by Laura Steven
This time, it only takes a few moves for Mateo to launch his verbal assault. ‘Coward. Do you know how boring you are to play against? I would say it’s like watching paint dry, but that’s offensive to paint.’ He launches an assault with a knight and a bishop, but I’ve arranged my frontline so there are no hanging pieces. He groans in frustration.
I find myself in a position I so often land in: everything is so neat and impenetrable that I don’t want to move anything when my turn comes around. I reluctantly shuffle a pawn forward. Mateo’s eyes light up, and he swoops into the gap I’ve been forced to create. His eyes smirk, even though that’s technically not a thing. It’s the only way to describe it. He’s obviously delighted with himself.
Said grin soon vanishes when he realizes I’ve forked his bishop and his knight, which is unfortunately nowhere near as dirty as it sounds. Just means he’s about to lose one of them.
‘Damn,’ he grumbles. ‘Lucked your way into that one, didn’t you?’
I maintain a neutral expression. ‘Totally. Pure luck.’
It’s a little cooler in this classroom, since it’s north-facing and all, but I’m still feeling clammy and uncomfortable. There’s almost definitely going to be a sweaty assprint on this seat when I stand up.
Apart from a whirring ceiling fan, the room is graveyard quiet, and ripe with the sound of concentration. Until Mateo pipes up again, since he basically has to be making some kind of noise at all times, and starts humming an annoying tune from a commercial I can’t quite place. If he’s trying to put me off, it’s working. I can barely focus on the board, I’m so hot and bothered.
But then I see it: the intention behind his last couple of moves. He’s visibly angry when I castle just in time to stop him from skewering my queen to my king.
What I want to say in response: ‘I’ll skewer your ass to your face, you pugnacious prick!’
What I actually say: ‘Please be quiet, Mateo. Some of us are trying to concentrate.’
Look, I don’t mean to sound like Hermione Granger every minute of the livelong day. It just happens.
We play for a while longer. I try to regroup and fortify my defenses, but his unrelenting attacks punish my piece count. It’s not going great, but at least I don’t have any brainspace left to think about Haruki and our awkward encounter.
After ten more minutes, I’m not surprised when he promotes a pawn and effortlessly checkmates me.
At this point Mateo could choose to be gracious in victory, but as it happens, that is not the path he takes. ‘Suck it, Kerber! What’s that now? Eleven games to three? Twelve? I lose track.’ He whistles unnecessarily. ‘You need to grow some lady balls. Launch an attack. Maybe take your queen out for a joyride every once in a while. Or, you know, keep making a dick of yourself. Your call.’
I swear to god, I’m going to shove a rook so far up his ass he’ll be able to taste wood varnish on the back of his throat.
By the time I leave school at five-thirty, the temperature is vaguely less hellish, so my walk home is bearable at least. Despite the absurd amount of thunderflies in the air.
I live a couple miles from school, which I diligently cover on foot every single day on account of Dad #1’s obsession with car accidents. If you ever need to know hard statistics on how many people are killed in crashes each year, he’s your guy. As far as fetishes go it’s pretty niche, but I’d rather his search history showed repeated hits on government data sites than on hardcore pornography. You take the wins where you can.
At least the route home is pleasant. My neighborhood is a nice one; my dads are both tenured academics, so we live in the more affluent area of town. However, when you’re a chronic overthinker, walking four miles a day with just your own thoughts for company is a special kind of hell. And before you suggest podcasts or audiobooks, yes, I have tried them. Doesn’t work. My cogitation is louder than any headphones can plausibly go. I experience the audial equivalent of reaching the end of a page, then realizing you’ve absorbed precisely nothing because you’re so busy fixating on an embarrassing thing you said back in kindergarten.
Tonight is no exception. As I pass preppy spandex-clad joggers, Labradoodles in appalling Swarovski collars, and an implausible number of 4x4s, all I can do is replay the painful encounter with Haruki over and over again.
The public call-out. The subsequent loaded silence. The heat – oh god, the heat. Like my cheeks were being flame-grilled and served as the steak portion of a surf ‘n’ turf.
As if that weren’t bad enough, the ass-clenching moment when I stopped at the sound of his throat-clearing, and it became immediately, excruciatingly apparent that he was not clamoring for my attention.
And the look. The look he gave me – like I was nothing to him. Which I guess I am.
I take my time ambling home, in no rush to discuss what I learned at school today with my dads over dinner, like I do every night. Blame the heat, or the emotions, or the ABSURD QUANTITY OF THUNDERFLIES, but for whatever reason, my heels are dragging.
Argh. Why do I even care so much about Haruki’s lack of interest? I’m used to the whole unrequited-love deal. It’s not new to me. I should be better at handling it by now.
Because it’s definitely a pattern. A pattern with no outliers, no anomalies, no exceptions. Just data point after data point after data point of rejection. No, not even rejection. Rejection would require the objects of my affection to notice me enough to reject me in the first place.
Actually, there is one almost-exception. Kevin Cartwright. He’s a couple years older than me, and we had a string of hookups over the summer. It started with a drunken one-night stand at a house party – classy way to lose your V-plates, right? – and became a regular occurrence whenever he’d had so much as a sip of beer. But every time I texted him sober, he ghosted me. He only ever wanted to hook up when it was on his terms, and when his blood-alcohol level was past the legal limit.
One night – when he was super wasted – he told me he was still hung up on his ex, and that it wouldn’t be fair to me to turn whatever we had going into something more. And even though I was starting to kind of like the guy, I tried my best to bury whatever feelings I had for him. I knew deep down it wasn’t going anywhere.
Then he went away to college a few weeks back, at the same time as my older brother, and I haven’t heard a peep since. Guess I was just a way to kill time, when the lights were low and the beer goggles were firmly in place.
I sigh, inhaling warm summer air. The streets are quiet, even by my sleepy town’s standards. Nearby, an elderly man is cutting the grass with his shirt off. A grey-haired woman watches lovingly from the window. And, to be fair to the Matching Hypothesis, they are precisely the same level of hotness. Figures.
Pulling my phone out of my back pocket, I press the home button. My lock screen lights up: nada. No messages, no missed calls. Keiko will be rehearsing for tonight’s gig, and Gabriela will be tutoring after-school Spanish. She speaks, like, seven languages, has a makeup Insta with a gazillion followers, and bakes the best banana bread in the literal world.
Then she’ll be hanging out with her boyfriend, Ryan. They’ve been together since freshman year and are basically the same entity at this point. In fact, I’m not entirely sure she hasn’t absorbed his personality via osmosis. She had some actual points to make about the NFL draft the other day. Still, they’re pretty cute. He’s always picking up egg and cheese bagels for her breakfast, holding up her ring light so she can take the perfect selfies, making her study playlists on Spotify.
When I think of being with Haruki, that’s what I imagine. Not huge, grand gestures of rapturous romance. Not even necessarily the physical aspects of having a boyfriend. Just small, everyday kindnesses that let you know you’re loved.
For whatever dumb reason, I unlock my phone and open up the message chain between me and Kevin. It’s . . . confronting. The last three messages were all sent by me: a stack of shameless blue bubbles.
Hey, h
ow are you? Are you going to Steph’s party this weekend? Hope to see you there. *beer emoji*
Kevin! Fancy a drink tomorrow night? My dads are out of town. And there’s red wine in the refrigerator. (I know. They’re criminals. Room temperature or bust.)
Hey! Just a quick message to say I hope your big move to Penn State goes well. Hit me up when you’re next home and we can catch up.
My skin crawls, reading them back. But they’re not that awful, are they? I obsessed so hard over striking the right balance between casual and flirty. Between upbeat and sarcastic. Between perfect and, well, perfect. And it still wasn’t enough to get his attention.
I can’t help but feel, like I do 201,674 times a day, that it’s all because of the way I look. The blank stares, the ghosted messages, the everlasting feeling of irrelevance. It has to be. Because I’m smart, I’m interesting, I’m funny (when I have the guts to actually crack jokes within earshot of other human beings). I’m a nice fucking person. And yet no guy has any interest. Why?
I’m about to shove my phone away when, as it always does, temptation strikes. What if this is the one time Kevin will reply? What if he’s drunk at a daytime frat party, and I send a message at the perfect moment, and he actually responds? It would soothe my self-hatred, if only for a moment. And hey, if he ignores me – what’s new? It can’t suck any more than it already does.
So I do it. I fire off a quick, breezy text, watch as the ‘delivered’ sign appears, and bury the phone back into my pocket. Maybe if I don’t look for a while, there will magically be a message waiting for me later tonight.
My pretty, faux-Edwardian house is detached and modestly sized. Vati – Dad #2 – is out front gardening, and as I’m walking up the driveway I almost don’t see him. He’s about two inches from the soil, hacking away manically at the border with a pair of secateurs. He’s a godawful gardener. Like, imagine you gave a donkey a pair of scissors and told it to go to town on your flowerbeds. That’s how our garden looks.
But Vati loves it, so Dad just lets him crack on and do his thing. That is love, right there. And not that I’ve ever, you know . . . rated the hotness of my fathers, or anything, but they are pretty similar levels of good-looking and socially desirable. The Matching Hypothesis never fails.
‘Bärchen !’ he calls, dropping his tools and kneeling back on his haunches. Vati – Dr Felix Kerber – is Austrian. He’s always called me Bärchen, ever since I was teeny. Little bear. It still warms my heart.
‘Hey, Vati,’ I say, stopping just short of the front door. ‘How goes the gardening? Zu heiß, nein ?’ That’s about as far as my German goes. Gabriela is the language goddess of our friendship tripod, and is completely fluent. Vati always loves when she visits.
‘Ja, this heat is ridiculous,’ Vati replies. ‘And I’m making a real mess of this. I never did know what to do with bushes.’
And then he guffaws. Actually guffaws. At his own disgusting joke.
I mime gagging, and shout back, ‘Is Dad inside? I would like some sensible conversation, for once in my life.’
Vati is too busy guffawing to respond.
Our dog Sirius – a one-eyed cockapoo – greets me at the door with a half-hearted tail wag. He is very old and very lazy, and his depth perception is very bad on account of the one-eye situation. Also, his face smells like a rotting corpse. Apart from that, I love him very much. Unfortunately, Sirius loves nothing but barbecue ribs.
I find Dad washing potatoes in the kitchen sink. Dumping my backpack on the counter, I immediately raid the fridge, as I do every night. And, as he does every night, Dad says in his dulcet Bostonian tones, ‘You will ruin your dinner.’
He’s the sensible one, Dad. While goofy Vati plays the clown, cracking inappropriate jokes and generally throwing caution to the wind, Dad is more subdued. As a world-leading expert in experimental hepatology, Dr Michael Murphy is not interested in your scatological humour. He is painfully smart, painfully literal, and affectionate in his own special way.
‘Dad, there’s every chance that the Higgs Boson being made over at the Large Hadron Collider are becoming unstable at this very second,’ I say dramatically, while peeling a string cheese into my palm. ‘By the time I’ve finished this sentence, one could have triggered a catastrophic vacuum decay, causing space and time, as we know it, to collapse.’ Triumphantly, I cram several pieces of stringy deliciousness into my mouth. ‘In which case, dinner will be ruined regardless.’
‘Very good,’ Dad grumbles. ‘But since you have finished your sentence – and your snack – without a black hole in sight, you can close that fridge door, grab a vegetable peeler, and tell me about your day.’
3
Thanks to a potent dinner-table combination of intelligent conversation and creamy mashed potatoes, I manage to avoid checking my phone for a good couple of hours.
As I traipse upstairs, belly full of schnitzel, I’m almost dizzy with the anticipation of pulling my phone out and seeing Kevin’s name light up my screen. Or Haruki’s. Or anyone’s, for that matter.
It’s been two hours. I’ll probably have several messages in my group chat with Keiko and Gabriela, comprising pre-show selfies like we always get from Keiko, and witty comments from Gabriela about the spoilt rich kids she tutors. Possibly even a missed FaceTime call, if Gabriela’s particularly mad. Perhaps Leo, my brother, has tagged me in a nerdy meme only he and I would find funny. Maybe Haruki has reached out via Instagram to apologize for dropping me in the shit this afternoon. And surely Kevin will have replied by now, right? It’s been two hours. Two hours!
For no real reason, I make a slight ceremony of the phone-checking. I get into comfy sweats and an oversized T-shirt, throw my hair up into a messy pony, switch on a couple lamps and my fairy lights, and curl up cross-legged on my bed. Dad must’ve put fresh bedding on this afternoon, because the plain white duvet cover with tiny pink flowers smells of lavender and camomile. That’s when you can tell Dad is getting bored on sabbatical. He does all the laundry imaginable, instead of finishing the book proposal he’s supposed to be working on.
When I’m finally ready, I press the home button on my phone.
Nothing.
Just the time – 9:01pm – and my background photo. Keiko and Gabriela’s shiny faces smile back at me. We took that picture after Keiko’s first ever gig, when we were all sweaty and high on adrenaline and good music. I’m sandwiched between the two of them, and you can barely see my face through Keiko’s blue hair.
No texts. No calls. No notifications. Nada.
I shouldn’t care. I know I have people around me who love me. Keiko and Gabriela, and my dads, even my big brother, although he’s usually far too busy studying to pay me any attention. I know they care. It’s just . . .
Technology today makes it so easy to constantly communicate with your loved ones. So when they don’t communicate, when they all ignore you at once, it’s the worst feeling. They could get in touch with you. They just don’t.
I forever feel like everyone else gets more messages, more calls, more notifications than me. Everyone around me is forever looking down at their screen, laughing at something funny in their family group chat, swooning over a selfie from their crush, sighing as they faux-complain about how many notifications they have to read. And I just sit there, pretending to be doing the same, when really the only people who would ever message me are in the very same room.
It’s pathetic, and I hate myself for caring. But I do. I just want a guy to text me and let me know he’s thinking about me, to ask me how my day was, to send funny pictures to cheer me up when I’m down. It seems like everyone has that but me.
So, I do what I do almost every night when I’m down about my love life, or lack thereof. I whizz through my homework, take a long, hot shower, wait ’til my dads are both asleep – they usually hit the hay early – then sneak down to the refrigerator to retrieve half a glass of red wine. A full glass and they’d notice, but half usually slips under the radar, p
roviding I remember to wash the glass and put it away again after I’ve finished.
Then I tiptoe back upstairs, lock my bedroom door, and engage in my dirty little secret: trashy rom-coms from the early noughties. Movies from before social media, before selfies, before the constant need for validation, before memes and Facebook politics. Just shamelessly cheesy romance and all the happy endings a girl could want.
My dads would murder me if they found me watching this crap. It’ll rot your brain cells, they’d say. Try this NASA documentary instead. Or if you have to watch a movie, at least start with Guillermo del Toro.
But hey. You can’t help what you love. And what I love is curling up in my empty bed with half a glass of red wine and watching cheesy rom-coms with the volume turned down low.
Ugly nerd on the outside, lonely middle-aged spinster on the inside. Form an orderly queue, fellas.
Tonight’s pick is Just Friends, because I have a massive soft spot for Ryan Reynolds, like almost everyone with retinas. It’s basically an in-depth study of the Matching Hypothesis. Ryan Reynolds’ character doesn’t get the classically hot girl until he changes everything about his physical appearance to match her level of attractiveness. Standard.
I’ve seen the film a couple times before, so I scroll aimlessly through my phone as I watch. Because I’m clearly a fan of torturing myself, I open up the conversation with Kevin – if you can even call a one-sided deluge of messages a conversation – and stare at my unanswered text.
Hey! You settling in okay? Hope you’ve managed to find a gaming buddy to replace Bryan.
And so begins the cringing.
