sure they’ll visit.”
“Yes. I’m sure they will.” He laughed. “There is not enough medication in the whole world to get me through Parents’ Weekend.”
“Now you’re being absurd,” I said. Then: “Medication?”
He gave me a look.
“You’re not taking medication,” I said, followed by, “are you?” Probably this is the kind of thing I should have known after four years of friendship. But it’s not like I make a habit of raiding people’s medicine cabinets. That would be rude. And jejune.
“Well, I was,” he said. “Quite a bit of it.”
I hesitated, because sometimes I can’t tell when Nate is joking and when he’s being serious. “Really?”
“Yeah. I was. You know, antidepressants. For about two years.”
“Oh,” I said. “I didn’t know that.” I knew he was in therapy, but I didn’t know he’d been taking antidepressants. And I didn’t realize you could start taking antidepressants and then stop….I kind of figured once you were on them, you had to stay on them forever.
There wasn’t a whole lot I knew about Nate from the period before we’d met. I knew he’d been a crazy-successful student, which was how he’d gotten into Blanchard in the first place. I knew he used to play soccer. I knew he quit both of those things because he’d had some kind of a burnout that he never, ever talked about, but that other people had talked about in hushed tones freshman year.
“Mischa,” he said. “It’s not like you never heard this story.”
I shrugged. “I heard some rumors, but I tried not to pay too much attention to them.”
“Why? Weren’t you curious?”
“I guess. But satisfying my curiosity by listening to a bunch of gossip seems pretty cheap.”
He slung an arm over my shoulder. “This is why you’re my favorite,” he said. “But you’re wondering now, right?”
“I—I guess.”
He smoothed his hair out of his face. “Okay. I had a breakdown when I was fourteen.” He laughed. “It was awesome.”
This was kind of in line with what I’d already heard. “That doesn’t sound particularly funny.”
“It wasn’t, at the time. Well, maybe it kind of was. Who has a breakdown when they’re fourteen?”
“What happened?”
“Combination of things, I guess. School. Soccer. Parents.” He picked up a napkin from the tray on the counter and started tearing it into tiny little pieces.
“You sometimes like boys,” I added.
“You know,” he said thoughtfully, his hands going still, “you’d think that would have contributed, but oddly enough, no one ever cared about that.”
“Nobody?”
“Well, Grandma thought it was a phase. She still thinks it’s a phase. If I marry a man, she’ll show up at the wedding, stand up to make a toast, and say, ‘Joseph is a lovely man, and I’m so very happy for my delightful grandson, who is both a prince and the apple of my eye. This is, however, a phase.’ ”
“And if you marry a woman?”
“Well, she’ll just take that as proof she was right.”
“How much does that bother you?”
“On a scale of one to ten? Like a two. Midway between a sigh and an eye roll.”
“That’s not so bad, I guess.”
“Yeah, that really wasn’t the problem. It was just, I went from school to soccer practice, to homework, to sleep. Day after day after day. I got really tired. I had a stomachache all the time. I stopped eating.”
“That must have freaked out your parents.”
“They didn’t really notice.”
“They didn’t notice? You eat like a linebacker.”
“So anyway, that spring my travel team was in the regional finals. And we lost by one point.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah,” he said. “And I started crying. Like, little-kid crying. The loud, ugly kind.”
“I mean, that sounds normal.”
“Crying for fifteen minutes would have been normal. But I couldn’t stop. It was like once I started, I couldn’t find the off switch.” He looked away sharply, and I was really sorry I’d asked. This was something that had hurt him. That still hurt him.
“I get it,” I said. “You don’t have
to say any more.”
“I didn’t even tell you the good part yet.”
It didn’t sound like this story had a good part, but I said, “Okay. So you cried.”
“I cried for four hours. My parents started yelling at me for ‘attention seeking.’ And then I started hyperventilating. And then I passed out.” He flung the wadded-up napkin onto the table. “About an eighth-grade soccer game. I cried until I passed out about an eighth-grade soccer game. I didn’t cry that much when my grandfather died.”
“It wasn’t about the soccer game.”
He shrugged. “It wasn’t. And it was. I don’t know.” He rubbed his eyes. “They took me to this place called Meadow House. It’s like, inpatient psych care for teenagers. I stayed there a month.”
“A month?”
“Yeah. I was on a whole cocktail of drugs. Antidepressants, antianxiety stuff. Something to make me sleep at night. Lots of therapy.” He smiled a little wanly. “They didn’t want to put me in with the kids there for drugs, so my therapy group was me and four kids with eating disorders.”
I tried to imagine a younger Nate, without his easy smile, all alone in a place full of kids too sick to be at home. I wondered if any of his friends had come to visit. I wondered if he’d even wanted them to. Maybe once you hit a place that low, you just want to be alone so you don’t have to pretend anymore. I grabbed his pinky finger into my fist and squeezed it, which made him smile, just barely, without looking at me. His eyes were on our hands.
“But you got better,” I said.
“I did. Mostly I realized that if I didn’t start setting boundaries with people, my life was going to be hell.” He turned to look at me and ran a finger over my forehead, smoothing the wrinkles there. “You’re frowning.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry that happened to you.”
I wondered at what point in the process the Millers had started funneling Nate’s sister into travel softball and extra tutoring and twice-weekly clarinet lessons, if it had been before Nate’s breakdown or after. I wondered if he’d burned out, and his parents had taken all that energy and moved it to her, just like that. Like they had a very specific amount of mental and physical energy to apply to child-rearing, and they weren’t going to waste it on the kid who wasn’t going anywhere. The situation put me in mind of locusts, devouring a field and then, once everything was gone, moving on to the next. They’d used Nate all the way up.
Or maybe he was just letting them think they had.
“Also,” I said, “I’m just thinking that I was an odd friend for you to pick.”
“You are a little odd, it’s true.”
I elbowed him in the gut. “I mean, if you were looking to break from your overachieving past.”
“Not really. You’re kind of wonky with the studying and stuff, but that’s you. You don’t care about what I do. I could flunk all my classes, and I don’t think you’d even notice.”
“Of course I’d notice!” I protested.
“I didn’t mean it in a bad way. It’s just like, if I ask for help, you help. And if I don’t ask for help, you don’t help.”
“You say that like that’s not what everyone does.”
He laughed at me. “Mischa, that isn’t what everyone does, trust me.” He reached over and picked up the bag of his parents’ leftovers. “Did you still want the ziti, or did you want to try the jejune steak?”
“Oh,” I said. “The ziti, I think,” but he’d already grabbed a fork and was eating out of the white paper box.
“Wow,” he said. “I can’t believe it. My mother was right.”
“It’s bad?”
He held out the fork, and I took a bite. “Ergh,” I said. I stuck my face into the sink and drank some water out of the tap while he laughed. “What is that? Candied meat?”
Nate’s mother had come back into the kitchen and said, “I told you. You laughed, but I told you.”
“Yes, Mom,” Nate said, giving her a one-armed hug and a kiss on the cheek. “You told us.”
On Monday morning I had to go to the dentist.
I lay back in the chair for forty minutes while the hygienist yelled at me for inadequate flossing and I stared at a poster of a beach on the ceiling.
“Open wider,” she said, and I obliged as she attempted to extract either a chunk of tartar or my eternal soul from between my molars. Whatever it was, it wasn’t coming out.
“You need to take better care of your teeth,” she said.
“I rush wice a ray,” I mumbled around the metal implement of death.
“You should try an electric brush,” she said. “We sell them here. Forty bucks and they come with an extra brush head.” She leaned into my gums, and something gave way. “There we go.”
“Ow,” I said.
“You’re fine.”
“I’n reeding.”
“You’re fine.”
Two pints of blood later, I got to school just as lunch was starting. I walked into the cafeteria, where Jim was sitting at the table under the window with Caroline, Mark, and Molly St. Andrews. I thought about taking my tray out into the hallway, when Jim beckoned me over.
As I approached, their conversation stalled. I found myself staring, not at their faces, but at their shirts.
I realized, belatedly, that this was College Sweatshirt Day. I’d gotten an email reminder about it last week and deleted it. Every senior in the dining hall had their selected school emblazoned on their chest like Superman’s family crest—the thing everyone thinks is an S but isn’t an S because…I don’t know. It’s just not an S. Anyway, every person had some kind of trademarked logo on their torso, except me.
The good people of table three stared at my blank chest. Jim cleared his throat. “You want to sit, Vicious?” he asked.
“Don’t call her that,” Caroline hissed.
“What?” he asked.
“Get a clue,” she whispered.
I blinked at both of them, because this made no sense. So I didn’t have a sweatshirt on. So what?
“It’s okay,” I said. Jim had, in fact, never, to my face, used my real name, not since we were in class together freshman year and our English teacher butchered my last name taking the roll. But he always said it with this tiny little smile, like it was our private joke, that made it charming instead of mean.
Jim pushed out the chair in front of me with his foot. “Grab a seat, Mischa,” he said.
I closed my eyes. I sat down, because people were already starting to stare at me.
Last year Dina Myer’s father had a heart attack. He was in the ICU for days before he finally pulled through. He’s fine now, so far as I know, except that he spends all his free time at some yoga studio, presumably assuming the corpse pose and trying really hard not to overidentify. Anyway, everyone in our class walked on eggshells around her for weeks, because her dad was (hypothetically) dying, and no one knew what might make her burst into tears. That’s how everyone was looking at me. Like someone was dying.
Jim and Caroline were holding hands. Were they together? I wondered when that had happened and how I hadn’t known. Admittedly, I had been pretty distracted lately.
Or maybe they’d been together six months, and I hadn’t even noticed. Was that possible?
“Hey,” I said. “You guys are…”
They glanced at each other, at me, with eyes full of…what? Pity?
“The meatloaf looks great today!” I said way too loudly.
“It’s shepherd’s pie,” Mark said quietly.
“Oh,” I said. “Right. The potatoes.”
“To be fair,” Jim said, “meatloaf is usually served with potatoes, too. I kind of thought it was meatloaf at first.”
“Yeah,” Caroline agreed. “It does have that kind of look, doesn’t it? It’s very, you know. Meaty.”
“So,” Caroline said. “Mischa, you know, my step-cousin went to Revere. He really liked it.”
I stalled with my shepherd’s pie an inch from my mouth. “Revere?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “They have a really good internship program.”
Had I mentioned Revere to anyone? Besides Nate. And the Ophelias. And my mother. My mother. My mother had run into Meredith at the mall. My mother had told Meredith I was going to Revere.
Meredith effing Dorsay.
I considered telling them I wasn’t going to Revere, but what was I going to say? I was going no place? Wasn’t that worse? At least this way my mother wasn’t going to hear I had no acceptances at all from someone else. I suddenly understood the way everyone was looking at me. It wasn’t just pity; it was also fear. And it’s not like I didn’t understand why I was scary. I was a reminder of how precarious everything was for all of us. Our lives were like a very neatly ordered stack of dominos, precisely lined up. But you pull one out, and the whole system goes haywire. There’s no margin for error. None at all.
Inside my pocket my phone buzzed, and I pulled it out.
It was a text from Emily. It said: This is your rescue call.
I looked around but didn’t see her. Where are you? I texted back.
Hallway, she replied, and I craned my neck to look out. Emily was leaning against the door frame, her keys dangling from one hand. She raised her eyebrows at me before typing something else into her phone.
Are you coming?
I got up and grabbed my tray. “I just remembered: I’m meeting Ms. Wentworth in ten minutes,” I said. “I should get over there.”
No one said a word. They just watched me leave the table.
As I crossed in front of where Meredith Dorsay was sitting, someone—I’m not sure who—very loudly went cough-cough-cough “SAFETY SCHOOL,” and the entire table erupted in laughter.
“Oh, grow up!” Caroline shouted from the other side of the cafeteria. But I just hunched my shoulders and kept walking.
Emily fell in next to me as I passed her. “That looked fairly painful,” she said.