Capítulo 33: Honesty is Never a Good Policy for Me. Here's Why.
A week after my eavesdropping stakeout with Julia White, the Biggest Group of Losers in History and I were at the usual table inside Stacks. I had shriveled up to make myself invisible.
Did I forget to set up the scene and introduce stuff in this chapter?
I will tell you that Willie wasn't there, but Kim, Austin, and Stuart were. They'd dragged me there by my hoodie. We were planning to go straight to therapy after we ate.
That was before they'd started interrogations.
My goal: stay alive and keep my non-existent love-life a secret. I was Ethan Hunt on Mission Impossible. Except this was all too real, and all too possible.
"Sooooo," Stuart said for the umpteenth time. "Who's the girl?"
I flinched. What if he jumped me again? What if everyone else joined in?
My chin firmed as much as it could for a wimpy seventeen-year-old. Dynamics were stringy, everyone was acting as if they'd been possessed by aliens, and I didn't want to participate in pushing life farther into insanity. Everything in my life was the opposite of a pattern. This group wasn't going to join the chaos.
Chirp.
I glanced at my phone.
Hey, let everyone know I might be a little late.
Okay, Julia. Okay.
Poker face, Ben, POKER FACE! Tiny Person said.
I don't know what my face did. Maybe my eyes were wider than usual. Maybe my lips had curled up like a freaking psychopath. Maybe my eyebrows had spread slightly across my face.
Austin grinned. "You're texting her right now, aren't you!?"
Shake your head! Tiny Person squealed. The answer is no. No! Give me a hearty Darth Vader no and shake your head like there's lice in it. Idiot! You have one mission. You're going to blow this for us!
I froze.
Kim peeked over my shoulder. "Oh."
Austin turned on her. "WHAT?"
"I don't think you should worry about this right now, Austin."
Stuart moaned, "He's texting the terrorists. I knew it!"
"Shut up, people are staring," Austin said.
"I don't think that's because of me. You've ordered every French fry the restaurant has left, and they're a little cranky. Um, what are you doing?"
Like a soldier on the Vietnam front lines, Austin bulged his arms across the table and wrapped his hands around my wrists. I dropped the phone. Austin must secretly be a ninja.
I told you to shake your head.
Is it just me, or is Tiny Person much too loud lately?
Austin held my phone like a lifeline. There are so many words that I could use to describe this moment. About my unfeeling hands, or the crease building up in my forehead. I'll just say this: I felt like a turkey on the day of Thanksgiving.
"No, no, no, no, no, no."
I expected the self-proclaimed optimist to smile. I thought he would toss back the phone and grin, maybe announce my feelings to the whole restaurant, give Stuart thirty bucks after losing the bet that it was a dude. Instead, he took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes hard in the core.
"Please, tell me you are not crushing on Julia White."
Deny. Deny. Deny.
I looked down at my hands.
Dang it, Ben!
Kim glanced at me. "Austin, what's the big deal?"
"The big deal? THE BIG DEAL? Julia White is a demon with absolutely no emotional hold on herself!"
My mouth was empty, but I choked. "What?"
"Look, Ben." He separated the curly fries from the straight ones. "This is Julia. Perfect life, perfect world, perfect friends." He pointed to the burnt curlies. "She's not about to mess it up again with people like us any more than she has too. She's moved on. I've accepted it, they all have, and I'm not going to let you kid yourself while you fall under her curse."
"Dude, why are you hating on her so hard?" Stuart said. "You two are like this."
He crossed his fingers.
"Exactly. I'm the only one here who knows how much trouble she can be. Ben, I'm begging you, don't waste the last little bit of emotional energy you have left on the likes of her. You're never going to be good enough for her. No one is." He shoved his plate across the table. "You don't deserve to get hurt like that."
Tiny Person hurled an oven against my chest as Austin stormed out the door, his food untouched.
This was some cheap plot twist in poor writing. Austin is supposed to be happy and nosy while he says stupid stuff that would make most people want to beat the fudge out of him. His character isn't supposed to freak. My last bit of faith in humanity filed through the paper shredder.
Stuart combined the fries and plopped them in his mouth. "Great. We're starting this again."
"What?" Kim said.
"The living soap opera. Ben and Julia. Julia and that Alex character. You and Willie fighting again. Austin's mad at the world. I think the alien invasion is upon us."
Who talks like this? Like ever?
Whoever's writing the story of my life is doing a terrible job.
"You alright up there, Cloud Nine?" Stuart waved a curly fry over my nose. Was he talking to me? "Don't worry about him. Austin's been rejected so many times he's starting to question his humanity. This's got nothing to do with you."
I felt Kim's tiny little body pulse against the seat. "Do you think he might be re-"
"No, he's over that."
"Over what?"
Wow. I spoke to be involved in the conversation.
Stuart focused on the ketchup bottle. "Austin…struggles sometimes. I mean, he's not like the rest of us with these real problems that get taken seriously."
I tried not to chortle at the thought of anyone taking Stuart seriously.
"What do you mean?"
"He tries," Stuart said, "He really tries."
"Tries what?"
Stuart shrugged. "To be…you know…normal. Since he doesn't have any of those labeled psychological issues, he thinks that he's the only one standing in his way of being normal, but it's never that simple. Just because you know something doesn't mean you can change it."
I was really lost.
Kim slipped out of the booth. Her bleach blond bun loosened on her tan neck. "I'm gonna check on him."
She yanked the purple sleeves of her hoodie down and sprinted out the door.
I shifted, "But-"
"Hey, guys? What's wrong with Austin?" I stared at the wall like I knew not how not to not interaction with human species. "He nearly took out a tree on his way out of here."
Stuart looked like a squirrel on a highway. "Nothing. He's just mad at us again."
Julia adjusted her hat. It was that same baseball cap. Navy blue with solid gold stitching.
"I really don't get what his deal's been lately."
"I'm sure he's fine," Stuart's voice climbed an octave at a time.
She sighed, "Yeah." I glanced at her eyes to find some sort of longing in them, the deep thoughts just enveloped inside. She turned towards me. "Hey, I thought you were going to tell everyone to wait for me."
Her lips were curled up. I think she was trying to be funny.
Look at me reading human emotions.
I had a feeling that if I opened my mouth, anything in my stomach would have come up. Hadn't I talked to her just a week ago? Yet she'd been missing from therapy those last few days, and already I felt like I was attempting to talk to a supernatural.
Stuart coughed. "He was going to, but I told him that might briefly distract people when they're trying to chew and could be a choking hazard, and then someone might have choked, and they would proceed to be hospitalized and then Ben as well as yourself would have a death forever ceiled into your fate."
She swallowed.
"And if your fate-"
"Yeah, okay, Stuart. We wouldn't want that."
"No, we wouldn't."
I could feel Julia's attention drift back to me, more like a fox. "Did you need a ride to therapy?"
My mouth opened, but no sound came out. I'd croaked. My eyes wouldn't contact the emeralds. They were stuck on that spot right in between by the bridge of her nose, which as I've mentioned earlier, is scientifically proven to make people uncomfortable.
Come on.
Speak.
Bad boy.
"Actually, I already offered him a ride."
Stuart.
Thank you.
"Oh." Now she went quieter. She knew about Stuart tackling me during our fears project. She knew because I told her about it. Plus…does Stuart even have a license? How would someone like him have a license? I don't even have a license. "Okay. But are you sure you don't want to carpool? It might save some-"
"Nope, we're good."
Stuart.
In your words: What the heck, Dude?
"Fine. I guess I'll see you guys there."
She was gone. I wanted to yell out that hearty Darth Vader no.
Stuart didn't say anything else to me. But he wore a grin like he was the byproduct of a devil and a clownfish. I wasn't going to live this down.
✎✎✎
Three weeks. Twenty-one days of minimal communication with Julia. Five hundred and four hours of this painstaking ride, watching her become closer with Alex, make things up with Austin, and go through the pressures of Senior year finals. Thirty-thousand, two hundred and forty minutes of this non-stop torture, opening my mouth to speak to her without a sound ever making its way through.
This was so much easier before Austin. Every time I'd go up to her, every time I would so much as face her direction, his eyes would pierce through my nonexistent soul, opening it up for the devil himself. The calculator says I haven't spoken to Austin for 1.814e+6 seconds. That would be correct.
I think.
However long it's been since that lunch when he yelled at me. Somewhere along the way, Stuart had become my new fill-in best friend.
Talk about desperate.
It was after therapy. I think there were two or three weeks left in school. All Stuart would talk about were finals. He talked a lot higher and faster than Austin., and since I had no social life, I had to listen to him.
"...And Mr. Drenk is out to get me, so it doesn't matter what crap I put on that piece of paper: he will fail me, and I will be kicked out of school, and then I'll live in my parent's basement until they kick me out and I'm on the streets until I die a slow, painful death due to the corrupt system that will one day be a dictatorship, because my efforts to preserve the democracy will all be in vain. And it's all Voldemort's fault!"
"Uh…huh."
He shook me hard with his fists, then put on hand sanitizer. "Don't you understand that we have to act now! I need to pass this Spanish final!"
I don't take finals. I didn't know what he expected from me.
I took in my surroundings. Austin was still here, but Julia was not. Perfect. Now I could sneak out in peace.
"Stuart, I'm going to walk home."
He glanced at Austin's stink eye. "Yeah, sure. But don't forget what I told you about the ACT. They are set up to make you fail, just like video games."
I'm glad I didn't tell him I had no intentions on taking the ACT. I'm not into theater.
"Sure."
Austin rolled his eyes. "Stuart, the ACT was like two months ago."
"Oh sh-"
At that I snuck out. Now that Stuart wasn't stealing all the oxygen with his rants, I could maybe kind of sort of breath again. I didn't see the familiar figures trailing me out of the school, shadowing me for the perfect moment to strike.
"Ben?"
My heart sunk all the way down to my feet. I already missed Stuart. He was an effective distraction from myself.
She was right behind me.
I had no choice but to turn around. Despite my height over Julia, I felt like I was kneeling before some Greek goddess. How did Hercules, Achilles, and Odysseus do it?
"Can we talk?"
"Why?"
Her features made a familiar expression. I was back at the fountain, and she was grabbing my knife from me. "WHY? Because you won't talk to me and I don't know what I did! I mean, did I say something wrong? Did I do something to you?" I turned away, but she grabbed my shoulder. "Look, I don't know if this is just something that you're going through or if I upset you somehow or what but for God's sake would you please just talk to me!?"
In that moment, my emotions were strapped to a snapping turtle. Julia had opened the dungeon door hiding it and the snapping turtle hijacked my control system. Words were going to leave my mouth, for better or for worse.
Spoiler: worse.
"Don't you think I want to?" I pulled my hair at its roots. Dark brown, not black. Dark brown, not black. "I try, but I…can't! I can't eat, I can't sleep. It's just this big mess that's my reality, but you wouldn't know. You can't know…that…"
Julia dropped my arm. "Ben, I'm no therapist."
I punched the snapping turtle in the gut, and he knocked my tiny person over like a bowling pin. There was no one to steer. They fought over the wheel, grabbing to knock the other into oblivion before—
"No, you're not a therapist. But you're the girl who I think I'm in love with."
No. Orange soda. Crush Soda! Tiny Person caged the snapping turtle and grabbed the wheel.
But it didn't sound right.
I had no explanations for her reaction. This was worse than the villain in a superhero movie. (Not to give any spoilers, but this went about as well as anyone would expect.)
"Ben…I…"
Citric acid climbed my eyes. I slammed into the lockers and sunk to the ground. "I-I-I'm sorry…I mean…I meant…I like you. I t-tried to ignore it and change it and I know it's…stupid but…it's…true."
Orange crush soda! my tiny person grabbed for emergency controls.
I flicked him off the pedestal.
She shushed me. Not like the person talking in a movie theater, more like a nanny in a daycare. She knelt beside me and moved my hands away. Her emeralds grabbed mine and demanded any sense I had left.
"Ben," she said, "You don't 'love' me…or 'like' me. Not like that."
Um…
"What?"
What?
"Look, I've always seen you as a really, really close friend and I love that we can talk and-"
I shook my head. "I know that. I know how you feel. That doesn't change how I-"
"Stop it, Ben. You don't."
What?
"What do you mean, 'I don't'?"
That feeling that had swelled in my chest for months converted. Like specks of salt poisoning freshwater. She stood up and pulled me to my feet. "I think you're just feeling really vulnerable right now."
What?
"And you're letting these feelings for me as…as a friend develop into something else because you think the world says you have to. But you don't, alright?"
My head crinkled towards my eyes. I couldn't stop breathing through my mouth.
"But listen," she continued. I couldn't read her face. I couldn't tell what she was thinking. "Our friendship is really important to me. I never want to lose that. Okay?"
She wrapped her arms around me. I could tell it was supposed to be a hug, but it felt like a death-grab.
"Ben, I…I have to go. Call me, alright?"
I don't remember how I ended up on the ground after she left, leaning against the same locker. My eyes were glued to the wall, my tiny person maimed in the wrong part of my head, dethroned. I heard footsteps come down the hall. I recognized Austin and Stuart exchanging crazy remarks about the end of the world.
But I didn't care.
I wouldn't move.
I couldn't move.
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