OCD Love Story (20 page)

No one notices. The Newbury Comics employees are a pierced, stoner bunch and I have on an A-line skirt and wool tights and librarian glasses, so I can get away with anything in this setting.

Almost.

“What you got there?” Beck says, coming in from behind me. Not touching me, but swooping in sort of close to my neck so I can feel the breath and vibration of his words without ruining his meticulous cleaning rituals.

“Oh! Band I like.”

“Lemme see.”

“You won't know them or whatever. They're all, you know, hipster and stuff.”

“I could be hipster. You're making terrible assumptions just 'cause I go to Smith-Latin and like the gym.” Beck takes the poster out of my hands and I can't really resist without getting him suspicious, so I try to look like what I imagine is sex-kitten cute and let him check out the poster.

“Well, we have to go see them, then!” he says. “Let me get us tickets.” Huge Beck smile. Quick surge of
ohmygod
,
he really likes me
, followed immediately by the realization of the mess this is all becoming.

“No, I don't want you to, I said that already” is what comes out from the panic going on in my head. There's something about the way Beck is on top of the world after therapy today that is unsettling and making “us” decidedly not
us
. Like what worked about us, or what I liked about him, was the distance between us, the awkward competing obsessions and compulsions, the way we both darted in and out of unhappiness. This Beck, the one full of hope and recovery and willingness isn't so easy to sidestep. Like availability is in and of itself something unlikeable.

Not unlikeable. Terrifying. But as luck would have it, my totally awkward refusal of his really sweet offer to buy us tickets to their concert brings him right back to his vulnerable state.

“ 'Kay,” Beck says.

Then he taps eight times.

“Don't watch me do this, okay?” he says. “It's embarrassing.”

I turn my head, but my peripheral gaze catches him tapping another eight times. He starts touching things. Counting CDs. There are rows and rows of CDs so it's going to be a losing battle, but he's counting them in groups of eight.

Then he's reorganizing them. I stop watching from the
corner of my eye and face him full on.
Flip, flip, flip, flip, flip, flip, flip, flip.
Then a stop. Leaving a space in the racks, and then grouping the next set of eight.

“I'm sorry, that was bitchy. I had a late night. I didn't sleep much. Going to the concert would be great. That's sweet.”

Eight more CDs set into a little group.

Eight more.

Then he starts counting them out loud. It's under his breath, but audible. “
Onetwothreefourfivesixseveneight
,” a long and strange whisper of a sound. Odd enough for people to notice, cock their heads, and tap their friends on the shoulders to point him out. I want to cover his mouth with my hand, lead him out, and find somewhere safe and hidden for us to coexist.

The cashiers are starting to look at us funny. Newbury Comics isn't exactly a Friday night hotspot, so there's no crowd to hide behind. It's just a couple of punked-out kids, some young hip mom, me and Beck, and a few old-timers looking for jazz records.

“Hey,” I say. I don't touch him. But I get in close, like he'd just done. So my breath is there, the friction of my body is right up next to him but not ever quite breaking the wall between us. In grade school we used to play a game called Red Light, Green Light, and dating Beck is kinda like that. We are playing the longest, most tiring high-stakes version of Red Light, Green Light ever. When we are just normal
teenagers temporarily unencumbered by our own lunacy, we rush at each other. Then the consequences happen and we halt. Midsentence sometimes. Midkiss. Midflirtation. Red Light. Green Light.

“Would you call this our third date?” Beck says. He doesn't look blissed-out and energized anymore. He looks just like Beck. I feel terrible and turned on all at once. I feel on safer ground with this damaged Beck.

“Yeah, third date. Sure. Why?”

“Just wondering,” Beck says, and for a split second I think it's adorable, like he's celebrating minianniversaries or something, and I look over at him to glow in his general direction, but he's tapping
eight, eight, eight
with his finger on his thigh, and with something like a gasp it hits me that he's counting. Not just randomly, on his thigh, not just how many times he's washed his hands or turned on and off the lights. He's counting me. We're moving toward eight dates. And if his mind is anything like mine, we are hurtling toward the eighth date at an unstoppable speed. And we're in trouble when we get there.

I HAVEN'T LISTENED TO THE
tryst cd yet.

“Just listen to it already. I wanna hear,” Lish says when we hole up in my room googling the shit out of Tryst the next night. I use an entire ink cartridge printing out articles, reviews, random tweets about the band. I look at their website and take note of all the musicians they list as “influences.” Then I google all of
those
musicians and Lisha sits by just watching, and occasionally trying to distract me from the whole event with two bottles of wine that she managed to sneak out of her parents' huge wine cellar. I am not easily distracted, since this very second I am glue-sticking an interview Austin did with some lame music blog last month into my pink shooting star notebook, and that takes up most of my mental power. That, and the anxiety and desire to do more, know more, check on them more.

“Pour me another glass?” I say. I'm too busy typing and printing and glue-sticking to do it myself.

“I'm giving up on glasses. Drink from the bottle,” Lisha
says. Neither of us holds our liquor well, but Lish gets particularly messy. She still has a crick in her neck from passing out on my couch last night.

“I gotta get over there. Austin's. Are you good to drive? Am I good to drive?” I say.

Shit. Didn't think this through. This is exactly why I don't party.
In the battle between safe driving and checking on Austin and Sylvia, I have no idea what will ultimately win out. Maybe if I drive even more slowly than usual it will be okay. Or maybe I could hitchhike. Or I could call Beck and ask him to take me.

It is a bad sign that I am even considering that.

“But aren't we checking on them right now?” Lisha says, gesturing vaguely to the computer and the collection of papers growing in towering piles on the floor, the table, the bed.

“It's not the same,” I say. I spill a little wine on the computer keyboard. I'm starting to panic with the knowledge that neither of us should be getting behind the wheel.

“Here's a question,” Lish says. She's an aggressive drunk. I've noticed this about people: Drinking gives them permission to be the person they've always wanted to be instead of the person they actually are. “You make up all your own rules, right? So, like, why can't the new rule of stalking them be that two hours of internet trolling is equally as valid as driving by their apartment building?”

When Lish is drinking she has trouble hiding just how
little she actually understands about why I do what I do. She's better at faking it sober, but after a glass or two of wine she's wrinkling her nose and cocking her head and making all the gestures and movements of a person who simply does not get it. When things were bad before, we didn't have wine to bring out the honesty, so I never knew what she thought of the mistakes I made.

It's lonely.

“I don't make up the rules, Lish. Seriously, can you drive? Do I seem sober enough to drive?” I'm giving myself an impromptu sobriety test, which is probably the least useful thing I've ever done. I go cross-eyed watching my finger try to meet my nose.

“I thought you wanted another drink.” She's taking another swig, and another. Now she's doing it just to be difficult, just to get me riled up, just to prove that she
can
and that she's not going to drive me to see Austin and Sylvia. Little beads of sweat prickle on my spine. I can feel each individual drop as it's forming. I hate it: waiting for it to fully form and then drop down. A sickening kind of torture designed to make me hate myself even more.

“Maybe I can call them,” I say. “Maybe I can check on them that way since neither of us can drive.” I'm really only proving Lisha right, that in some weird way I'm making up the rules as I go along, but it doesn't feel that way. “I mean, I just need to know they're okay for the night, and then I'll see
them at therapy Wednesday. Right? Do you think that's okay? I mean, if they're answering their phone, then that means everything's cool. And I've, like, done my duty.”

Lisha shrugs.

I decide Dr. Pat would approve of the slight shift in my routine. If she knew I had a stalker routine. It's kinda the same thing as Beck washing his hands five times instead of eight: not a solution exactly, not a sign of sanity, but a step in the right direction.

“This is good. Okay,” I say. Lisha bites her lips and drinks from the bottle with a few deep swallows. She's all bones and knobby knees and uneaten sandwiches and it's impossible not to wonder if the wine is maybe the first nourishment of her day. So, you know, her judging me doesn't have the hugest impact. Harvard or no, she's not perfect either.

It doesn't take much effort to find Austin and Sylvia's home phone number. Things get easy when you know someone's address and last name and profession, and before long I'm listening to the phone ring and letting my stomach drop more with each unanswered trill. Their voice mail picks up so I hang up and call again.

“They're not home,” Lish says.

“They will be,” I say.

“This night blows, Bea. No offense.”

“Maybe your brother could drive us by there,” I say.

“Jesus, no.”

“I could call Beck—”

“Bea,”
Lisha says, loud and sudden like a shot. It goes through me like a shot too. I pinch my thigh. “Please don't be like you were with Kurt, okay? Please?”

I don't say anything.

“I mean, he's cute and a musician and stuff but—please. I'm exhausted.”

I don't say anything. I dial Austin and Sylvia's number again, listen to the voice mail, hang up with a sigh.

We polish off the fancy wine.

“Remember Cooter's friend Jeff?” Lisha says in a sleepy drunk voice.

“Hm?”

“Jeff. You had that huge crush on him?”

“I know who Jeff is. What about him?” It's hard to have any kind of conversation right now. I drank an extra half bottle when I realized I couldn't drive to Austin's. I figured if I wasn't going to check on Sylvia and Austin I would do my absolute best to quiet down my mind.

I'm not even really listening to Lish by now because I want to drunk-dial Beck. I want to drunk-dial Beck and have him come over and take me out and try again to be two normal people liking each other. I mean, first I want him to take me to Austin's to make sure everything's cool there, but
then
I want to go be normal. Lisha's voice is basically just a distraction from that desire at this point. Little thoughts ride around
a carousel in my mind: Austin, Beck, knives, cars, and then once in a while whatever it is Lisha is saying.

I call Sylvia and Austin again. They could definitely be home by now. Meanwhile, Lish is still chattering on about Jeff, the least relevant person ever.

“Not like Cooter's friends with him
now
, obviously. But did your mom tell you Jeff's in prison again?” Lisha says, her voice finally coming around again on the carousel of thoughts.

At first I don't register the meaning of the words and then I think I heard her wrong, because I'm dialing Austin and Sylvia's place again and finally someone has picked up (Austin, I assume), out of breath, like he ran in the door and sprinted to catch my call. I'm really distracted by a million things so nothing she's saying is penetrating.

Then, just like that, there's a feeling of
zoom
deep in my chest and I can actually listen and breathe and focus on Lisha's face for the first time in a few hours. That is how the carousel of thoughts works.

I hang up the phone.

“Wait, why are we talking about Jeff?” I say.

“I was thinking about all your men. Don't you ever think about him?”

Weird that Jeff is coming up right now. Suddenly he's everywhere. Even when I'm at Newbury Comics, usually it's
my
space now, not his. I have a whole sea of memories of Harvard Square that has nothing to do with Jeff. Three
years' worth. But lately he's staining everything I do.

“What do you mean
back
in prison? Jeff was in prison before?” It's been so long since I've even thought of the guy that it's like I've forgotten everything about him and have to start from scratch. I half know everything about him. It's all fog where his face and biography should be.