Nine
Paul and I stand surveying the wreckage. Paul’s theory is that we placed too much weight on the middle of the table, which explains why the middle legs buckled and sent the two pieces of table smashing into each other in a spectacular splinter of blue wood.
“It wasn’t made well,” he says. “Or maybe the screws in the legs weren’t tightened all the way.”
“Or maybe two full-grown people weren’t supposed to sit on it?” I hypothesize.
Paul looks dubious. When I offer to help pay for the damage, he waves me off.
“I am a man,” he says, “and therefore if it was a matter of weight, mine was to blame.”
I give him an unamused look but don’t protest. I’m not in the mood to talk comparisons between my weight and Paul’s. I am well aware that I’m thirty pounds over what an issue of Cosmopolitan deems beautiful.
Only when we leave the entertainment room do I notice blood on my foot. There’s a long, thin cut along my leg that takes three regular-size Band-Aids to cover.
“My parents will never let me play with you again,” I say very seriously. And while I’m on the topic of parents, I add, “We should tell your dad.”
Paul nods but says, “He’s not here. He’s at some meeting for work.”
“Well, you shouldn’t have to tell him on your own.”
“Tash, I’m nineteen. I’ve got the balls to tell him.”
“Okay,” I say, unconvinced. “But if you need me to come back over, I will. Or if you want to blame it entirely on me, that’s fine too.”
“You could stay over if you want. Jack will be back soon.”
“I told my parents I’d eat dinner with them. Though I do feel kind of shitty about breaking your stuff and running away.”
Paul shrugs. “I’m a bad host, you’re a bad guest. We’re even now.”
• • •
For dinner, Dad makes a giant spinach salad filled with goat cheese, sliced plums, caramelized onions, and roasted almonds. He’s baked and sliced a chicken breast for his own salad, but I’m confused by the second piece of chicken I see sitting on aluminum foil in the kitchen.
“Is Klaudie not here?”
“She texted she was staying out with Jenna,” says Mom.
Right, I think. Out enjoying her summer.
Klaudie and I haven’t spoken since our fight. The past couple days have been nothing but frigid glances and a shoulder brush in the stairwell. Our very own cold war is officially under way, and I’m certainly not going to be the first to warm back up. Klaudie is in the wrong here. I’ve had to spend hours on the script, both with and without Jack’s help, fixing the structural havoc Klaudie wreaked.
Dolly isn’t as important a character as Anna Karenina, or even Kitty, but Jack and I wrote an airtight script, where every single episode hinges on the next, where no dialogue is superfluous. Cutting Klaudie’s lines was easy enough—therapeutic even—but it’s been much harder to reconstruct the story after the demolition. I’m most worried about how we’re going to work Stiva, Brooks’s character, back into the plot. Almost all of his scenes are with Dolly, and I don’t want to take away Brooks’s screen time, especially now, right when we’re getting popular.
I know I shouldn’t be this angry with Klaudie. If I went to one of the teen meditation classes at the Zen Center and talked to Deirdre, my group leader, she would tell me my anger is only hurting me and that Klaudie has her own path to follow. But I haven’t been to the center in a few months now. I’ve been wrapped up with filming and college entrance exams, and though I tell myself I’ll start going back once things settle down, it doesn’t look like things are going to settle down anytime soon—especially now that I’m “mildly famous,” as Jack likes to put it. I do my ten-minute breathing meditations most nights, but sometimes I curl up with my laptop and get so immersed in all the new tags and mentions that I lose track of time and end up too sleepy to get up and brush my teeth before bed, let alone practice mindfulness.
• • •
I have trouble focusing the next morning at work. The Scrabble episode posts in the middle of my shift, and I’m itching to see the fans’ reactions. When Jack tweeted from the Unhappy Families account two days ago, hinting at what was to come, our followers promptly created the hashtag #KevinThursday, which produced equal amounts of exhilaration and panic within me. I kind of wish Jack hadn’t hinted, because now everyone has high hopes for today’s episode, and what if it disappoints? I think it’s great, of course. But I have not one iota of objectivity, no way of knowing if the episode is good because I know how much work we put into it or because the episode is actually good .
I’ve already decided I’m not going to check my phone during my ten-minute break. Whether the reaction is good or bad, I wouldn’t be able to unpack it all in just ten minutes, and I’d be even more of a mess on the floor than I am at the moment. I’ve already screwed up two checkouts—first by double scanning a bathing suit, then by mis-entering a birthday coupon code. Stupid mistakes. Maybe it would’ve been better to call in sick today.
“You okay?” Ethan asks me when I zone out and totally miss the volleyball he’s tossed my way.
Apologetically, I say, “I’m not where I want to be.”
Ethan laughs and says, “You and me both.”
• • •
My man Leo once said, “Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the company of intelligent women.” Which might be sexist. Or not at all. Or a little. It’s hard to tell sometimes with guys who lived more than one hundred years ago, when sexism was just the Thing to Do. Anyway, I like to modify his words to the following: “Nothing is so necessary for a person as the company of intelligent people .” Because really, if we didn’t occasionally hang out with smart people—especially people smarter than us—we’d probably end up turning back into single-celled organisms floating around in swamps.
Jack is smarter than me. Meaner and weirder, too, maybe, but definitely smarter. It’s been helpful to hang around her the past couple weeks, during this fame explosion of ours, because she knows how to keep it in perspective. Her most recent favorite saying is “Yes, this is nice, but everyone will probably hate us tomorrow.” That’s why I need to be with Jack now, on #KevinThursday—to get some perspective on all the fan feedback.
When I walk up to the Harlows’ house, Mr. Harlow is watering the front garden. For a moment, I consider if it would be unacceptable behavior for me to throw myself into the hedges and army-crawl to the backyard, hidden from view. Don’t get me wrong—most days I like talking to Mr. Harlow. He’s funny in the same twitchy-mouthed, deadpan way as Jack. He’s also much easier to approach than Mrs. Harlow, who is usually in the Northeast on business or, if not, typing away in her home office. But today, the memory of the broken Ping-Pong table is fresh in my mind. Paul must have told him about it by now, and I’m not sure I want Mr. Harlow unleashing his devastating wit on that incident.
“Hey there, Tash.”
I look up, startled, to find Mr. Harlow shading the sun from his eyes with one hand, holding a watering can in the other. I can tell the can is full because of the little sprays of water that shoot out every time he moves. Too late now to duck and crawl, I suppose.
I approach the garden. “Hey, Mr. Harlow. The dahlias look nice.”
I’m saying this purely for the sake of conversation. I don’t know what the hell constitutes a nice dahlia; I’m just proud of myself for knowing what a dahlia is . Mr. Harlow began to garden after he went into remission. His oncologist recommended it as a stress-relieving activity.
Mr. Harlow snorts. “You didn’t come here to talk flowers.” He nods toward the house, causing more water to splash out of the can. “Jack’s inside.”
“Um, thanks.”
Is that it? Not even a hint at the Ping-Pong table incident? Maybe Paul hasn’t mentioned it yet, which makes me even more uncomfortable, because it means I have to anticipate a joke about it the next time I see Mr. Harlow.
“I really wasn’t kidding about the flowers,” I call, throwing open the storm door. “You’ve got the nicest yard on Edgehill.”
Mr. Harlow keeps a straight face and waves me off. I head inside, toward Jack’s bedroom. She doesn’t look up when I come into the room, just pats the space of bed beside her. She’s frowning in concentration at her laptop screen.
“Seen anything yet?” She clicks something on-screen, then unleashes a furious burst of typing.
“No,” I say, my impatience ringing in the word.
I pull my laptop from my backpack, not bothering to hook up the power cord. Nothing is working as fast as it should. My username and password are taking too long to process, the Harlows’ Wi-Fi is taking too long to kick in, my Internet browser isn’t popping up new tabs quickly enough.
But finally, finally , all of #KevinThursday is at my fingertips.
“I’m working through Twitter,” Jack says. “People retweeted the shit out of this thing. We’ve got a couple hundred more followers.”
“So, what’s the reaction?” I ask. “Good or bad?”
“Overwhelmingly positive. The video comments are mainly fangirling. In terms of Rotten Tomatoes, I’d say this episode’s certified fresh. Stop doing that to your face or you won’t be able to fit the Jell-O spoon in your mouth when you’re eighty.”
But I can’t stop grinning, even after minutes of scrolling through a deluge of screenshots and GIF s and exclamatory reblogs. Nearly an hour passes before I tear my eyes from the screen, look around the room, and ask, “Where’s Paul?”
“Playing basketball with some guys,” Jack says, before launching into another burst of typing. “He’ll be back in a couple hours.” She slows her typing to a dramatic punch . . . punch . . . punch as she cocks her head toward me. “I heard about Ping-Pong.”
So Paul told someone .
“Ha” is my reply. The welcoming white glow of my computer screen is rapidly sucking me back in.
“If I didn’t know any better, I’d think it was the result of wild monkey sex.”
That’s enough to permanently shock me out of my Internet daze.
“Excuse me?”
“But I do know better, of course,”
“Yeah.” I scowl at Jack. “You do. Gross, Jack. Why would you even say that?”
“Oh my God , it was a joke. It’s funny because it’s totally inconceivable.”
“It’s not . . . It isn’t . . .” I let out something between a growl and groan. “What’s that supposed to mean? Why would you say something like that?”
“Like what?” Only Jack isn’t being flippant anymore. She’s shut the lid of her laptop and is looking at me with an atypically earnest gaze. “What did I say wrong?”
“Paul’s a guy, and . . . and I’m a girl. I still like guys.”
Jack is very quiet. “You like Paul?”
“No. That’s not what I said. I mean you don’t have to talk like I’m some sort of . . . robot.”
“God, Tash. That’s not what I meant at all.”
I press my hands to my face. “Yeah, I know. But that’s what makes it worse. Like—like you automatically look at me like I can’t feel stuff for anyone.”
“I don’t think that,” Jack says, with ten times the feeling she usually allots to her words. “I’m sorry. I don’t think that at all. It’s just . . . you weren’t exactly clear when you told us . . .” She breaks off. In a mumble she says, “I didn’t know you felt that way.”
I lower my hands, if for no other reason than to show Jack I’m not angry. I don’t blame her for being confused. Sometimes I still feel confused when I attempt to describe it, to put it into words that don’t sound crass or sensational. I’m not happy with how I explained it last September, when Jack and Paul and I were sitting around their pool, wrapped in towels, with sodas in hand. I’d just broken up with Justin Rahn, my first boyfriend. Jack was saying how there were plenty of other not-stupid guys out there and how they’d come out of the woodwork now that they knew I was in the dating ring, and I blurted out, “I don’t want to.”
“Don’t want to what?” she asked. “Date?”
I grew quiet. With Jack’s and Paul’s eyes on me, I said, “I guess I’ve never really wanted to do . . . stuff. That dating people. Want to do.”
To their credit, Jack and Paul said nothing.
“Like, I’ve never wanted to,” I rushed on. “At all. And when Justin asked me out, I thought it was a good idea, because maybe I just needed to, you know, do it .”
Jack made a strangled sort of sound, and I hurriedly added, “Not do it. Just be around a guy. Like that.”
I felt hot all over. Hot from the sun and hot from the inside. I concentrated on my pruny toes and said, “This is really awkward, I shouldn’t have brought it up.”
Jack got up from her deck chair and joined me on mine. She swung an arm around my shoulder.
“You know it’s cool, right?” she said. “Whatever you like. Whatever you don’t like. It’s cool.”
I melted into Jack’s shoulder, suddenly tired to the point of sleep. When I opened my eyes, I saw Paul looking at me the way he always did—affectionately.
“Ditto what Jack said,” he said. “It’s cool.”
And we haven’t brought it up since.
I mean, I’m sure Jack and Paul have brought it up when it’s just the two of them (a thought that makes me cringe with embarrassment), but they never bring it up around me . Which doesn’t mean nothing’s changed. I’ve noticed things. Little things. Jack has stopped pointing out guys’ backsides in the cafeteria. Paul has stopped cracking quite so many dirty jokes. I guess they feel as awkward about it as I do, and I guess they’ve been waiting for me to broach the subject again. And I tell myself I will, when the timing is right and I feel more confident about however the hell I see myself these days.
In the spring of my sophomore year, I decided I had to make a choice: Either I liked guys all the way , or I wasn’t allowed to like them, period. So when Justin Rahn invited me to his junior prom, I saw it as a sign. I liked Justin. He was funny, he wasn’t bad to look at, and he always complimented me on every date we went on that summer. I didn’t even mind that much when we kissed. That is, until the kisses began to lean further and further into something else altogether. Something involving loosening limbs and quickening fingers and shallower breaths. And I couldn’t, just couldn’t . I wasn’t afraid, I just didn’t want it.
The week before school started back up, I told Justin I needed to focus on school. Junior year is supposed to be the most stressful, after all. It wasn’t a messy breakup. Justin was hurt, but he said I should do what was best for me—which only made me feel guiltier than ever. I considered for a moment, just a moment, telling Justin the truth. But how was he supposed to understand the truth when I was still figuring it out for myself? I couldn’t help the way my body felt. But I couldn’t help the way my heart felt, either.
That fall, when I wasn’t working with Jack on Seedling Productions planning, I was bundled up in bed, scrolling through forums with purple color schemes, browsing through topics, clicking on every single one that contained the words “heteromantic” and “likes guys.” Still, no matter how many posts and replies I read, no matter how much more knowledgeable I became about terms like “ace” and “graysexual” and “allosexual,” no matter how supportive everyone on those forums seemed, I could never convince myself it was okay . That the way I felt was normal, that it was lasting. That it was really part of who I was. Because how could I like guys—want one to ask me out, to put his arm around me, to tell me he liked me, loved me even—and not want to have sex with them? What if everyone on those forums was just . . . confused, like me?
Over winter vacation, I formed this horrible habit of staying up late every night and laying out all the facts in a Word document on my laptop. How, to me, guys could be as beautiful as works of art. How I wanted one to kiss me on the forehead, but nothing more. How I’d never gotten sex—not when Jack started talking about it in middle school and not when I watched Titanic at my friend Maggie’s thirteenth birthday party and the girls fanned themselves and said how “hot” the car scene was. When it was my least favorite scene. When I sank my face into my knees and waited until it was over before I looked again. I definitely didn’t get sex when, during my sex ed class at Calhoun, Ms. Vance told us, “Sex is a normal part of life. We’re all sexual beings.” And all I could think was, Not me, why not me.
Every night, just before I drifted to sleep, I clicked out of the document without saving changes and without feeling any wiser.
That’s how it was after September. That’s how it was for nearly nine months. Nine months. Like some bizarre gestation period of sexual identity that led to . . . what? It’s a girl! Sort of? Because how could I be a girl , when apparently all other girls were sexual beings ?
Toward the end of spring semester, I started to spend a lot more time on the forums. This time I wasn’t just creeping on other people’s posts. I signed up with the username videofuriosa and began joining in discussions, even starting my own threads. I made friends with several users over personal messaging, exchanged e-mails with a couple of them. Then, in April, I came out. It seemed fitting there, in the place I’d spent so much time sorting myself out, accepting this part of who I was. There, I could call myself heteromantic ace, and everyone would understand and think of me as totally normal.
But as cathartic as that experience was, I can’t shake the guilt that I’ve come out to these people, who I don’t even know in real life, but I haven’t come out to Jack and Paul. Not really, not in a way that isn’t botched like it was back in September. It doesn’t bother me that my family doesn’t know. Why do they need to? If I ever date again, I’ll date guys, like they’re expecting. Anyway, what kind of family dinner conversation would that be? Hey, Mom and Dad, that thing you did to produce me? Not a fan of it myself. In fact, I find it mildly unsettling.
But with Jack and Paul, it’s different. We’ve talked to each other about crushes and dates ever since they were actual things in our lives. More than that, Jack and Paul know me . In ways my parents and Klaudie never will. It’s wrong to hold out on them. It’s bad for them and bad for me. I’ve wanted to bring it up for weeks now, wanted to tell them both at the same time, in the right way. Instead, over the course of two days, it has spilled out of me all messy and haphazard. On a Ping-Pong table. On Jack’s bed.
So now, while Jack is apologizing and looking genuinely mortified—both big rarities—I can do nothing but say, “It’s okay. I haven’t been exactly clear about everything.”
She still looks fidgety. “Do you . . . uh, do you want to talk about it?”
“Um. Did Paul say anything else about last night? Other than us breaking the Ping-Pong table?”
Jack looks like she’s about to answer one way. Then she seems to change her mind and says, “He said that you like a guy.”
A blush is sheeting my face. “Right. Okay, so. Crap. I really wanted to tell you and Paul the right way. Like, together. In a . . . non-awkward way?”
“Probably not possible. Just say it, Tash. I told you before, I’m cool with whatever.”
I nod. I haul in a long breath and then say, “I like guys, but I don’t like sex. So that makes me, um . . . It’s called romantic asexual? Not that I really like labels. And I know it sounds like an oxymoron, but . . .”
“No. It doesn’t. I know what it is.”
I blink. “Um. Yeah.”
Jack nods.
“How . . . You do?”
Jack gives me an incredulous look. “Please. Don’t you think I did a shitload of research after you told us that stuff in the fall?”
I suddenly feel magnificently stupid. Of course Jack has looked into it. Of course , but I haven’t once considered that possibility before now. I have talked through dozens of possible explanations for Paul and Jack, all ways of defending myself. Like I need a defense. Like Jack isn’t already on my side.
Jack is on my side.
The relief is sudden and all-consuming. I begin to cry.
“Oh God,” says Jack. “Do you need a hug, or do you want me to pretend you’re not leaking?”
I blubber out a laugh. “I’ll be fine, just give me a sec.”
Jack nods and flips her laptop back open. She pretends to be tending to her social media duties, but I see her sneaking an occasional glance as I sop up my tears and return to stasis.
“Do you want a tissue?” she offers.
“No, I’m good. I’m fine now. Sorry.”
“Hey, don’t apologize.” Jack continues to click around, frowning at her screen before edging her gaze back to me. “So. So, Thom? With an ‘h’?”
“I know I told you about him.”
“Yeah, Thom Causer. The dude with the sci-fi blog.”
“Sci-fi and actual science.”
Jack gives me a look. “Okaaay. So, what? You like him? Like, you like him?”
I scratch my forehead, just to give my hand something to do. “I mean, we’ve been talking a lot, over e-mail and text.”
“But is it, like, something more?”
I’m blushing again. “I don’t know.”
“Okay. And does he know about . . . ?”
“No. Only you and Paul know about that.”
Jack is quiet for a long moment. “Really? You haven’t said anything to Klaudie?”
“Why would I say something to Klaudie?”
“I just . . . didn’t know we were the only ones.”
“Well, you are,” I say. “And I don’t feel like I have to make that big a deal of it, or—or ‘come out’ in some big way or anything. I don’t want to.”
“No, I get that. I’ve never had the urge to stand in a public square and say, ‘I wanna do the dirty with menfolk.’ ”
“Exactly.”
“Hmm.”
And that’s that. We’ve said what we need to say. There’s no pressure to prettily tie it up. I return to my laptop screen, and Jack to hers, and we descend into a comfortable clicking silence. That is, until Jack makes a squeaking sound and says, “Tash. Tash, I need your help.”
She turns her laptop toward me, her expression unreadable.
“What?” I say, frowning at an e-mail Jack has pulled up.
“Am I hallucinating,” she says, “or did we just get nominated for a Golden Tuba?”