Nell’s To-Do List
• Stop making to-do lists. They suck. A lot.
Between the time that Torres left my bed the morning after his concussion and his return later that evening . . . before everything fell apart, I’d added something to my list.
And I know I can cross it off because even though I hate him, even though the thought of him brings every doubt and insecurity roaring to life in my head . . . that damn fist around my heart still squeezes.
So I guess I can finally admit it. Late, though it is.
23. Fall in love.
Been there, done that, wish I had never written a single word of this stupid list. But I’m committed to it now, so I add yet another item.
24. Get my heart broken.
Then I cross them both off at the same time. Whoo-hoo life experience. Sure glad I have that now.
I knew this whole experiment would all go bad. There’s no way it couldn’t, not with me at the helm. God, I should have realized this sooner. I should have known that he and I wouldn’t fit together under normal circumstances. The only reason he ever looked twice at me was because of her.
There are still items on my list that I haven’t completed, but I feel like I’ve done my part. I’ve stepped outside of my comfort zone. I’ve taken risks. And I’ve paid for it.
And I was right all along.
I’m better off committed to my work. And now I’m going to graduate early. I’ve narrowed down my grad school choices to two programs, and I’ll be filling out those applications . . . soon. Anytime now. I’m going to do the things I always planned to do, and I’m never going to look back.
That’s the first lie I tell myself.
I’m no longer worried about my future. I know everything is going to work out.
That’s the second.
The next day, I lie when I tell Dylan (and myself) that I changed my mind. That Torres and I, while attracted to each other, just aren’t compatible.
I lie when she asks if I want to eat ice cream and watch chick flicks, and say instead that I need to work on grad school applications. Then, when she’s gone, I break out my sweatpants and the ice cream and settle down on the couch to watch a special on the Discovery Channel about lions hunting their prey. (Okay . . . so I wasn’t lying about the chick flicks, but all the rest of it . . . )
It’s a lie each time I go to bed and promise I won’t think of him.
It’s a lie each time I wake up and convince myself that he was absolutely not the first thing on my mind.
It’s a lie that I’m not disintegrating with worry the night before the football game thinking about all the things that could go wrong, the ways he could be hit, how it could affect him.
I don’t care.
I don’t care. I don’t care. I don’t care.
(More lies.)
So, even though I hate my list . . . even though I said I was through . . . when Saturday comes, I make plans to check another item off my list.
10. Go to a football game.
After this . . . I’ll be done.
TAILGATING.
Dallas tells me that it gets its name from everyone camping out at their trucks, setting up food and drinks on their tailgates to party before a football game. Personally, I think it’s absurd to make the name of an inanimate object into a verb, but no one asked me. I also think it’s absurd that in a sport called football, the majority of the game has very little interaction between balls and feet. But again . . . not my choice.
Dylan, Matt, Dallas, Stella, and I carpooled together, and I follow them to a section of the parking lot where the student union is throwing a huge tailgate party. From the few things I’ve picked up over the years, I had expected the game not to be very female-friendly. I mean, it’s sports, for one thing. But so many commercials and photos I’d seen played up the cheerleaders in skimpy clothing, and I figured that kind of stuff would run rampant. Ironically, there are a lot more half-naked guys than there are girls.
There’s one large group of shirtless guys whose chests are painted a dark red to match the school’s colors. Each guy has a single letter on his chest in white, and while I’m sure this was not their intention, the four closest to me spell out the word “suck.”
I get a hot dog, but decline alcohol, and the five of us sit down on those concrete slabs that are placed in front of parking spots. As I eat, I survey the group of shirtless guys again, taking in all the letters, and working anagrams in my head trying to figure out what they might say. They’ve shifted again and instead of “suck,” there’s now a group sporting the word “scat.” Again, I’m doubting (and also weirdly hoping) this was their intention. There are somewhere between fifteen and twenty guys, and they keep moving around, which is putting a serious damper on my anagramming.
“What are you staring so hard at?” Stella asks beside me.
Everyone else has kept up a steady stream of chatter, but the two of us have been quiet. I heard Dallas mention something about this being the first game Stella has attended in a while. According to Stella, it’s only been like a month and a half, which doesn’t sound like that big of a deal to me, but everyone else seems to think it’s significant.
“I’m brainstorming possible combinations of the letters on those shirtless guys that are really extraordinarily drunk considering how early in the day it is.”
She smiles. “What do you have so far?”
“Well, this group here and that one over there could combine to spell ‘scrotum.’ But I feel confident that’s not their intended message.”
Stella chokes on her soda. “Oh God, I hope it is.”
I think about how much of a kick Torres would get out of this, and my heart rattles.
“More realistically, though, they’re spelling something to do with the school. Rusk. Those letters match up. There’s not a Y that I can see, so I don’t think it says ‘university.’ There’s an F and two Os, so I’m betting ‘football’ is part of it. But that still leaves some letters unaccounted for.”
“Wildcat,” Stella provides. “The team mascot, I think the rest spells ‘wildcat.’ ”
I scan the letters again, and she’s right. I nod. “Mystery solved.”
Then I go back to chewing my hot dog. And chewing and chewing because I don’t know what to say. I should be working on that whole friendship thing. That’s the one thing that might be salvageable from this whole list disaster. Everything else might have backfired, but I know now that I can’t let myself go back to being lonely. I can’t work that way, and it was foolish to think that I could.
“I’m nervous,” I tell Stella. “About seeing this game.”
“Don’t be. Football isn’t as complicated as it seems. You’ll get it in no time.”
I shake my head. “It’s not that. I was sort of, briefly, dating Torres.”
She coughs and thumps her hand against her chest a few times as if she’s choking. “You were? Seriously? How did I miss that?”
I shrug.
“Damn,” she continues. “I’m off my game. Usually, I’m the first person to know that kind of stuff.”
“Well, there’s not much to know anymore. We got in a big fight, and it’s over. Really, it was doomed before it ever started because . . . well, it just was.”
Because me and emotions don’t mix.
Because I was just a stand-in.
Because we’re too different. Way, way, too different.
She says, “I know a thing or two about being doomed before it starts.”
“It’s awful, isn’t it?”
She glances over her shoulder, almost like she’s checking to make sure her friends are still busy in conversation. Satisfied, she turns back to me and says, “It’s like . . . you have plans, ideas for how something is going to unfold. And you’re patient, you don’t try to rush things because you know they’ll happen when they’re supposed to happen. But then what happens is something altogether different. And it doesn’t just affect your old plans, it obliterates them. It makes the choice for you. And you’re left feeling stupid that you ever even considered those old options, that you ever got your hopes up.”
Stella and I are both short, roughly the same height, actually, but she seems so small next to me. My first instinct is to attribute that sense to her emotions . . . except she’s not really showing any. Her hands don’t shake as she continues eating. Her expression is neither wrought with feeling nor purposely blank. Her eyelashes are long, but she’s not blinking like she’s fighting off tears. She seems normal. Fine.
But she got her hopes up for something.
And I know how that feels. I spent all that time wondering whether I was capable of a relationship. Whether I had it in me. I was stupid to not be prepared for it to be him that got in the way.
I never would have done that in an experiment, let a factor like that go unconsidered.
“I don’t think you were stupid,” I tell Stella. She stiffens beside me, and I keep going. “I don’t really buy into that word. There are only wrong answers and right ones. Stupidity and intelligence, those are attributes we add to make ourselves feel better. Making a stupid decision doesn’t make you stupid. Just as making a smart decision doesn’t necessarily make someone smart. Our bad choices don’t make us stupid, they just make us wrong. About that one thing. Not about everything.”
“I want to believe that. That one choice, one thing, doesn’t define you. But everything is just like fucking dominoes, and they keep falling, one after the other, and I can never get ahead of it. So as much as I want to believe what you say, I can’t.”
The two of us sit in silence as we finish our food.
And maybe Stella is right. There’s a reason the social sciences exist, because people are unpredictable. They’re not like math and physics and biology. They’re different, separate. You can’t depend on people to be consistent or rational. So much of what I’m learning in school deals with medicine’s attempt to remove humans from the equation as much as possible to prevent human error.
Maybe that’s where I went wrong, trying to approach life the way I approach science.
In science, every action might have an equal and opposite reaction, but not in life. Life is unbalanced. Life is complicated. A little lie can cause a lot of pain. A big event like an important game or losing your virginity can have an enormous impact or it can turn out to not mean that much in the end.
“There’s no predicting it,” I say aloud. “How one thing can affect your life. There’s no way to know until it’s too late.”
“Life’s a bitch like that.”
I tap my water bottle against her Dr Pepper can, and for the rest of the tailgate party, Stella becomes my partner in silence. She doesn’t push me to talk, and I don’t push her, and when we head for the stands, I’m relieved to be seated by her.
And when the players exit from the locker room, and my eyes pinpoint Torres in his uniform, she bumps her shoulder into mine. “You okay?”
I shake my head, then nod, then shake my head again. “I don’t know.” I’d thought coming to a football game would give me some kind of closure. I’d get to see him again to ease the ache in my chest, but I’d also see how different our worlds are. That realization was supposed to help me let him go.
Instead, I watch him stretching and my own heartbeat sounds suspiciously like Love him, love him, love him, in my ears. This isn’t going to give me closure. It’s just going to give him more power over me.
Torres is my catalyst. He set my life spinning, and there’s only one way to counteract that kind of momentum.
Friction.
I’ve got to fight back. Resist the urge to miss him, to seek him out. I’ve got to resist. I stand up as the band starts playing next to the student section, and at first no one hears me over the music, so I have to say it again, louder. “I can’t be here!”
I can’t sit up in these stands, watching him risk his own health for a game that could never be more important than his future. There are two things I know for certain about Mateo Torres:
1. He has a type (my type, apparently).
2. He will always put football first. He did it with his ex, and now he’s doing it again with his health.
And there’s one thing I know about me:
1. I don’t dwell on setbacks. I move forward. Always, always forward.
Stella stands, and hooks her fingers around my elbow. “Come on. I’ll go with you.”
“Wait. You’re leaving?” Dylan asks. “But you’re the one who wanted to come.”
I shrug. “Sometimes you make the wrong decision. And that’s okay, as long as you don’t keep making them.”
“Stella?” Dallas asks. There’s a bigger question in those two syllables, but whatever it is, it passes just between the two friends. Then Dallas nods even though Stella hasn’t said a word, and the two of us begin inching past all the people in our row.
“Let’s get out of here,” I say.