Twenty-Seven
Mom is waiting for me outside baggage claim. It’s past midnight, and the sky is moonless, which makes the Camry particularly dark. I tell Mom thank you at least five times, but it still doesn’t feel like enough. I ask her for more details about Mr. Harlow, but she doesn’t know any. She asks if Unhappy Families won, and I tell her we didn’t, in a firm, dead tone that stops all further inquiry. Mom doesn’t need me to tell her to drop me off at the house twelve down from ours, but I do anyway.
Both cars are in the Harlows’ driveway. I go straight around to the back patio door. My fingers fumble on the handle before I realize it’s locked, the basement dark. I’m about to make a run for the front porch, where I will knock on the door for however long is necessary. That’s when I see that the entertainment room isn’t entirely dark. There’s a flash of blue and purple light coming from the television. When I peer closer, I make out Paul sitting on the floor, tilting a game controller side to side.
I knock on the glass, tentatively at first, because what right do I have to disturb Paul after the way I treated him the last time he and I were in this room? But soon enough my overwhelming desire to be there with him and Jack suffocates my shame. I pound on the door, effectively startling Paul. He tosses down the controller and hurries over to unlatch the door.
The moment he slides it open, I throw my arms around him. Forget what passed between us days ago, just for now. Forget all of it and put my arms around him, because it is instinct and it is the only thing I know to do that isn’t wrong. His own arms are around my back instantly, and his head is pressed into my neck, and I hear him say in a muffled whisper against my hair, “Fuck , Tash.”
That’s when I notice something’s off. I pat my hands over the width of his upper back, feeling around for the familiar soft cascade of his ponytail.
“Paul,” I croak, pulling away. “What’d you do to your hair?”
“Chopped it off and donated it to Locks of Love. Because he’s an idiot.”
Over Paul’s shoulder, I see Jack descending the basement staircase, arms crossed tight against her chest.
“What are you doing here?” she asks me.
“I got an early flight back,” I say, not sure this is the answer she’s looking for.
“I don’t want a hug,” she warns me, as I come closer.
So I stop my approach and instead move to the couch, where all three of us pile and stare vacantly at the paused Call of Duty . After a while, Paul clicks on the side table lamp and turns off the television. We sit in the yellow glow, silent. I keep stealing glances at Paul, unable to fully comprehend him with short hair.
“I don’t know what to say,” I finally whisper. “I’m just really, really, really sorry. And I’m here.”
Paul scratches the back of his head, his fingers lingering just where the close-cropped cut ends on his neck. Apparently he, too, is unable to grasp what he’s done.
“The best thing you could for me?” says Jack. “Make me think about something else. Like, I dunno, the Golden Tubas. I saw your photo with George. Am I going blind, or did you look genuinely happy to be one inch away from him?”
“It was all for publicity. You know how it is.”
“Yeah, well, I was expecting to see a selfie with Thom .”
“Yeah,” says Paul. His voice is easy and interested. Too easy, too interested. Like he’s trying to make up for past wrongs. “Yeah, how was that?”
I laugh. I drop my head in my hands. I laugh some more.
“I’m confused,” says Jack. “Is that a rom com giggle, or a bloody horror giggle?”
“Horror,” I say, in an appropriately raspy voice. “Definitely horror.”
“Oh my God, I know what happened. He turned out to be silverspunnnx23, didn’t he? You totally got catfished. Some really convoluted version of catfished.”
“Jack, that doesn’t even make sense,” says Paul. “He was the one who posted that video defending her, remember?”
“Defending her in a super patronizing way,” Jack retorts. “Anyway, that just makes him more suspicious. He probably planned it out so that he wrote the post and recorded the video the same day. So he could pretend he was her savior or something.”
“You guys,” I say, lifting my head. “You guys, no . He was not silverspunnnx23. He was just . . . not very understanding.”
Silence.
Jack says, “So, you told him, then?”
“He thought I was making it up. He basically told me the Internet invented how I feel and it’s not a real thing. So. Worst possible reaction ever.”
Jack’s response is immediate and vehement: “Asshole.”
Which she follows up with a half-dozen other variations on the theme of “ass.”
Paul is conspicuously silent. Nothing he says right now won’t sound vindictive or trite. Not after what’s passed between us. We both know that.
“He didn’t . . . try anything, did he?” asks Jack.
“What? No, nothing like that. He just peaced out. I don’t know, maybe I was expecting it, because I don’t feel all that shocked.”
Jack mutters a few more choice words about what caliber of human Thom is, then surfaces from her plunge into profanity to say, “Damn, now you need to be distracted. Paul. Hey. What can we do to distract her?”
This is insensitive of Jack to say, and I think she realizes it soon after, because she beats Paul to an answer by saying, “I know. We need to start talking Kickstarter details. Goals, perks, how we’re going to divvy the funds, which project we want to pick next. The Oscar Wilde one is the most fleshed out at this point, but I don’t know if we want to go that—”
“Jack. Seriously?” I’m looking at her like she’s confessed to being a deer hunter, and frankly, I think that’s a very mild reaction on my part.
“Seriously what?”
“You just found out your dad’s cancer is back. You haven’t even told me the details of his condition, and you want to talk details for our web channel ?”
“Um, what part of ‘distraction’ don’t you understand? Have you been listening to me at all? Talking details for our web channel is exactly what I need to be doing. The show must go on. That’s professionalism.”
“Yeah, I think it’s actually called emotional repression.”
“Okay, look.” Jack’s voice turns jagged. “I am going to break down. At some point in the probably near future, I will ugly-cry and go on a drinking binge, and you will have to hold my hair back as I vomit. At some point, I will tell you all the details I know about my dad’s fucking cancer. But I don’t feel like doing that now, okay?”
“O-okay.”
“Calm down, Jack,” mutters Paul. “How is she supposed to know what you want?”
“She doesn’t. That’s the point: We’re best friends, and none of us know what any one of us wants. It’s all a big effing stew of repressed emotions, isn’t it? So at least I’m doing Tash a service and telling her exactly how I feel.”
Jack gets up, hurls the throw pillow she’s been clutching at my gut, and storms out of the room and up the stairs. She has thrown the grenade and run for cover, and I can’t decide if it was a brave or cowardly thing to do. I also can’t decide if I should make a run for it too.
I’m suddenly so aware of Paul’s presence next to me. The space he occupies, the rhythm of his breathing, his . . . lack of hair. It’s bothering me so much.
“I should get going,” I say, and I know that’s the cowardly thing to do.
I’m halfway to the patio door when Paul says, “I felt like a bad person.”
I stop, turn around. “What?”
He pulls his feet up on the couch and repositions himself so he’s facing me straight on.
“I felt like a bad person, when I told you I thought my dad would get cancer again. Because I’m his family, so I’m supposed to be the optimistic one. And I wasn’t. And I always felt guilty for telling you that. I felt like somehow, because I’d said it out loud, that would make it happen. And now it has.”
“Paul.”
“So that’s why I didn’t tell you, when Dad first complained. That’s why I told Jack not to let you know. Because I thought if we said it out loud, it’d definitely be true. It’s not because I didn’t trust you. I wasn’t trying to hide anything, I just . . . felt like such a bad person.”
“You’re not a bad person, Paul.”
He smiles grimly. God, how long will it take for his hair to grow back? Years?
I modify my previous statement: “You’re the best person I know. Aside from my mom, maybe.”
“No one beats your mom.”
“Okay, yeah,” I concede. “No one beats Mom. I spoke hastily.”
Paul’s smile turns pained. It looks like he’s been forced to swallow kerosene. “I’m not ready to lose my dad yet. That’s all I keep thinking, over and over: I don’t want to be the guy without a dad. It’s so selfish. It’s worse than Jack not talking about it at all.”
“It’s not selfish.” I step closer to the couch, where I can see Paul’s face better in the lamplight. “You love your dad. You don’t want him to die. And you don’t want to be the guy without a dad. All of that is really natural.”
“You’d be so disappointed in me. I’m thinking very un-Zen thoughts these days.”
“Yeah, well, me too.”
There is more to say here. There’s more I should be saying. I should be apologizing. But to apologize is to bring up everything that happened before I left for Orlando, and now isn’t the right time.
“I’m here if you need me,” I say.
“Don’t worry, we do. And you know Jack. She’s just . . .”
I nod. I know.
But as I walk out into the night, I wonder if that’s entirely true. I know that Jack shuts down and walks off when she’s upset. I know she likes creepy stop-motion films. I know she doesn’t like hugs. But I don’t really know the why of it. It’s not that she’s a bitch or a sullen person or emotionally stunted. Those are all tidy explanations for Jack’s behavior, but they’re not the why . I don’t know the why, and Jack is my best friend. So good God, what does that say about the human race at large?
People these days love to speculate on the apocalypse—whether our ultimate demise will be due to nuclear warfare or zombie epidemic or alien invasion. But I think it’s more likely that our end will come on a normal day when we all stop trying to figure out the why of anyone around us and go live in separate houses and rot away, alone.
On the way back home, I notice an anthill forming in our next-door neighbor’s yard, illuminated by a streetlight. It’s begun in the grass and is now encroaching on the sidewalk. There’s a steady line of ants filing in and out, so focused on their mission they don’t notice the giant stooped over them, observing their work.
I wonder if ants know each other, or if they even try. Maybe they don’t have to. Maybe they aren’t hung up on a sense of self. Maybe they just are each other.
Once I’m in bed, fighting my way to sleep, I keep getting this crawling sensation on my arms. I don’t know if it’s chills or imaginary ants, but I’ve got a feeling it’s not the last I’ll hear from them.