What Has Become of You (9 page)

The other people in the living room were Bret’s aforementioned friends, Dave and Colin. Introductions were made all around. Dave has glasses and an eruption of frizzy hair, and he was sitting on an armchair with an afghan covering up his legs like an invalid. As for Colin, he was wearing eyeliner and mascara, which can look good on pretty, androgynous men, but not on Colin’s big, blunt-featured face.

“We made a bet you wouldn’t come,” Colin had said as soon as I showed up.

“Sorry to disappoint.”

I took a seat on a corner chair and tried to pretend I was paying attention to what was on TV. That it was perfectly ordinary for me to be someplace other than in my living room watching
Jeopardy!
with my parents on a Thursday night. That I was used to sitting around with a small group of overly intense and slightly sweaty boys who had the lights turned down low.

Colin and Dave, who go to the same high school, kept talking about something that had gone on earlier, involving Colin’s car and a questionable driving tactic that Dave referred to as a “wicked burnout,” when all of a sudden, right in the middle of the stunning dual dialogue of
Repo Man
and Dave and Colin, Bret Folger asked me, “Do you like Poe? You look like somebody who would like Poe.”

“He’s a little overrated, but he has his place.”

“I agree with you. I mean, he has predecessors in the Gothic genre who were just as good but are barely remembered today. What are you reading right now . . . for nonassigned reading?”

“Madame Bovary.”

“Madame Ovary,” Colin said joyfully.

“Shut up, Mackay,” Bret said. Then, to me: “What do you think of Kerouac?”

“Kerouac? Also overrated. It’s the kind of writing that people with no real life think they can relate to. Also the kind of writing that all writers think they can imitate but shouldn’t.” I could feel myself turning very red at this point, saying all this.

“I kind of like him. Allen Ginsberg, too. Have you read ‘Howl’?”

“I can’t hear!” Dave Epstein whined. A bowl of potato chips had somehow migrated to his afghan-covered lap, and he was clutching it as though it would keep him afloat in times of crisis.

“Like you weren’t talking over the movie yourself two seconds ago,” Bret said. At me, he said, “Let’s go into the bathroom and talk some more about books. This movie kind of sucks, anyway.”

“The bathroom?”

“My little brother’s doing homework in the den, and my mom might need the kitchen.”

Either one of them might need the bathroom, too,
I thought, but I didn’t argue. As we got up, Colin said something in a low voice that I couldn’t make out, and Dave sniggered. I have never used the word
sniggered
in my life, with good reason—it’s a stupid word. But I swear that’s what Dave did.

The Folgers’ downstairs bathroom was perfect and pristine. Nothing like ours at home, with its stained, pink, ruffly curtains and the weird stuffed animals that my mother is so fond of—the ones that seem to leer at you when you’re naked. Expensive toiletries were lined on a rack against the Folgers’ bathroom wall, and a lot of pricey department store makeup caught my eye; I hoard makeup and toiletries, even though I don’t use them much. I wondered if there might be something I could slip into my pocket, an eyeliner or whatever, but then I remembered that I didn’t have pockets. Besides, nothing was in my color—just boring nude lipsticks and the dark beige foundation of someone who tans. His mother’s stuff, probably. There was a wicker chair in the bathroom, too—what for, I’m not sure. In case someone needed to sit down and wait while someone else took a dump, I suppose. I sat down in it.

“So,” I drawled, “literature. What about it?”

To my horror and—I hate to admit it—exhilaration, Bret reached out with one of his bony hands and swept away the hank of hair that always hangs in my eyes. “Your face is always covered,” he said.

“Now you sound like my mom. She tells me I look better with my hair out of my face. But I think all mothers have some kind of contractual obligation to say that.”

“I think it’s better in your face. You look like a little rat peering out from under things. A pleasant rat.”

“A pleasant rat?” I said doubtfully.

And then something sort of hideous happened—something I feel funny even writing about, but I’ve gone this far. Bret’s face moved toward mine. He had to stoop way down to reach me sitting in the armchair. I could see the pores of his nose up close. They looked like little strawberry seeds.
He’s going to try to kiss me,
I thought in a panic. No one had ever tried to kiss me. Not even close. I imagined his mouth forcing my lips apart—a wormlike tongue, like you see sometimes inside parrots’ beaks at the pet stores. I turned my face away.

“Why are you turning away? Do you have bad breath or something?”

That made me laugh. “No. Well, maybe. Probably.”

“Let me smell.”

I breathed into his face.

“It’s a little bit bad,” he said, “but it could be worse.”

I laughed some more. I couldn’t help it.

“Are you going out with anyone?”

“Me? No. I mean . . . definitely, no, I’m not.”

“Would you go out with me? I mean, just to try? I’m leaving for Columbia in about six weeks. But six weeks is kind of a long time away.”

“Okay,” I said. Just like that. I couldn’t even begin to explain to myself or to you how this happened if you asked me. But I said okay. I really did. There was a part of me that thought:
Well, maybe he’ll come in handy somehow.
You just never know.

It’s almost nine months later, and Bret and I are still boyfriend and girlfriend. It’s a funny kind of relationship, as you can imagine. Even in those six weeks while Bret was still in Dorset, we mostly just talked on the phone, and when we saw each other in person, it was mostly in groups with his friends. Every once in a while, he’d sneak me over to his house when his parents were out and his brother was away. More often, we’d go to his Aunt Miriam’s cottage when she wasn’t there. But mostly it was phone calls for us.

Our phone conversations were epic. They still are, usually. I don’t have a cell phone, so I have to talk on my parents’ old corded phone in the kitchen—pacing around, sometimes going in circles and winding the cord around my body till I’m trapped in a web of cord and have to untangle my way out of it. And sometimes I lie on the carpet in the dining room and talk to Bret in the dark because conversations in the dark always feel a little more meaningful. In general, the subject of our conversations is predetermined by Bret; that is, we talk about things that he feels like talking about or is interested in. He is interested not only in fiction and poetry but also in the philosophical writings of Nietzsche, Hegel, and Kierkegaard. I’m having to do a little brushing up on this stuff to act as though I can keep up with him, to be honest.

We write letters, too—real old-fashioned letters, with a strict no-email rule. That’s what I spend most of my time doing: writing him letters. I write him four or five a week, and I’m lucky if he sends me two a month. When he was here over Christmas break, we did this thing where we’d leave notes for each other inside books at the Dorset library, and it would be like this Easter egg hunt to find which book the other person had left the note in. Usually there were clues, though. Like if Bret said something about being assigned
The Vicar of Wakefield
for class, I’d leave a note for him inside the cover of
The Vicar of Wakefield
. That was the most fun correspondence we ever had.

I have let him kiss me, but we haven’t gone further than that. Kissing isn’t quite as bad as I imagined, but it isn’t exactly what I would call good, either. His nose (which is sizeable) always knocks into mine (which is also sizeable), and his lips always feel chapped, and the whole thing feels kind of invasive. “You’re a very tense kisser,” he told me once, which is probably true. I wish people would kiss the way they did back in those old black-and-white 1940s movies, with their shoulders hunched up and their faces rigidly jammed together. It seems better than those probing, messy, exploratory kisses you see in movies today. But I guess I’m lucky that Bret doesn’t show much interest in going further than that—from what I understand, from movies and books and such, that’s pretty unusual.

I don’t put a lot of faith in love and sex. I think it’s kind of lame, if I’m being honest. I think people start having sex at about the age their parents stop hugging them because they still want that infantile closeness to someone that they used to have, except it’s all muddied up in sexual desire. Maybe my views are tainted by my parents’ weird combination of openness and close-mindedness; once, when I asked my mother to explain a passage about male-on-female oral sex that I’d found in one of her books, her reply was, “A man’s face doesn’t belong down there.” I don’t know. I haven’t sorted this all out in my mind.

During the many phone conversations Bret and I have had since last July, I’ve found there are some things I can talk to him about and some things I can’t. For instance, one time I was lying on the dining room carpet after having drunk most of a bottle of cough syrup, which had somehow made me feel more depressed instead of having the desired effect of making me feel mildly drunk. We had just got done talking about the mating habit of insects, specifically this mite that leaves its sperm behind in intricate patterns for the lady mite to sit on, if she approves of the artist’s work. I said I thought that was romantic. Then Bret started telling me about this guy who lived in one of his dorms who’d gone to visit his family for the weekend and had shot himself. He said, “He was this brilliant musician. I can’t believe he did it with a gun. I’m not even sure where he would’ve gotten one—not from his house, I know that. I met his mother once, and she had this huge peace sign tattooed on her leg and a ‘Bread, Not Bombs’ bumper sticker on her Prius.”

Then, without even knowing I was going to say it, I said, “Sometimes I think it’s a good thing I don’t know how to use my stepdad’s gun.”

Bret paused so I could hear the full measure of his distaste. “Your stepdad has a gun?”

“Yes, the service pistol he got issued in the navy. I tried to pick it up once, but it’s too big for my hand—about three pounds. Still, sometimes I think about what it’d be like to bring it to school and hold a classroom hostage. I could go up and down the rows of desks, pointing the gun at people, and decide right then and there who’d live and who’d die. Wouldn’t that be interesting? I don’t think I’d know what I’d do unless I was actually in that situation. Maybe I wouldn’t even shoot anyone. Maybe I’d just make them
think
I would.”

“I would call that extremely
uninteresting
,” Bret said, “and definitely not romantic.”

He didn’t understand at all. He didn’t understand that I was just blowing off steam when I thought about these things, like I’d done with Scotty. That was the last time I brought up anything serious or personal like that with him. Since then, we’ve stuck to safe subjects—subjects he likes. Whether or not dark matter exists. Whether homeless people are visionaries. Whether Andy Warhol was really an artist. The number of starving artists who are actually starving.

With Bret being away at Columbia, we don’t even have phone conversations that much anymore because of the long-distance bill. So now it’s just down to Sundays. And that’s what got me started telling you about all this in the first place—because of that call I just got. That call where he seemed distant, though maybe I just imagined it.

This is part of the reason why my parents don’t like Bret. They say he doesn’t seem that invested in me. My mother always says, “An investment is something that you give to someone that you can’t get back.” Still, Bret’s about as
invested
in me as anyone else has ever been. And this, to me, has come to mean a whole hell of a lot—enough so that I don’t know what I’d do without him.

I’m going to try to go back to sleep now. I didn’t mean to go on this long, but now I have, and I’ve worn myself out—and you, too, probably, if you actually read all this.

Vera laid the last page of Jensen’s journal on her table. She wanted to write a comment on the girl’s paper, an in-depth comment thanking her for the entries she’d written thus far—the sheer volume of them and the quality of thought therein. But somehow she could not think of how to respond to Jensen without revealing her own stories—stories, she thought, that were best kept to herself.

Instead, she took out a fresh piece of paper and began to write a response to affix to the end of Jensen’s journal entries; she preferred the old-fashioned approach of handwritten feedback, though most teachers she worked with now relied on computers.

Jensen,

This is a general response to all the journals you’ve submitted thus far. I’ve made individual notes in the margins of each, responding to lines and phrases and sections that struck me particularly. What I want to say most of all, though, is that it is a pure pleasure to read your writing. I am honored by your candor, honored to know you have trusted me as an audience.

Your emotional honesty and flair for writing are very good for someone your age. I appreciate how the entries range from savagely funny (even a little bit Holdenesque at times, which I’m sure isn’t accidental) to melancholy and derisive. You cover the whole spectrum of moods here. Though you make some statements that might alarm some readers, I want you to know that I don’t disregard these comments, but I am not easily shocked by them, either. I am someone you can always come to with such thoughts and issues, and if coming to me with them helps, then so much the better. You mentioned something about a therapist in one of your entries—do you ever think about trying a different one? Do you think there would be any value in doing so?

Sometimes seeing the world too clearly can misfire and result in hurting oneself badly, but in my opinion, the clarity is still worth it in the end. In the best-case scenario, it can make you something quite special in this world. I know this may offer you little consolation now, but it is something to keep in mind for the future.