by Matthue Roth
“I didn’t mean—”
“It’s not what you meant, it’s what you did. I thought maybe we just needed some time, some way to hit the reset button. We’re exactly where we were before. Please, when I hang up, don’t hit redial.”
The conversation was slipping away from me. The conversation. Her. This couldn’t be the end. It couldn’t be. “Larissa, don’t do this—”
“Arty. Stop not getting it. We’re not the only people in each other’s lives, and now because of you, every time I walk down the hall of that place, people are going to be looking at me and imagining me naked, they’re going to know what happened to me. They’re going to know I had sex. My own rape isn’t even mine anymore. Now will you please leave it at that?”
There was a click. Not her hanging up, but me. I don’t even think I realized I’d done it until I saw the phone back on the nighttable, my hand resting on the little silver logo. There was a horrible thud like an anvil landing in my stomach. Up till now, everything had felt temporary, tentative, as though we were just trying it out. But this—this had the devastating whiff of forever.
I didn’t know how things had gotten this way, but a horrible gravelly feeling in my stomach let me know I had no one to blame but myself.
be cool, be ice cold
That first day, the first Monday morning headed back to school, I desperately, torturously, had to pee. The feeling welled up inside me on the bus, first as a thought, and then as a physical feeling, explosive, all-consuming, pressing on every part of the inside of my body.
The other all-consuming feeling, the one in the back of my mind, was this: Today was my first day in a world without Larissa.
It didn’t just feel like we were taking a break again. It felt like there was no Larissa. Or, worse, like there was—but in a totally separate dimension from mine, a dimension I was not allowed to enter. I could not just-this-once text her. I could not type under my desk on my touchpad as the teacher spoke, hoping I was hitting all the right letters and not the tohjy ;ryyrtd. Without sneaking out of class and into the bathroom to message her. (Aaaaaaah. There it was: thinking of the bathroom again.)
The bus stopped. I hopped off, ran into school faster than I ever had and bolted straight toward the bathroom. Unburdened myself, and then walked out, once again silently cursing the alignment of doors.
Smacked straight into Carrie.
“Whoa there, cowboy,” she said.
And suddenly, in my head, the only life-changing event I could remember from this weekend was the concert Saturday night.
Carrie smiled at me with a hint of shared secrets, those undercover memories of our extra-curricular lives. This morning she was wearing a plaid librarian’s dress and a chain- link skull necklace. Was this new? Or had she always broad- cast signals of irony and coolness, and I just hadn’t had been tuning in?
I straightened up, feeling the well of my own outside- school coolness.
“Giddyup,” I said.
It was still way early. Homeroom didn’t start for another thirty minutes or so. I got to school early by habit, more time to not be around my parents.
I followed Carrie to the bottom of one stairwell, in that vacant basement landing where no one ever went. It dipped half a floor below the lowest floor accessible, just a sort of architectural afterthought. The steps were dusty and the walls bore the mellow brown fermentation where the janitors didn’t even bother to clean. Anywhere else in school, it might have created an appearance of a sewage reservoir or a dump for old tests, but this felt like a mystical undiscovered library.
They were all sitting there. Not doing anything, just hanging out. It was like they were waiting for me. It felt like the ending of a movie, where the main character learns his true friends were with him all along. And YOU were there, Damon. And YOU were there, Crash Goldberg…. Except that none of those people would show up here, my old friends, the people I’d shared Larissa with. We were goners; we’d self-destructed in a poof of our own vices. We’d never really encouraged each other’s weirdnesses; it had just been a marriage of convenience, all of us losers, so we might as well be losers together.
But these people—even after one night, they felt like my cheerleaders.
Roger/Ryan/Brian/Broderick was the first to greet me, bouncing up at once and throwing his arms around me. He engulfed me in a monster bearhug.
“You remember Roderick, right?” said Carrie.
“Roderick,” I repeated, turning my head so it was only my ear that was crushed against his chest, not my whole face, and simultaneously allowing the rest of me to breathe. “Of course I do.”
Mercifully, he released me. He beamed down at me, approving. Whatever test they were giving, I’d passed.
I settled in. To one corner of the nook, and to those people. They passed me a coffee. I looked around for the thermos from which it must have come, but I couldn’t find one. Instead Little Jen was pouring herself a refill from a French press. “Wow,” I said. “You guys have everything here.”
“Yeah,” said Little Jen with an air of breezy nonchalance. “We basically moved in.”
Attached to that was the unspoken invitation: And you should, too.
*
The thing about my and Larissa’s unlikely friendship was exactly that: It was unlikely, so close to being impossible that it nearly didn’t exist in the first place. We occupied different neighborhoods, different lives. We didn’t overlap in schools, cities, or friends, except for the ganglion of friendships we had manufactured for ourselves. All we really had binding us to each other was Hebrew School.
We should never have been friends in the first place. At first, that was what devastated me about our breakup—that we’d never be able to rekindle that. But the longer we stayed apart, the less vital it felt; my life moved on without her; interesting things were still happening; maybe our knowing each other wasn’t necessary in the first place, and just a cool, if momentary, blip in the continuum of reality.
And time passed. I didn’t think about Samson, I didn’t think about Theodor Herzl, and I didn’t think about Larissa.
Only, I did.
*
I started coming to school early every morning. It was nice, you know? To not worry about anything, and to actually enjoy being there. That nook at the bottom of the stairs became my hideout, and the gang became my gang. Carrie and I had this weird bond like we’d known each other since we were kids. And Roderick had a way, every time you spoke with him, of making you feel like the king of the world.
Bethany, the blond girl, had two classes with me, and we’d never noticed each other. She was one of the Beautiful White Girls. I was a Socially Awkward Nerd. Before, we’d regarded each other as stereotypes and we were afraid of trespassing into the other’s social echelon. Now we saw each other as undercover outcasts from those very same roles. Now we were comrades.
Before class started, we hung. Sitting inside, we traded furtive expressions, rolling our eyes when someone got ridiculous toward the teacher, gaggling at an impossible problem, sharing twin looks of dread—and twin don’t-worry, you’ll-get-through-this looks of reassurance—when Mr. Roff popped open his desk drawer and sprung out a surprise quiz.
Walking from class to class with Damon, I saw Roderick approaching. He saw me too. He stretched out his long arm across the hall, palm open. I met it in a high five. He didn’t say anything, just smirked vibrantly and kept walking.
“You know that guy?” Damon said.
I felt a surge of anger well up, just instinctively, but at this point I was through fighting with people. If Damon wanted to be civil, I could be civil. “Sure,” I said, as pareve as I could manage.
“But he’s a gay, isn’t he?”
“Yep,” I said, as does-it-matter? as I could muster.
Damon gazed thoughtfully after Roderick’s departing form, only now considering the possibility of the existence of such a phenomenon as a gay person.
“Okay,
I guess that’s cool,” he said finally. He walked away, head shaking, mind completely blown.
But most of all I spent time with Carrie. She really was awesome. Funny and thoughtful and schooled in all the books and bands of my counterculture, the ones that I’d thought that nobody knew but me. She showed me how it wasn’t about finding bands you liked, but what you did with those bands; how you learned from them and internalized the lyrics and made each song a part of yourself. Had I been doing it wrong the whole time with Larissa? For my whole life? No: Carrie and I weren’t discovering musical similarities so we could be United Forever, or whatever I’d thought of Larissa and me. Carrie was just an ambassador. She was where I could be in a few years, or a few months, or however long it took me to feel okay about my life.
And then she’d look at me intensely from under the clear rims of her silent-film-star glasses as though she was telling me something deep and serious and intense. At first I thought I was supposed to kiss her. I soon realized, it wasn’t that at all—she wasn’t after me at all, and she definitely didn’t want me going after her. She was just watching to check that I really understood, that I wasn’t just faking it. We’d both been alone our whole lives, surrounded by people who had no idea what we were thinking. Finding other people who did think was a rare prize, not to be taken lightly.
Monday I got home from school late. Tuesday I was even later.
“Let’s get moving,” called my father, already jingling the keys to the car. “We’re already late. We’ve got to get you to Hebrew School in light speed.”
My heart got stuck in my throat. I had planned on confessing to them about my suspension Sunday, first thing after I got home. I was still in the moment, nervous and scared and shaken. It would sound honest. They’d take pity on me. Only, when we got home, they both vanished to do their things and left me to do mine. Later it just seemed too big to talk about. Like the sort of thing that would go away if I ignored it.
“Okay,” I said. “Let me just grab my books.”
*
I ran into the lobby and watched my father drive away. My heart convulsed against my ribcage. I watched the doors. Would Dr. Tolsky have Riff take care of me, too, if she found me? Every second I waited was a new danger.
I waited for my father to be completely gone. Then I doubled back. I walked out the parking lot, then onto the boulevard, and then the freeway. Cars sped alongside me, whipping my hair in my face and whipping my face with mean and crazy tailwinds.
I got off at the next exit. The Wawa was easy to find. I bought a Mountain Dew from the soda fountain. I got the largest size. It was so big that I’d probably be able to leave some of it to my descendants. As a last thought, I added a single-serving fruitcake. I always hated Christmas-branded things, but today I needed desperately to feel merry. This was the first solo adventure I’d had in practically forever.
I tried not to think about the ghost of Larissa trailing me. Even the cashier looked at me askew, as though I was missing something. As though I was missing half of myself. I walked back to Hebrew School and I got there just as last period was letting out.
Perfect. I was perfect.
*
During my fortnight suspension from Hebrew School, I barely thought of anything Jewish. It amazed me how fast these things could evaporate from my brain. On a three-day weekend I’d get stray mental flashes of the book we were reading in English class, or feel a quiver of uncertainty about whether or not I finished my American History essay; while drawing, I would see a parabola superimposed on the arc of a dragon’s back and feel compelled, even for just a second, to think in mathematical terms. With Hebrew School, there was no such baggage. No Prophets, no Hebrew, no kosher. Once I thought I heard Milt yell at me from across the street, but it was just an insane homeless guy.
Most days, I stayed late at school with Carrie and her friends. Or we went to Roosevelt Mall, where all the Yards football-jacket kids hung out, but they never touched the places where we went. We hung at the post office and the record store. We went to the tattoo shop, which Little Jen’s parents ran, and although you had to be 18 to enter they let us hang out and eat Tastykakes and watch Jeopardy! in the back. It was the first time I didn’t feel ashamed for knowing most of the answers. In fact, Little Jen knew even more of them than I did, and it turned into a whole competition.
“What is Tripoli?”
“Who was Richard Feynman?”
“What is ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’?”
“What is forty-two?”
At first, everyone was rooting for Little Jen, since they knew her better and it was her parents’ shop and all, but their support quickly evened out as the questions got harder. Someone hit the Double Jeopardy question, and time ran out on us; neither Little Jen nor me had any idea. The on-screen contestant had no idea either—until, a fraction of a second before the buzzer sounded, something clicked in my mind and I yelled out,
“A time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant, and a time to reap!”
which was the lyric to one of the songs that they always played on my parents’ radio station, the station I hated listening to. No more, I promised G-d, just as the TV host repeated the same exact words I’d just said.
I looked up at Little Jen, who’d been gnawing on her thumbnail in consternation. Now her whole mouth hung wide open.
Then Roderick scolded me: “You forgot to phrase it in the form of a question.”
And everyone burst out, laughing and cheering at once. Little Jen, too. She reached over and ruffled my hair in admiration. Behind everyone else was Carrie, beaming at me proudly—not for getting the question right, I was reasonably sure, but for having broken myself in with the rest of them.
team portrait
I drew them. It was an inevitability, as sure as secrets need to spread, that once Carrie’s and Roderick’s and Little Jen’s and Bethany’s faces started appearing in my line of vision on a daily basis, they’d be in my head too. And once they were in my head, one way or another, they were going to come out.
I drew them as a superhero team. But not as the Justice League or Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, all bright colors and victory hugs. That wouldn’t have been real. It wouldn’t be them. Instead I took visual cues from movies, from internet videos, from their lives. Instead of bright spandex, I gave them leather and kevlar, slick jackets and skin-thin gloves, goggles and tech and metal robot appendages. In the center was Carrie, our team leader, our Professor X, facing us head-on, arms crossed over her chest, an in-control smile with just a hint that maybe, just maybe, she was secretly teasing you. She wore a short black dress (a grey pattern of skulls and crossbones, only discernible if you looked closely) with the hedges of a cape (black, leathery) perched on her shoulders like bats.
There were no costumes. There were no superpowers. There were just us—each of us, as fabulous and weird and unreal as we were in real life.
To one side, Roderick leaned on her shoulder, the most exaggerated and supernatural of the group, tall black boots, just a hint of puffed-up abs and muscles—I wanted to keep his uncanny skinniness, the twisty dexterousness of his body, that sense that he could dodge bullets. Flanking Carrie’s other side was Little Jen, in a tube top that I hoped wasn’t too cleavagey or sexist, except that her pants—tight, shiny, and at least two-thirds covered by even-tighter boots—were even more unapologetically sexual. But it wasn’t pervy—or, perhaps, it wasn’t only pervy. She had spiky don’t-touch-me hair, the way she cocked her hip, the way she lay her hand on top of it, spreading her fingers across its curve, the kind of sexy that guys could check out, but that she herself owned.
Bethany stood off to one side, smiling, happy, mostly-quiet, blonde, but enigmatically blonde, because she could easily pass as popular, she could be one of those girls who ruled boys like sheep, but benevolently, like Larissa, saying you don’t have to be afraid of being friends with me, and meant it—but Bethany just wasn’t like that. It was like she’d
made it to the top of the food chain and then flat-out rejected the whole thing. I made her costume more utilitarian than sexy. I thought she’d appreciate that.
And I drew me. I wasn’t sure if I should, but by the time I’d gotten that deep into the drawing, it just sort of naturally started happening before I knew it. And there was no reason not to—I’d been hanging with these people practically every weekday for weeks. Was I one of them? It felt a little presumptuous, but why not? I wasn’t confining myself to them. I wasn’t making Carrie and her band the borders of my life. They were just one comic I could draw, one in a library...but one comic that, these days, I really liked coming back to.
I drew a volcano surrounding us. Either because we were immortal, or because we all knew our entire world could blow up at any moment.
I wasn’t going to show them the picture. I didn’t want to give away their secret identities—to them or anyone else.
Just as I was putting the finishing touches on the volcano crater, though, Roderick walked by—or sashayed, really, dancing to the beat of a song the rest of us couldn’t hear. (No, he wasn’t wearing a headset.)