Definitions of Indefinable Things Read online

  Little Carla. Ever since we were kids, my mother had always referred to her as Little Carla. Why wasn’t I friends with Little Carla? Why didn’t I ever invite Little Carla to my house? Why didn’t I ever want to go to Little Carla’s parties? I imagined it was hard to see Little Carla as Pregnant Carla or Mommy Carla or Less-Than-Perfect Carla when my mom had always not so secretly wished her daughter were more like precious Little Carla Banks.

  I looked directly into her nervous eyes as she waited for a response. There was no point in lying to defend Snake. He was who he was. And if he’d been beside me in that moment, he wouldn’t have made a single excuse for himself. He would have owned his wrongs. He would have enjoyed the ensuing scorn. I had to respect his absence, the mistakes he made to keep himself sane.

  “Yeah. He is,” I admitted.

  Shots fired. Karen down.

  Her skin flushed red. She crawled through the steps of the premental breakdown breathing routine. My dad stood up and walked to the couch to lay a hand on her back, but she only shook him off.

  “Listen to me, Reggie,” she choked. “I don’t want you to see that boy again. He’s a bad kid. I don’t know how else to put it. You’re better than that. I won’t have my daughter getting involved with someone like him. Do you understand me?”

  “You don’t know him.”

  “I know enough.”

  “You know one mistake.”

  “It’s a very big mistake, Reggie.”

  “You don’t know him!” I shouted, the pent-up bitterness from every judgmental look and raised brow seeping through my teeth as I confronted her warped conclusion about the boy I knew. The boy she wouldn’t bother to understand.

  She didn’t know Snake the way I did. She didn’t know the way he grinned with only part of his lips, or the way he spoke about whatever random thought popped into his mind in a passing minute, or the passionate way he filmed the dullness of our lives, or the way he cared about everything, no matter how ineffective he knew it to be. She didn’t know the Snake I knew.

  “It’s my job as a mother to protect you from people like him,” she said, wiping her nose with the back of her hand.

  “Guess what, Mom? I am a person like him. He’s as bad at being human as I am. But I guess that just gives you another reason to resent him, doesn’t it? It certainly gives you plenty of reasons to resent me.”

  “I’m not going to deny that you struggle, Reggie. But you’re better than him. He’s not a good person. It’s as simple as that.”

  I stood up, my fists clenched at my sides and my bones rattling. I was having a near-Hulk experience. “Because you’ve never screwed up, right? You’re so damn holier than thou, it amazes me.”

  “Don’t talk to your mom like that,” my dad interjected. His tone was too soft and unimposing to be taken seriously.

  She jumped off the couch, standing nose to nose with me. “You sulk around and make your smart-aleck jabs and pay no mind to anyone else, and I’m sick of it. Start behaving with some respect.”

  “Give me something to respect!” I yelled back desperately. “All you ever do is judge me, judge Dad, judge Snake, judge his moms, judge, judge, judge, and I’m the one who’s sick of it. How about you stop acting like you were directly appointed by God to be everyone’s keeper, because you’re no better than anyone else.”

  As I tried to move past her, she stepped in front of me and grabbed my wrist. “You are not to leave this house for two months. Only school and work. I hate to do this, Regina, but I’ve had as much as I can take. I don’t know what made you this way. I don’t know why you can’t just . . . just be normal.”

  She was staring straight into my eyes, like she knew the parts of me that were in the blue and nothing underneath. I saw a distorted image of myself in the lens of her glasses. The truth of it was, there was too much underneath for her to know. For me to fully know myself.

  My dad sat down on the couch. He stared at the wall like he couldn’t comprehend what was going on. If I wasn’t so fully hating, I might have tried to explain that none of this was his fault. But I was so far past being reasonable.

  I jerked out of my mother’s grasp and stormed up the steps. When I made it to my room I slammed my door, nearly knocking it off the hinges.

  I raked my hands through my hair until my scalp hurt. My stomach was tied in a legion of knots, each aching and pulsating and throbbing to the point of near explosion. I kicked my bed and my laptop toppled onto the floor. Watching it hit the carpet was like a gunshot, detonating a built-up rage that had lived inside of me for the past year.

  My heart wasn’t an organ with valves and blood and arteries. It was another creature entirely. One that couldn’t be ignored, no matter how quietly I told it to beat.

  I grabbed a pillow and screamed into it.

  The first scream was for my mother. One loud, screeching, teary cry for my mother. I hated her. I wasn’t supposed to say that, and maybe one day I would regret letting myself think it, but I couldn’t stop. I hated that she didn’t try to understand me. I hated how she turned her nose up when she walked by my room at night and saw me crying. I hated that I wasn’t the kid she bragged about to her friends in church group. All she saw in me was a walking mistake, a sin to be forgiven, a disease to be cured. I hated that she looked at Snake and saw the same.

  Then I screamed into the pillow a second time.

  I screamed for myself. I screamed because she was right. I was a disease. I was sick and vastly spreading and untreatable. But I wasn’t my depression. Depression was a symptom of another illness. Being human. Being me.

  I screamed again.

  The third time, I didn’t know who I was screaming for. Maybe Snake. Maybe my dad. Maybe another pity round for myself. The shriek clawed from the cords of my throat without intention. But once it was out in the open, sucked into the pillow, it became increasingly clear.

  My screams were of lost souls and Cherry Coke and acrobats and geometric shapes and pill bottles and uselessness and flashing red lights and lightning and loneliness and babies crying and brevity.

  I hated having to live each day knowing that, good or bad, I would never get it back. And I hated to resent time simply because it couldn’t be taught to stay. And it took me until that moment, falling to my knees at two o’clock in the morning, to realize that all the things I hated, I hated only because they wouldn’t let me hold on. Because they didn’t know how to outlast themselves.

  I hated that the world wasn’t empty, but I was.

  Whispers from the living room interrupted my Stage 2 breakdown.

  “She will never be okay,” I heard Karen say. My dad was trying to shush her, but she only got louder. “She’s been dealing with this depression issue for an entire year. I prayed about it and meditated on it and talked to Pastor James, and, against my better judgment, tried the antidepressants and the therapy, but nothing works. And now she’s running around with this boy, God help her. He’s only going to tear her down. It won’t be long before she’s the one having his baby. What are people going to think? I can only hide so much.”

  “She’s being a teenager,” my dad said quietly. He didn’t sound like himself. “They all go through rebellious phases. You went through one yourself.”

  “I would have never shouted at my mother like that.”

  “I agree. She shouldn’t speak to you that way. But she’s lashing out. This will pass, Karen. It’s a phase.”

  “You always make excuses for her,” she snapped.

  There was a brief silence in which all I heard was heavy breathing. And then the sound of the couch shifting as someone stood. It was my dad’s voice, a shallow whisper.

  “I don’t think you make enough excuses for her.”

  I had to leave. That was what all the screaming and pillows and echoing conversations amounted to. I couldn’t stay there that night. I needed to think. Needed to breathe. Needed to be anywhere but there. I grabbed a pair of jeans and a white T-shirt, shoving the cl
othes into my messenger bag. I sat crumpled on the floor for minutes, focusing on nothing but depression issue. Depression issue. Depression issue.

  The words whooshed in my ears like a wave crashing against my eardrums. Depression was a symptom of me. Depression was an issue. I was an issue. A problem. A mistake.

  I had no logical place to run to that late. I had no logical person to turn to. None but one, and he was hardly logical.

  When I went downstairs, I headed straight for the front door. My mother sprang from the couch, her brows furrowing the moment she noticed my bag.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “I’m leaving.”

  “No you’re not.”

  My dad met me where I stood, watching me with a hint of something my mother’s anger lacked. “You don’t have to do this,” he whispered. “Let’s talk.”

  “There’s nothing to say. You married a lunatic. There. We talked.”

  “She loves you.” He laid a hand on my shoulder mechanically, observing me through his glasses. His gray eyes were fading. Had they always been so lifeless? “I love you.”

  “I know. I know you do. But you can’t speak for Mom. You may want your words to replace hers, but they don’t.”

  My mother moved toward me. “Regina,” she said, anger ebbing in her tone. She wasn’t even looking in my eyes anymore, but at my hands clasped tightly to the bag. “I love you. I want you to stay.”

  I love you. Three words. She wanted three words to rectify a year. She wanted three words to heal two completely different people. It was a nice idea, that words could do that. That they had the power to fix and repair and transform even the most shattered of people. But unfortunately for us, words were nothing more than a string of nice ideas.

  “Why am I depressed?” I asked, grasping at the niceness of ideas until they vanished.

  She looked surprised. “What?”

  “Why am I depressed?”

  She glanced at my dad, who was watching me, maybe knowing the answer. Maybe wishing there wasn’t one.

  “Well, it . . . it was what happened to Bree,” she stuttered, still eyeing him for help. “But now? I don’t really know.”

  “That’s the problem, Mom,” I said, tossing the bag over my shoulder. I opened the door and it creaked in the stillness. “You don’t know me.”

  My dad held my mother back and ordered her to let me go as I took off running through the front yard and down the street. It was the ideal dramatic exit. The girl leaves her overbearing parents behind and runs to the boy without ever looking back. It was cinematic perfection. It was real-life destruction.

  My feet were clunky like wooden blocks and my chest wouldn’t lift to let me breathe and my temples were throbbing with an excruciating headache unlike any other I’d experienced. The streetlights were guiding me forward, but the sway of the clouds was drawing me back. I stopped running the instant my brain caught pace with my rage. I was trying to run to Snake’s house on foot. Snake, who lived at the pond a ten-minute drive away. And me, who couldn’t run for more than a half mile without getting a side stitch. I stopped in front of this hideous yellow house down the street that my mom always said reminded her of a lemon. I dug my cell phone out of my pocket and texted Snake.

  I’m in front of an obscenely yellow house near the end of my street. Please come pick me up as soon as possible. I may have barely survived that execution we were talking about.

  I plopped down on the curb and waited. It had only been nine minutes when blinding headlights flashed in my direction, the word Namaste glowing in the darkness. The Prius came speeding around to the curb, nearly leveling my feet against the road. Snake parked. I jumped up, swung the door open, and dove in.

  “Thank God for you,” I panted as I shut the door.

  I turned to him. He was watching me calmly, wearing only gray sweatpants and no shirt, his hair flopping from his scalp like a mop. I kept telling myself not to stare at his stupid, hard chest. At the curvature of his abs that weren’t really abs, but close enough. At his waist that formed the perfect shape of a . . . crap. Okay, so I was staring (see: drooling).

  “Where’s your shirt, loser?”

  “Under my bed.” He hit the gas and took off down the road. “I was almost asleep, but the damsel needed my saving.”

  “Call me a damsel again. I dare you.”

  He laughed. “All right. Fill me in.”

  “Nothing abnormal,” I said as he turned onto the main road. “Karen found out about your upcoming transformation to world’s most underqualified dad the same night that I break my curfew so we can sneak out together, disregarding the fact that I’m forbidden from seeing you. As I’m sure you can imagine, she took that very well.”

  “I’m not that underqualified,” he argued.

  “Wow. That’s all you got from that.”

  “Sorry. From where I’m sitting, it doesn’t sound like anything new. Shouldn’t a knockdown-dragout have been expected?”

  “Yes, but—” I tried to think of a reason why this time was different. A nasty word or a banishment to the nearest convent or a fist brawl to the song “Kung Fu Fighting.” Something. But it wasn’t different. The only difference was that I ran this time. The only thing that was different was me. “It doesn’t matter. I need time away, okay? Can I stay with you tonight, and we can figure the rest out tomorrow?”

  “Sure. But my family is leaving tomorrow.”

  “Leaving?” My stomach rose to my throat.

  “Not forever.” He grinned, smugly delighted that the idea of him leaving bothered me so much. “Just for the day. Remember when I picked you up that first time we went out, and I told your mom that my family goes to Cedar Point every summer?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, we haven’t missed a summer since I was six. My moms arranged for us to go tomorrow. We have to do it early this year since the summer is going to be super hectic with the baby and everything.”

  “Oh.” I tried to picture Snake at an amusement park with his moms and a head-size cotton candy on a stick, but couldn’t conjure the image.

  “You can come with us,” he said as we reached the stoplight, his bare skin draped in red. “We can buy you a ticket.”

  “I don’t want to put a damper on your postcard family outing.”

  “It will be torture having to listen to you make fun of old men’s fanny packs all day, but I’ll survive.”

  “I don’t do heights. No Ferris wheels or drop towers or anything like that.”

  “You jumped out of a window,” he noted.

  “Because I knew I would fall on you.”

  “Well, then, pretend like the ground below is a bunch of concrete mes to break your fall . . . and kill you, but that’s besides the comforting point I’m making.”

  We pulled into his driveway. The house was completely black except for a single light shining from his bedroom window upstairs.

  “My moms are asleep. Be very quiet,” he whispered as we walked up his porch steps.

  “Are they going to be mad that I crashed?”

  “No, they’re cool about stuff like that.”

  “Carla Banks. Exhibit A.”

  He scowled and opened the door, placing his index finger over his mouth like he was a kindergarten teacher at naptime. He led me upstairs, past the nerdy beach picture that seemed to get nerdier the more I looked at it, as if the spike cut and buck teeth could get any worse. He stopped at his door and turned to me, suddenly fidgety and awkward and . . . was he nervous?

  “I’m sure you have a guest room in this fine estate,” I whispered.

  “You don’t have to whisper up here. My moms’ room is downstairs. And yeah, it’s that one right over there.” He pointed across the hall to a room diagonally across from his. The door was cracked slightly. “There’s a bathroom in there, too.”

  “Where’s the basketball court and indoor pool?”

  “Basketball court is undergoing renovations, and the pool is be
ing cleaned. You forgot about the exercise room.”

  “I didn’t forget. I only asked about the rooms you’d find me in.”

  He smiled and lowered his head, his blue eyes fixed on the ground. His shoulder was pressed in the doorway and the light from his bedroom reflected against his smooth skin. I bit down on my lip so hard it went numb. I’d never been much of a lip biter, mainly because I found the habit to be flirtatious and very Carla-ish, but Snake inadvertently gave me a new tic just by being so boyish and so shirtless and so freaking close.

  He glanced up. And that time, it was me who was nervous.

  “I should probably go to bed,” I whispered, pointing behind me. I was pretty sure I pointed in the wrong direction. My brain was so Snake-high, I didn’t know which way was up.

  “Okay.” He nodded. Then he took an extended breath, his hard chest lifting, and said, “You could stay in my room if you want.”

  I want. I want. For the love of—​

  “Stop flirting with me.”

  “I don’t think I can.”

  I didn’t want to go to the guest room. I didn’t want to go to bed within ten feet of him and not with him. I didn’t want him to stop flirting with me. I didn’t want to be the one to admit it.

  He took me by the waist and pulled me against his chest, wrapping his arms around me tightly as if he thought the girl within his grasp would float away in an instant. And I might have with anyone else. But not with him. He felt safe and warm, and still had that magazine cologne scent on his chest. He was breathing heavily into my knotted hair, my ear against his heartbeat. And even though I didn’t like heartbeats, I liked his. His heart wasn’t just blood and pulsation. His heartbeat had a rhythm. A sporadic, insecure, perfect rhythm. It was like mine, a beast all its own.

  “I just want you to know that there are still streaks of purple in the sky from the lightning,” he whispered into my hair.

  I lifted my head from his chest and looked into his eyes. Comfortingly dull. Hidden. Wanting. “So?”

  “So not everything leaves,” he said, his hands sliding away. And then his chest wasn’t so close to my cheek. And his cologne smell was vaporizing. And I didn’t know what the tingling against my skin meant. He glanced down the hallway and back at me. “Good night.”