Beheld

by Alex Flinn

  I wondered, if everyone thought I was so funny and nice, why I’d never gotten invited to parties like this before, why she’d never even spoken to me. I mean, it’s not like I wasn’t friends with all these people. But I knew the answer, of course. I’d been a duckling. I hadn’t been fit to party with the swans. I wasn’t really sure how I felt about that. I mean, weren’t people at least supposed to pretend they liked you for you, not just because you looked a certain way?

  But I pushed the thought back when Sydnie stroked my arm and said, “Let’s go into the water.”

  “You want to . . . swim?”

  “Yeah, silly. I want to swim. I’m thinking about trying out for the swim team.”

  “You have time . . .” I started to ask if she had time for swimming with cheerleading. Then I realized she was being sarcastic. Short, fat Chris used to get sarcasm. Tall, thin Chris apparently had no sense of humor, not even enough to keep up with a girl who had photos of Victoria’s Secret models on her phone.

  She stood on her toes and whispered loudly in my ear, “I want to make out with you in the water.”

  So I followed her into the water. She wasn’t really who I wanted to make out with, but she was pretty and she was there, and she wasn’t my best friend, and I’d never kissed anyone before, so I followed her, and we made out in the water. And I may have had a couple of drinks after all, but I was big enough and we stayed late enough that I didn’t get drunk. At least, I didn’t hit any public art. But I did forget to charge my cell phone, so when I woke up the next morning at eleven, it was totally dead.

  And it was almost noon before I charged it enough to get Amanda’s text that said:

  Hope you had fun with your uncle

  And then I saw about twenty photos online of Sydnie and me at that party. Including one of me with my tongue fairly obviously in Sydnie’s mouth. I guessed Amanda knew about those parties even if I hadn’t. Amanda knew everything.

  And, by then, it was too late for me to make it to Amanda’s noon game.

  And since they lost, it was the last one.

  And she didn’t answer any of my texts saying I was sorry.

  Or any of the others.

  And I was too ashamed to go knock on her door, even though I should have.

  On the Monday-morning announcements, they said the Lady Lions had come in third in the regionals. Amanda was MVP.

  I was probably the only person in my class who even heard the announcement. Sydnie held up her phone, then pulled me toward her for a selfie. I tried to smile.

  I saw Amanda in the hall on the way to lunch. Okay, I took a different route to lunch in an attempt to run into her, and it worked.

  “Hey, congratulations.” I tried to pretend everything was okay, that she hadn’t ignored eight texts in the past twenty-four hours, which was the maximum number I felt I could send without a reply.

  “On what? Coming in third? Yeah, that’s impressive.” She started to walk away.

  “Third at regionals is good. And you were MVP.”

  “We almost won. If I’d gotten one more hit, we’d have won. Of course, you wouldn’t know that since you weren’t there. But forgive me if I’m not all that excited about this tiny victory.” She walked faster.

  “You always congratulated me on my tiny victories.” I tried to keep up with her.

  “Yeah, cause that was all you had.”

  I stopped, stunned. It had always been unspoken between us that she was more athletically gifted than I was. She was the star. I wasn’t. She was the winner. I was just a player, and a mediocre one at that. I thought of all the times she’d made a big deal when I got a most-improved trophy or made second string. Had she been lying all those times?

  “I don’t get why you’re so mad.” I ran to catch up with her. “I went to a party for, like, the first time in high school. I made the plans before I knew about your game.”

  “So why lie about it? Why tell me you had a visiting uncle?”

  “I guess the same reason you lied when you made a big deal about me making JV and stuff. I didn’t want to hurt your feelings.”

  “Well, that worked.”

  And she turned and walked away.

  I didn’t follow her that time.

  15

  So that was how we stopped being friends.

  I didn’t see Amanda for a week or two. Our schedules were different, and she had a different lunch. And she was avoiding me.

  And maybe I was avoiding her too, but only because it felt too bad to see her, like getting my arm cut off with a chainsaw.

  Some people, like my mother, want to wallow in bed when they’re upset about something. My mother spent two weeks in pajamas when my dad left. I’m not like that. I like to fill my schedule with so many activities that I don’t have time to think about whatever’s upsetting me. When my dad left, I started playing volleyball at the Y in addition to football at school, and I ran for sophomore class president (which, fortunately, I lost), took a class in stand-up comedy, and briefly considered joining a barbershop harmony group before I remembered, oh yeah, I wasn’t seventy-five years old. I did join Matt’s garage band. Sometimes, I still sang with them. And I spent almost every day at Amanda’s house.

  And then I got over it. At least enough to function.

  When I lost my best friend, I decided to get over it by making twenty others. I started dating Sydnie, going to all her cheer competitions and driving her to dance classes, and partying with her—now my—friends, who roped me into entering the Mr. Lion King homecoming contest.

  A month later, I still wasn’t over it.

  Most of Amanda’s friends who had, I thought, been my friends too, sort of looked through me these days. It was like I was their friend’s cousin who they might have met at a birthday party once, but they weren’t sure. That was when Amanda wasn’t around. When Amanda was around, they formed a sort of girl wall around her like they might just lift her up on their shoulders at any second. And once, I heard her friend Callie whisper something like, “Ignore him.”

  I felt like I’d become my dad. Amanda and I were divorced, and I got the hot new girlfriend and all of the blame while she got all our friends and righteousness on her side.

  Except we weren’t married. I hadn’t cheated on her. We were just friends, and I’d gone to a party. Why was she being like this?

  The only one who’d still talk to me was Kendra.

  “Hey, I saw that interception,” she said in the parking lot the day after a particularly stellar game. I was throwing myself into football, and it showed in the amount of play I was getting—and the results.

  I nodded.

  “It was great,” she added. “You’re a star.”

  “Yeah. A star.” I saw two girls from my bio class. One of them, the one whose name I didn’t know, leaned over to the other and whispered something ending in “hot.” The other one—her name was Emily—yelled, “Great game, Chris!”

  “Thanks,” I yelled back.

  “You don’t seem too happy about it,” Kendra said.

  “I’m not. I’m a star, and I can’t share it with my best friend. This wasn’t what I wanted.”

  “Sometimes, things don’t work out like you think they will. A wise man once said you can’t always get what you want.”

  It took me a second to place the line. Then I recognized the lyric from an old song. I said, “Yeah, but he also said if you try sometimes, you get what you need.”

  “So what do you need, Chris?” She put her hand on my wrist. It felt weird, like when the blood pressure cuff tightens at the doctor’s office, even though she was only touching me with her fingertips.

  “I need Amanda.” I had to catch my breath to choke the words out. “She’s my best . . . person. I’d give up”—I gestured to my body, my swan body—“all of this for her. Can I do that? Can you do that?”

  “Do what?” Kendra removed her hand from my wrist, and the weird, throbbing, intriguing feeling stopped. “Give up what?”
she asked.

  “This. Being tall. Being a starter. I don’t care about any of it. It doesn’t matter.”

  “How could you give it up?” Kendra looked confused. “Your height is your height. You can’t change it.”

  A wind swept by, whipping up dirt and leaves and pebbles. I remembered once Mom took me to this play, a musical called Damn Yankees. She thought I’d like it because it was about sports. I sort of did. It was about this old guy who sold his soul to the devil so he could be young and athletic and lead his favorite team to victory.

  Was that what I’d done? Was Kendra the devil? Had I sold my soul to be a few inches taller, to make a team, to be a hero?

  I said, “Can’t you put me back the way I was before?”

  She said, “I don’t understand what you mean. How could I do that?”

  No, she wasn’t the devil, but she was a witch. And no one ever said witches were nice or that they did anyone favors.

  She put her hand on my wrist again, and again, I felt weird. I wanted to flinch away, but I didn’t, couldn’t. Instead, I said, “What do I do?”

  She said, “Figure out what you really want from Amanda. Then figure out how to get it.”

  “Oh, okay. That’s easy.”

  “After all these years, it should be.” She took her hand off my arm.

  I had no idea what she meant.

  So I went to school and went home and did homework and hung out with Sydnie and her friends and played football (well, amazingly well), and I never saw Amanda. She didn’t come to my games.

  Until she did. With Darien. She was going out with Darien.

  And then I knew the answer to the first question Kendra had put to me: Figure out what you really want from Amanda.

  What I wanted was not just to be friends with Amanda. I wouldn’t want to ball Darien up in my hand like a used McDonald’s napkin over a girl I just wanted to be friends with. I loved her. Like, love loved her.

  But I didn’t know the answer to the other part: how to get what I wanted. What I needed.

  I broke up with Sydnie. It wasn’t fair for me to date her. I tried to be nice about it, but when she screamed that I was just doing it to get out of taking her to homecoming when homecoming was a month away, I was over it. Done. She only liked me because I was a tall, good-looking football player. But I didn’t even know who that was. The guy she liked wasn’t me. In my heart, I was still a short, fat, funny guy who sometimes played football but mostly liked math and sending goofy texts.

  Other girls flirted with me, but I didn’t flirt back. I didn’t want anyone else. I knew who I wanted.

  I wondered if swans ever looked into the water and wondered who that was, looking back.

  Probably not. They were birds. You could only carry a metaphor so far when it involved birds. Birds weren’t really that smart.

  I tried to text Amanda, but now she’d blocked my number.

  I left a note on her car, begging her to meet me. She ignored it.

  I wanted to do more, but when you’re a guy, there’s only so much you can do before you get arrested for stalking.

  Then, one day, I came home and my mother was cooking ziti.

  Mom never cooked ziti, not anymore. Since my dad left, she’d been on a health kick, lost forty pounds, and pretty much only ate dirt. Or quinoa, as some people called it.

  Now she only made ziti when someone died, to take it over to the family. One time, it was a woman from her book club. Another time, my uncle Dave.

  So, weirdly, I associated the usually pleasant smell of sausage and onions with death.

  I walked up behind her. “Everything okay?”

  When she turned, I knew from her face it wasn’t. “Oh, Chris. It’s Tim Lasky. He’s had a heart attack.”

  “Tim . . . what . . . is he . . . ?” I looked at the ziti, boiling in the stockpot.

  “He’s okay. I mean, he’s going to be okay. I heard from Stacey Rankin, and then I called Amanda. She said he was doing better. He’s in the hospital, though.”

  A landline. She’d gotten hold of Amanda on a landline. I’d forgotten such a thing existed. We’d stopped answering our own because it was only robo-calls.

  Mom was still talking. “I tried to get her and Casey to come stay with us, but she said they were okay. So I thought maybe you could bring this over there?”

  Mr. Lasky. Tim Lasky could have died, and I woudn’t have talked to him in the past four months. Shit.

  “Tim’s really okay?” I noticed I was shaking.

  Mom nodded. “Yeah, that’s what Amanda said. Can you bring this over there? I know you’re busy.”

  “She’s home?”

  “I can call and make sure.”

  I half expected to see Amanda’s car roaring away down the street when I showed up, but she was there. She opened the door.

  “Hey,” she said. Then, maybe realizing there was no way simultaneously to take the proffered ziti and slam the door in my face, she stood there a moment, doing neither, saying nothing. Her hair was messy, and she had on a T-shirt that said, You wish you could throw like a girl! She looked the way she looked when we were kids.

  And, stupidly, I said, “It’s ziti. My mom made it.”

  She said, “I know. She called and told me.”

  “Can I maybe put it in the refrigerator?”

  She moved aside, and I walked in. I hadn’t been there for months, and the smell, a kind of air freshener I’d never really noticed but that had always been there, a smell like lemons, brought back every memory of being there, every Halloween, every day after school, every weekend swimming there. I could barely hold up the casserole dish. My arms felt too weak.

  “How is he? He’s going to be okay?” I needed reassurance on this point.

  “Yeah, he’s fine. Or he will be. I think. They say he’ll be home in a few days.”

  It had never been awkward to talk to her before. Before, I’d barely had to speak at all. It was like she was inside my head, hearing my every thought through headphones.

  I wanted to tell her everything, everything from the car with all the bumper stickers to how much I missed her every single day, but I said, “I’d like to go see him.” I put the dish into the refrigerator. That, too, was so familiar. Takeout rotisserie chicken, stacks of Oscar Meyer cold cuts, and a six-pack of Sam Adams.

  “They’re only allowing family.”

  I turned on her. “He is my family. He’s the only one who ever played ball with me, the only one who cared about . . . anything.”

  “Yeah, he asks about you, why you don’t come around anymore.”

  “Yeah? What do you tell him?”

  “I tell him the ugly duckling grew up to be a huge asshole.”

  “Why? Why are you so angry at me? Because I missed a softball game, because I messed up once? You’re throwing away an eleven-year friendship over that?” I’d been over and over it in my head, and I still couldn’t believe she wouldn’t give me a second chance.

  “It wasn’t the baseball game. It’s that you lied about it. And . . .” She shook her head. “Forget it.”

  “No, what?”

  “You’d rather hang with those people, people like Sydnie, people who make fun of people like me, now that you’re good enough for them.”

  I couldn’t even answer her. Was that what I’d done? I’d just been freaked out that things were happening for me, making varsity, having girls actually come on to me when I was used to being the fat, funny kid everyone mostly ignored. Maybe I was star struck. Was that the same as what she’d said? Probably was.

  “We don’t all get to be swans, Chris,” she said.

  “I don’t want to be a swan. God, I’m sorry. How can I tell you I’m sorry so you’ll believe me? I just want it to be like it was with us.”

  We were standing in front of the open refrigerator. Maybe that was why I shivered when she said, “I’m just stupid. I thought maybe we’d be more than friends, and now I feel so stupid and embarrassed for thinkin
g that.”

  Was she saying what I thought she was saying, that she had felt the same way? Was that why she’d gotten so mad at me? I looked in her eyes. “There was never anything more than our friendship. Our friendship was the biggest thing in my life.”

  And then I leaned over and kissed her.

  It felt like the right thing to do. I loved her. She was the single most important person in my life, always had been since that first day with Spidey. She’d said she wanted to be more than friends, and I did too. I knew, just knew I had to kiss her. I thought she’d kiss me back.

  Instead, she pushed me away. “Really?” She backed up until she was on the other side of the open refrigerator door, then held it in front of her. “You really thought it would be okay to kiss me? When my dad’s in the hospital, and we haven’t talked in a month?”

  “I don’t know. You said—”

  “I know what I said. You thought it would be a good idea to take advantage of that, of my feelings?”

  “They’re my feelings too. I have the exact same feelings, Amanda. I need—”

  “You need to leave. You need to . . . I can’t look at you anymore.” She slammed the refrigerator and started toward the front door.

  I followed her. “Amanda.”

  “Please leave.”

  “I’m sorry.” I knew now it was a stupid thing to do. God, I’d just gotten her to talk to me again. What an idiot I was. “I’m sorry.”

  “I wasn’t just waiting around for you to decide you like me, you know.”

  “I didn’t think that.”

  “Go away!” she said.

  She was gesturing toward the door, then out the door, and I knew I should shut my mouth, but I had to say, “I’m sorry.”

  I was on the doorstep now, and she started to close the door behind me. I looked at her face. It was pink and beautiful, and I could tell she was trying not to cry.

  “Tell your mom thanks for the ziti,” she said.

  “Yeah, tell your dad—” But she’d closed the door and couldn’t hear me. Someone down the block was mowing the lawn, and it drowned out my voice, but it didn’t drown out Amanda’s voice, what she’d said, her voice in my head. I was a huge asshole. But that didn’t mean I had to keep being an asshole. I admitted to myself that I’d wanted to go to the beach party and not her game. It wasn’t because I’d committed to it first. It was because I was flattered by the attention, that people wanted me there, the varsity players, a hot senior girl. Amanda was right: I was flattered to be good enough for them.