Definitions of Indefinable Things Read online

  “I came up with that gem while you were discarding my opinions. Yes or no?”

  I tapped my chin. “Tomorrow night? Nope. Sorry. I’ll be busy doing nothing and hating it.”

  “Well, there’s your problem.” He smiled. “You’re supposed to do that on Saturday. Did you not read The Guide to Successful Depressive Behavior? There are pie charts and everything.”

  “Must have forgotten to pick that one up.”

  I brushed past him and began spraying the counters with Formula 409. When I finally turned around, he was gone. I checked the back room, but there were only freezers and boxes of inventory. I heard a tap on the order window and found him staring in from the outside, lifting the ice cream cone in his hand like a torch. “Do I want to know what you’re doing?” I asked once I slid the glass back.

  “That’s no way to greet a customer.” He reeled. “I’m offended.”

  “Fine. Welcome to Oinky’s. Do I want to know what you’re doing?”

  “I would like to return this vanilla cone.”

  “We don’t have a return policy on ice cream.”

  “Then I would like to make an exchange.”

  “Okay?”

  “I will exchange this vanilla cone for the pleasure of your company tomorrow night.”

  I snatched the cone out of his hand and dumped it in the trash can under the cabinet. “I’m going to say yes so we can get out of here, but I think you’re immature and talk too much and are not nearly as cool as you think you are. Are we clear?”

  “I heard nothing after yes.”

  We left at nine. The minivan light stayed off when I opened the door, because it was a 1992 Town & Country and my dad insisted he would be able to fix it without having to take it to a repair shop. Snake had parked his car next to mine. He had a gold Prius with a license plate that said NAMASTE. I assumed it was his moms’.

  “That’s a chick car,” I said as he reached for his keys.

  “That’s a misogynistic assertion,” he returned quickly. Well played. “I’ll pick you up at eight.”

  “Whatever.”

  “I already put my number in your phone while you were washing the sink.”

  “That’s thoroughly creepy.”

  “Oh, by the way.” He leaned across the top of his car. Towered over it, actually. “My answer is smart.”

  I had no idea what he was saying, but I figured that he just said a bunch of random stuff all the time to hear himself talk. “Answer for what?” I asked.

  “Tuesday, when you asked me if I would rather be smart or happy. I would rather be smart.”

  “Why?”

  “Because intellect can be proven scientifically with machines and litmus tests and IQ evaluations, but happiness is only based on a loose pool of interpretive data drawn from perception and emotion. It’s a theory, see? And I’d rather put my faith in something real than something that’s inconclusive.”

  “So, you don’t think happiness is real?” It was the first time I’d questioned him and been eager for his response.

  “I think it’s tolerable pain. Happy people have a really high tolerance, that’s all.” He tapped the hood of his car. “See you tomorrow.”

  He drove toward Sun Street with one of his taillights busted, flooring it through a yellow light that blinked red the moment he crossed the threshold. I read the word NAMASTE until the letters disappeared.

  Chapter Four

  SYMPTOMS OF A DEPRESSIVE EPISODE ALWAYS came in three major stages—​wait, scratch that. Symptoms of a Reggie depressive episode always came in three major stages. As I lay on my floor, my knees curled beneath my chin, the most exaggeratedly morbid song moaning into my headphones, I knew that I was in Stage 3: Disconnect.

  Stages 1 and 2 were pretty brutal, sure. Lots of sobbing, shaking, sore body parts for no reason whatsoever, walls that did all but swallow me whole, a bunch of upbeat, cheery things like that. But they were nothing compared to Disconnect.

  My mom had tried to help when it first started happening. She would suggest taking a walk together whenever the silence got loud. When I wouldn’t answer, she’d bake me chocolate chip cookies and leave a note under my door to let me know when they were ready. Eventually, though, she just sat downstairs and ignored me because she said the devil had to release his control before the Lord could do His work. Personally, I wondered if even the devil was Stage-3-caliber mean. Sometimes it felt like it was my mind that was the cruel one. Like it was true what people say about you being your own worst enemy. That, or I was just plain crazy.

  Anyway, Disconnect was either the best or the worst stage, depending on how you looked at it. It was numbing. It was staring for half an hour at a spot on the ugly wall Karen insisted on painting yellow to make me stupid (see: happy) while the piano from my earbuds spilled into every bone and vein and fiber. Numb. That was what made it the best stage. It didn’t hurt. It was also the worst, because I could feel nothing for only so long.

  That’s where I was that night. I was in frayed jeans with a coffee stain, a white T-shirt with a cross-patterned scarf, and my black combat boots laced halfway up my shins, lying in a heap of human on the bed. And Snake was supposed to pick me up in less than two minutes.

  “A little gold car just pulled into the driveway!” my mother called from the living room. I had hoped he wouldn’t pick me up at the door, because one look at his tattoo, and he would be walking out of there with a Gideons Bible tucked into his pants.

  It was hard to move during Disconnect, but I picked myself up by the bootstraps (almost literally). When I dragged my wobbly legs into the living room, I saw Snake standing on the welcome mat just inside the door with both hands in his ripped pockets, my dad studying him from his usual spot in the La-Z-Boy, and my mother’s wide-eyed, disapproving stare as she took her place on the love seat. He was wearing a T-shirt that said ONLY THE GOOD DIE YOUNG with the word YOUNG marked out by a red X.

  He wasn’t the least bit uneasy or ashamed or anything close to what I would have expected, given the pretty portrait I’d painted of my mom the night before.

  I walked toward him and motioned to my parents. “Snake, this is my mom, Karen, and my dad, Dave. Mom and Dad, this is Snake.”

  A customary awkward silence ensued, followed by my mother being unable to deny her nature. “Snake can’t possibly be your real name, sweetheart. Does your mother approve of that nickname?” she asked.

  He grinned his Snake grin. “My mothers prefer it. Self-expression, and all that.”

  She raised her brows at the mothers part. I nudged Snake so he would know to gear up for battle.

  “Your mother and stepmother?” she asked, wringing her hands in her lap.

  “No. My mothers. You know, like you and Dave, except neither has a mustache.”

  “I’m working on a Fu Manchu,” my dad added.

  “Dave.” My mother’s face turned redder than the sweater she was knitting. She turned back to Snake, unable to let it go. She never could. “So, two mothers. That’s . . . interesting. Is that difficult for you?”

  “Really, Mom?”

  “It’s okay, Reggie.” Snake reached into his pocket, and before I even saw it, I knew he was after a Twizzler. “Let’s see,” he said, tapping the licorice to his chin. “I moved here this past year from Westbrook, just south of Flashburn. I’m sure you know where that is. And I lived in a two-story Victorian. And I had a racecar bed. And we went to Cedar Point every summer. And I got bedtime stories read to me about the Lorax. And they were always still there when I woke up the next morning. So, if that sounds difficult to you, then, yeah. I guess I had it pretty hard.” He took a bite.

  My mother glared at my dad for reinforcement, but what could he do? Snake had just answered an invasive question the best way he knew how. Couldn’t fault him for that. And besides, when it came to fight or flight, my dad was a first-class pilot. He would have been much better off in the basement, stitching the skin of a dead squirrel.

  Anoth
er uncomfortable silence oozed into the room. I knew if I didn’t get out of there fast, Karen would find a way to make the unembarrassable Snake feel embarrassed.

  I grabbed his arm and pulled him through the door. As he was stepping onto the porch, he leaned his head back inside and said, “It’s Matthew, in case you were wondering.”

  “What?” my dad asked.

  “My birth name is Matthew.”

  Then he shut the door behind him.

  He parked the Prius at the end of a cul-de-sac in a dingy neighborhood downtown. I didn’t go downtown much, but I liked it. Everyone walked slowly, like they were dying, and even the sun that was beginning to set over the hills couldn’t brighten anyone’s day. Misery with no end in sight. These were my people.

  “You didn’t seem keen on coming out with me tonight,” Snake said as he yanked the key out of the ignition.

  “Was it the insults or the blatant no that gave you that impression?”

  “It might have been the attempted assault. That was pretty telling.”

  “Would you be keen on going out with you?”

  He leaned closer. His dull blue eyes judged me beneath his hair. “I’m going to reverse that question. Would you be keen on going out with you?”

  “I wasn’t the one who begged for a date. If you think you’re doing me some favor, you can do me another and take me home.”

  He grinned and spun his keys around his finger. “It’s not me who’s doing the favor.” He reached into the back seat and grabbed something, then bumped my face with cardboard as he pulled it to the front. “Sorry.” He laughed, touching my forehead. The cardboard was a pizza box. “I know you hate most things, but I’m assuming you like pizza.”

  “It’s all right.”

  I love pizza.

  “Well, this pizza is two days old. And it’s cold. And we are going to eat it over there.” He pointed to a dumpsite beyond a barbed-wire fence, stacked with garbage bags taller than the houses. “You may want to know why, or you don’t care. Either way, I want us to dig into a cold pizza and whine about how lonely and depressed we are while sitting on top of a heaping pile of rot. An anti-date. Is that terrible enough for you?”

  He opened the car door and popped the trunk, retrieving a bulky black video camera that probably cost more than my house. I wondered how he could afford it.

  “What are you doing with that?” I asked as we headed toward the fence.

  “I’m a filmmaker. Aspiring filmmaker, actually. I like to document moments so I can watch them back and mourn the sheer uselessness of our condition.”

  “You just film things for the heck of it?”

  “I enter contests on occasion.”

  “You ever win?”

  “Winning is such an abstract term—”

  “You’ve never won.”

  “Yeah, no.” He smiled. “But I’ve been runner-up. Like, a lot.”

  I kicked a pebble and it whizzed across the lot. “So what’s the subject tonight?”

  “Tonight.” He shrugged. “I just want to capture the sheer uselessness of our condition.”

  He led me to the waste site. The fence was conveniently torn where the metal met the dirt, just round enough for us to crawl through. The camera was a challenge, but once Snake scuttled under, he dug a spot in the ground to give it room to slide. We climbed up a ladder on the side of a green disposal bin, me with a pizza box under my arm and Snake with a camera tied around his back. When we reached the top, we were at least fifteen feet in the air, the romantic aroma of spoiled food and dirty diapers stinging our nostrils from below. I sat down beside Snake on the edge of the bin, and he offered me a slice of cold pizza.

  “You don’t know how pitiful Flashburn is until you see it from above,” I said.

  “Right? Up here there’s a great view of the black hole sucking inhabitants into the void. It’s between suburbia and the pond.” He unhooked the camera from where he had fastened it like a backpack and flipped a switch that triggered a flashing red button. “Landscape shots,” he said, as images of the dilapidated houses reflected in the lens.

  “It must be nice to have a talent.”

  “Not exactly.” He turned the camera off and placed it beside him. “It’s painful to have a passion. You care so much it hurts.” He looked at me. “I’m sure that you’ve experienced too much caring, or you wouldn’t be so depressed.”

  I hadn’t cared much about anything the past few months. My therapist said it was because I overanalyzed simplicities, that life wasn’t so complex that I couldn’t take the good for what it was and accept it. But that didn’t seem like an applicable observation. More like something I could find in a self-help book (see: feel-good bullshit).

  “My therapist makes me write,” I told him.

  “What kind of stuff does she make you write?”

  “Journal entries. Self-evaluations. My own eulogy.”

  His eyes bulged behind his camera. “No way.”

  “Okay, the last part was a lie. But she might as well. She’s basically forcing me to find a passion.”

  “Well, do you like writing?” he asked.

  “Kind of. But it doesn’t really matter if I do or don’t.”

  “Why?”

  “It just doesn’t. We’re the smart ones, remember? Caring about life and dreaming that you can change the world in any significant way . . .” I almost laughed at the idea. “It’s . . . I don’t know . . . it’s kind of . . .”

  “Like searching for a pebble in the sand?” he finished.

  I had never thought if it that way, but it was true. Like digging for a needle in a haystack. “Yeah. Exactly like that.”

  He grabbed the camera and turned it on himself, the red light flashing in his eyes. “I am but a pebble in the sand,” he said into the lens. “I am sitting on a pile of garbage eating pizza that tastes like paper with a girl who hates me almost as much as she hates herself, and I am but a pebble in the sand.” He turned the camera off. “Can I tell you a story?”

  “No.”

  “It’s about the mouse and the snake,” he continued. I tossed my crust into the bin. “There was this baby mouse that got lost in the woods. He found a snake coiled beneath a tree. He asked the snake, ‘Can I make my home here?’ ‘Next to me?’ the snake asked. ‘If you’ll have me,’ said the mouse. ‘You see, I have nowhere to go, and the forest is too big for a little mouse like me.’ The snake raised the mouse for seven days, providing shelter and warmth. On the seventh day, just as the mouse was waking from his sleep, the snake said, ‘I’m sorry, mouse. But the forest is too big for a little snake like me.’ And he swallowed the baby mouse whole.”

  My mouth fell open. He had shocked me for the first time. “That sounds like the Edgar Allan Poe version of a nursery rhyme.”

  “My moms used to tell me that story every day when I came home from school,” he said, fiddling with the camera strap. “I was sort of weird and nerdy and didn’t have any friends. Hard to believe, I know.” He grabbed a Twizzler and wrapped it around his finger. “I used to think it was a story about a poor little mouse and an evil snake. But then I realized what it meant. The snake wasn’t evil at all. He was just trying to survive. The world was just too big for him, too big for me.”

  “That’s where you got your nickname.”

  He turned to me, earnest and eager. “I think it’s the same way with caring. Caring about things, no matter how utterly wasted the effort, is just a way to survive. Everything we do is. It’s like that old saying.”

  “What old saying?”

  “You’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t.” He shrugged. “Might as well do, I guess.”

  I wiped the pizza sauce from my mouth. “Maybe I should switch to Prozac.”

  He laughed and ate his Twizzler. We didn’t say anything for at least five minutes. I guess we were absorbing, as Snake put it, “the sheer uselessness of our condition.” When I finally glanced at him, he was staring at me with that intru
sive, pimple-analysis scrutiny I’d seen before.

  “Keep staring and I’ll punch you in the jaw,” I warned.

  “I’m guessing you’ve never had a boyfriend.” He smiled. “Guys stare.”

  “I’ve had a boyfriend, thank you. He didn’t stare.”

  “Then he wasted his moments. How long did you guys date?”

  “A year. He moved to Vermont the winter before last.”

  “Good,” he said. “I’ll stare in his absence.”

  “Fine. Let’s see how you like it.”

  I scooted closer to him, my cold arm pressing against his warm one. His eyes were the dullest kind of gray-blue imaginable, boring and not particularly noteworthy in any sort of way. But they were nice. Beautifully average.

  “I want to kiss you,” he whispered.

  “Pump the brakes, buddy.” I leaned away from him. “This is the first time we’ve really hung out.”

  “So?”

  “So, you don’t kiss people on the first date. I’m not even sure I like you.”

  “I know you don’t like me. You don’t like anyone. But I think I’m bearable to you, or else you wouldn’t be here.”

  “Bearable doesn’t get kissed.”

  “Did you find your boyfriend more than bearable?” he asked.

  “Not really.”

  “And I’m sure you kissed him . . .”

  “Yeah, so what? We’d known each other since kindergarten.”

  “Well, I’ve known you since Tuesday, and you already find me bearable. That poor sucker had to wait years for that milestone.” He inched closer. “I don’t understand this concept of waiting, anyway. You have to wait to kiss. You have to wait to get a job. You have to wait to grow up. You have to wait to live. All this waiting, and they wonder why we’re depressed. It’s because we’re always waiting for the moment that we won’t be.”

  When he put it like that, it did seem pretty ridiculous. If I could get past his deformed tattoo and dumb T-shirts and relentless babble, I could certainly kiss him. And for some reason, he was determined to kiss me.

  I reached for his neck and pulled his face to mine. My lips clashed into his in that awkward first-kiss way that everyone hates but endures to get to the slightly less awkward second. He tasted like strawberry Twizzlers. I probably tasted like pizza. He kept it simple, a hand against my back. None of that hit-or-miss groping that was nine times out of ten a miss. He kissed pleasantly, which was bizarre, because I wouldn’t have described him as a pleasant person. Compared to my ex, who kissed like a seizing fish (see: terrible kissers), he wasn’t so bad.