by Don Zolidis
“Can you tell him that—”
“I am telling him nothing,” said my dad, hanging up. Later I was threatened with a week’s grounding if the phone rang after nine, and he made a point of explaining to Kaitlyn that if any boys called after nine he owned many, many guns.
We had one phone line because my parents were cheap. We didn’t even have call waiting. Kaitlyn would monopolize the phone line until well after nine. (Side note: Not only did Kaitlyn have boyfriends, she also had actual friends, so she had a lot to talk about apparently. My friends, who I will describe in just a bit, had learned their lesson about calling after nine, and didn’t believe in phone communication anyway. They mostly just showed up at my house in the middle of the night and ate my food.)
Anyway, this is all a roundabout way of saying that I was always the one who called Amy. And my point is that this is part of what made our relationship awesome.
I’d wait until ten or so, when I was sure Kaitlyn was off the phone. Then I’d stare at the phone on my bedside table like it was a portal to another world. It didn’t matter how many times I called her, I was always nervous. My stomach lurched. Little bears clawed their way up my esophagus. My throat went dry and I temporarily lost the ability to speak intelligently. Luckily, I had written out topics of conversation in advance. Tonight’s discussion: November 16, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” (For reference: this is twelve days after we got together the first time and five days after we read “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in AP English.) And then, before I could think better of it, I was dialing her number.
“Hi,” she said.
I froze up. How does one respond to this? I had forgotten.
“Craig?”
“I mean, is Amy there?” Why was I asking? What was wrong with me? One second into our conversation and I was already stupid.
“Do you think I sound like my brother?”
“No, I just, um…How are you?”
“Good.” And for some amazing reason, I could hear her smile through the phone.
I tried to imagine what she was doing. She had a butterfly chair in her room—made out of white canvas, it was one of those fragile things that looked like it had floated in from Scandinavia and yet was somehow both sturdy and environmentally conscious. I imagined her sitting in it, the phone against her skin.
I was lying on my stomach with my face against my pillow and my eyes closed. I held the receiver as close as I could to my cheek, as if I could somehow feel Amy through the phone line. I tried to sense the warmth of her skin; the way the light from her reading lamp made her glow like the surface of the moon.
“Don’t you think so?” she said.
“Hmm?” I said, snapping back to reality.
“That we’re in a perpetual cycle of becoming someone else?”
“Oh, definitely.”
“But I think it’s important that you embrace the fact that you’re becoming a new person. That’s life, you know? I’m not who I was last year.”
“Who were you last year?”
“I was scared. I was shy. I was more concerned about what people thought of me. But now, you know, it’s like, I’m feeling like I’m shedding that.”
“Like a dog?” I was so deep.
“I have a theory about that. It’s like a snake. You have to shed your skin to grow. You never see a snake regretting its old skin.”
“Snakes don’t really talk, so maybe they’re just consumed with regret all the time and we just don’t know. Maybe that’s why they don’t even walk. They’re just like, Oh, man, that skin was great and now it’s gone and I’m just gonna lay here and slither.”
She laughed. “You know what I mean.”
“Yeah. I think. Probably.”
“Over the summer I had a huge blowup with some of my so-called friends. And I realized, you know, I don’t need these people. I don’t need to be the person they want me to be. I kept thinking I’ve got one more year until college, and then I can be my true self, and then I was like, why am I waiting? Let me be my true self now.”
“I have no idea what I’m going to do about college. I just wrote my admissions essay.”
The essay question had been What famous figure from history do you think is a good role model?, and I had picked Fyodor Dostoevsky because I was an idiot. I’m sure other people had written about inventors of vaccines or Mother Teresa, and I had picked a crazy-ass Russian dude with a gambling problem who lived in a basement and wrote things like “Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness.” Good job, Craig. I’m sure there was an admissions officer somewhere laughing his ass off at my essay and showing it to his admissions officer friends like, Check out this dumbass.
She laughed again. “You know what I’m saying?”
“Sure,” I said, realizing I had zoned out again and she had probably said something important. “It’s just like…‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.’ By T. S. Eliot.”
“Well, yes, but I think that’s more about alienation than anything else, and what I’m talking about is acceptance. Like, Prufrock can’t accept that he’s changed and the world is becoming different, you know?”
“Yup,” I said, crossing it off in my notebook. Shit.
You’re probably beginning to understand why I wrote down things to talk about.
“I think my favorite line,” I said, looking down at the rest of my notes, “is ‘I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.’”
“Aww,” she said. “Why?
I smiled into my pillow. I hoped she could see it too. “Because that’s how I used to feel before I met you.”
“I’m singing to you,” Amy said into the phone. “Except I really suck at singing.”
“I think the singing is metaphorical.”
“Maybe they’re like the Sirens. Luring lonely poets to their doom. And really they’ve got teeth like knives and will rip you to shreds if you come too close.”
“That pretty accurately describes my love life up to this point.”
“I’m sure it’s not that bad.”
“It’s pretty bad.”
“Oh come on.”
Amy was my first girlfriend. Well, okay, there was Jessica Southern, my junior year, who I went out with for nine days. We kissed once, and then she decided that the whole thing was a misunderstanding. Which it probably was. So, twelve days into my first relationship with Amy, we had already lasted exactly 33 percent more than my previous record (yes, I had done the math).
“Tell me about your first kiss,” she said.
“No,” I said.
“Come on. I’ll tell you about mine first.”
“All right.”
She paused for a bit. “I was in sixth grade. It was after school with a guy named Brent Preston.”
“He sounds dreamy.”
“He was! Shut up. I was really tall, and he was the only boy in class who was almost as tall as me, and his friend gave me one of those notes with a check box on it? Like, do you like Brent, check yes or no. So I knew that was a trap, so I had one of my friends send a note back saying, ‘Which box do you want Amy to check?’”
“That’s like James Bond–level thinking.”
“I know! Strategy. And he checked that yes, he wanted me to check yes. So we met up after school by the monkey bars…for some monkey business.”
I laughed. “That’s amazing.”
“I know. We did not fall in love, though. All right, your turn!”
“No, I want to hear more about Brent! Did he have gorgeous eyes? What were his abs like? I want the whole romance-novel version.”
“There is no romance-novel version! It was awkward and weird, and that’s about it. Brent is unimportant. You’re telling me about yours now.”
“Fine. It was eighth grade,” I said.
“Wow.”
“I was a late bloomer.”
“Go on.”
“Okay, so we were on a field trip som
ewhere, and I didn’t have a lot of friends, so there was no one next to me on the bus. And this girl Megan D’Angelo comes over and sits right next to me and she’s like, ‘You are so cute, I think we should kiss right now.’”
“Damn!”
“So I do what any guy would do in that circumstance, I say to myself, Yes, it’s finally happening! We are now boyfriend and girlfriend. So we kiss.”
“Was it magical?”
“It was slightly less than magical. It was like touching lips.”
Amy laughed. “That’s what a kiss is.”
“I know! That’s all it was. We touched lips. And then she’s like, ‘I’m coming over to your house every day in the summer and you’re never going to be able to stop me,’ and I’m like, Whoa, this relationship just got really intense and I’m in, like, way over my head now, I need to slow down—I don’t know if I thought my mojo was really working or whatever, but…So I said, ‘This is how AIDS starts,’ which made no sense. And she laughed and she’s like, ‘You’re so funny,’ and she starts mussing my hair, and then she goes back to sit with her friends.”
“A whirlwind romance.”
“And then later I found out her friends had bet her a dollar if she could kiss the ugliest boy on the bus.”
Amy was quiet for a second. I had never told anyone that story before.
“Oh. That’s pretty shitty,” she said.
“It’s fine.”
“And I’m sure you weren’t the ugliest boy on the bus.”
“’Cause some kids were really hideous in middle school,” I joked.
“No, ’cause you’re cute now. I’m sure you were cute then. Pre-blooming.”
“Thanks.”
And we talked and talked long into the night, and long past the time when my dad emerged searching for a beer, until I’d finally exhausted my notebook. The next day I’d start writing it again.
Now is probably the time to introduce a few more characters to the story. You know, for context. Just so you understand exactly why there were zero mermaids singing to me. Or if the mermaids were singing to me, they were only doing so because their mean mermaid friends were paying them.
My friends consisted solely of a few weirdos that I had met in middle school. We played Dungeons & Dragons together and had bonded over our mutual awkwardness. It was kind of a symbiotic relationship—we embraced our oddity, and as a result grew stranger and stranger. First up, a kid named Groash.
Paul Groashnewski went by Groash because it sounded like gross—even though he wasn’t especially gross. He was tall and rail thin, and resembled an overgrown spider with a concave chest. Nearly every day he wore the same T-shirt with the word SLIMEBALLS on it, which had at one point been black but had slowly evolved into gray through countless washings since middle school. He also sported a strange pair of what he called activity pants, which weren’t sweatpants or jeans, but something that occupied the strange hinterland between the two. Throw in a pair of black combat boots, a safety pin for an earring, and a dirty-blond Mohawk and you’ll understand why my dad referred to him as “that weird kid.”
My other friends included Brian Nguyen, who wasn’t even cool enough to aspire to the trench coat or safety-pin earring, and Elizabeth, who was a girl and yet somehow still hung out with us.
Elizabeth was about an inch taller than me and had a mop of curly brown hair that sat on top of her head like a lost animal. She was still cute, even though she wore baggy painter’s jeans and tended to dress in shapeless sweatshirts. She was the kind of girl who kept a wallet on a chain and was the first one in our school to get her nose pierced. She was big into computer programming, and occasionally Elizabeth and Groash would hang out with skate punks, who terrified the hell out of me and Brian. Brian was in the formative stages of rebellion, and had grown his black hair just long enough so that it covered his eyebrows. He wore nifty John Lennon glasses that he had acquired somewhere, and showed an alarming lack of fashion sense. All of them had managed to escape any connection to after-school activities, athletics, or church functions with the exception of Brian, who wrote nihilistic news articles for the school newspaper. (Example: He called the school’s new ban on hats a “pointless exercise in social engineering destined to fail.”)
I’m not going to explain Dungeons & Dragons. Let’s just say we were hopped up on caffeine, sat around a table, pretended to be elves and dwarves and wizards, and fought monsters. Brian was our Dungeon Master, which was kind of like a mix between referee and storyteller. His job was to invent a whole bunch of weird-ass stuff that would fight us, and then we’ d roll a bunch of dice and have an awesome time and make lots of noise so that Kaitlyn would be mortified enough to leave the house to go have sex with someone or get drunk.
So, anyway, to set the scene, the four of us hung out in my basement a lot because Groash’s family was a wreck, Brian didn’t want us at his house, and Elizabeth’s mom was an honest-to-God witch. With spells and everything. It was way cool, but she was also a sometime nudist with biker friends, so going over there was something of a terrifying crapshoot.
Every Saturday night, the four of us would gather with a case of Mountain Dew, a basket of puppy chow trail mix, and three boxes of Little Debbie brownies, which were made out of materials not native to Earth, and we’ d play Dungeons & Dragons. At some point we’ d order pizzas and Groash would steal an entire pie and devour it by himself in the corner while the rest of us looked on with shock and horror.
“It’s probably not healthy to eat that fast,” said Brian, observing this mad ritual for the thirtieth time.
Groash said nothing because he had folded two pieces of pizza together and was maneuvering them into his mouth.
“You guys act like it’s some kind of primal war to get the most food,” said Elizabeth.
“It is,” managed Groash. “And I’m winning.”
“Animals,” grumbled Elizabeth.
“Speaking of which,” snickered Brian, rolling some dice behind his Dungeon Master’s Screen. (Which was basically a tri-fold with pictures of monsters on one side and dozens of complicated charts on the other. It was an essential tool of any Dungeon Master seeking to prevent the players from learning devious secrets or reading the module.) “Speaking of which…you hear a slurping noise from the water behind you, and before you can react, a giant crayfish leaps out of the water and stabs you in the back with its pincers.”
“Son-of-a-bitch,” howled Groash, taking two more pieces of pizza.
You get the general idea.
“What the hell do you guys do down there?” Kaitlyn would ask. “Are you summoning demons?”
“No.”
“It sounds like you’re summoning demons.”
“We’re not. We’re adventuring.”
“Oh God. You need to stop. Just stop.”
She’d raise her hand like I had just dropped a dead possum on the ground in front of her and she had to shield her eyes from the sight of it. And then she’d steel herself and put her hands on my shoulders like she was being really helpful and say, “This is why no one will ever love you.”
And you know what? She was kind of right, as Kaitlyn often was. She really had her finger on the pulse of the mermaids, being one herself. But I figured it was better to embrace who you truly are rather than pretend to be something else. I had my friends. I didn’t care if people thought we were summoning demons.
“So you are summoning demons.”
“No, Kaitlyn, if we were summoning demons, we would have already succeeded, and you would be disemboweled by now.”
“The only reason you know a word like disemboweled is from Dungeons & Dragons. Your entire vocabulary is a nightmare.”
“Whatever.”
“Whatever you.”
And then we kept doing that for a while.
If this were a romantic comedy, this would be called the meet-cute. The meet-cute is an event that happens about five minutes into the movie where the heroes meet in a contrived, y
et adorable way, in which they mysteriously hate each other, or there’s some kind of stupid misunderstanding that will come back to haunt them later on. Then they eventually solve it and kiss and get married, and then nothing interesting ever happens again, because everyone knows that once you get married all comedy and romance end. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
If I was writing this movie, there were a number of ways it could’ve gone down:
Car accident. My car slides on the ice into hers. She gets out of her car and hits me in the face with an ice scraper. I start bleeding and cry like a baby and lose consciousness. She has to look through my wallet to go call an ambulance and discovers both that I am more buff than she thought and that my buttocks are entrancing. Probability of happening in real life: 10 percent. (I would need to borrow Kaitlyn’s Buns of Steel video for a few weeks before this would happen; also, we’ d need to meet when it was icy in Wisconsin—so between September and May.)
We spot each other across a crowded room. Why? Who knows? We’re at a party (that’s the first implausibility—that I would be invited to a party—but let’s just say I’m there). She glances in my direction. Our eyes meet. She notices that my eyes are dark and full of mystery. Who is that sexy boy in the dark, wool trench coat? He almost resembles Dostoevsky. (In my mind, girls are attracted to Dostoevsky. Perhaps that’s why I chose him as a role model, even though he resembled a homeless dude who ate rats. Fun fact: Dostoevsky probably did eat rats, because he was imprisoned in Siberia.) I must speak with him, but not here. Anywhere but here. I casually pick up a rat and take a bite out of it. She thinks that’s awesome. Probability of happening in real life: 2 percent.
I stalk the hell out of her in a non-threatening, family-friendly way. I memorize where her classes are. I make sure I’m in the hallways in her passing period so that I can walk past her, make eye contact, and give a wry little smile like Hey, what’s up? I find out her phone number and call her to ask about homework in classes we don’t even have together. I find a way to have Brian interview her for the school newspaper. Just a feature on Amy. Like, a random-hot-girl profile on Amy. Probability of happening in real life: 87 percent. (I put the probability that high because I had already tried method three on two separate occasions: my three-years-long crush on Jessica in grades six, seven, and nine (I took a break during eighth grade, don’t ask), and my unfortunate obsession with Megan in the spring of my sophomore year. Both crushes ended in nightmarish disasters that may have involved writing bad poetry and, in the case of Megan, a poorly constructed bust made out of modeling clay.)
