by Tim Federle
Like, this is just a professional work obligation. It’s not even an official hangout.
Anyhoo, some days you’re a freshman in high school, and though the world is a bubble of suck, inside the bubble you’ve made something rare and beautiful. The downside being: At any moment it could collapse.
Jordan calls me while Ben is in the fitting room in the men’s room at American Eagle. Ben comes out to show off a little, but none of the pants really work on him. He’s got kind of strange (but cute) legs that are short but paired with a long (and cute) upper body, which I swear I’d never noticed before this.
The semi-helpful checkout lady—a mom-type working at the mall while her kid is at college, I bet—offers to find Ben “the exact right pants,” and then calls him “sir,” which makes us laugh. He’s thirsty after biking over here from school, says he’s going to go get a Coke, and asks if I want anything, but I’m like, Nah.
But I’m checking my texts, and Jordan’s sent a bunch of “why aren’t you picking up?”s when I hear Ben yell, “Diet Root Beer?” from outside the store, and I shout back: “How did you know I love that stuff?” and he goes, “I know things,” and smirks, and it’s a pretty good moment.
My hand vibrates, or my phone does in it, I should say. So this time I pull myself into the girls’ short-shorts section, and pick up—just in case Jordan has, like, an emergency hernia or something. “Jordy,” I say over FaceTime, “whaddup.”
“I hear your musical is amazing. Like it’s literally gotten back to me on the set.”
“You’re kidding, how?”
“Details, details,” he says. “Just a sec!” he yells off-camera. “Interview,” he explains with an eye roll.
“I’d love to be interviewed for something,” I say. “Sounds genuinely and not ironically fun.”
“It’s overrated, and all your stories are canned beforehand. Like, the publicist made me memorize a funny story. It’s all fake to promote the project.”
Ben’s already back, or almost back; I see him, across the corridor that American Eagle shares with an Auntie Anne’s Pretzels, doing my entire cast’s inside-joke dance move, just to make me laugh.
He hauls our giant drinks back across the corridor, toward me, and Jordan goes, “What’s so funny?”
But I do a You wouldn’t get it shake of my head.
Because I’ve got a whole other kind of humor with Ben.
With Ben, I’m goofy, I’m a leader, I’m the person giving him the answers. We giggle at stupid stuff.
With Jordan I’m the understudy who’s lucky if the lead calls out of work sick.
It’s a dynamic we never totally got used to, or recovered from. If Jordan was at work, he was onstage. If I was onstage playing his part, he was home.
“C’mon, tell me,” Jordan says, at the same time that Ben swears a pretty bad word, and spills his Coke all over the girls’ fake-fur hoodies at the front of the store, which should buy me a second.
And so for reasons I can’t explain, I get up the courage to say something I’ve never said to Jordan.
“Jordan—” Here goes. I’m going to ask him if he loves me. Crazy, right? I’m feeling crazy. Or like I have to know. “Do you—”
“Hold that thought. Listen: My manager’s nephew’s college roommate still lives in Pittsburgh.”
“Wait, is this story going to involve math? I’m already confused.”
I hate family trees, because when I tried to do mine for a sixth-grade project, I discovered that my parents were so deeply incurious about their own pasts that I ended up telling half the class I was related to royalty and the other half I was an adopted orphan.
“The point about my manager’s nephew’s college guy,” Jordan says—rare, a Jordan story with a point!—“is that he’s a producer, did some stuff for the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, once helped get Patti LuPone to do a very famous concert downtown, before you were born.”
As if Jordan and I aren’t the same age, by the way.
“Okay?”
“And I’m sending him to see your show. That’s how good I heard it is.”
“Wait,” I say. “So many things.”
The nice lady in the store is helping Ben sop up the spilled soda. Ben is the type of kid who sticks around to help people.
I glance at one of those human-length clothing-store mirrors and realize I don’t hate my outfit, for once. Usually I hate at least three things about myself. “Where are you hearing my show is so good?”
“Some of your cast are posting videos and, like, live-streaming rehearsals,” he explains.
It’s Ben. It’s Ben who’s doing this, I know this, because he wants to maybe be a cinematographer when he grows up, he told me. But I cover, to Jordan, with: “And I don’t know about this!”
“Well, you’re busy being a fancy-pants director,” Jordan says, just as the helper-lady is taking another load of pants off to the dressing room Ben was using.
“Your friend is just helping me mop up the spill,” she says to me in passing. “I said, You don’t have to! But he insisted.”
“What friend?” Jordan says. “Are you . . . in a women’s clothing section? If you’re doing drag without me, I’ll kill you.”
I look at my outfit again and poof! Like an insane person, I realize I actually hate my hair, and that my shoes are like a billion years old.
“A kid from school. From English. From my English class.”
Jordan side-eyes me, turns to address somebody off-screen, and says, “As always, I gotta run. Anyway, was just trying to share a compliment! That’s the only reason I called!”
Ben is back. He hands me my drink. “Sorry it’s all sticky,” he says. “There was an incident.”
I’m not thirsty at all, but I’m definitely hungry. Maybe a Food Court stop is in order.
“The pants fairy arrived!” he says, leading me back to the changing room.
I murmur, “Hey, who are you calling a pants fairy,” but he’s already in there, trying on another pair, and doesn’t hear me.
He swings the door back open and steps out. “I think these are the ones.”
Maverick Boys
It’s the kind of Friday night where I just want to have Netflix on in the background while I’m watching live Idina Menzel concert videos on my phone, but that’s not the Friday night it ends up being.
Instead Libby invites me over with a cryptic text: “come over now don’t ask questions”
And nineteen minutes later: “Eat one of these, trust me,” Libby says after I arrive breathless and curious. She sets down my favorite food group (lemon squares) on a tray, and she doesn’t even make a fuss or give a warning about not getting powdered sugar on her rug. Because that’s the kind of mom she has. Chill.
“Why do I feel like you’re about to deliver bad news?” I say, but she’s silent and puts down a hot cocoa next to the lemon square, and my stomach is in a civil war of tension and desire.
“Here,” she says, and holds her phone up in front of my face. “Watch this.”
“An . . . ad for a new car?”
“Ugh, hold on,” she says, and skips the ad, and then I see it.
“Jordan,” I say. Or, I see him, I should say. Though lately, he’s been feeling like more of an it than a him. Like a faraway concept instead of an actual verifiable thing, like how nobody knows if the Aurora Borealis is even real.
“Wait for it,” Libby says.
He’s sitting for the interview that he was prepping for earlier. I know right away because he’s in the shirt he was wearing when he and I FaceTimed at the mall, right before Ben found the perfect pants.
“So, congrats on making your TV debut,” the host says to Jordan. Who looks so comfortable and bright.
“It’s such a blast!” he says, which makes the audience laugh as if it was funny. “There’s so much free food on set!”
And he pats his stomach like he’s Santa even though he has the metabolism of a rabbit.
I re
ach out and eat an entire lemon square in two bites.
“Yeah, you’ve really let yourself go, I can tell,” the host says, and the audience cracks up like there’s a giant blinking sign that says L-A-U-G-H, which there probably is.
“Anyway, I got my start in the theater, but it’s so fun to get a second shot at a hard scene,” Jordan says, and the host goes, “I don’t get it, what do you mean,” and Jordan says, “On Broadway, you only get to do it once and the scene just moves on. On ‘Mav’—sorry, ‘Maverick Boys’ ”—the name of the series—“if the tears don’t come, you get to do it over and over again.”
The host pretends to cry and Jordan improvises and goes, “Cut! Do it again!” and Libby and I both snort at the very same time, and a little bit of lemon square gets stuck in my throat.
“It must be hard, balancing school and work as a thirteen-year-old,” the host says, and I go, “He’s fourteen!” and when Jordan doesn’t correct him, Libby pauses the video.
“So . . . that isn’t the only lie the kid spouts,” she says.
I burn my tongue on cocoa and Libby hits Play again.
“Well, yeah,” Jordan says, swallowing hard. “Honestly, my big secret is that my girlfriend lets me copy her homework.”
Actually, no. All he gets out is: “My girlfriend lets me copy her home—”
And then the video stops, buffering, caught in Jordan’s lie.
The spinny wheel of death just turns and turns, gripping my chest shut like a vise, and Libby and I are as quiet as quiet gets.
I’m still choking on the lemon square, and my tongue is still throbbing with burnt-ness, when Jordan texts me: “so did you get my voicemail??”
Which is . . . new. We never leave voicemails for each other. What are we, thirty? I open up my mailbox and see his three-minute-long message, and press Play and then Speaker.
“Before you see the interview I just gave,” he’s saying, fast as heck, “just in case it goes viral or it posted online before we FaceTime: I just want to warn you that I say a mild white lie in it. Which my agent insisted I say! And . . . like, it’s not personal at all. And . . . just call me back so I can explain! Oh, it’s Jordy, by the way. Okay. I guess I just hang up? It’s been literally six months since I’ve called someone. There’s actually a rule on-set that we’re not allowed to speak on our phones! There are so many rules at a TV show, you literally wouldn’t believe it. It’s like: Are you kidding me? Anyway. Okay, FaceTime me. Bye.”
And then it’s muffled, but it takes the kid like twenty seconds to figure out how to hang up, and there is swearing involved. Finally, after a brief silence:
“Text him the middle-finger emoji!” Libby says. “Seriously.”
No. Not that one. I’m scrolling through all the emojis, trying to figure out the exact right response—the poop emoji, the broken-heart emoji, maybe a taco just to confuse him. But I power my phone off instead.
“Show me the interview again,” I say to Libby. I hear my own voice darken, and I hate it. Like, it’s the moment in those superhero movies that my dad randomly loves, when the bad guy gets badder.
“Nope,” she says. “No more upsetting video content. You’re cut off from everything but lemon squares.”
I step off her bed. “I have to pee,” I say.
“Are you mad at me, for showing you?”
“No.”
“Then why do you seem mad?”
“Because I am mad! Because Jordan is telling people he has a girlfriend. Because I was just erased from his life history, which is so much more interesting than my life history, and now doesn’t even include me!”
“Well, I’m part of your life history,” Libby says, just as I’m slamming the door to her bedroom. (She has her own bathroom attached to her bedroom, and she doesn’t even have to share it, if you can believe some kids are that fortunate.)
I turn on Libby’s hair dryer because her overhead fan is broken and I hate when girls hear me pee. And when I’m done, I’m seeing my reflection in the toilet water like the world’s worst wishing well. And then, whoops, it’s raining, or I’m crying.
“Natey,” Libby says, soft, through the door, once I’ve turned the blow dryer off and splashed water through my hair and tried to pull together my look a little bit. (Fail.)
“What.”
“My mom has a whole other batch of lemon squares downstairs.” She clears her throat the way she always does before she gets louder. (Terrible vocal technique.) “And apparently this batch has a little essence of lime in it too, because Mom is experimenting in the kitchen these days, like she’s the Ina Garten of Pennsylvania.”
I swing the door open and cross my arms and pout.
“There’s that smile I love,” Libby says. This time we hug full body-to-body, like the old days. None of this too-cool side-hugging.
“I hate him,” I say.
“Nobody likes being erased,” she goes.
We rock each other like her room has a breeze, and we’re a couple of trees whose only roots are each other, or something.
My Whole Life Is a Word Search
Yeah, it turned into a sleepover, as so many things do when they cross the critical 2 a.m. mark.
And so the next morning before rehearsal, I stop at home to get my water bottle, because I still believe in the power of recycling. It’s my E.T. bottle, and sometimes I wonder if that looks like showing off, to my cast—who don’t even get their own swag for Great (which is what we call Great Expectations for short, even though I wanted to call it G.E. as an homage to E.T.).
Mom is in the kitchen hovering over her financial ledger for Flora’s Floras, my family’s flower shop that specializes in affordable displays for all your funeral needs. Look us up.
“Natey, if I have one piece of advice for you,” Mom says as I’m pouring Sunny D into my water bottle—because apparently I do drink my calories when under stress—“it’s: Don’t ever own a small business.”
“Got it,” I say.
She closes the book and lays her head down on it.
I run up to my room, two steps at a time, and spritz a respectable amount of Axe all over my T-shirt and pants, and then a little more on my T-shirt, and then a whiff more on my hair to be sure I’ve covered the bases.
And then I power my phone back on from Libby’s place, and you guessed it: Jordan has just texted me a bunch of question marks and then a frowny face and then a sobbing face, all from last night.
And I just can’t.
“Mom?” I say, back in the kitchen, a halo of Axe following me.
“It’s fine,” she says.
“What is?”
“Are you asking if you can sleep over at Libby’s again tonight? It’s fine. I know her house is more fun than ours.”
I pull up the chair that Feather used to chew on as a baby dog. It’s so honest and true, what Mom just said, that I don’t know how to spin away from it. Some families’ houses are just a lot more fun than others’.
“No, I wasn’t going to ask that. And this house is plenty chill. You finally got us Netflix and Hulu.”
She laughs and sloshes the coffee around in her mug like it’s a fine wine, the way Libby’s mom does in their kitchen. My mom doesn’t “do” wine anymore, she does cold coffee and Diet Coke by the half gallon. Like Ben’s mom, I bet.
My phone buzzes again and Jordan is texting: “I didn’t mean to make you feel bad. That’s all I can say.”
“What is it?” Mom says, and elbows me but in a sweet way.
“I was just going to ask you if Dad has ever, like, hurt your feelings, and how did you forgive him?”
She makes an over-the-top clown face like she’s Olaf in Frozen—but the stage adaptation, obviously, not the movie. “What are you talking about?” she says. “Are you pulling my chain?”
I instantly regret asking for any version of relationship advice. I can feel and hear my phone ring in my pocket again, the buzzing, and I silence it, fast and nervous. And she catches on to me
, I guess. Whenever a boy acts quick like a jackrabbit, he’s hiding something.
“Ah, someone special?” she says.
My face skin gets so prickly that maybe I’m growing my first-ever mustache.
“No,” I say, “I don’t know, maybe, how-do-I . . .” But I trail off, like my whole life is a word search.
“Yeah, your dad hurts my feelings sometimes, but I guess I hurt his too.”
“Like on purpose?”
“Nah, just being people.” She taps the pen against her books. She’s got ink all over her hand. She used to be so pulled together in the old days.
“Natey, is there something you want to tell me?” The way she says it, all angular and consonant-full, sounds translated from German.
Yes, so badly. “Nah.”
“You can always tell me anything, as long as it won’t give me a heart attack.”
She goes to kiss my head, but I pull away, and toss the empty Sunny D bottle into the garbage can, and miss by a half mile. It ricochets against the kitchen counters and almost spins into Feather’s tail.
“Can you believe Anthony and me are related?” I say, picking the bottle up, placing it in the recycling bin. “Can you believe we share the same DNA?” That kid can dunk hoops in his sleep, blindfolded.
“I love you both equal,” Mom says, in a hoarse morning whisper. And before I leave for rehearsal, she goes, “Drinking your calories again, I see.” And I say, “I started realizing I wasn’t sure who I was staying in such good shape for,” and she grunt-laughs and lifts her mug and says, “Hear-hear,” and blows me a kiss, which I catch, because nobody’s watching.
I’m on the lawn, on my bike, waiting for Ben, when Mom texts me, “Have a good last rehearsal Natey,” and I text her back the thumbs-up emoji, but don’t send it yet. Because she’s still typing. Typing something new, as a follow-up.
I see the text bubbles pop up, then erase, then bubble again. A classic teen move that Mom has never pulled on me.