Definitions of Indefinable Things Read online

  We hopped in the Prius and were at his house in ten minutes. The house was dark except for the twinkle-lit sidewalk, buzzing like fireflies in the shadows. He led me past his screened deck, where there was a master grill like the ones in those fancy commercials. As we went through the backyard, I was staring at the sky, dazing off as the gray gave way to black.

  “Reggie?”

  Snake was staring at me again, but it was more of an earth-to-crazy stare this time. I looked around and noticed that we were on a hill a good few yards behind the house, not a huge one, but high enough to provide a great view of the neighborhood and the pond. He untied the camera from his back.

  “Are you going to lay the blanket down?” he asked.

  I forgot I had been carrying a hand-stitched quilt his grandmother had made for one of his moms when she was a baby. The pattern was Jacob’s ladder in patriotic colors, and I knew that because Karen had instilled in me every possible design of quilt that any human could ever not need to know. I spread the blanket across the dewy grass and sat down. Snake sat beside me, his arm pressed to mine.

  The lightning had already begun on the car ride over. There were little flashes here and there, but nothing significant for his documentary. He clicked the camera on just as brighter sparks electrified the horizon.

  “Why do you need lightning shots, anyway?” I asked as a bolt struck above his house. The sky was honey in an instant, and bruised purple in the aftermath.

  “Because it’s ironic,” he said from behind the lens. He had one eye squinted into the viewfinder as the sky erupted. “A lightning storm in Flashburn. Who could pass up the opportunity to capture not only our uselessness, but the predictability of our existence?”

  “We are exactly what we say we are. No surprises.”

  “None except one.” He pulled away from the camera and looked at me, a flash of pink blinding half of my vision of him. “You’re the only person who’s ever surprised me.”

  “I’m not that complex.”

  “On the contrary, you’re so exclusively complex that you only have one predominant behavior.” He kept the camera rolling, but set it on the ground in front of his feet. He leaned closer to me, his eyes electrified by lightning and something of an entirely different kind of nature. “Hate. It encompasses you, but barely scratches the surface of who you are. And I’m still not sure how that can be.”

  I didn’t want to be repetitive even to my own conscious, but this guy. This presumptuous guy. He was roundabout, complimenting me like he always did, sprinkling his assertions with arrogant assumptions. It used to make my skin itch. Now, it was comfortable. It was the kind of lightning that only bothered the sky.

  “So I’m a little complex.”

  “No kidding. I can’t tell if you hate because you’re inherently hateful, or if hate is your love language.”

  “What about you, huh? You’re surprising.”

  “No, I’m not,” he mumbled.

  “No? I see a kid refilling his Prozac and find out that this guy has a cool talent, awesome moms, a girlfriend, whether or not he wants one, a baby on the way, and he’s clinical.” I shrugged. “Doesn’t make much sense.”

  “I’m sorry my depression isn’t listed on the periodic table of logical depression. Do I have to draw up a map of why I feel the way I do, or can we accept my defects as one of the unexplainable mysteries of life and let them be?”

  “No, I get it. People always want reasons. My therapist always asks me, ‘What was your initial trigger?’ and I used to not answer, because I didn’t know. But then I just got tired of the nagging and this idea that misery must be attached to reasons why, so when she asked me for the thousandth time, I said, ‘Birth.’ ” He laughed. “Yeah, my therapist hates me. And not in the love language way.”

  “My therapist always tells me, ‘To have a friend, you first must be a friend.’ ” He yanked a blade of grass from the ground and tied it around his thumb. “That’s it. That’s the eighty-dollars-a-session advice that I couldn’t possibly get anywhere else, like from my moms or a minivan bumper sticker.” He looked at me as lightning struck behind the trees of his neighbor’s house. “I guess loneliness is my hatred. One screwed-up movie we’re in, huh?”

  I looked away right as more lightning exploded, rosy hues kissing the gray. The flashes were like light bulbs across the atmosphere, like the gods were paparazzi taking pictures of the lost and broken little humans wandering aimlessly beneath their thumbs. I looked at Snake, who had snatched up his camera to make sure he got the perfect shot. I hated myself for thinking it, hated myself for not hating how stupidly happy I felt beside him.

  And I couldn’t help but think of how pointless it was to live in the imaginings of lightning, to believe that they were fireworks and the universe made them so that we could be futile little humans in love with our own futility.

  “Her name was Bree,” I whispered against the show.

  Snake turned to me, setting the camera down as the lightning simmered. “Who?”

  “My trigger, if I had to pick one.” I watched a cloud be torn apart by the sparks. “The friend thing never worked much for me either, believe it or not. I guess my good looks and general charm were too threatening.”

  His eyes rounded at charm, and he chuckled.

  “I met Bree in the bathroom on the first day of seventh grade after I spilled Cherry Coke all over the crotch of my pants. She offered me her gym shorts to wear for the rest of the day so it didn’t look like I’d peed terminal red piss all over myself. We sort of had to be friends after that. The only problem with friends is, you care about them. A lot. And then they get hit by a drunk driver a few weeks into freshman year and die before they were ever given a chance to feel the things the rest of us get the opportunity to feel all our lives.”

  He gasped under his breath. “Holy shit. Wow. Um . . . yeah. That’s . . . I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. I get the feeling I would have ended up miserable regardless, but it sucks for her and her family, you know?” I ripped up a chunk of grass and tossed it to the side. Snake sat completely motionless, not bothering to do that thing people do where they pretend they understand. It’s ridiculous how much trouble people have admitting that they don’t understand everything. “Anyway, when something like that happens, there’s no good way to move on. So I did my best. Tried to bury myself in schoolwork and books and stuff, but it all felt, well, useless.”

  His mouth morphed into a sad smile.

  “So I started hanging out with this guy in my geometry class that I’d known since he was just a nerdy kid in kindergarten. But I couldn’t help but notice he wasn’t such a hopeless dork anymore. He was awkward and cute and told me lame stories about the space robot invasion from his favorite comic book. And I didn’t care about the robots or the book, but I cared about the nerdy boy who did. Especially when he told me he loved me and said that he wouldn’t ever leave like Bree did, and that even though he was moving to Vermont at the end of the summer, I would still be a part of his life. But then when he moved to Vermont, I never heard from him again. Saw online that he had a girl there he’d been talking to all school year, the daughter of this guy his dad knew, and that was it. He never talked to me again. And there I was believing that I had someone who would never leave, and he was never really there to begin with. That’s when I realized that caring isn’t a way to survive. It doesn’t prevent pain, it encourages it.”

  I looked at Snake. His lids were heavy, but not like he was tired. Like he was hurt. Sad, even. “That was my trigger. Absence. Realizing its inevitability. I cared too much about Alex from geometry, and he left. It’s human nature, I suppose. Temporariness. Tightropes into oblivion.”

  “The Onslaught.”

  I tried to smile at him, but knew I looked unhinged. “One point for complexity, right?”

  He was exuding multiple Snakeisms at once. His pervasive staring. His Twizzler chew. His grin that wouldn’t even complete a full upward turn becaus
e it was defiant toward the mouth that made it. “I never imagined there was a point in time when Reggie Mason was anything other than a total misanthrope,” he teased, trying to lighten the dark cloud I’d tossed over the evening. “That’s not one point for complexity. You just won the whole complexity game.”

  “What about you?” I asked. “What’s your kryptonite of choice?”

  “I wouldn’t call it a choice.” He shut his camera down for good. I prayed the audio hadn’t been on for my humiliating oration. “And I don’t know. I wish I did. In some ways, I wish I had a Bree, or Alex from geometry, to make sense of it. Maybe it’s friendlessness or only-child syndrome or something. But I didn’t have a trigger. It was sort of a slow burn, I guess.”

  “How did you know you were depressed?”

  “How does anyone know they’re depressed? You feel equally alive and dead and have no idea how that’s even possible. And everything around you doesn’t seem so full anymore. And you can’t tell if the world is empty or you are. That’s how I knew. I realized it wasn’t the world that was empty.”

  He forgot the part about the walls closing in and threatening to suffocate you when you’re already barely breathing, but it wasn’t my depression we were talking about. And he was right about the empty theory. Except he was wrong about one thing.

  He wasn’t empty. Not to me, anyway.

  “Look at us,” I said, motioning to the blanket damp from the evening dew, his three-piece suit, and my pajama pants. “We’re a wreck. No wonder people don’t want to hang out with us.”

  “No one except Carla. She thinks you two are best friends.”

  “What?”

  “Yep. You’ve been propelled right into the friend zone.”

  “I would like to remain in the silently-loathe-one-another-from-afar zone.”

  “She isn’t that bad. I promise. A tad conceited, but not wholly insufferable.”

  “So you’re telling me that prom wasn’t insufferable?”

  “No, prom was hell. The DJ only played reggae, and the punch tasted like poisoned apple juice.”

  “Now you know why I don’t go to Hawkesbury functions.”

  He scrunched his face like he didn’t blame me. “Horrible party planning aside, Carla and I actually had a pretty good time. Granted, her friends weren’t hanging out with her, which I think had more to do with me than her, but still. We hung out. We mainly sat around and talked about you and baby stuff.”

  “Me?”

  “Your budding friendship. And you and me.”

  “What about you and me?”

  “She said that she didn’t totally hate you. And that she didn’t totally hate me. And if I liked you, I should go for it and stop wasting her time.” He shot me a playful look. “She put it differently, but I’m telling you the clean version.”

  “You’ve never said you liked me to my face,” I pointed out. “You’re too much of a coward.”

  “I said I hated you in the best way, which I thought was the same.”

  “Do you mean it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then tell me you like me.” It shouldn’t have surprised him that I was demanding his affection so I could mock it. He knew too many layers.

  “You’re going to call me a name and tell me to get over myself.”

  “Probably. But if you’re going to continue your sad attempts at winning me over, at least man up and say what you want from me so I can properly reject it.”

  “If that’s what you want.” He grinned with a dash of hopefulness as he leaned toward me and said, “Reggie, I really like you.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Get over yourself, douchebag.”

  He looked down and shook his head, the tips of his hair swishing against his bottom lashes. I watched him smile to himself, pleased with my dismissal of his affection. And for the first time, I understood why he liked being hated. It was so much easier to mock our feelings than indulge them.

  “I should go home,” I said after he yawned. “If Karen’s still awake, she’s probably sent out a search team.”

  He tied the camera around his back. “I’ll drive you.”

  It took fifteen minutes to make it home when it should’ve only taken ten. Snake was driving twelve miles an hour under the speed limit, stopping extra long at every stop sign. He claimed that he needed to get the engine checked on the Prius before the baby arrived because it was a heaping pile of junk, and Carla wouldn’t want her kid cruising in a safety hazard on wheels. It would’ve been a great excuse if the check engine light had been on to back up his story. That idiot was driving Miss Daisy to buy himself time with me, time he was afraid he wouldn’t get back. I would’ve called him out on it at the very first stop sign if I hadn’t been willing to pay it in full.

  When we reached my house, it was lit on both levels. I was a dead girl walking.

  “I think you’re screwed,” Snake whispered, shutting the headlights off.

  “Sentence predictions?”

  “A month. Solitary.”

  “Generous. I’m going to take your month and up you another. Also, possible execution.”

  “I would bet you on it, but it feels wrong to gamble with a dead person.”

  “I appreciate that considerate decision.”

  The light in my bedroom disappeared just as the hallway light made its debut in the Signals of Reggie’s Imminent Death show.

  “I’m going to go before the whole house turns yellow,” I whispered, turning to Snake.

  The porch light flashed on, and I knew I had to act fast. I grabbed him by the arm and pulled him close, kissing his cheek lightly. His skin was smoother than most boys’, and it smelled of a cologne that reminded me of those cheap samples that come in magazines. He was too cool for magazine cologne.

  When I backed away, he was staring at me with a keen smirk, like he was winning a game I hadn’t known we were playing. In a squeaky voice that was supposed to be a mimic of mine, he whispered, “Snake, I really like you too.” Then he smiled and said, “It isn’t that hard.”

  I opened the door and slammed it shut, the window shivering in the socket. The entire house was shining, my window still swung open from my dive to the pavement. He held his smirk as he sped down the street, nearly flattening my neighbor’s trash can with his reckless driving. Skid marks dotted the asphalt like footprints to the pond.

  I watched him leave and felt that familiar deep-seated fire, a sensation with which I was well acquainted. The emotion to end all emotions.

  Hate.

  Apparently, it was my predominant behavior. I was hating again. But, for once, I wasn’t hating him. I was hating the absence of him.

  I smirked back as he vanished.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “REGINA LORRAINE MASON,” KAREN HISSED THE second my boots touched the carpet. She was clad in her pink floor-length night robe with her whale-spout hair cocked messily to the side of her head, her glasses balancing crookedly on her nose. She pointed to the love seat across the room. “Sit down. Now.”

  As I made my trek to the couch, I noticed my dad reclining in his La-Z-Boy, struggling to keep his sagging lids peeled. He wore pinstriped silk pajamas and tiredly watched me with a sad sort of irritation. The creases that cornered his eyes said more about my presumed rebellion than any sinner’s prayer my mother was preparing to make me recite.

  She stood beside the couch, staring at me with quarter-size crazy eyes (see: slasher-movie status). “You have ten seconds to explain where you’ve been. Go.”

  “That’s not enough time to come up with a good cover story. Come back in five minutes, it’ll have machine guns and everything.”

  “Don’t start that tonight, Regina,” she snapped. “I’m not in the mood.”

  “Saving a cat from a burning tree?”

  “Regina!”

  “Fine.” I sighed. “I was with Snake.”

  Her scowl all but froze her face. She wasn’t shocked, though. She knew. Moms always know. “Where
did you go with him?”

  “We were out having sex and doing drugs . . . and something with machine guns—”

  “Reggie,” my dad interrupted. He yanked the lever on his chair to push himself up. He frowned at me the way he did when I’d lied to my mom about stealing the communion bread at church or when I’d called her Jezebel because I thought it was the absolute worst Bible insult I could dish out. “Tell your mom the truth, and you won’t get in too much trouble. I promise.”

  Truth. Honesty. Authenticity. If only Dr. Rachelle were there to applaud my efforts. “Snake showed up after prom and asked me to help him film some shots for a movie he’s making,” I explained. “We went to his backyard and filmed the lightning storm, and he brought me home. That’s it.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “Yeah, Mom. I made up that incredibly lame story because holding a giant hunk of metal in the middle of a lightning storm makes me sound like such an intelligent individual, and I thought you’d be impressed.”

  “He didn’t try anything with you?”

  “I guess you missed the having sex part.”

  “Be serious, Reggie.” She rubbed her eyes and smeared leftover makeup across her cheeks. “I don’t trust that boy. I’ve heard rumors about him in my ladies group.”

  “What your mom heard has been very unsettling for her,” my dad added. It didn’t slip past me that he emphasized the her in that explanation. I never heard a me. “She has a lot of concerns.”

  “What about you, Dad?” I asked. “Do you have concerns?”

  He blinked at the ground, his brow wrinkling. “I suppose I do, yes,” he mumbled after he gave it some thought. But I wasn’t sure he meant it. He wasn’t good with humans, especially ones like Snake and me. Unlike dead animals, we weren’t so easy to repair. “If it’s true, of course.”

  “And these rumors are . . . ?”

  He looked to Karen for support. She sighed, sitting next to me hesitantly. She paused for a moment and kept her eyes on the ketchup stain on the carpet as she said, “I heard he’s the boy who got little Carla Banks pregnant.”