Definitions of Indefinable Things Read online

  “I know how to turn. I’m choosing not to.”

  I had no idea how to turn.

  “No, you’re so unbelievably stubborn that you would crash yourself into a rocky bank just to prove that you don’t need anyone’s help.” He glanced at me and grinned, his eyes squinted. It was different than usual, or it might have just made me feel different. I wasn’t sure.

  He grabbed my leg right beneath the knee, moving me in the direction we needed to go. With his help, we missed the bank by an inch. After, he slid his hand upward, his fingertips skimming my thigh before letting his arm fall at his side.

  “Smooth,” I mocked.

  “Actually, quite prickly. Have you considered shaving?”

  I punched his arm harder than I meant to as we drifted toward the west side of the pond, away from Snake’s house and my family (see: ragtag team of psychos).

  “It’s nice out here, right?” Snake asked. He said it like he wasn’t sure.

  “It’s trees, water, grass, and sky. I could get it on the Discovery Channel.”

  “Yeah. But experiences are better than the replications, aren’t they?”

  “Our experiences are just replications of other people’s experiences.”

  “Nothing new under the sun.”

  “That’s from the Bible.”

  “I know.” He smiled. “My family doesn’t really smoke hookah next to a statue of Buddha while listening to a Celtic orchestra.”

  “Good,” I said, smiling back at him. “Celtic orchestras suck.”

  He steered us toward a white-blossomed tree that was vomiting flowers onto the water and took his foot off the pedals to let us drift. Then he looked at me kind of intensely and said, “This is where I take the time to make an absolute fool of myself to apologize for making an absolute fool of myself.”

  “Sounds foolish.”

  “Oh, it is. And I probably won’t come away from it a better person than before, but I need to tell you I’m sorry for not showing up to Carla’s birthing class the other night and making you liable by association. I would say symptom of depression, but I’m starting to think depression is a symptom of me.”

  “It’s not a symptom of anything,” I corrected him. “And you can’t control Disconnect, Snake. I’m not judging you for it.”

  “Disconnect?”

  “The third stage. I look at it in three stages. Disconnect is where you were the other night. It’s that nonfunctioning state where you feel nothing. Numbness. You just want to listen to music that makes you miserable and take Prozac and sleep for eternity. So I get it. You’re not really up to taking your pregnant girlfriend to a parade showcasing the miracle of life when you feel like dying.”

  He was watching me intently. His boring eyes seemed less boring every time I saw him. I couldn’t tell if it was because he was getting better or I was.

  “I like the way you see it,” he said, pumping his feet to spin us in gradual circles. “When I first got on Prozac, my moms started blaming themselves, like I needed something they couldn’t give me. I think they felt powerless, or something. But it’s because they were viewing it all wrong. We don’t always feel pain for a reason. Sometimes we hurt because it’s better than nothing. We hurt to feel alive.”

  “I think that’s where you and I are different. When I got on Zoloft, I might as well have been diagnosed with cancer as far as my mother was concerned. I was a lost soul. I didn’t have Jesus. I needed to pray. Karen blamed it on everything and everyone but me. It’s like she couldn’t accept that maybe I hated to feel because it’s overrated. I didn’t need feelings, I needed the world to slow down.” I reached over the side of the pedal boat and picked up a blossom. “The world’s too fast to stop, though.”

  “It feels pretty slow out here.”

  “Yeah.”

  I didn’t expect that I’d feel the same. But he was right. Somehow, he was right. We weren’t spinning.

  “Feeling’s not overrated. I don’t think you do enough of it.”

  “And I think you do too much,” I argued, tossing the blossom to the water. “We only have a scrap of useful passion. It’s a shame to spread it thin.”

  He didn’t answer. We bobbed toward the bank again, but he successfully steered us back onto the pond and toward his house. This time, he pedaled slowly. He went slower than he had on the way to the quiet side. I could tell that he didn’t want to waste his moments. But I almost wondered if our moments were better off wasted. Empty. Wouldn’t it have been better that way? To let our feelings drain so that nothing could be lost when the moments were over?

  “How was it?” he asked. He didn’t seem himself. Nervous, even. “The class? I’ve been to a few, and they were the closest semblance to physical torture I could imagine.”

  “I ended up between Carla’s legs while she pretended to push a child out of her body to a techno beat. The torture was very much physical.”

  I didn’t mention what Carla told me at the mall, about the feelings she might have still had for Snake. Telling her secrets felt like sticking a thumb on her bruises. As a person with a lot of wounds, I knew how badly that could hurt.

  “She texted me yesterday,” he said. “She wasn’t upset with the way things ended. I kind of got the feeling she was relieved to be rid of me.”

  “I hope you know you’re not really broken up. And you’ll never be rid of each other, either.”

  “Do you want me to be with her?” He stopped pedaling again and was calculating my reaction under disheveled hair. “You act like you think we should be together.”

  I didn’t know if want was a term I would use. And I knew that want was all he used. And it was the most honest and unusual question, but it didn’t have an obvious answer.

  “You know what I think? I think we’re too young and imperfect and unpredictable to decide who should be with whom and who is the proverbial ‘one’ and what draws us together apart from the simple bias of human obligation to the concept of love. So I don’t care if you’re with Carla, or convincing yourself you’re without her, or pining after wants you can’t obtain because the bias of love falls short on you. You can want what you want, but there are some things that never change. And Carla’s presence in your life is one of them. So, the answer is no. I wouldn’t say I want anything in particular.”

  He didn’t grin. The one time I was brutal to a fault, and he wasn’t cheerful about it. But he wasn’t thrown. Rather, expectant.

  “Who am I to forsake obligation?”

  “No one.” I rubbed my eyes. I couldn’t believe I was about to say it. “You actually have one more obligation.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You need to take Carla to prom.”

  He almost laughed. “Um, what?”

  “Personally, I find it ridiculous. But Carla is wired to need it, and you should know all about that.” He was watching me with more feeling than I liked. Like everything else he did, it was too much. “Friday night. Take her.”

  His blue eyes were too dull against the water, and the sun was brighter than he would ever be, and he lied to himself every day, and he was too presumptuous, and I was pointing out all of his flaws because I was beginning not to notice them anymore. It was like the first time I met him. He was beautiful and average. Only this time, minus the average part.

  “I really, insanely, undeniably hate you in the best way,” he whispered.

  “Reggie!” Karen called from the grass. She had the picnic blanket rolled under her arm while my family headed uphill toward the street. “Come on. We’re leaving.”

  The pedal boat reached the dock. I turned to Snake, and he lifted his hand. “After you,” he said, motioning for me to leave. Every ounce of me protested.

  I jumped out of the boat and clumsily climbed onto the dock without his help. I didn’t need it. He was crawling out behind me when I took off and sprinted toward my mom. I didn’t look back.

  He was probably soul staring me. He was probably waiting for a response
that would ease his hunger. He was probably wanting too much.

  But there was no probably when it came to what we both knew.

  I really, insanely, undeniably hated him in the best way too.

  Chapter Thirteen

  HE NEEDED A SUIT. IT WAS no revelation to discover that Snake Eliot had never owned a suit in his entire seventeen years of living. Not a church suit, not a funeral suit, not a for-the-heck-of-it suit. Nothing. So that’s where I found myself Monday night after work, shopping for suits at a mom-and-pop retail store for a guy who was too pretentiously unpretentious to buy a suit worthy of his price range, so he could attend junior prom at a school he didn’t go to with his pregnant ex-girlfriend who didn’t really want him there.

  “She said fine.” He laughed, modeling in front of the dressing room mirrors. He was wearing a navy blue tux that swallowed his arms, still insisting he try on sizes that were totally beyond him.

  I sat in what I could only deem the girlfriend chair. It was the only explanation I could come up with for the white plush pillows and Cosmopolitan magazines on the glass table.

  “How did you start it?” I asked as I flipped through an article about what men look for in the ideal woman. Because nothing said female empowerment like a commentary from the peanut gallery (see: patriarchy).

  “I started it off like, ‘Hey, babe.’ She said, ‘Don’t call me that, jerk.’ Then I said, ‘I know you’re mad, and you’re not in the mood to hear from me, but I really want to take you to prom.’ She kind of got quiet and was like, ‘I’m not going. I’m too big for all of the dresses, I’ll look ugly, yada yada.’ And I was like, ‘You’re beautiful. Come on.’ And that got her, you know. Vanity and all. Then she said, ‘Fine.’ That was it. Fine. I thought I would at least get a thanks. Jeez.”

  “You knock her up, tell her you have feelings for someone else, don’t show up to her birthing classes, and then ask her to prom.” I tossed the magazine on the table. “You’re lucky you got a fine.”

  He spun around and held out his arms in a sweeping gesture.

  “What do you think?” he asked. I couldn’t concentrate with the crooked bow tie beneath his chin.

  “You look ridiculous.”

  “I think I look like James Bond.”

  “Maybe his deranged stepson twice removed.”

  “You’re a harsh critic.” He grinned, unbuttoning the tuxedo jacket to reveal his white T-shirt underneath. “I’ll have to remember to never come to you if I need an ego boost.”

  “Your ego needs no boosting, my friend.”

  He stepped down from the pedestal and grabbed a hanger from the rack. “Friend, huh?” He smiled. “Is that what you’re telling yourself these days?”

  He hung the jacket inside out, probably because his hair had gotten so long he couldn’t see what he was doing. Or he was just an idiot. There was ample evidence for both.

  “Would you call it differently?”

  He took a seat in the chair beside me. He still wore the baggy tuxedo pants with his tattered white T-shirt, holding the fluffy throw pillow in his lap. Despite his shaggy hair, I could see his eyes sparkling as they teased me. He was some piece of work (see: smug bastard).

  “See the thing is, I’ve gone above and beyond to make my feelings remarkably clear. However, you seem to hate me in fluctuating patterns, which lead me to rocky conclusions, which, in the grand scheme of things, don’t matter at all. Because whether you hate me in the bad way or you hate me in the good way, you’re still thinking of me. So I believe that we’re either A) very passionate friends or B) masochistic lovers.” He smirked with desperate flirtation. “I prefer B myself.”

  “I prefer C) try on another tux or I’m leaving.”

  “That wasn’t an option.”

  “I’m not playing this game.” I jumped from the seat and walked to the rack of hideous and oversize suits. I grabbed the one he let me pick out that was in his size. “Try this one. Maybe you’ll get lucky and won’t look like the before shot on a Weight Watcher’s infomercial.”

  “Ha. Ha.” He strolled to where I stood and stepped as close to me as he possibly could without completely needle-popping my personal bubble. “Masochistic lovers it is.” He took the hanger and disappeared into the dressing room.

  When he returned, I barely recognized him. He was in formfitting black, with a long, skinny tie and sleeves that accentuated his arms. I could tell he’d messed with his hair, because it kind of had this swoopy thing going on that wasn’t there before. His stupid tattoo was covered, too. For once, he looked like the preppy rich boy he was trying so hard not to be.

  “You can’t tell me I don’t look good in this one.”

  “It’s only because I picked it out. I have impeccable taste.”

  “I have to give you credit,” he said, checking himself out in the wall mirror. “Carla won’t be able to keep her hands off of me.”

  “Only if she’s strangling you.”

  He laughed. “She’s not as violent as you are.”

  “I bet you just adore that about her.”

  “It’s a perk.” He glanced back at me with a playful smile. “Are you jealous?”

  “Jealous?”

  “Yeah, because I’m going to prom with Carla. Because that was your brilliant idea, not mine.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I couldn’t care less what you do or don’t do with Carla.”

  “Reeeeally?” He stretched the word as far as it would reach. “So if Carla and I go to prom, and we dance to some sappy song, and she starts getting emotional as we reminisce about the night we met, and we start making out and professing our undying devotion, that would be perfectly okay with you?”

  “First of all, sloppy drunk sex is hardly something to reminisce about. Second of all, good luck slow dancing with her jumbo belly between you. Third of all, the whole public-make-out thing is gross.” I stood up and tossed my messenger bag over my shoulder, fed up with his grins and suits and sad flirtation attempts. “Pay for your damn suit.”

  As I turned to leave, I heard him yell, “Wait!” He walked to me with a sort of pained look in his eyes. I didn’t care why. “I just want you to know that if the situation were reversed, it would drive me crazy seeing you with someone else.”

  “Then you’re a sucky person,” I snapped. “Because I’m not doing that to you. I’m putting myself second to do right by people I don’t even like just so I can . . .”

  “Just so you can what?”

  “Nothing.”

  He touched my cheek with the back of his hand. It was a simple gesture, one I’d seen him try on Carla a thousand times. I should’ve shoved him away. I should’ve told him to screw off like I wanted to that first time I met him at the pharmacy. But I never could because he was Snake. Infuriatingly persistent, charmingly sincere Snake.

  “I don’t think you’re putting yourself second because of anyone but yourself,” he said. “You’re afraid that you could feel something for me, and that terrifies you.”

  “Feeling is overrated, remember? I don’t feel things for people, Snake. And I don’t need you to feel anything for me. And I definitely don’t need you telling Carla that I make you feel long-term, because it’s never going to work.”

  “Never going to work because of the baby?”

  “Never going to work because you and I are toxic. I learned that from a bottle of Zoloft, weeks of therapy, and a doctor who prescribes me pills every month. And if you think we’re stable enough to make something work, especially with you having a baby, you’re even stupider than depression.”

  He looked at the ground and didn’t look up again. I’d succeeded in hurting the feelings he esteemed so highly. And it wasn’t even that I meant to; it was that I didn’t want him to make this harder. Despite everything, he always hoped and believed and trusted, and I just . . . didn’t. I couldn’t.

  “I better change,” he said, undoing the buttons on his jacket.

  He disappeared into the fitting room with
out another word.

  I called Snake later that night, prepared to mend whatever it was that I’d broken at the store. Unsurprisingly, he ignored all three calls. Texts, too. I’d struck him somewhere that did a lot of damage, and while it was more than a little vindicating, it mainly hurt like crazy.

  I knew it was stupid to fall into a depressive state over a few dodged calls, but I wasn’t exactly the master of my depression. So I stopped trying to dominate my uncontrollable insides and let myself go. I cried. I blew my nose into a school permission slip on my nightstand because I mistook it for a tissue. I swallowed my Zoloft.

  And then I thought about how alone I was. And how painful the mere act of breathing could be. And what it meant to be whole, because I always felt more like a million origami shreds glued around an inflated balloon. And if I would ever be stupid enough to be happy. And if people would stop being people and be permanent instead.

  I reached for my phone again, dialing the number I knew by instinct. The number that wouldn’t change. The number that would be immortalized inside my head, regardless of what could never physically or otherwise exist on the other end of the line.

  This number is no longer—​

  “I miss you.”

  —​in service.

  Chapter Fourteen

  MY MUCH-NEEDED THERAPY SESSION WAS RESCHEDULED for Tuesday. When I arrived, Dr. Rachelle bent forward in her chair, paying me what I labeled her creepily undivided attention. I had a tissue in my hand even though I wasn’t crying, because she insisted I be ready. I didn’t think I could produce any more tears after the debacle from the night before.

  “It looks like you’ve had a rough day,” she said, invoking her killer instincts (see: common sense).

  “It’s me. Your expectations should be pretty low by now.”

  “My only expectation is that you be genuine. That’s what counts.”

  “I don’t feel like being genuine.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because I have no one!” I yelled, surprising myself.

  She slid on her horn-rimmed glasses, something she always did when she predicted that our session was about to get real.