“That’s a great idea!” she said.
“My parents don’t think so.” My father was obviously still upset about the whole thing. This morning he had watched me take my antidepressant, which he hadn’t done in weeks. Usually my mother was the one who watched, and even she had gotten almost casual about it. But this morning, Dad had said, “Let me see it,” had made me show him the pill on my tongue, had checked my mouth after I swallowed.
“Yeah, my mom would probably hate the idea, too.” Nicki sighed. “She even got a little weird when I sprained my ankle playing volleyball.”
My dad had never made a big deal when I got hurt playing sports—I think he was even kind of proud when I came home a little roughed up. Not that he wanted me to get seriously injured or anything, but the occasional jammed finger or twisted knee used to get me nothing more than a sympathetic backslap. But that was before the night in the garage.
“You played baseball, right?” Nicki asked.
“Yeah.”
“What position?”
“Second base, usually. I was the backup shortstop and played there a few times.”
“You must’ve been a good fielder. Could you bat at all?”
“There were guys on the team who were better than I was. I was good at running the bases, though. They usually put me at the top of the lineup.”
“If you were that good, why’d you stop?”
I stared out the window. “I told you, mono.”
“But you don’t still have it, do you? You can play next year if you want.”
“I only ever played at West Seaton. I don’t know how I would stack up at Seaton High. I might not even make the team.”
She shook her head. “If I stopped playing volleyball, I would miss it. Don’t you miss baseball?”
I thought of all the games I watched with my father, the way my arm sometimes twitched when the second baseman made a throw, the way my legs tensed up when I watched a base runner. “I don’t know, maybe.”
“You sound like you miss it.”
“Hey, if I want someone to analyze my feelings, I’ll go to my shrink.”
“Touch-y! Why don’t you admit you miss it?”
I ignored her and rubbed at a spot on the windshield so I could see better.
“Come on, Ryan, what do you get out of acting like a robot? Sometimes when you talk I hear all these layers in your voice, I can tell you
think
about things and you actually care about something, and then you close up and your voice goes dead.”
I didn’t answer her, but I was listening.
“You’re a lot more interesting when you’re not a robot. And this is going to be a looooong car ride if you shut down.”
“Why do I have to do all the talking?” I said. “You talk for a while.” Since we were on the subject of sports, I decided she could talk about volleyball. “Tell me about being a setter.”
“You don’t care about that.”
“Yeah, I do. Go ahead.”
She snorted. “You do not. Tell me one thing you know about volleyball.”
“You get three hits to a side, not counting blocks.”
That shut her up for a second. Then: “Everyone knows that.”
“Come on.” I took the last slug of my water. “Who’s being touchy and shutting down now?”
She laughed. “Okay, I love being the setter because I get to play so much.” She went quiet to maneuver around a driver who had slowed down to talk on his phone. “Ideally, I’m the second hit on every play. I have to know how everyone on the team likes to hit, and not only set it where they want, but at a place where they can hit to the open court.” I could see how Nicki would like that, being in the middle of the action, calling the shots.
She talked on about close games they’d had, mistakes she’d made, her troubles learning the overhand serve. She talked about playing against a school whose ceiling was so low, the balls that hit it were still in play. “Those girls had such an advantage, because they played with it all the time, they knew how to play the ricochets.”
“Home ceiling advantage,” I said, and she laughed.
When she got tired of volleyball stories, I picked up a book I’d brought, but even though my eyes ran over the words, my brain kept seeing Val. I put the book down.
I couldn’t stop thinking about this one time at Patterson, in the dayroom. My therapy sessions had been intensifying, with my counselor pushing me to talk about last winter, when I’d hoarded the painkillers. He wanted to know what had triggered me to buy each bottle—forcing me to relive every stupid, embarrassing, horrible moment that had sent me to the drugstore.
I’d told him how nobody at my new school would fucking talk to me. I’d told him how the mono had used me up and squeezed me dry. On this particular day, I’d started talking about giving up baseball, which was the only thing I’d ever been good at—good enough for people to remember my name sometimes.
My counselor had made me talk about the sense I had that if I disappeared, nobody would remember I’d even been here, because nothing about me stood out. I was one of those ordinary boring people who don’t matter, who never do anything worth noticing. And that was itself a boring problem—not like the problems I heard about in Group every day. So I’d collapsed in the dayroom after my session, seething with self-loathing, feeling like I would bleed from every cell if I moved more than an inch.
Val stalked in then. I pulled myself out of my fog long enough to notice the tears in her eyes, the pinched line of her mouth. “Do you ever think this world is a totally unfair, pointless, fucked-up place?” she said, plunking herself down next to me. Val didn’t often talk that way. I did, all the time, and so did Jake. When Val got bothered, she would pull on her hair or pick her nails or tap her foot, but she rarely gave in to despair.
And usually I would’ve said something like, “Oh, you’re just finding that out?” or, “Yeah, I’ve noticed that a couple thousand times.” But I didn’t say it. I wanted to ask her what was the matter, but I didn’t have it in me. A dense clot of misery filled my stomach, chest, and throat, leaving no room for anything else. Except, around its edges, the pull I had toward Val stirred.
I put out my hand, but I wasn’t sure she would let me touch her just then, so I rested my hand on the edge of her chair. She looked down at my hand. Then she put her hand on my chair, and we sat like that for a minute.
Jake came in, holding the mushy soccer ball that served as one of our pieces of “recreational equipment.” “I signed out the ball,” he said. “You guys want to kick it around the yard?”
Val lifted her chin. “Oh, yeah,” she said. “I want to kick the hell out of that ball.”
Jake and I gaped, and then we broke into laughter at the same moment.
It stuck in my mind because, as terrible as that day had been, in some ways it was a great day. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Val’s hand on my chair was one of the things that kept me going, that made me think I could stand to keep living.
• • • • •
Nicki drove well, never speeding, eyes laser sharp on the road. “Time for some music,” she announced, clicking on the radio. While I was answering my mother’s second inane text of the day (“Do you want oranges or peaches when I go to the market?”), Nicki found a country station and sang along. Loudly. Just when I was about to overdose on cowboys and heartbreak, she turned down the music and said, “What’s this girl’s name again?”
“Val.”
“Val.” She repeated it as if tasting the name. “Does she know you like her?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Have you ever kissed her?”
I laughed. “No.”
“Have you ever kissed anyone?”
“Yeah.”
Her lips puckered as she concentrated on the road. Or maybe on the next question, which was “Have you ever had sex?”
“What? Why do you want to know that?”
“Just wondering. We’ve got at least another hour to kill; we might as well talk about something.”
“Then why don’t you tell me about
your
sex life.”
She frowned. “You really want to know?”
“Yeah, why not.” I rolled down the window and let the breeze hit me full force.
“Well, I had a boyfriend last year. He was a few years older than I was—my mother hated him.”
“I bet she did.”
“I slept with him, though I probably shouldn’t have. At the time I thought he was so great and we had this tremendous love and all—and it turned out he was hooking up with his old girlfriend the whole time I was seeing him.”
“Where’d you find an asshole like that?”
She rolled her eyes. “He lived next door to one of my friends.”
“No, I mean, what made you go with him in the first place? You could do a lot better.”
She gave an embarrassed half-laugh. “He had these amazing eyes. And he would drop his voice when he talked to me”—she demonstrated—“
like this
.” She cleared her throat and went on in her regular voice. “Like he was telling secrets, and everything was just between us. Now I know it was all bullshit, but he seemed so
sincere
. And he had this great shaggy beard—”
“Beard! How old
was
this guy?”
“Eighteen,” she said softly, her eyes on the road.
I knew she was fifteen now, which meant this guy must’ve been older than her by three or four years. “Isn’t that kind of—”
“Don’t say it.” Her mouth twisted. “My mother and my brothers said it already. Matt almost beat the guy up. Anyway—” She flapped a hand, apparently trying for casualness, but whacked the rearview mirror. “Ouch. Anyway, it seems like a long time ago now. I was such a stupid little kid back then.”
I didn’t know what to say at first. I let the highway miles roll by. Then: “Did you like him because he was older, or in spite of it?”
“Um . . . because, I think. Yeah, because. The guys my age are all so gawky and stupid.”
I became very aware of my left knee then, which was practically sticking into the gearshift, and my right knee bumping the glove compartment, and my elbows jutting out. But since I was about a year and a half older than she was, I didn’t know if I counted as “older” or “her age.” I was in no danger of growing a full beard yet, that was for sure. I checked to see if my hair was sticking up, but it was blowing all around from the open window.
“Well, he sounds like a prick to me,” I said.
She laughed. “I told you he was. So—your turn. Are you a virgin or not?”
I’d been hoping she would forget about that question. “No.”
“Who was the lucky girl?”
“Nobody you know.”
“Are you sure?”
“She went to my old school.”
“Come on, Ryan. I want details.” She snapped her fingers. “Names, dates, who made the first move—”
“I don’t think so.”
“Come on. I told you mine!”
“I’ll say this much. It was only one time, it wasn’t the best night of my life, and she never talked to me again.”
“Sheesh,” Nicki said after a long pause, during which the tires ate up several miles of road. “What’d we do to deserve such crappy first times?”
I had no idea what Nicki might’ve done. But I was pretty sure I knew what I had done wrong.
• • • • •
It happened after the whole fiasco with Amy Trillis, right before we moved out of West Seaton to come live in the house in the woods. Some guys from the baseball team talked me into going with them to this Christmas party. I barely knew the person whose house it was, and the guys from the team went off to play a drinking game in the kitchen a few minutes after we got there.
I roamed through the house with a giant plastic cup in my hand. At first I drank because I didn’t know what else to do, because it kept my hands and mouth busy. And then I drank because it made everything fuzzy, out of focus, less real. It wasn’t that I was happier, but I no longer gave a damn about whether I was happy or not. Finally I propped myself against a wall, and drank, and watched everyone else through my haze.
“Hiii,” this girl named Serena said, grinning at me, her face shiny with the heat of the room. She was in my math class, but I’d never talked much to her. I was a little vague on her last name—Hunter? Huntington?
“Hi,” I said.
“If you move, will that wall fall down?” She giggled and rubbed my shoulder.
“Where should I move to?”
“Upstairs?” She turned her head to glance at Bret Jackson, her on-again, off-again boyfriend. He was hanging all over a girl from my English class who I’d always sort of liked myself.
Serena’s fingers slithered down the front of my shirt. I knew what game she was playing, but between my depression and the drinks I’d had, I didn’t care. I gulped what was left in my plastic cup and dropped it on the floor. I touched Serena’s arm, tentatively, expecting that would call her bluff. But she tossed her head and snuggled closer. And then her mouth was on mine, wet and beer flavored, her tongue thrust into my mouth. I kissed her back, not because it felt good but because I was hoping to get to the point where it did feel good. I was hoping it was just the shock of her sudden attack that made kissing her seem like making out with an old sponge used to mop beer off the floor. She threw another look at Bret and tugged on my shirt. “Come on, let’s go upstairs.”
When we were alone in an empty bedroom, with no Bret to impress, I expected her to stop, but she didn’t. She lay on the striped spread of a narrow twin bed and pulled me down on top of her. My body responded to the contact, but my mind seemed to hover somewhere around the ceiling. Her breath scorched my ear. “Do you have anything?” she murmured, unzipping my pants.
“No.”
She grunted and squirmed to reach into her own pocket. “It’s okay; I do.”
I couldn’t believe she was still playing the game, forging ahead. I couldn’t believe I was following her down this road, either. I knew I didn’t like her much.
I didn’t dislike her, either. She was nothing. But then, I was nothing, too. Nothing I did mattered. I could have sex with her or not have sex with her; it didn’t matter either way.
Except maybe if I did, my numbness would break. Something would change. Losing your virginity is a big change, right? It should feel like
something
. It should be different, carry you across the bridge to some other place. Anywhere else.