Tell Me Three Things (16 page)

Would a drug addict take the time to memorize poetry? Theo has to be wrong. Ethan is not on drugs. Ethan is an insomniac and maybe damaged, whatever that means. Except I do know what that means, because who’s kidding who? I am damaged too.

I
can’t eat lunch. Too nervous. In just a few hours I’m meeting Caleb for our first date, though it’s not really a date, and I’m not sure it can even be called a first, since we talk online all the time. Last night, we IM’d so late, I fell asleep with my computer on my lap and woke to his words dinging on my screen.
Three things,
he said:
(1) good morning. (2) I have keyboard marks on my face. slept on the “sdfgh.” (3) you leave in 24 hours, and I’m going to miss you.

“I’m not buying that Caleb is SN,” says Agnes, when I refuse her fries for the fifth time on grounds that I’m worried I might throw up. “I mean, Dri is right, he’s weird like that, but I dunno. He’s not, you know, shy. He’s like the most direct guy I’ve ever met.”

“But I told him where I worked and then he showed up there. I totally saw him texting at Gem’s party at the exact same time we were writing. And whenever I talk to him, he does this weird phone shake thing, to say like, ‘I’ll write you,’ and then a second later he always does. And he quoted me back to me. It has to be him,” I say.

“It’s definitely him,” Dri says. “And I’m impressed that you made the first move. Ballsy.” Dri is not looking at us. She’s staring at Liam, who is sitting on the other side of the cafeteria, nowhere near Gem. “You think they broke up?”

“No idea,” I say, and shrug. “Nor do I care.”

“You may have actually brought down Gemiam.”

“Gemiam?”

“Gem and Liam. Gemiam.”

I roll my eyes at Dri.

“I want to talk about Jessaleb. I just feel like I would have heard if his sister had died,” Agnes says, and my stomach clenches.

“You said he never really talked about her.” Dri multitasks: she talks to us and watches the Liam show at the same time. I’d worry about her being too obvious, except Liam is clueless. I just hope Gem won’t notice. “And there were rumors.”

“I mean, yeah, I had heard she was a total cutter, and she had a major eating disorder, so who knows. But I thought her parents sent her off to some mental hospital on the East Coast, not that she, you know, offed herself or anything like that,” Agnes says. Her tone is so casual, as if we’re talking about a character in a book, and not someone’s actual life. Whether a real person, in the real world, is alive or dead. It strikes me how callous we all are, how comfortable we are belittling other people’s problems:
Total cutter. Major eating disorder.
So easy for us to say.

I wish I had never mentioned his sister. Now I feel like I’ve betrayed Caleb, spilled secrets that weren’t mine to spill. I’m glad I’ve never said anything about his mom.

“Maybe he meant it metaphorically? Like it
felt
like his sister died,” Dri offers, but I shake my head. Caleb wasn’t at all vague. “Or maybe he just said it to connect with you, you know, about your mom?”

I take Agnes’s french fry, nibble it slowly and deliberately. I will ask Caleb later, if I have the nerve. I’ve never really wished anyone dead before, but it would be so not cool if he made the whole thing up. No, Caleb has lost someone close to him. We are a select crew, the dead family club, and I think I can tell who is for real. He counts the days, you know,
since,
just like me.

No one could make up counting days.

In English, Gem takes her seat without looking at me. I just see her straight back, her ponytail swishing its disapproval, the side of her arched brow. Her beauty is so classic, so generally agreed upon, that it’s almost impossible not to stare. I hate myself for it, but I long to look like her, to cast spells without even having to open my mouth. To have a body like hers, assembled from lean, proportionate parts, as if dreamed up and arranged by the fantasies of all the men.

I wonder if Ethan is staring at her too. If he can help it.

If, at night, Ethan thinks about Gem the way I think about him.

I try not to. Think about him, I mean. I’ve tried to do a bait and switch, put Caleb where Ethan’s face appears, but it never works. I may spend my evenings IMing with Caleb, but I spend my dreams with Ethan. In them, he’s awake, his hands eager, his eyes on mine. In them, I’m not scared of sex, of intimacy, of anything at all. In them, I don’t feel ugly or compare my body to Gem’s. I feel beautiful and strong and brave.

In the morning, I wake up flushed, sad, when the feeling gets wiped away by the reality of day. When I wash my face in the mirror, see whiteheads, red splotches, round baby cheeks.

“Ms. Holmes?” Mrs. Pollack asks, and I wonder how long she’s been calling on me.

“Um, yeah?”

“Care to answer the question?” I remember suddenly that she’s been going around the room. I had ample warning, knew I was next up, but still I somehow got lost in thought. I look up at Mrs. Pollack; she’s attractive, might have looked a lot like Gem when she was in high school. I bet she’s never had a pimple.

“I’m sorry, I—” The whole class looks over, Gem and Crystal snicker in duet, and my face flashes hot. A bead of sweat threatens to streak down my right temple. I flick it away, try to calm my beating heart. Back in Chicago, English was my strongest subject. “I mean, I wasn’t paying—”

“That scene with Raskolnikov at his house with his mother and sister. How he’s able to act like everything is normal, even though he’s actually going crazy inside,” Ethan breaks in, and though I have no idea what he’s talking about, his comment satisfies Mrs. Pollack, who moves toward the front of the room to write something on the blackboard.

“Exactly,” she says, giving me one last look, which catches me by surprise. Because it’s not mean. It’s not even pity. It’s something else entirely. Empathy.

“Thanks,” I say to Ethan after class, once we are safely in the hallway. “You saved me.”

“My pleasure, Tuberlicious.”

“I hope I don’t ruin your grade with our project.” I fiddle with my bag, which feels too heavy on my shoulder. “Especially after I kind of made you work with me.”

“I’m not worried.” He smiles, so I force myself to look him straight in the eye, to bathe in the blue. No, not like a serial killer’s, like I first thought. More complex than that. Like a gathering. I hear Theo’s warning in my head and check for dilated pupils, but they look normal-sized to me.

“Good,” I say. Not clever. Not flirtatious. Not anything. Maybe in an hour, I’ll come up with a better line. Something funny and light to punctuate my exit.

But now: nothing.

Ethan rubs his head, as if trying to wake up his hair. Smiles again.

“Have a safe trip tomorrow.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t forget about us,” he says, and before I can even articulate a question—What does he mean by us? Wood Valley? LA? Him and me?—Ethan is gone, out the front door and halfway to his car.

I wait for Caleb near the school’s entrance, stand idly by the stairs. He said we should meet at three o’clock, and now it’s three-fifteen, and I pretend not to be nervous that he won’t show. I stare at the screen of my phone as if I’m deep in thought, as if my life depends on this text I’m typing. But I’m not really texting anyone, because the person I normally write to at times like this is Caleb. So I’m just thumbing over and over with my fingers:
Please don’t stand me up. Please don’t stand me up. Please don’t stand me up.
I wonder how long I’m supposed to wait and at what point it will become obvious to me that I’m an idiot.

Gem walks by, because of course if there must be a bystander to witness my humiliation it will be her. For a moment, my stomach drops with the thought that SN may be Gem, that he has been a joke all along at my expense, but then I catch myself and let the thought go. No, Gem has better things to do than to text me late into the night as part of an elaborate practical joke. My friendship with SN is real, even if Caleb is not yet ready to face me.

“I wish you’d just go back to where you came from,” Gem says as she skips down the stairs, words thrown over her shoulder as sharp as darts.

“Me too.” I say it low enough that she can’t hear.

“Me too, what?” Caleb says, and now he’s next to me, and I can’t help but grin from ear to ear. He didn’t stand me up. He’s here, car keys dangling from his long fingers, ready to go. We will have coffee and finally talk and it will be as easy as it is with my fast-moving thumbs. As strange as it is to trust him, I do.
Three things,
I start writing in my head:
(1) You understand me. (2) Tell me about Kilimanjaro. (3) Were you scared up there?

“Nothing,” I say. “Just talking to myself.”

“Do that often?”

“It’s been known to happen,” I say. Caleb is so tall that I need to look up to talk to him, my neck arched back at an unfortunate angle. Maybe later I’ll take a selfie to see what I look like to him from way up there, the entire plane and slope of my face. All chin and eyebrows. It can’t be pretty. I’m not Barbie to his human Ken doll.

“Listen, about coffee,” he says, and the disappointment hits me full force, even before he says the words.
This is what you get for being ballsy.
Ridiculous of me to be so optimistic and open, to assume this was going to happen. I keep letting myself be lifted and dropped, like a stuffed animal in an old-fashioned claw machine. I’ll never actually be chosen, especially by someone who looks like him. “I think we shouldn’t.”

“Have coffee? Okay.” I want to pick up my phone again. IM SN. Write what is too hard to say:
Why not? Why aren’t I good enough for you in person?

I think of the whitehead on my chin, which I covered with makeup in the bathroom just a half hour ago. I think of my arms, flabby and pasty, not browned and toned like Gem’s. My eyebrows, which, no matter how long I spend in front of the mirror, always come out just slightly mismatched. My clothes, which are almost as nondescript as Caleb’s, but girls, I guess, are not supposed to aim for nondescript. The width of my nose—which has never bothered me until right now—my chipped fingernail polish; even my earlobes, too loose, like long hanging fruit. And of course my forever-disappointing chest, which somehow manages to be both small and floppy at the same time: stupid, sad, flat funnels.

Caleb will not see my disappointment. I mirror his casualness. Shrug, like it’s no problem. Keep the smile from dripping down. Act like I don’t feel the small, hard knot in my intestines, as if someone has reached into me and plucked them into a hideous bow. I grin through the pain—an actual, literal, visceral pain.

“You know, because of Liam,” Caleb says, and now he’s gone fuzzy and I don’t understand at all. He’s speaking a foreign language I’ve never heard before. One overly punctuated and aggressive, nasty simply because of the sounds of its hard, cruel letters.

“Liam? I mean…Wait, what?”

“I just think he’ll get the wrong idea. And he’s my best friend, so, you know,” he says. But I don’t know. What does Liam have to do with my getting coffee with Caleb?

“I still…I mean, I’m confused. What wrong idea? What does Liam have to do with anything?” Again, my brain is stalling. Maybe Caleb is right after all: let’s keep everything in words on a screen, where they are so much easier to let out. Where they are clear and can be saved so they can be returned to later in case of a misunderstanding.

“You know he broke up with Gem, right? Because of you.” Caleb’s tone is so matter-of-fact, as if this is basic Wood Valley knowledge. And also as if it has little to do with him.

“Um, no. I didn’t know they broke up, and if they did, I had nothing to do with it.” I swallow, start again, hear that I sound defensive, though I don’t know what about. “I mean, she’s a huge bitch, and maybe he saw that she’s been, you know, so mean, so indirectly, I guess it could tangentially have to do with me. But wait, what?” I’m rambling because I’m nervous. I stop, let my brain play catch-up. He’s not saying what I think he’s saying, is he? No. Liam couldn’t have broken up with Gem because he likes me?

No, that’s not possible.

Oh God. I finger the paper in my pocket. My ticket back to Chicago. Tomorrow cannot come soon enough. I need to get far, far away from this place. I think of Dri hearing this somehow, through that weird Wood Valley network I’m not at all clued into, and her thinking I’ve betrayed our new friendship. She knows I have no interest in Liam, right?

None of this makes sense. Gem is the kind of girl who makes
men,
not just boys but
men,
do double-takes. There is no universe in which someone would break up with her for me. Unless…Is Liam somehow SN? Do we have some sort of intellectual connection that would make him want to bridge that impossible gap between Gem and me?

No. Liam’s an only child. No dead sisters—real or otherwise. And it’s not like we really connect when we talk in person. At least, I don’t think so.

Liam did tell me the other day at the store that I was “easy to talk to” and a “really good listener.” They seemed like throwaway words, the right thing to say to someone who is a little shy. Honestly, I am not that good a listener. I am just good at letting other people talk.

No, Caleb must have the story wrong.

“All right, whatever. But I can’t get involved,” he says, and starts to walk away.

“Wait,” I say, wanting to ask a million questions but realizing I should probably just IM him instead. More direct and efficient.

“What?” Caleb looks back. He’s shaking his stupid phone again, like that alone should satisfy me: the promise of a future message.

“Nothing,” I say. “Just talking to myself.”

So I was wrong. It’s not easier to write the words, to spell it out:
You hurt my feelings today. I don’t like Liam. My fingers are tired of this. It was just coffee.

Or this:
How can you like me so much in words and care so little for me in person?