Of course, Anna knew.
Ted’s pride bristled inside him, cutting into the soft parts. For the first time, he was angry at Anna, at the way she’d allowed a random distribution of physical resources—height, facial symmetry, soccer-playing ability—to determine the outcomes of both their lives. He was smarter than Marco, and kinder than Marco, and had more in common with Anna than Marco, and he knew how to make Anna laugh harder than Marco ever would—but none of that mattered, because who he was didn’t matter, to her or to anyone else.
The evening dragged on, and as the party started to break up, the remaining guests decided to wander down to the beach. Ted could have gone home, but instead he stayed and sulked. Someone lit a campfire, and Ted sat in the literal shadows as he watched the glow from the flames play across Anna’s face. He felt like something deep inside had broken. He’d asked for nothing; he’d tried to content himself with as little as it was possible to want. Yet here he was, feeling humiliated and small once again.
Anna was roasting a marshmallow, twirling it contemplatively over the coals. She was wearing a boy’s sweatshirt over her short dress, and her bare legs were crusted with sand. The wind shifted, sending a plume of smoke billowing over her. She coughed, and stood, and then she circled the fire and plunked herself down next to Ted.
“Getting hard to breathe over there,” she said.
“Did you have fun at your party?” Ted asked.
“It was all right,” said Anna. She sighed, probably because Marco was long gone. He’d only stayed an hour. Looking at Anna, her forlorn expression mirroring his own, Ted felt bad about how angry he’d been only a few minutes before. He unrequitedly loved Anna; Anna unrequitedly loved Marco; Marco probably unrequitedly loved some rando none of them had ever met. The world was pitiless. Nobody had any power over anyone else.
He said, “You look beautiful. Marco’s an idiot jerk.”
“Thanks,” Anna said. She looked like she might be about to say something more, but instead, she put her head on his shoulder, and he put his arm around her. She closed her eyes and settled against him, and when he was pretty sure she was asleep, he let himself kiss her forehead. Her skin tasted like salt and smoke. Maybe I was wrong, Ted thought. Maybe I could be content with this.
* * *
Unfortunately, he could not.
Ted had hoped that when Anna left for college, his feelings for her might torment him less, but they didn’t. Indeed, with Anna’s physical presence in his life so diminished, Ted could see with greater clarity the astonishing amount of space she took up in his head. In the morning, as he waited for his alarm to go off, he imagined holding her in his arms and nuzzling her neck; the first thing he did when he got up was check his email to see if she’d sent him a message overnight; all day, he filtered his experience for amusing bits and pieces that he could turn into stories to write to her about. Whenever he was bored or anxious, his brain distracted itself by worrying at the question of whether he could ever make Anna like him, like a dog working the last bits of marrow from a bone. And for hours at night, his bedroom turned into the set of an imaginary porn film starring the two of them, with the occasional movie star or classmate as a walk-on guest. Given how little contact Ted had now with actual Anna, it was like he was in a relationship with an imaginary friend.
Ted would have preferred not to live like this, but he wasn’t quite sure what to do about it. He supposed the answer was to develop a crush on someone else, someone who might like him back. As it happened, that wasn’t as wild a prospect as it might have been a year earlier—while Ted was still short and nerdy, his braces had come off, he’d gotten a decent haircut, and there was this girl he tutored in biology, a sophomore named Rachel, whose crush on him even he wasn’t oblivious enough to overlook.
Ted wasn’t remotely attracted to Rachel, who was thin and frizzy-haired and abrasive, but he was seventeen years old and had never even held hands with a girl, so who was he to keep his standards high? Maybe if he and Rachel hooked up, he’d start to develop feelings for her. Stranger things had happened. Besides, he had to admit that dating Rachel couldn’t hurt his chances with Anna—after all, how many stories had he heard about girls who didn’t realize the love of their lives was standing right in front of them until the moment he fell for someone else?
So, one afternoon after tutoring, Ted, mumbling, asked Rachel what she was doing that weekend and if she wanted to hang out. As soon as the words escaped his lips, he regretted them, but it was too late. Rachel took charge immediately, acquiring his phone number and giving him her own. She told him what time, precisely, she’d be expecting him to call her, and when he dutifully phoned, she let him know what movie she wanted to see that weekend, what time it was showing, and where they should eat dinner beforehand, and then she gave him directions to her house so he could pick her up.
As they walked out of the theater, she was already making plans for future hangouts, chattering about how much she wanted to try the new Thai place on Seventh, and how they shouldn’t forget to go see that romantic comedy they’d watched the trailer for, and did Ted have any plans for Halloween, because she and her friends were putting together a group costume and he’d be welcome to join.
Ted was wildly uncomfortable. He wasn’t quite sure who Rachel was on a date with, but it didn’t seem to be him. He’d contributed nothing to the outing; as far as he could tell, she could have brought an inflatable doll with her to the movie and had an equally good time. As he drove her home, he resolved to politely make it clear there would not be a second date. Rachel would hate him for dumping her, obviously, which meant he might need to drop out of the tutoring program, but he figured it’d be worth it to avoid the awkwardness that would otherwise follow. They didn’t have any other activities in common, so if he played his cards right, he might never have to see her again.
When they reached Rachel’s house, he put the car in park but left it running.
Rachel unbuckled her seat belt. “Good night,” she said, but she didn’t move.
“Good night,” he said, going in for a hug. What, precisely, were his responsibilities here? Did he even have to explicitly break up with her, since they’d only been on the one date? Could he just quit tutoring and hope she got the hint? He was patting Rachel’s back in a way that he hoped signaled: Please don’t hate me, I’m sorry about what I’m about to do to you, when she took his cheeks between her palms, held his face steady, and kissed him on the mouth.
Ted’s first kiss! The shock of it briefly drove all other thoughts from his head. He froze, jaw slack, and Rachel plunged her tongue into his mouth and wriggled it around. Just as his brain caught up with his body, and he remembered he was supposed to be kissing her back, she broke away and started covering his lips with light little pecks. “Like this,” she said breathily, and he realized she was taking it on herself to teach him how to kiss her, because he obviously didn’t know how. A hammer of shame swung down and flattened him. Dorky, know-it-all Rachel, condescending to teach him how to kiss!
Well, since it was too late not to humiliate himself, he might as well take the opportunity to learn. After a few minutes, he decided that kissing wasn’t that hard, really, although it certainly wasn’t everything it was cracked up to be. Overall, it wasn’t an unpleasant sensation, but there was nothing particularly erotic about it. Rachel’s glasses kept bumping up against the bridge of his nose, and it was weird to see her this close up. She looked like a different person, paler, more . . . vague, somehow, like a painting. He tried closing his eyes but it made him uncomfortable, like someone was going to sneak up behind him and plunge a knife into his back.
So this was kissing. He had to admit Rachel seemed into it. She kept kind of rolling around and sighing. Would he be enjoying himself more if he were kissing Anna? Frankly, it was hard to ever imagine being turned on by this activity. Two boneless slabs of flesh, flopping around, like a pair of slugs mating in the cavern of your mouth. Gross, Ted. What was wrong with hi
m? Rachel’s breath smelled like popcorn butter: slightly metallic, with a hint of the burnt grease that stuck to the bottom of the machine. Or was that his breath? He could think of no way to tell.
Rachel was basically on top of him now, moving her hand in an exploratory way, like maybe she was trying to figure out if he had a boner. Needless to say, he did not have a boner; he actually felt like his dick might have snuck up inside his body to hide. Was the fact that he didn’t have a boner going to hurt Rachel’s feelings? Should he try to fantasize about Anna so that he could get a boner so that Rachel wouldn’t feel bad about the fact that he hadn’t gotten a boner for her? No, that could not be the right course of action. But what did Rachel want? She was full-on straddling him now, grinding her hips against his knee and groaning. Did she want to have sex? Surely not. They were parked outside her parents’ house, and she was only a sophomore, and besides, he was Ted. It was one thing to accept that Rachel might have developed a minor crush on him during biology tutoring, another to think that he’d made her so wildly hot for the D that she was ready to bone him in the front seat of his car.
Still, she really did seem to be absurdly into this. It was almost existentially unsettling, that two people in such close physical proximity could be experiencing the same moment so differently.
Unless . . . she was faking her enthusiasm? Or if not faking, entirely, then exaggerating. A lot. But why would she do that? Pretend he was turning her on with his clumsy tongue fumblings when he wasn’t?
Oh.
As soon as it occurred to him, he realized the answer was obvious. She knew he was nervous, and she was trying to coax him through it. His ineptitude and discomfort were probably visible from space. She was pretending to enjoy herself so that he’d relax and stop being such a bad kisser. She was faking sexual excitement out of pity.
If before he’d felt like his dick had crawled up inside his body, now he felt like a two-ton lead slab had dropped on his crotch from the heavens, paralyzing him for life.
Kill yourself, Ted, a voice in his head said. Seriously.
He might have done it, too—just leaped out of the car and pitched himself in front of the nearest oncoming vehicle—but then Rachel picked up his hand and pressed it to her breast. He felt the no-thoughts shock again. Rachel’s breasts were small but her shirt was low-cut, so he was touching a lot of very soft skin. Tentatively, he squeezed, and then he rubbed the spot where he was pretty sure her nipple would be. Holy shit, it was there, and after a second of rubbing, it popped up under his thumb.
Whoa.
Closing his eyes like he was jumping off a diving board, he plunged his hand under her shirt and bra, and then he didn’t have to worry about the no-boner problem, because the bare nipple he was pinching was the dirtiest, sexiest thing in the world, and it was somehow only dirtier and sexier for being attached to a person he barely knew, whose breath smelled like popcorn and whose transparent parody of arousal was an insult to them both.
He pinched it again, a little harder. She yelped, but then quickly recovered. “Oh, my God, Ted,” she moaned, fakely.
They dated for the next four months.
* * *
Looking back, Ted thought Rachel was the first woman he could truly be said to have treated badly. Yeah, he’d inadvertently creeped out some of his crushes, but he’d been a kid, and he’d wrestled mightily to keep himself under control. And there was probably an argument to be made about the way he’d acted around Anna when they’d been in school together—that he should have been honest with her about his feelings instead of skulking around in the friend zone—but while he might have been cowardly with Anna, he’d also done his best to be kind. Rachel, though . . . if there was a hell, and he ended up in it, he was pretty sure the devil would hold up a picture of Rachel, shake it in his face, and say, “Hey, buddy, what was the deal with this one?”
But he didn’t know! He really, truly didn’t.
In the four months they were together, he never started liking Rachel any more than he did on their first date. Everything about her bugged him: her stupid hair, her nasal voice, her habit of bossing him around. The thought of people saying, “There goes Rachel, Ted’s girlfriend!” made him cringe. He saw, in her, all the parts of himself he tried so hard to repress: her sycophantic overtures to people who treated her like shit, her faux-patrician condescension toward the handful of people below her on the popularity ladder, the sarcastic jabs she used to distance herself from all the other losers on her social plane.
Like him, she was prone to embarrassing bodily mishaps—period stains, bad breath, sitting in ways that inadvertently exposed her underwear—but, unlike him, these episodes didn’t seem to cause her inordinate shame. He was the one who felt ashamed: when he caught sight of her in the hallway ahead of him, sauntering on with a rusty patch on the back of her jean skirt, or when Jennifer Roberts fanned the air in disgust after Rachel, who’d been standing much too close, finally turned away. In these moments, Ted didn’t just dislike Rachel: he hated her, more than he’d ever hated anyone else in his life.
So why didn’t he break up with her?
At home, alone, Ted knew he did not like Rachel and that he did not want to date her, and so breaking up with her seemed straightforward, the right thing to do. But then they would meet up, and as soon as Rachel saw him, if he hesitated, or pulled away, or signaled with even the tiniest of expressions that something was wrong, then her face would darken. At the first hint of her anger, he would feel an onrush of guilt and cold fear. He’d get swept up in a current of conviction that he was a total garbage asshole jerk, his sins stretching in an unbroken chain back to his original decision to agree to go on even one date with her when he’d been in love with Anna the whole time. Skewered by guilt, he would decide that rather than confront Rachel directly, and add to the immeasurable wrongs he’d already done her, it’d be so much better to wait for a more opportune moment, like maybe one where she’d do the breaking up herself. After all, it wasn’t like he was such a prize; surely if he just sat it out, sooner rather than later she’d free herself of this delusion that he was remotely datable and dump him of her own accord. With that in mind, he’d agree to whatever she was suggesting with a sense of profound relief—and then it’d be ten minutes later, or fifteen, or an hour, and he’d surface and think, wait a second, I was going to break up with her, why are we sitting here in this Olive Garden, eating lunch?
With Rachel prattling on, that dark cloud of incipient anger nowhere to be seen, the idea that just seconds ago it had felt impossible to end the relationship seemed absurd—but it also seemed absurd to break up with her out of nowhere, when he’d just been sitting there acting like everything was fine and saying things like, “Sure, I’ll go with you to visit your cousin on Sunday.” Because if he tried to break up with Rachel right now, while she was halfway through a breadstick, surely the first thing she’d say would be, “If you knew you were going to break up with me, why did you literally just agree to go with me to visit my cousin on Sunday?” and he would have no answer.
Well, what if she did, Ted? What. If. She. Did. Couldn’t he have just shrugged his shoulders and said, “Whelp, sucks for your cousin, I changed my mind?” No. He could not do that, because that was something that only an asshole would do, and he, Ted, was not an asshole. He was . . . a nice guy.
Yes, okay, everyone agreed that nice guys were the worst, but this was different. To feel incapable of interrupting Rachel in the middle of a meal and dumping her without warning—that wasn’t Nice Guy Syndrome, that was just being humane. He’d never empathized with Rachel more than he did in those moments, imagining what it would be like to be innocently eating lunch with a person who had been acting for all the world as though he liked you, who had given you no hint that anything was bothering him at all, when suddenly, out of nowhere, wham, it turned out you were completely wrong about him, and that everything he’d been telling you was a lie.
His whole life, Ted had clung to t
he idea that he was misunderstood—that the girls who’d rejected him were wrong to treat him as though there was something inherently creepy about him. He might not have been the handsomest guy around, but he wasn’t bad. And yet sometimes he’d lie awake at night imagining Rachel telling her story to a tribunal of all the girls who’d ever rejected him, regaling them about his deceptions, the way he’d pretended to like her when he didn’t, the mask of “niceness” he wore when the truth was he was a selfish, lying piece of shit—and he saw all those girls, Anna at their center, shocked but not shocked, nodding and agreeing that yes, of course, they’d known something was wrong with him all along.
And so Anna took on another role in his head: forewoman of a jury that stood ready to convict. The longer the relationship with Rachel went on, the more he needed her to return to his imaginary tribunal with a story that vindicated him. He needed his first-ever girlfriend not simply to say, but to believe, that while things might not have worked out between them, he wasn’t creepy or scary or bad; he was, fundamentally, a good guy.
To placate this imagined version of Anna, he stayed with Rachel, and he lied. He finished his lunch at the Olive Garden, he went to visit the cousin, and he tried to lay the groundwork for his escape. He did his best to keep his distance from Rachel, not enough to make her angry, just enough to keep the relationship from getting any more serious than it already was. He didn’t call her very often, and he was busy a lot, but always apologetic about it. He did exactly what was required of him, but no more. He felt a bit as though he were playing dead, remaining limp and pliable in the hopes that she would eventually lose interest and wander away. All right, the tribunal would say at the end of it. He’s not the best person. He’s not a saint. But he’s no Marco, manipulating girls just for the hell of it. It could have been worse. He deserves another chance. We find the defendant . . . reasonably okay.
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