An hour later, Anna sniffled. “Thank you for listening, Ted,” she said. “It really means a lot to me.”
I would die for you, Ted thought.
“No problemo,” Ted said.
* * *
After that, Ted and Anna began talking on the phone almost every night. Never in his life had Ted experienced anything that matched the thrill of those late-night conversations, and he found himself constructing an elaborate set of rituals around them, the way that a primitive tribe might need to perform rituals around the lighting of a fire, to keep its power contained.
Part of the ritual involved keeping the conversations a secret—from Rachel, of course, but also from his parents and everyone else. He moved the phone in the den away from his computer and up by his bed. He ran the fan outside of his door to create a mask of white noise. He took a shower, brushed his teeth, and got under the sheets. Before Anna even answered the phone, his skin would have grown warm, almost feverish.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
Their voices were husky and low; they murmured to each other, Ted thought, as though they were lying beside each other in bed, whispering across the pillow. He closed his eyes and pictured this.
“How was your day?” he asked.
“Oh. You know.”
“Still. Tell me. I want to hear.”
As Anna began telling him the story of her day (“Well, so, I woke up at four A.M. because fucking Charise had fucking crew . . .”) Ted stroked his hand slowly down his chest and around his rib cage, imagining it was Anna’s hand, his skin goose-pimpling beneath Anna’s fingers.
As she talked, he said very little, mostly just sympathetic “uh-uh”s and “oh-no”s. Once, when she sounded particularly upset, he said, “I’m sorry,” and then mouthed silently, “. . . sweetheart.”
Meanwhile, his hand progressed in slow sensuous circles down his torso, along the waistband of his boxers, and under the elastic band, hesitantly stroking the edge of his pubic hair.
“Tell me more about Kathleen,” he said, when Anna seemed to be running out of story. Kathleen was Anna’s stepmother. He began playing with his dick—tapping it with his fingertips, flicking it on the shaft. “Do you think your dad will stand up to her, or will he take her side?”
“Oh my God, are you kidding?” Anna practically shrieked.
“Shhhh, shhhh,” Ted hushed her. “Charise has practice in four hours.”
“Fuck Charise,” Anna whispered. Ted laughed. Anna laughed, too. He could practically feel her breath on his face. He squeezed his dick, arcing his back with pleasure, and gritted his teeth to force himself to keep quiet.
“Are you getting sleepy?” he asked at last.
“Yes,” Anna said.
“Do you want to fall asleep together?”
“I do . . . but you have to get up so early . . .”
“It’s okay,” he said. “I’ll sleep in study hall.”
“You’re sweet, Ted. I like falling asleep with you.”
“I like falling asleep with you, too. Good night, Anna.”
“Good night, Ted.”
“Sweet dreams, Anna.”
“Sweet dreams, Ted.”
In the ensuing quiet, he imagined Anna watching him with fascinated disgust; he imagined her touching him; he imagined that on the other end of the line, in the humid New Orleans night, Anna, racked with desire, was touching herself and thinking of him. He listened to her breathe in and out as his hand worked steadily beneath the sheets. He felt ashamed of himself, of course, but the warmth of that shame pooled in his crotch, amplifying his pleasure. He came in a torrent, making no sounds other than those that could be explained away as sleepy breathing. Only when he’d calmed himself completely, his pulse and his breath both fully slowed, did he dare to whisper: “Anna, are you asleep?”
He imagined Anna lying awake, eyes wide, staring at the ceiling, her heart full of yearning, but there was only silence.
“I love you, Anna,” he whispered, and he hung up the phone.
* * *
And then it was winter break, and Anna was coming home to visit. Would Ted see her? Of course he would see her. They were practically best friends! They talked every night. She’d said, “You were always there for me, always.” He would see her, obviously. The only question was when.
And where.
And how.
In high school, making plans with Anna had been a process as delicate as surgery, and occasionally as brutal. If he asked her directly to hang out, she’d always smile and say, “Sure! Sounds great! Call me tomorrow and we’ll figure it out.” Only a slight tightness around her mouth, and the heaviness of her exhale, would suggest that he’d imposed. But inevitably, a conflict would appear at the last minute, or else, when he tried to pin down the details, she’d simply fail to answer the phone. If he called her out on her flakiness, or even made reference to the broken plans, as opposed to pretending they’d never existed in the first place, she’d pull away even further, in a way that made him feel ashamed of himself, and needy for pressing her.
On the other hand, she happily kept him informed about plans she had with other people, providing a steady flow of information about excursions that were about to happen, details of dates or parties that were always this close to coming together. As long as he listened, without complaint, to an endless description of activities that were supposed to happen without him, there was a 30 percent chance, at least, that Anna would change her mind at the last minute, claim to be unable to handle the unbearable burden of whatever her social plans were supposed to be, and decide to hang out with him instead. She’d arrive at his house and collapse in exaggerated relief: “I am so glad we’re doing this, I was so not in the mood for another house party at Maria’s.” As though they were both equally at the mercy of circumstance, similarly oblivious to the power dynamic that governed their “friendship.”
But surely something had changed between them! Surely she wouldn’t treat him, now, the way she had then, not after she’d spoken the words aloud: You were always there for me, always, but I never appreciated it, I always took you for granted. What could those words be but a confession? And what was a confession if not a promise, or at least a willingness, to change? He loved the way her voice had caught and hitched a little before that second “always.” You were always there for me, always. When they got married, she could include them in her wedding vows: You were always there for me, always. You were always there for me, always. You were always there for me, always.
They were the most beautiful words he’d ever heard.
* * *
The night before she got on the plane to New Jersey, Ted tried to nudge Anna, as gently as he could, into saying what he wanted to hear. “I’m excited to see you,” he said.
“Me too! For sure.”
“Have you talked to anybody else from here lately? Like, friends, or anybody? I remember you saying that your friends from home were bad at being in touch.”
Was he imagining the slight hesitation before her answer? She still hadn’t confided in him about Marco; the other day, Rachel’s obnoxious friend Shelly had announced, out of the blue, that she’d heard that Marco Hernandez had an actual restraining order out against Anna that required her to stay five hundred feet away from him at all times. This was obviously an idiotic rumor of the type that was Shelly’s specialty, but he still wished Anna would do something to reassure him—ideally burst into tears and say, You were always there for me, always, and plead with him to forgive her for all her years of neglect—but he’d have settled for even a hint that she intended to make an active effort to meet up.
Instead, the conversation took a sharp and unsettling turn.
“Actually,” Anna said. “I was talking to Missy Johansson, you know her? And she told me you were dating somebody! Rachel Derwin-Finkel? And I was like, no way, that’s not possible. But she insisted that it was!”
“Hahahahahahahaha!” Ted said.
; And then, when Anna’s silence indicated that cackling like a madman was an insufficient response, he added, “Um. Yeah. We’ve been hanging out.”
“Hanging out as in dating?”
“I mean, I don’t know. We haven’t really put a label on it.” (They had.) “It’s complicated.” (It wasn’t.) “You know how I am.” (She did not.) “But . . . yeah.”
Ted, who had been leisurely erect at the beginning of this conversation, now felt like he might puke. There was something deeply wrong, almost violating, about having Anna talk to him about Rachel; it was like having his parents walk in on him having sex.
“Maybe all three of us can hang out when I’m there! I’d like to see Rachel again. It’s been way too long.”
“Um, sure. If you want.”
“Did you know our moms were friends? We used to have playdates, like, constantly. We don’t know each other that well anymore, ’cause we went in different directions, socially, in school, but Rachel’s a really good kid. Mostly what I remember about Rachel is that she was super into horses when we were little. And My Little Ponies and stuff. Remember?”
Clever, Anna. Very clever. What had actually happened was that a rumor had spread around school that Rachel Derwin-Finkel masturbated with My Little Ponies. It was one of those rumors that no one really believed, not really, but that they passed along enthusiastically nonetheless. Ted himself had argued passionately with the other boys at his lunch table about whether that was even possible (Did she just stick it in there, or . . . ?), and then, when the controversy had threatened to die down, he’d willfully revived it, because the Rachel scandal had taken the focus off the previous scandal roiling the third grade, which was the question of whether or not he, Ted, had been caught by the music teacher pooping in the instrument closet during the spring recital, WHICH OF COURSE HE HAD NOT.
What did Anna know about what it was like to have a rumor like that spread about you, that overpowering and helpless shame? He wished he could believe Anna was jealous, but he didn’t; she was just marking her territory, like a dog peeing on a patch of grass. Did he even exist in her mind, as a living, breathing, thinking person? He spent so much time trying to figure out what she was thinking, but what kind of a consciousness did she imagine lived behind the mask of his face?
For the first time, Ted imagined fucking Anna the way he (almost) fucked Rachel: cruelly, without concern for her comfort, fully acknowledging that as much as he loved her, he hated her, too. In his fantasy, Anna was underneath him, his hand was around her throat, and, oh shit, there was Rachel: they were in a three-way. Rachel was naked, on her hands and knees, and Ted was grabbing Anna by the hair and forcing her—
Making her—
They were both—
“Did you hear what I said, Ted?” Anna asked.
“No—sorry—listen, I, uh, I’ve got to go!”
* * *
On Anna’s fourth day in New Jersey, Ted was in Rachel’s bedroom, dressing himself after another round of not-quite-copulation, when Rachel asked him what he wanted to do for New Year’s Eve.
“I don’t know,” Ted said as he pulled on a sock. “I think I might just stay home.”
“You can’t do that,” Rachel said. “Ellen is having a thing and I told her we’d go.”
“What? Why would you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Make plans without asking me first. Don’t you think that you should have checked in with me to see if maybe there was something I’d want to do other than being dragged to some party with a bunch of sophomores I don’t even know? I have a life outside of you, you know.”
“Um. You literally just said you had no plans on New Year’s and were going to stay home.”
“I said I might stay home.”
“Okay. What else might you do?”
“I don’t know. There’s this party at Cynthia Krazewski’s I was thinking of checking out.”
“At Cynthia Krazewski’s.”
“Yeah. What?”
“Cynthia Krazewski invited you to a party.”
“So?”
“Ted. You’re telling me Cynthia Krazewski invited you to her New Year’s party, and you’re thinking of checking it out.”
“Are you, like, having a stroke?”
“I’m just trying to get my facts straight. Cynthia Krazewski called you up on the phone and was like, ‘Hi, Ted, it’s me, Cynthia, and I would like you to come to my party’? ”
“No. Obviously.”
“So who invited you?”
“What? What are you talking about? Anna invited me. Who cares? I didn’t even say I was definitely going, I said I was thinking about it.”
“Oh, now I see. Now I get it. Now everything is very clear.”
“You don’t see anything! I was on the phone with Anna and she mentioned the party at Cynthia’s and we talked about going. We don’t even have concrete plans.”
That was not what had happened. What had happened was that Anna had complained to him at length the previous night about the painful obligation she was under to go to Cynthia Krazewski’s party, despite the fact that it was the absolute last thing she’d ever want to do, and thus Ted had inferred there was a strong likelihood that if he should happen to be home alone on New Year’s, he would get a last-minute phone call from Anna, and the two of them would wind up spending New Year’s together, most of which they would pass watching SNL in Ted’s basement, but then at midnight, they’d switch to network television to watch the ball drop, and he’d “discover” a bottle of chilled champagne in his fridge, and after they’d toasted each other, he’d turn to her with a wry, amused smile on his face and say, “I know this is silly, but we might as well!” and she’d giggle and say, “I guess so!” and so he’d kiss her in an almost-friendly way, on the lips but closed-mouthed, and then he’d pause as he was pulling away and wait, and she would wait, and then she’d go in for the kiss, and then they’d be making out for real, grappling on the couch and then on the floor, and when he took her shirt off, he’d pull it up but then kind of twist it around her arms so they were pinned above her head, which was a trick he’d recently discovered with Rachel, and Anna would make this kind of sexy, surprised Oh face with her mouth, and she’d be panting underneath him and they’d fuck and he’d make her come so hard that afterward they would be together for the rest of their lives.
It was a foolproof plan.
Oh, wait. No, it wasn’t. It was a sexual fantasy, and he was an idiot.
Then, just as he was acknowledging this to himself, Rachel—his girlfriend, his mirror—began to dance. Clad in only her underwear, her tiny tits shaking, she did a hideous little dance, a mocking-Ted dance. A dance that, in a moment, fused everything he loathed about her with everything he loathed about himself.
“Hi, I’m Ted!” Rachel sneered, shimmying. “Look at me! I’m Anna Travis’s dorky sidekick. I follow her around hoping that if I do everything she tells me all the time, I can somehow make her like me. Look at me, look at me, look at meeeeeeeeeeeee!”
Was there a point at which your ego was crushed so completely that it died, and you no longer had to lug around the burden of yourself? There must be a German word for this feeling, when the elaborate contortions of your own thinking rose to the surface and became suddenly and unpleasantly visible. Like walking past a mirror in a crowded mall and thinking: Who is that dude with the terrible posture, and why is he cringing like he expects someone to punch him, I’d like to punch him—oh wait, that’s me.
“Did she invite me?” Rachel practically spat. “Am I invited with you to the cool kids’ party?”
Ted didn’t answer her.
“So she didn’t invite you? Did she just say she was going, and you were just going to lurk creepily around her like, oh Anna, I’ve missed you so much since you’ve been at college, I wish we could just run away together and watch like twenty hours of SNL while I make you popcorn and breathe heavily into your ear?”
“Yep,” said
Ted. “That’s pretty much what happened.”
“I have an idea,” Rachel said. “We’ll go to Cynthia Krazewski’s party together. Sure! Why not? I’ll call Anna. I told you our moms are friends, right? I’ll ask her if we can come to Cynthia’s. I’m sure she’ll say yes. It’d be fun to see her. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Ted?”
“No,” he said. “I would not.”
But that was precisely what they did.
* * *
In New York City in the year 2018, Ted lay on his back on a hospital gurney, shoved into a hallway of a crowded ER. Unable to turn his head either left or right, he stared directly up into a blinding fluorescent light and wondered if he was dying. That’s ridiculous, he told himself. I am absolutely not dying. A lady threw a glass of water at me; it’s a minor injury; it’s absurd to think a person could die because of that. Immediately, he imagined Rachel saying scornfully: “People die of head injuries all the time, Ted.”
Ted thought: I am probably not dying but I am scared and alone and I don’t like this.
“Excuse me,” he shouted, through a dry, cracked throat. “Could someone please tell me what’s going on?”
No one responded to his plea, but eventually some blurry shadow-creatures came swimming toward him. They asked him questions in a nonsense language, and he answered in an equally unintelligible garble, and he was rewarded by a prickle in his arm, followed by a flooding ease of bliss.
As the drugs took hold, Ted’s memories began to entwine with a strange yet perversely lovely hallucination. In this hallucination, the tumbler Angela flung at his head had not bounced off his skull but had shattered instead. One piece of glass had become lodged in his forehead, and he could see that piece of glass in the center of his vision, rising like a tower, impaling him, pinning him down, refracting a shimmering circle of rainbows in the light. Through the glass, he could see himself reflected in all his miserable glory.
You Know You Want This Page 13