I DIDN’T THINK ANYONE WOULD EVER NOTICE
The game was called Word Hunt.
My mom would listen through an Amelia Hunt song and pick out two words that grabbed her along the way. The first word was called “the starter,” and the second was “the tie in.” The point of Word Hunt was to make a vocabulary path (dictionaries were allowed) that connected the two words via synonyms. For example, let’s say the starter word was vicarious and the tie in was Enumeration.
Vicarious. Secondary. Extra. Count up. Addition. Add. Figure. Number. Enumeration.
The person who actually connected the words, and had the least amount of connections in five minutes, won.
A few months before The Woman told me she was leaving, Amelia Hunt was playing in the living room. I walked downstairs after doing homework, and she had a whiteboard set up in the living room. On it, she’d written the words unsatisfied and temptation.
I gathered the family. We played.
“Let me see what you got, Adam?” The Woman had said.
Dad laughed. “Adam’s got jack. I saw him over there writing down random words and coming up with synonyms.”
“It’s definitely not me. I was just thinking up French words the whole time, which really should make me the winner,” Addy said.
I smiled. I’d made a ten-word path.
I’d won that game, but I lost at what came after.
I’d realized the words unsatisfied and temptation weren’t ever together in an Amelia Hunt song. I don’t know if anyone else ever noticed, but I did. Instead of doing something about it, I just went up to my room and worried. To forget, I typed in “free porn” in the search bar.
I still hate myself for not asking The Woman about it.
Maybe I could’ve stopped everything before it went up in flames.
Maybe everything was my fault.
Maybe I deserve to be alone in Puget Sound.
—
I’ve slept one hour and porn-ed away the rest. I pretend to be sleeping when my dad walks into my room.
“Time for Mr. Cratcher’s,” he says. “I’m sure he needs you as much as you need him right now.”
“Define need,” I say.
“Can you just be a typical teenager for a day? Where on earth did all this metaphysical definition stuff come from?”
I don’t want to think about it, but I don’t think I could feel any worse if I did. I may have reached a point where it doesn’t matter if I think or don’t think.
“The Woman. We used to play-argue before you worked at home.”
His face goes soft. “I guess that was a stupid question considering she has a philosophy degree. You have that transparency thing tonight, right?”
I let out a groan. I feel like my body’s burning in the lava of my unnatural disaster self. “Yeah.”
Dad nods and then crosses his arms. “Is it weird that I’m excited for the Addiction Fighters group on Thursday?”
Thursday.
I get to see Dez. The girl I ignored last night. Suddenly, my week has a tiny blip of goodness in it. Sugar in black coffee. A stray crouton in a salad of old spinach.
“Kind of,” I say. “You aren’t addicted to anything, though.”
“Well, technically neither are you, right?”
Did Mr. Crotcher not tell him? Is he really that blind? Does he think I’ve just been coming upstairs every day for last two years simply so I can read for my philosophical enlightenment? I guess, in his defense, that he thinks I’m there because of what happened at school. Am I that good at hiding? I guess only Mr. Crotcher knows about my playlists and that was because he saw me making them at Pritchett’s once.
He continues. “The group is just as important for those addicted to the ideas of things,” he says. “Like getting your mother back.”
“Yeah.”
We fall into silence. That’s one thing I don’t want to think about right now, being addicted to ideas. I’m already addicted to something physical; I don’t need to add anything intangible. I stand and put on my pants in a few frustrated tugs. I have the sudden urge to throw my computer into Dez’s pool.
Dad sighs. “I’m sorry about Mark, Adam.”
I shrug. “It’s alright. I didn’t know him that well.”
He shrugs, too. “Loss is still loss. Hurt is still hurt. Doesn’t matter how big or small.”
“Thanks,” I say, and we both walk downstairs for our morning Cocoa Puff ritual, and this morning we welcome a semi-permanent guest: Adelaide Hawthorne.
—
My morning with Mr. Crotcher is dismal. I spend most of my time trying to figure out why porn has started to hurt instead of, I don’t know, not hurt. My distractedness makes me press a bunch of wrong buttons for most of the test recordings we do. I accidentally reset all of the levels we’ve meticulously tweaked over the last two days. Eventually, Mr. Cratcher ends up shooing me out of the chair to do everything himself, and I can’t blame him.
On my way home, I have the idea that if I call Dez to apologize for not answering the phone, I might not feel as bad.
She answers after the first ring. Does she answer after the first ring for everyone?
“Oh good, you’re not dead,” she says.
“Sorry,” I say. “I just didn’t feel like talking to anyone last night.”
“So I have a theory about our kind.”
“Okay.”
“Hurt isolates us—”
I sigh and interrupt her before she gets any further. “If you’re mad at me about not answering the phone, just tell me.”
“Shh! This will be a paradigm shifting academic paper later on.”
I let out a fake sigh of disgust.
“Seriously? Fine. I’ll talk to you later the—”
“No! No. I was kidding. Come on. You’re supposed to get my sarcasm,” I say.
“Whatever. I’ll talk to you later.”
She hangs up.
I stare at my phone in disbelief, and then a few seconds later, her name appears on my screen.
“Dez …” I say before she can take over the conversation.
“What, Adam?”
“Can you just forgive me for not answering?”
She laughs. I’m a little confused as to how she can go from hanging up on me to laughing. “I’m not your wife. You don’t always have to answer the phone when I call. Even if I was your wife, you wouldn’t always have to answer the phone when I called. However, it’s a nice idea, you always answering the phone, I mean. Not the wife thing. Wait, that sounds bad. It’s not that I wouldn’t consider marrying someone of your stock. I just probably deserve to marry a substance-abusing clown or a hot dictator. Actually, back to the answering the phone thing, I’d totally want you to answer all the time if I were your wife. If you didn’t, I’d be like ‘damn it, Adam, answer. I’m your wife.’”
She’s silent for a few seconds.
“Okay, I recant all that I just said. I definitely want you to answer the phone when I call you. It’s nice to know there’s a number that will always lead somewhere.”
“Wow,” I say.
“Sorry, I’ve had like ten cups of coffee this morning. If my mind was a sound, it’d be a bumblebee smacking against a pane of glass over and over and over and over and—”
“Dez! Do you forgive me?”
I just want to feel better. I want Dez’s acceptance to snap me out of my dismalness.
“Of course you’re forgiven, Adam. You didn’t answer the phone. So what? It’s not that big a deal. I mean, answering the phone, not your forgiveness. I mean, me forgiving you.” She grunts. “God, sorry. I’m not making any sense. The reason I had so many cups of coffee this morning was to keep my mind off Mark. So far it’s working. The only thing I can think about right now is running on a treadmill at the highest-ass speed it can go.”
I laugh, and then my mouth starts moving, but I have no idea what I’m about to say. “I didn’t answer because I was looking at porn. It just like, took me over more than usual last night.”
What. Is. Happening. To. Me.
“Damn it, Adam! I’m your wife. Answer the phone when you’re looking at porn and I call you!”
I laugh, but something about her saying “I’m your wife” makes me want her even more, and the collision of all these things—me actually wanting a girl outside of sex, my honesty, my feelings about Mark—makes my insides feel like a crossword puzzle and I’m scared into speechlessness. Dez must interpret my silence as anger because she apologizes again.
“Sorry, I’m probably not the best person to talk to about hard things at the moment. Really, Adam, I get it. You medicated. You felt hurt so you went to get rid of it. You’re forgiven. Oh, just a warning: when the caffeine decides to stop working, expect a call from me in which I proceed to break down over Mark.”
I pull into my driveway and take the keys out of the ignition. “I’d love that. Those are my favorite.”
“Sarcasm noted. I will punish that comment with extra irrationality and over-the-top sobbing.”
—
It’s Transparency time, and I lean my head against the back of an old chair that smells like ancient butts and musty coffee.
Mr. Crotcher slowly pulls an unlit pipe out of his mouth. It makes him look less like an old man and more like a gentleman explorer. “Tonight, we’re going to talk about Mark.”
Trey lets out one of those “heaviest thing in the world” sighs.
“Who wants to go first?” Mr. Crotcher asks.
Not me. I’m drowning in my own guilt/embarrassment/darkness. I’d be happy if I didn’t say anything for the rest of my life.
“I will. I’ve felt this way before,” Elliot says. “I’ve had a little more time to deal with the shit death dredges up.” He shifts in his seat as though readjusting is going to make him more comfortable talking about a kid dying. “When my mom died, I felt a lot of guilt and darkness. The whole shit-storm changed me. It made me into a depressed variable, to borrow the term from Mr. Cratcher.”
So that’s the answer to Mr. Crotcher’s question: we’re variables. We aren’t fixed outcomes or results—we’re variables. It’s a fancy way of saying we can change. I look at Mr. Crotcher to say, “that’s what I am,” but he gives me a quick glance with a tilted head to say “almost, but not quite.”
I curse under my breath.
Elliot continues, his face somehow emotionless. “We—” He points at each of us “—are still here, and we’ve got to choose how to move past the guilt and darkness. Like Mr. Cratcher says, it’s a life and death decision. We can wallow or we can live better.”
That homeless feeling that’s been plaguing me starts bubbling in my stomach, and it’s stronger than ever. It’s so strong and overwhelming that I finally think I know what it is. It’s the feeling something’s innately wrong with me. That the deep parts of me aren’t okay. It’s like a tornado of blood, hurt, and nerve is raging in my body, and if I keep it inside, it will tear me apart.
“I’m Mark,” I say, interrupting Elliot. “That’s why I can’t stop thinking about this. I’m Mark.”
Elliot stops talking and knocks his head to the side to get the hair out of his eyes. He waits for me to say something else.
“He didn’t want to be here,” I say. “He was frustrated because he was forced to do this. He didn’t want to be helped. He just wanted to be addicted because that was his relief. His addiction was his help, but it wasn’t working. He was still miserable. After our last meeting, I asked him if he wanted a ride home and he said no. I know why he said no; it’s because he’d already decided I wasn’t going to change anything for him. I chose the same thing. I felt the same way. I’d made up my mind that you guys were a waste of time.
“I spent all of last night looking at porn to feel better. It used to make me feel great, but this time it made me miserable. I’m scared—I’m scared I’m just going to spiral into nothingness. Where nothing’s capable of making me feel good …” I trail off and look at Trey. The kid’s smiling like an idiot. I just bared my soul and the kid is smiling.
He puts his hand on my knee. “Welcome, for real this time, to the Knights of Vice.”
—
I’m sitting on my bed, staring at the ceiling, when my phone rings. I pick it up.
Best choice I’ve made all day.
“Hello?”
“We need to conquer something,” Dez says.
I smile. I think of the line Mr. Crotcher kept quoting. The one about every word being a blaze of light, no matter if it’s holy or broken. That’s Dez. She’s made of blazes of light and she’s both broken and holy. I really want to tell her that. Maybe I should.
“So you decided to spare me from the breakdown?”
“No, it’s still coming. I may have lied when I said I had only ten cups of coffee. I had like, two industrial-sized pots. I’ve been peeing all day.”
“You’ve probably raised the water table a bit.”
“If there’s flooding somewhere in the world, I’m sure it’s my fault.”
“So, what do we need to conquer?” I ask.
“I don’t know. Just something. Like, when I play with Indecent, my dog, he gets mad if I keep him from ever catching the ball, right? I feel like that’s what life is like with us. Everyone is fighting everything all the time, but because we’re all addicts, we never catch the ball, so we all need to conquer something.”
“Compelling pitch. Any ideas?”
“We should run a marathon backward.”
“Why run a marathon backward?”
“Because everyone who’s running it forward is doing it on purpose.”
“So, we run a marathon backward on accident. Okay. When you figure out how to do that, let me know.”
“Look, all I’m saying is that we should think about it for a while and come up with some other ideas.”
“Yeah, I’m down.”
“Do you, Addy, and your Dad want to come over for dinner after Mark’s funeral on Saturday?”
Me, Addy, and my dad? Dinner at Dez’s house? Thousands of questions pop into my head at once.
“Why my dad?”
“My dad’s writing a book and wants to pick his agent-y knowledge.”
“Oh, my dad hates it when people try to butter him up.”
“No buttering, I swear. Besides, if my parents are occupied, we can do something else without them constantly reminding me to be a different person.”
Something else? What does she mean?
“I don’t mean sex. So just stop.”
“Did I say that out loud?” I ask.
“Yes, your confusion and hope were quite audible.”
I laugh. “Sorry, I didn’t mean—”
“Don’t worry about it. Oh, I’m addicted to alcohol now, FYI. Hope that’s cool.”
“It’s not, but who am I to talk?”
“Yeah, French Porn Boy, stop talking.” I hear a smile in her voice.
“I’ll see you Thursday, right?”
“Abso-freaking-lutely.”
“Dez?”
“Adam?”
“You are made of broken and holy blazes of light.”
The phone’s silent for a few seconds. Have I scared her? Should I take it back? How do you take back a comment about being made of blazes of light? You are pure darkness? You are smoky tendrils of evil?
“Finally,” she eventually says. “I didn’t think anyone would ever notice.”