So Glad to Meet You

by Lisa Super

  An ultimatum. Oliver had never received an ultimatum this early into a nonrelationship. He nodded, impressed. “That’s fair.”

  She crossed her arms under her chest. “How is it fair?”

  “Uh, because you said it was.”

  “I never said it was fair. I want you to be my boyfriend.”

  She knew what she wanted and was saying it out loud. Oliver showed his gratitude by placing his hands on her thighs. “And I said I couldn’t be your boyfriend, so you said we couldn’t have sex, and I said that was fair.”

  “Thanks for the recap.” She climbed off him and yanked her shirt back on.

  “Why are you upset?” He genuinely wanted to know.

  “You know why I’m upset.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  In some ways, girls were still a science experiment to him. He wanted to understand the workings of their minds on a theoretical level. He wanted to become a master, a black belt in women. Earning that piece of cloth might be his key to figuring out the universe.

  Katrina sighed and sank into the sofa facing him. “We should be together. As a couple. You should be mine. And I should be yours.”

  “But we can still be that. We’re exclusive. I’m faithful to you and you alone.”

  “Then why can’t you be my boyfriend?”

  He scratched at a tingle in his chin. “Because it’s a word I don’t like. I have my reasons.”

  “What reasons?”

  “Jason,” he said.

  “You don’t have to explain. I get it,” Katrina said.

  The mere mention of Jason won every argument. When Oliver said his brother’s name, he attached no emotion to it. Yet, for whoever listened, guilt and anguish always harmonized in its two syllables.

  Oliver and Katrina nodded at each other in understanding. For the time being, they would both get what they wanted, until she needed more. Oliver stood up. “I should probably go.”

  “Okay.” Katrina leaned over and kissed him, sucking on his lower lip as she pulled away.

  He gathered himself, touched his quads to make sure his legs could carry him. “Pick you up before school?”

  She grinned, breaking her seductress façade. Something even more stunning shined through the cracks. “Yeah. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Oliver limped out the front door blue-balled, anxious, and pleased. He couldn’t tell which sensation outweighed the other two. Driving home, the testosterone and pleasure faded, and only the anxiety remained. He’d thought about Jason twice in a single conversation without his parents’ prompting. These statistics were troublesome.

  At the dinner table half an hour later, the Jason percentage increased as predicted.

  “I was going through Jason’s box today, and I found a note that he left on our car one morning.” Oliver’s mom pulled out the crayon scrawl on green construction paper, cut into the points of a star. “Dear Mom, have a god day. A god day. He forgot an o,” she cooed.

  “Maybe he’s hinting that we should go to Mass.” Oliver’s dad matched her tenderness and scratched a sentimental itch in his salt and pepper beard.

  Jason had died when Oliver was eleven, but not a day passed that Jason wasn’t mentioned in the Pagano household, revered as the most perfect son that ever existed. Jason, who had taken his first steps before any of the other children his age. Jason, who had gotten straight A’s on every report card since kindergarten. Jason, who had written the most thoughtful Christmas and birthday cards every year and always delivered them early.

  Oliver resented that his parents never once mentioned that this perfect child had also permanently wounded them, twisting the invisible knife so the hole would never heal. And Jason didn’t even have to stick around to watch the suffering. Not that Oliver considered his brother to be lucky, but it wasn’t fair that his parents only spoke of Jason’s great accomplishments and his kind and beautiful and pure soul. The way Oliver saw it, Jason, a questionable soul, had made a series of unkind and not beautiful decisions that couldn’t be undone. It would’ve gone a long way with Oliver for them to mention this, even once.

  Oliver took a deep breath and opened his mouth, ready to enlighten his parents. But the bright tears ready to fall from his mother’s eyes sabotaged him. He panned across the table to his father’s flush of pride and twitching nose. The sadness was all right there under thin layers of skin and laughter. If this is what the happy memories did to them, what would the worst memory of their lives do? Oliver couldn’t bear to inflict this upon them. If he did, he would be just like Jason. Except the intent would be worse because Oliver was alive.

  He exhaled the tight balloon of air in his chest, stuffed his mouth full of mashed potatoes, and reminded himself that their pain was worse than his. And surely they knew that Jason wasn’t Prince Perfect. But, seriously, couldn’t they say it out loud?

  “Cute,” Oliver mustered for the green star, earning some good will.

  Further validating that Jason wasn’t Prince Perfect was the fact that Oliver’s parents had taken an approach to raising him that he referred to as Opposite Possum. They played dead to the fact that Oliver was an actual individual with a distinct personality, that he held different inclinations than his older brother. Oliver had no intention of ending his life, especially before he’d reached the legal drinking age. Nevertheless, they steered him to be Jason’s opposite in every aspect. Jason had gone to public school, so Oliver was enrolled at Sacred Heart. Jason hadn’t been policed by a curfew, so Oliver was due home earlier than all of his friends. He’d discovered a workaround for the curfew situation, though. It was called lying, and Oliver was getting pretty good at it.

  “Can I stay out until one on Friday?”

  “A curfew is a curfew, not a malleable state.” His dad trimmed the fat from his pork chop.

  “I’m negotiating,” Oliver said. “I know you don’t want to hear this, but there’s a party. My friends are going. I told them I’d be the DD.”

  His mom sighed. The distance between her thin brown eyebrows and pixie haircut left a lot of forehead to condemn him.

  “I’m just being honest. And responsible.”

  “We didn’t buy you that car so you could play chauffeur to your drunk friends,” his dad said.

  “They’re gonna drink, Dad. And they won’t be done by ten. I’m just making sure they get home without killing anyone.”

  Oliver’s parents had a telepathic debate across the table. His dad wasn’t easily convinced. A bite of pork chop was chewed long and slow in deliberation. His mother answered, “Midnight. And we appreciate your honesty. But maybe you should get a job to help supplement the gas and insurance for your valet service.” His mom stabbed a broccoli floret with her fork.

  Oliver accepted these terms.

  Luckily or unluckily, Jason had been an employee at Quickee Car Wash when he died. His parents wouldn’t press Oliver further on the employment front as long as he didn’t push the curfew extension limits.

  When it came to dating, Oliver chose to apply the Opposite Possum strategy on himself without his parents’ decree. Since Jason had a girlfriend at the time of his demise, Oliver would have no such thing. Thus, the No Boyfriend conversation. It wasn’t malicious. It was merely full disclosure.

  Some girls would immediately be turned off, and the dating would be over. Most took it as a challenge, thinking that he’d simply taken the stance because he wanted to keep playing the field. Like in all the movies, he just hadn’t met the right girl to commit to, and each one thought she was the girl. She would be the one to awaken his soul at last.

  They thought they could change him, and their efforts always failed. The girls eventually acknowledged that he would never be their boyfriend. More often than not, this conclusion led to feelings of deep, personal failure. This was the exact situation he’d tried to avoid, the whole reason he’d had the awkward No Boyfriend conversation in the first place. And still, his final encounters with the girls he’d been seeing usually
involved flinging grenades of tears at him and/or showering him with expletives.

  He wouldn’t give Daphne Bowman or her Friend Request that chance, even if it was just platonic. There was too much history. She had all the baggage of an ex-girlfriend and he’d never even met her. She was more dangerous than Katrina. He took out his phone and contemplated her photo for the last time. Her weird haircut and ghostly white skin. Eyes big and blue enough he could practically swim in them. Something in those eyes told him she was the smartest girl he’d ever met, and he was never going to know her. Oliver hit “Decline.”

  Keeping trouble out of his life was supposed to leave Oliver feeling cleansed. Instead, his skin drew tight, as if coated with dust. His whole body itched. Even though his brother had been gone for seven years, it was all Jason’s fault.

  Sacred Hearts

  Seventeen. Stupid Oliver Pagano and his stupid bird face reminded her that she was very much seventeen.

  Even before finding the list, Daphne had been thinking about her sister more than ever now that they shared the same age. Seventeen was the link to Emily that had been simmering in Daphne’s veins for seven years, a curse to be revealed and a chance to break its spell. If Daphne could just make it through seventeen, the doors of life would open to her and she could walk through anything. Emily’s list gave her a charm to counter this spell, but she didn’t know how to use it.

  She reached deep into the black nothing of her mind and grasped for any clue that Emily may have left. Her last memory of Emily was the most prominent, a few months before that infamous Tuesday, when Emily’s mood had swung on a peaceful hammock blowing in the wind.

  Daphne sits at her small desk, filling out a workbook for spelling class. Emily knocks on the door, which is strange because Emily isn’t a knocker. She’s barged in and out of rooms as long as Daphne can remember with absolutely zero courtesy for the people on either side of the door. The knock validated her parents’ whispers of medication and working, a quiet joy in their voices.

  “Come in.” Daphne’s words come out as suspicion rather than instruction.

  “How’s it going?” Emily tiptoes in, as if reduced volume lessens the disruption. Daphne goes back to her writing.

  “Doing homework?” Emily asks.

  Daphne is no fool. Plenty of times Emily has asked Daphne about school only to ridicule her teacher’s pet status. It’s better to say nothing and just let Emily get frustrated with the lack of attention and storm out of the room. Daphne nods without looking up.

  “Sorry you have Mrs. Morris. She’s a huge bit…” Emily catches herself. “Big, nasty person.”

  “That’s what I thought, too, before I had her. She seems really mean in the halls and at recess. But she’s a really fun teacher and not mean at all.”

  “I don’t know if I believe you.”

  “Why would I lie?” Daphne cocks her head, half innocent, half annoyed.

  “Why would you tell the truth?”

  Daphne gives this three seconds of thought. “Because I do.”

  Emily smiles at her, a smile Daphne hasn’t seen in a long time. A real one.

  “Yeah, you do.” Emily exits louder than her entrance. The ground creaks and moans under her feet, and she takes extra, weighted steps to build the noise.

  Daphne stares at Emily, at her rude feet.

  “So serious. You need to get out of this room.” Emily throws Daphne a wink as she saunters through the doorway.

  This list was probably there the whole time—maybe that’s what the wink was about. Daphne played the scene again and again in her mind. At the end of each wink through the doorway, her thoughts returned to Oliver. The other boy at another desk in the other house with another set of floorboards.

  She’d given Oliver a full week. Rather, she’d given herself a full week to forget about him, and she’d failed. Basic cyberstalking showed that he’d “Liked” one of their mutual friend’s photos. Deductive reasoning pointed to him having read her message. Still, she couldn’t let it go. She didn’t know what the list meant, but it meant something. He should have something, shouldn’t he? The list had become a secret she was keeping from him. Whether he wanted to hear it or not, the universe owed it to him. And Daphne was the universe.

  A quick Google search revealed that he’d scored a touchdown in football three years ago in a JV game. It was a start. The first place she’d look was the Sacred Heart football field.

  After school, one block before her house, she passed the Sacred Heart campus as she’d done roughly twelve hundred times before. Striding by the elite prep school every morning, she fantasized rolling out of bed at the first bell and still making it to first period without a tardy. Daphne had the sensibility to keep her dreams feasible.

  Though a block away in proximity, Sacred Heart levitated miles above her family’s income bracket, even with her mom working eighty-hour weeks at the hospital, even before her dad lost his insurance job. Daphne shared the sidewalk with girls whose shoes cost more than her entire wardrobe, and the student parking lot could stand in for an Audi dealership.

  The whole scene was pretty disgusting. Sweet-sixteen birthday presents could pay for entire college educations. Well, almost. Daphne always held her head high and slowed her pace when walking alongside the Sacred Hearters. The rich would suffer the sight of her ninety-eight-percentery as long as possible. She tugged on her vintage Harley Davidson T-shirt. The safety pins holding it together shimmered in the sun.

  “Cool shirt.” A blonde girl slipped in six dainty conch earrings, no mirror required. She gave Daphne a nod of approval and adorned her fingers with thick silver rings.

  That’s what Daphne got for trying to make a socioeconomical statement: a compliment.

  “Thanks,” Daphne mumbled. She also acknowledged that if she had the money, she’d buy the same pair of Alexander Wang ankle boots that No Mirror Girl was wearing, college education be damned.

  Daphne wondered what the girl would wear if she wasn’t hampered by the Sacred Heart’s polos and knee-length skirts. And that’s when Daphne realized the fatal flaw in her plan—the dress code. She couldn’t blend in wearing all black in a world of navy blue and khaki.

  She circled back, taking long, slow breaths to coax her stomach up the four inches it had fallen. In an effort to calm herself, she analyzed her findings from the initial Sacred Heart flyby. The main entrance had too much security to get through without a Student ID. All the other gates were locked, but the East Gate had a fair amount of foot traffic. That was her best chance of sneaking in. She just needed someone to open the door.

  By the time she made it back to the East Gate, the stream of students had run dry. Daphne milled about the sidewalk for ten minutes, pretending to be on her phone, until someone finally came. The Chuck Taylors beneath the boy’s khakis made him a solid prospect. They were decked out in rebel fashion with band logos reimagined as pro-Catholicism talking points. On one white toe cap, the squared NIN of Nine Inch Nails now read “NIV.” On the other toe cap, NOFX’s logo now promoted “NOSEX.” She walked to the gate, keeping her eyes on her phone, playing it cool. She moved to slide behind him, but he jerked the gate closed.

  “Hey, you don’t go here.” He held her shoulder.

  Daphne almost dropped her phone. “I…was…” She stuttered, unable to concoct a lie.

  He scowled at her and walked away.

  Entitled asshat. Trent Reznor would not approve.

  Daphne leaned against the fence, ready to give up. Out of the corner of her eye, No Mirror Girl crossed into the parking lot from the main entrance. This was Daphne’s last chance. She ran to the Alexander Wang boots.

  “Hey!”

  No Mirror Girl turned. “Hi?”

  “I don’t have a badge.” The line came out smooth because it wasn’t a lie. “Could you, please, let me in?”

  No Mirror Girl gave Daphne’s T-shirt a second look and pointed up and over the fence. “See those?”

  Daphne followe
d her finger to three security cameras aimed in different angles at the gate.

  “If you do anything illegal, it’s my ass. And I like my ass just the way it is.”

  “Understood. No asses will be affected.”

  NMG ran her badge over the sensor. The gate unlocked.

  “Thank you.” Daphne hoped the wavering in her voice conveyed her gratitude and ran inside.

  She didn’t know where she was going, but a sweet-rich-exotic cloud of incense swarmed the sidewalk. She followed the scent, averting her trespassing eyes from any remaining students. The trail led her to the school chapel. Directly behind it were the football field bleachers. The entrance was right there! But between her and the fifty-yard line, two male faculty members with badges dangling on lanyards were headed straight toward her. One of the men spotted Daphne and nodded in her direction. Daphne couldn’t turn around. They’d call her out for sure, and she’d be escorted out as soon as she’d arrived. The chapel was her only hope. Don’t panic. She held her head high and marched the ten steps to the chapel. Not too fast, not too slow.

  The chapel was filled with smoke from the incense. She froze in the doorway. Her own memories swirled in the exhaust.

  The thick haze escapes as the garage door opens. Her mom throws open her car door, tries to jump out with her seatbelt still on. The yank of the seatbelt reaching the end of its give, like a noose snapping a neck.

  PHLUGH-MEH-DUM! The brown flash in Daphne’s peripheral vision brought her back to the chapel. A priest whipped a rug through the air, whooshing fresh air in and incense out. A nun waved a broom, trying to do the same, while an overachieving altar boy apologized profusely.

  “It’s fine, Wyatt. I know it won’t happen again.” The warmth in the priest’s voice comforted the boy. The nun scowled, unconvinced Wyatt wouldn’t repeat his sins.

  Still flapping the rug, the priest spotted Daphne in the doorway. “Please, come in. If you don’t mind a little incense. This might put you off the stuff for life.”

  It struck her that the last time she’d attended church was Emily’s funeral. She considered turning around and running, but she liked the way the light blazed through the stained glass windows in the late afternoon. The vivid colors of the Virgin Mary and Jesus, mercifully not on the cross, energized her. At the same time, the listless eyes of shepherds and angels lent the room a sense of serenity. No worries, no happiness, no sorrow. She gave the priest a sheepish look and stepped inside.