The Half-Life of Planets (3 page)

Peanut M&M's. Wafer cookies. Blue tortilla chips. Fritos. Salty or sweet? My whole body leans into the machine. How many snacks are contained here? Six rows across, eight rows down, forty-eight possibilities of snack food, and only one will be the perfect fit for what I crave now. Krinkle Cheezies? I shake my head. Cheese balls. Tiny planets of horrifically bright orange. Swedish fish. What makes them Swedish? I suddenly really want to know, but there's no one to ask. Not even Cat, my best friend, who is blessed with a cool name and an even cooler summer job for which she left school a whole three days early—testing gelato flavors in Italy because her mother imports the stuff. So she's not here for a candy consult or anything else. And there aren't many people I could just call and ask such a weird question.

“E6,” I decide in a whisper and sling in an obnoxious amount of change and wait for my snack.

“Plain M&M's,” comes the voice. “A bold choice.”

I check over my shoulder. Intense and inky. Dark and daring. The boy from the bathroom. “Bathroom Boy,” I say to him. His pants are dry at least. He reaches down and collects my snack, tearing into them without asking, and chewing too loudly on a handful of my own personal would-be stash of candies.

“Bathroom Boy,” he says, and considers it. “I've been called worse.”

Chase kicks me out of the room
when Patti comes back. This is so he can “work his magic” on her to “get her digits.” I suppose Chase is arrogant when he says he is working his magic, but it feels appropriate. Getting girls to like you enough to give you their phone numbers, to kiss you, to do whatever else goes on behind the door of Chase's room, whatever goes on in his dorm room, is so impossible for me that it might as well be magic.

Not that I'm not getting better. The bullying stopped early in ninth grade, and with Allie's help I'm usually able to have a rudimentary conversation that appears normal, as long as I stay focused. But once you make a reputation, everything you do is seen through that lens. My position outside the social mainstream was cemented early in the ninth grade, and I don't even understand how one moves into the part of the social landscape where girls look for their potential boyfriends. I suppose it's fair to say I don't really understand the social landscape at all. I blunder around in it, lacking the map that most people take for granted.

I live in a beach town, and summertime is particularly painful in this respect. The town is awash in bikini-clad beauties, and the few not already dating my brother appear to have written off our entire family.

I'm thinking about this as I wander down the hall to the vending machines. I have never met or corresponded with any members of The Mooney Suzuki, a garage rock revival band, but when they mapped the brain of a young man as having a little room for music and the rest for girls, they might have been describing me. Though I guess I have more room for music than most people.

And then the girl with the breasts is there at the vending machines, and she calls me Bathroom Boy. She smiles, so I don't think she's being cruel. But I'm not sure. Even still, me in the wrong bathroom, suspicious stain on my crotch and everything, this girl was kind to me, and that simply doesn't happen to me very often.

So when I see her again, that little voice I usually hear as Allie's, which gives me tips to remember in conversation, goes away, and I just start eating M&M's.

“You know,” I tell the girl with the breasts, “Van Halen had a provision in their tour contract where they had to have a bowl of M&M's backstage with all the brown ones sorted out.” I pop a brown M&M into my mouth. “But I can never tell the difference. Can you? I mean, they used to say the green ones make you horny, but I've never found that to be the case, and if I had my eyes closed, I would certainly never be able to tell you what color I'm eating. Like this.” I close my eyes, reach into the bag, and pop an M&M into my mouth. “I have no idea. Blue? Orange? Did you see what it was?”

“No,” she says.

I stick my tongue out and observe the half-dissolved candy shell. “Well, it's mostly white now, but I guess it still proves my point. So my question is, why did Van Halen object? I mean, what's the difference?”

“At least they got to eat
their
M&M's,” the girl says, her dark eyebrows raised up and her arms crossed over her chest.

I look at my hand, and I'm suddenly embarrassed. “I'm eating your candy,” I say.

“Yep.”

“I'm sorry. I came here to get some M&M's because Patti came back and Chase told me to scram, and I was so happy to see you that I forgot about the fact that I hadn't actually bought the M&M's.”

The girl looks at me. I guess she's saying something to me with her expression. I don't know what it is. Now I'm nervous. I've forgotten to listen, I've forgotten to take a moment to think about whether another person might want to hear what's going on in my brain, all the advice that helps me navigate the world.

“Let me just buy you some,” I say. I feed the machine a dollar, press E6, and the rack circles so a pack of M&M's moves halfway out of the row and doesn't fall. “Crap. Wait, I have some more change. Then we'll have an extra bag. I wonder if they had the M&M thing with Sammy Hagar, or if that was just a David Lee Roth thing. Sammy Hagar recently sold his tequila brand to Seagram's. So I guess he's still making money even if he's not in the reconstituted Van Halen.” I feed the machine, and this time two bags pop out. I dig them out and hand them to…the girl.

“Hey,” I say. “Do you have a name besides The Girl in the Squeeze Shirt? Squeeze was going to reunite too—they did it for that VH1 show, but Jools Holland wasn't interested. Maybe they could have gotten Paul Carrack, though. I think they should have done it.” I suddenly remember that I'm supposed to pause from time to time and check in with my interlocutor. “What do you think?”

“Uh, I think sometimes it's better to know when to stop,” she says. She touches her lips with her fingers.

“I guess so. I mean, look at The Who, if you can still call them that. Pete Townshend says the band was never the same after Keith Moon died, which I guess everybody knew, but—”

“Well, listen, I gotta go. You want the extra pack of candy? You bought them, after all.” She moves away from the candy machine. I do not say Please don't walk away, I promise I will shut up if you'll just stay here, girls never talk to me, even at work I only talk to the male customers, or they anyway are the only ones who talk to me. I am thinking all of these things, but people get disconcerted when you say exactly what's on your mind.

“No, they're a present for you. For your trouble.”

She stops and smiles at me. “What trouble?”

“Well, I forgot to…because I ate your M&M's.”

She gives me another look. I really wish I understood it. If you can't read, you can walk through town and not understand the
DO NOT ENTER
signs or know what any of the stores are, so you'll go the wrong way down the street and ask if you can drop off your dry cleaning at a dentist's office. I guess my life is like this. That's what Allie tells me. She is female but doesn't count because she's a social worker and our relationship is strictly professional.

This is what she told me when I asked her if she wanted to go to a movie. She very nicely talked to me about how that would be inappropriate, and if I would work on the things she teaches me, I could meet other girls, girls my own age, to go to the movies with.

The funny thing is that I didn't have a crush on Allie. I just knew that she liked old movies and
High School Confidential
was playing at the Wilson Square Theatre. Little Richard, Eddie Cochran, Fats Domino, Gene Vincent, and The Platters all perform in that movie.

Allie tells me there are signs everywhere in the way people act, in the tone of their voice, in the way they hold their head, and I can't read the signs. So sometimes I go speeding down the road in the wrong direction. I'm afraid I may have just done this by giving this girl the extra M&M's, even though it just seemed to be the right thing to do.

“That's sweet,” she says finally. “I'm Liana, by the way. What are you in for?”

“What?”

“In the hospital. Why are you eating M&M's here instead of in a less heinous place?” She picks at something on her shirt right where the Z is.

“Oh, my brother, he's got some kind of lacrosse injury and—”

“Do you have a name?”

“Yeah. It's Hank.”

“Hank? Really?”

“Well, my real name is Henry. I was named for Henry Rollins, you know, from Black Flag, and the Rollins Band, as well as various spoken word performances and now a weekly show on IFC. I saw Peaches on his show once. She frightened me.”

“I don't know what you're talking about.” Her hair is dark brown and long, with choppy shorter parts at the front. The kind of hair a librarian would have in an old-school music video such as I watch on VH1 Classic from time to time, the kind of hair that starts tightly wound up to show the seriousness of the character, and then, once she unpins it or whatever, is transformed. Only Liana's already like that right now. Her hair is down, but not as huge as the hair of the girl in the video for Adam Ant's “Goody Two Shoes,” but that video is from 1982, the year that Mother refers to as “The Biggest of the of Big Hair Years.”

In between her hair and her breasts, there is her mouth. And when Liana smiles, as she's doing right now, she looks twinkly.

I do not tell her that she looks like a girl from an '80s video.

I have learned that people don't always like these comparisons. Though Chase quite enjoys hearing that he has Henry Rollins's body, Kurt Cobain's hair, and Justin Timberlake's face. Which I intended as a put-down.

“Ah. I'm sorry you don't know what I'm talking about. I have that problem.” I take a breath and slow down. “Anyway, when I was nine, I discovered Hank Williams, who, while he is a country artist, is kind of a godfather of rock and roll. George Thorogood covered “Move It on Over.” Most people don't even know that's a Hank Williams song. Though technically it's an old R & B—”

“Yeah. I certainly never knew that. Well, Hank, it was nice meeting you, and I've got to—”

“I work at Planet Guitar. If you ever want me to help you with a guitar or something, you should stop by. I also know a lot about our selection of guitar effects, so if you ever need help with a wah-wah pedal or your fuzzbox, I could help you. I can give you my employee discount.”

She's laughing and twinkling. I wasn't aware I'd made a joke. “Did you just offer to help me with my fuzzbox?”

“Well, if you play guitar. Or bass. Captain Beefheart covered ‘Diddy Wah Diddy' with so much fuzzbox on the bass that—”

“I'll remember that,” she says, but she's smiling and something doesn't match up between how she's looking at me and what she's saying. She's about to leave again.

“Listen, Liana, you're a girl, right?”

She keeps cocking her head at me and smiling. “That's why I was in the women's bathroom.”

“So can I ask you something about my brother?”

“Uh. Okay.”

“He's what's referred to as a ladies' man. And normally he gets the girls by being a big Carville University lacrosse-playing jock guy, and I always thought they were responding to the strength and confidence he projects.”

“Sounds like a good theory.”

“But then Patti, this student nurse, came in, and he acted all weak and scared. And she came back in just two minutes, and I had to leave the room.”

Liana smiles. “Ah.”

“What?”

“He's reading the situation. Why do you think girls study nursing?”

I remember to glance over at the vending machines because Allie told me people find it disconcerting if you look right at them all the time even if you are supposed to be paying attention to them. “Because they're interested in science?”

“No. That's why girls study
medicine
. Girls study nursing because they like taking care of people. So here's your brother playing ‘I'm a big strong athlete but I need you to take care of me.' It's a genius move.” She nods her head and flashes that smile again.

People say things like this a lot. They talk about moves and strategies when they're just talking about how to talk to each other. I can't even imagine how that works. Which is why I am just saying what's on my mind. I wonder what kind of move that is.

“I don't know…It just doesn't make any sense to me. You know? Music makes sense to me.”

“You just have to figure out what the other person is interested in, what they want, and try to be that for them.” She stops talking briefly and looks at the ceiling. I look up there as well but don't see what she sees, so I take the opportunity to look at her breasts again. Girls don't like it when you stare at their breasts, even if, like Liana, they have really tight shirts on. Allie did not tell me this. Chase did. Liana looks back at me, and I snap my eyes up to her face. “Does your brother like science?”

I laugh. Chase scrapes by in school on his lacrosse-playing ability and an inexplicable fondness for history. I don't think he's ever broken a C in a science class. “Not at all.”

“Well, I do. Let's go meet him, and I'll reveal my love of planetary science, and I'll bet you he suddenly develops an interest in astronomy.”

“I'll be surprised if Chase can even feign interest in things that don't revolve around him.”

Liana laughs.

There are certain lines in songs that I can make out but fundamentally don't understand. Like when someone says “my heart just flipped” or “my heart skipped a beat,” or when Buddy Holly asks his heartbeat why it stops when his baby kisses him. I should say I never understood those lines until I heard Liana laugh at my joke about Chase.

I've certainly heard laughter from girls before, but normally it's the behind-the-hand laughter one might refer to as sniggering. Liana's laughter was not like that. It seemed to stop my heart for just a moment.

“Let's go!” She reaches back and pulls at my arm. Her hand on my arm feels like an electric shock. But in a good way. I stand still for a moment, thinking about The Doors' “Touch Me,” but I can't really say, like Jim Morrison does,
I am not afraid
, because I am afraid, though I can't really say of what.