David Drucker is officially everywhere. In the parking lot before and after school. In almost all my classes. And, of course, at lunch, since I continue to choose his table as a refuge. Presumably he has always been in all these places, but until now I’ve never noticed him. You would think someone who is that bizarre wouldn’t be able to camouflage, but he is so entirely self-contained on his strange headphone island that he moves silently through school. He causes almost no ripple.
Still, after what is shaping up to be the Week of David, it’s just plain weird when I run into him at the drugstore. And I mean that literally. We are both looking down when our shoulders crash. Ouch.
“Are you following me?” I ask in a jokey tone. I’m borderline flirting with him in front of the maxi pads with wings. I drop my jumbo pack of super-absorbent Tampax and kick it behind me so he doesn’t see.
“No, of course not,” David says, and he sounds offended, like I’ve accused him of something.
“I didn’t mean…Never mind. It’s just funny to see you here.”
“Just picking up some stuff for Miney,” he says, and it occurs to me that actually I’ve been the one seeking him out lately, with the notable exception of the football snack shack. I chose his lunch table after all. I offered him a ride home yesterday. Maybe I’m annoying him?
“Miney?”
“My sister.”
“You have two sisters?” I wonder if Miney is as effortlessly cool as Lauren. I decide not. Not only does she have a weird name—who would name their kid Miney?—but no one is as effortlessly cool as Lauren Drucker. I glance at his basket: a bunch of different cold medicines.
“Just the one. Miney’s a nickname. Lauren graduated last year.”
“I know.”
“You know Miney?” he asks.
“I mean, I know who she is. Everyone at school does.” I wish I could somehow move us out of the feminine hygiene aisle, but condoms and lubricants are next.
“Really?”
“Of course. President of her class. Homecoming queen. She’s, like, Mapleview royalty.” If I were talking to Justin, I probably wouldn’t have admitted knowing all this info about his family. I don’t bother playing it cool with David. Not sure he’d notice.
“You don’t have any siblings, right?” he asks, and for the first time I see that he looks a lot like his sister. Different demeanor and mannerisms and voice, but the same face. Dark eyes and long eyelashes and full lips. If it weren’t for his jaw, which is square and strong and always has a dusting of five-o’clock shadow, he’d be almost pretty.
“Just me. All by my lonesome.” He nods, as if confirming that which he already knew.
“You seem like an only child.”
“I can’t decide if that’s an insult or a compliment.”
“Neither. It’s an observation. I’ve always thought it would be even lonelier not having a sister.”
“Are you saying I seem lonely?” This is what it is like to talk to David Drucker. Dive straight into the center. No matter that we are in a drugstore, surrounded by tampons and Monistat. We make good conversational partners, I think: I’ve forgotten the art of small, inconsequential talk, and he’s never learned it.
“No, not really. But there’s a stillness to you. Like if you were a radio wave, you’d have your very own frequency. Which is isolating because I don’t think everyone can hear you.” He delivers his speech to my feet but then suddenly looks up and stares into my eyes. The eye contact feels raw and intimate, and I shiver. I blink first. “I mean, you have lots of other waves too, all those commonly shared frequencies, the ones I most certainly lack, but the most important waves, the core you ones, those are harder for other people to decipher. That’s my theory, anyway.”
I don’t know what to say to this. David Drucker has a theory about my metaphorical radio waves.
Once we are outside in the bitter cold, standing with our hands stuffed into our winter jacket pockets, I suggest we get something to eat. I don’t want to get back into the car. I don’t want to go home. Both of these involve feeling feelings, which I prefer to avoid. Distraction is what I need. Distraction keeps time from being in slo-mo.
“Pizza Palace?” David asks. It’s just a few doors down. I picture my friends all huddled in a booth in the back. No need to combine David with my real life.
“Nah.”
“I figured you wouldn’t want to go there. Pizza Pizza Pizza is so much better and has that great two-for-one deal. I just didn’t want to suggest it,” David says.
“Why?”
“The name. It’s not like they have three times more pizza than other places. Ridiculous.”
“How about we not get pizza at all?”
“I thought you might say that too, since you had such a hearty, well-balanced lunch.” He pauses. Clears his throat. Stares at the single car making its way down Main Street. “That’s going to be one of those things I said out loud and then will regret later, isn’t it?”
I laugh and it feels good. He looks sweet when he realizes he’s said the wrong thing. His eyes go big and wide. To rescue him, I link my arm with his and start us walking down the street.
“Just so you know, if asked, I would have no idea how to describe your frequency,” I say.
“Honestly, sometimes I think only dogs can hear me,” he says.
“For what it’s worth, I can hear you just fine.”
“It’s worth a lot,” David says, and I blush, and I’m pretty sure he does too.
We end up at the counter at Straw and we order double cones of vanilla and chocolate brownie ice cream, despite the fact that it’s cold out. It’s easier this way, sitting at the counter facing forward, so we don’t have to look at each other while we talk. It’s crazy but I don’t feel self-conscious around David like I do with pretty much everyone else, but still, staring at the old-fashioned mini jukebox instead of his face helps me to forget myself.
“Do you believe in the butterfly effect?” David asks out of nowhere.
“English, please.”
“In chaos theory there’s this concept that one small change can have increasingly bigger effects. So, like, a butterfly flaps its wings here in New Jersey and it disturbs the atmosphere, and somehow that eventually leads to, like, a hurricane in the Galápagos Islands.” I nod and think about how exactly thirty-four days ago, a man called George Wilson, a name for a portly next-door neighbor in a sitcom, not a real person, decided to meet a friend for a drink. I think about how exactly thirty-five days ago, a work order to fix a traffic light was sent up the chain for approval, and how it got stuck in bureaucratic traffic along the way. I think about a foot not fast enough on the brake.
Seemingly small, inconsequential things.
I think about a butterfly flapping its wings and now my father is dead.
“I do. But I wish I didn’t, because it makes me realize just how much of our lives are out of our control,” I say.
“Like your dad dying.” He says it like the words have no power at all. I feel winded, like David punched me right in the gut. And also a little high because he read my mind and said it out loud. Straight out. With the exception of last night, my mom barely even says my father’s name, not to mention the whole him-being-dead part.
So many available words: Expired. Killed. Departed. Liquidated. Gone.
All have been banned from my house.
“Sort of,” I say. “That was a car accident, though. A bunch of things added up, but there were two drivers. Human mistakes were made. That’s different from an atmospheric disturbance, right?”
“Maybe. But take each one of those human mistakes in isolation and you’d have a totally different outcome. Your dad could have walked away without a scratch.”
I lick my ice cream, which is suddenly sickly sweet. I should have gotten it like David did: asked for the chocolate brownie on the bottom. Worked down to the decadence.
“I was thinking about the butterfly effect and about how a series of events brought you to sit at my lunch table, and you sitting there has led us to sit here. A week ago we wouldn’t have had ice cream together.”
“Probably not.”
“And then I may say the wrong thing, and that will lead us to never eating ice cream together again.” I look at the side of David’s face. He’s not as impervious to the world around him as he seems.
“You can’t get rid of me that easily,” I say. “I’m like a rash.”
“What?”
“Nothing,” I say, embarrassed. Did I just compare myself to a skin condition? Yes, yes I did. “Nothing at all.”
A little while later, we’re still sitting here in the empty ice cream store, legs dangling from stools. David has a bit of chocolate on his chin, but I don’t tell him. It’s kind of adorable.
“If you could be anyone else, who would you want to be?” I ask, because I’ve decided that I admire how David doesn’t self-censor. I should try it too.
I think about this all the time. Waking up in the morning, looking in the mirror, and seeing someone wholly different staring back. These days I’d give anything to be the old me, the pre-accident me, who could sit at my old lunch table and chat about nothing. The pre-accident me who aspired to be more like Lauren Drucker, former benevolent ruler and social chair of Mapleview. I really wouldn’t mind being entirely full of shit, so long as I didn’t notice.
“There’s this guy Trey who teaches me guitar,” David says. “He kind of pisses me off, actually, but he’s just the type of guy everyone likes. He always knows exactly what to say. Like has annoyingly pitch-perfect radio waves. So I guess him?”
“I used to want my metaphorical radio waves to play music that was, like, quirky but also perfectly curated, you know? Something cool. But now I feel like I’ve become traffic on the hour.”
“You are so not traffic on the hour,” he says, and to my dismay dabs at his chin with a napkin. “Though I wouldn’t mind even being that. Reliable, informative, albeit repetitive. At least people actually listen to it.”
“I think your signal is in Morse code,” I say with a smile.
“When I was eight, I taught myself Morse code. The clicks are highly irritating.”
I lean over and for no reason I can think of—maybe because I have nothing smart to say, maybe because with David I feel like someone else entirely, I want to be someone else entirely—I take a lick of his ice cream. The vanilla part. He stares at my lips, as shocked as I am.
“Sorry,” I say. “I liked your order better.”
“The cold medicine is not for me. Just to be clear,” he says.
“Wasn’t worried.”
I wonder what would happen if I looked into a mirror right now. Who would be staring back at me? Did time just leap forward with that single lick?
Later, when I’m home in my room working on a problem set, though it’s long past time to go to sleep, I receive my very first text from David.
David: I am usually anti-text, but I thought I’d make an exception.
Me: I’m honored. Why the staunch anti-text stance?
David: I have trouble conceptualizing the idea of words traveling like this. And I worry that how they sound to me might sound different to you. I’m not good with tone.
Me: I should know to expect a real answer from you. But still. It’s surprising.
David: When you ask a question, you get an answer.
I take my phone and snap a quick selfie. Me in my pajamas, hair in a bun on top of my head, giving him a thumbs-up. Far from a pretty picture, but I think it would offend David if I put a filter on it. I press send.
Me: Is it easier for you if we communicate in pictures?
There’s a long pause, and I wonder what’s happening on the other end of the phone. Did his mom just come into his room asking why he hasn’t yet gone to bed? Is he looking at my picture, disgusted by the messy, pudgy girl who keeps overstepping his boundaries? I keep thinking about how I leaned over and licked his ice cream cone, and hate that person, the me of just a couple of hours ago. Presumptuous and flirtatious, when I had no intention to be either with David. I didn’t realize I could like myself even less than I did this morning.
I wait another interminable minute.
David: :)
David: That was my very first emoticon. Or emoji. Must Google to learn the difference.
Me: Finally something I know and you don’t!
David: There are lots of things you know and I don’t. You obviously have a very high social IQ, for example.
Me: Thanks, I guess. You obviously have a very high IQ IQ.
David: 168 at last check.
Me: Sometimes I can’t tell if you are joking or being serious. Why aren’t you sleeping? It’s late.
David: Something else I’m not so good at.
Me: Me neither. Especially lately.
David: What do you do when you can’t sleep?
I pause. Realize if I were texting with, say, Gabriel during those two weeks we went out last year, I’d respond with something casual. A nonanswer. Maybe an emoji of a lamb to show counting sheep. Or a funny GIF. There would be no reason at all to stop and think about the truth.
Me: Right now, homework. But usually I think about the accident and what happened to my dad.
David: Why would you do that?
I stop writing again. Look at my fingertips. Wonder what they have to say. I seem to act on impulse around David. Nothing premeditated. Who licks someone else’s ice cream cone? Honesty is not the best policy.
Me: Ever press a bruise?
David: Of course.
Me: Well, it’s partially that.
I put down my phone and then pick it up again.
Me: But it’s also like a puzzle. I want to understand when it could have been stopped…if it could have been stopped. What was the very last second someone should have put their foot on the brake? It doesn’t matter, really.
David: Of course it matters. It’s an open loop. I hate open loops.
Me: Me too.
David: I could help you figure it out. If you really want to know.
Me: You could?
David: Of course I could. It’s not rocket science. It’s just physics.
I pull up the picture of the crushed Volvo on my phone. I force myself to look at it, and my whole body shudders. And then I close my eyes and hit send.