Affective Needs

by Rebecca Taylor

  It couldn’t possibly end well—for anyone.

  But right now, I was too distracted about the reality of my own spinning emotions to care about someone else’s.

  Calc was second period, but I wondered what class Porter had first hour. Then, right as I was taking my seat in the back of English Lit, it hit me. Porter would be in the affective needs room first hour. All the special-education kids started their day with their case managers.

  Stunned by my own epiphany, I stared blankly at the white board while Ms. Kline wrote the day’s assignment in blue dry-erase marker. My brain barely bothered to process that we were supposed to be doing something with chapters four through seven of The Outsiders; it was too busy worrying about the ramifications of falling for an affective needs student.

  What the hell was wrong with me?

  I was ready to bolt the second the bell rang. I wanted to be already sitting, deeply engaged in busy, busy work activity, before Porter walked in the door for second-hour advanced calculus. Like being there before him gave me some kind of home field advantage. Mostly it would just allow me to keep my head ducked low over my work while he entered the room instead of having to deal with him watching me enter—or something equally stupid.

  For the hundredth time since yesterday afternoon, I wondered what the hell was wrong with me.

  The closer I got to the classroom door, the more my stomach twisted up into a giant knot of anxiety. I was shaking, actually shaking, imagining him already there, leaned back, long legs stretched way past the desk in front of him. His messy hair, blue eyes.

  And that brain. God help me, but Porter’s brain was probably the sexiest thing about him.

  I placed my hand on the door handle and twisted it. I could literally hear my heart pounding in my ears. Inhale, Ruth. Breathe, you idiot.

  I pushed the door and kept my eyes glued to the tiled linoleum floor as I made my way across the front of the class to my sector on the other side.

  Was he already here? Watching me, right now? What was he thinking? What did I look like?

  I could feel every movement my every muscle made—my body didn’t feel like it was working right, every step I took suddenly awkward and ridiculous.

  MY GOD, why is my desk so fricking far from the door?

  When I finally reached it, I let my bag slip from my shoulder and dared a peek at Porter’s desk while I swung around into my chair.

  He wasn’t even here. Ryan Miller was the only other one in the room and he was hunched over his spiral notebook working on something.

  Idiot, Ruth.

  I took a ragged breath and tried to keep my nervous system from breaking down. Seriously, was this what it was like to like someone? No wonder Eli sounded like such blubbering hot mess whenever he talked about Jordan—that’s exactly what I felt like.

  Leaning back in my chair, I ran my hands over the smooth laminate desk surface until my fingers curled around the edges. I needed to steady myself, hang on to something solid, and get a grip because, really, what the hell was I going to do when Porter actually did walk through the door?

  I pulled my hands back, digging my nails hard into my palms, and forced myself to start moving through the usual routine. I leaned over and unzipped my bag. Nothing has changed, I reasoned, pulling out my heavy calculus book. Today is no different from yesterday. I grabbed my spiral note book. Or the day before that. I opened the small case I kept my pencils and pens in and selected a black number two with a deadly sharp tip. Or the day before Porter Creed showed up at Roosevelt High.

  I organized all these things on the desk in front of me, checking the space between my notebook and calculus book, making sure my pencil lay parallel to the edge of my notebook.

  Everything was exactly the same.

  EXACTLY. THE. SAME.

  Except . . . except I didn’t feel the same.

  The class door opened and my heart accelerated, a rush of adrenaline flooded my limbs and left a trail of sickening anxiety along my spine. Reflexively, I hunched over the fresh, blank lined paper and picked up the pencil.

  My name, I wrote my name, slowly, in the upper right hand corner.

  When nobody walked past my desk, the way Porter would need to in order to get to his, I dared to glance out the corner of my eye without moving my head even a centimeter.

  I was only Helen Nyugen.

  A small sigh of relief—or disappointment, I didn’t know which—escaped me.

  I forced my eyes to refocus on the paper in front of me, the date. What was the date? My mind, normally a fast-moving steel trap, couldn’t even come up with the right month.

  January! It’s January, you idiot!

  My hand, now sweaty and having great difficulty controlling the pencil, scratched January onto the page under my name.

  The door opened again, and again—every time it sent my nervous system into overdrive. But every time it was someone else. Finally, after what felt like the longest passing period I had ever experienced, Mr. T. walked through balancing his extra-large latte in one hand while he swung the strap of his computer bag from over his head with the other.

  The bell rang.

  I turned my head, glanced over my shoulder, just to make sure. Maybe, in the middle of all my freakish anxiety, I had missed him walking in.

  His seat was empty.

  “Welcome, my little cognitive rock stars!” Mr. T smiled before picking up a green dry-erase marker and writing today’s assignment on the board.

  Everyone began copying it down.

  He’s late.

  Fifteen minutes and two filled notebook pages later, it occurred to me that all my nervous jitters were for nothing.

  Porter either wasn’t here—or he was in trouble again.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Not until five o’clock on the Thursday I was supposed to be meeting him for dinner did my father finally get around to texting me with the reservation time.

  See you at 7:00!

  Seriously? How was it possible for a grown human being to be that inconsiderate? Mostly I was just pissed because I had been holding out a huge hope that he had forgotten he’d asked me to dinner altogether. No such luck.

  For about ten minutes, I considered texting him back. So sorry. Since I NEVER heard from you, I made other plans.

  But I soon realized it would only postpone the inevitable and give my mother that disappointed look she gets when she doesn’t like a “choice” I have made.

  Grudgingly, and with my brow furrowed so deep it was actually bringing on a headache, I texted him back.

  Fine.

  At 7:17, I was sitting in Tony’s, at a table for two—alone.

  No surprise. He hadn’t even booked the reservation right; the hostess had us down as a party of three before I corrected her.

  I reached, again, into the bread basket, took out another one of the long, hard, flavorless breadsticks and began at one end breaking it into half-inch segments, adding more crumbs to the growing pile on the small white plate in front of me.

  Five minutes. I glanced at my phone sitting face up on the table next to my water glass and noted the time. He had five more minutes, and if he wasn’t here by then, I was out.

  I sighed, popped the last piece of breadstick into my mouth, and glanced at the door.

  There he was, in one of his stupid patterned shirts with the weird pointy collars that only looked even halfway decent on guys that were both fifteen years younger and pounds lighter than my father. His round, protruding belly made the shirt hang lower in the back than the front. He thought they were cool because they were made by a designer. He thought he was cool because he knew who the designer was and could afford them—once they moved onto the clearance rack.

  I hoped that sometime during our meal, he spilled marinara sauce all down the front of it.

  The hostess grabbed some menus and began heading my way. When my father saw me, he ducked his head, shielded his eyes and waved with his other hand like I was a castaway on a fa
r off island.

  Crap. I picked up the last breadstick and broke it in half. I really, really, really wished I could just go home.

  “Ruth!” he said too loud when he reached the table, but then a confused expression came over his face and he turned to the hostess. “There’s a mistake. We need a table for three.” At this, he reached behind him and put his arm around a woman I had assumed was just trying to make her way through the restaurant behind him.

  While the hostess explained that she was sorry, that I had told her it was only two, and she would move us right away, I stared at my father and the woman he had his arm around.

  The woman who had a belly just as big as his but who had clearly acquired it in a very different way than he had.

  “Well,” he smiled while the hostess did her best to encourage me to stand. “I was hoping this would be a little more smooth.” He chuckled. “But . . . Ruth, this is Derry. Derry, meet my daughter, Ruth.”

  My mouth felt like it was filled with the entire plate of crumbs piled in front of me. I completely ignored Derry’s outstretched hand and stared long and hard at her enormous belly before lasering my focus back on my dad.

  “Is it yours?” I blurted.

  Derry retracted her hand and placed it protectively over her stomach just as my father’s expression lost all of its forced good cheer. He pulled Derry a little closer and shook his head at me. “Please, Ruth.”

  Please, Ruth? Please, Ruth! What the hell was he thinking?

  Completely pissed, I grabbed my phone and shoved the plate of crumbs so hard it clattered against my water glass. Without a word, I stood up and motioned to the hostess to lead the way. My tone and behavior were clearly making her nervous because she started to look around for some help as soon as she saw that there was a “situation” unraveling at table six. But when she saw that I was coming, peaceably, to the larger table, a table that sat more than two, a table that could accommodate three people and an unborn child, she ducked her head and led us away while she clutched the laminated menus to her chest.

  My brain throbbed against my skull. My father had a girlfriend, and his girlfriend was pregnant. Every fiber of my body felt like flipping over all the tables in the restaurant. This was going to be the most painful meal I had ever endured.

  When I got home, I made sure to slam the garage door behind me. I stood there in the dark, waiting for my mother to come and see what all the noise was about.

  But she didn’t.

  She knew, I just knew she knew. She knew my dad had knocked up some hippie, earth-hugging deadbeat, and my own mother hadn’t bothered to warn me. Not even a Hey, I think your dad might have something to tell you tonight. NOTHING.

  “MOM!” I shouted from the bottom of the stairs.

  “You’re home,” she called. I could tell from the direction of her voice that she was in her room.

  “Yes, I’m home.” I thundered up the stairs and headed straight for her door, ready to start a tirade of epic proportions, but when I pushed her door open, I stopped.

  She was standing in the middle of her room, her hands turned backward on her hips in that way that made her look so much older than she really was, already wearing her I’m-sorry expression.

  Just looking at her, already prepared for my anger, took some of the wind out of my storm.

  She shook her head and whispered, “It wasn’t my place to tell you. Even though I desperately wanted to, your father wanted to tell you himself . . . in his own way.”

  “Pretty crappy way. He ambushes me and waits until his love child’s about ready to burst . . . that’s his way?!”

  My mom stared at me, not saying whatever was really on her mind, which I highly suspected was exactly what I had just said out loud.

  “Why are you so fair to him? He doesn’t deserve it! He’s never deserved it and you’re always, always letting him slide.”

  “Because I love you.” She closed her eyes and let out a deep sigh. “If I’m fair to him, it’s because I love you, Ruth.”

  I shook my head. It was so hard trying to fight with a psychologist. Her words completely deflated my anger, and my slumped shoulders gave me up as defeated. She was a master, literally, at emotional disarmament.

  If my therapist had tried this shit on me, I never would have let her get away with it.

  But my mom? It always worked because she always meant it.

  Then she came in for the finish. With her eyes on mine, she moved closer until she pulled me, half-grudging, into her arms. I only held stiff for a few seconds before, with limp arms, I hugged her back. It was the scent of my mom that I was mostly powerless against. When she hugged me, the security of being eight replaced the insanity of being eighteen.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered into my ear.

  I huffed, “He’s the one who should be sorry.”

  She pulled me away and kissed my forehead. “You’d sooner see Santa Claus in the flesh then get an apology out of your father.” She twisted her mouth into an evil smirk.

  This was the closest thing to an insult I had ever heard her fling at my dad, and I loved it. I knew she couldn’t possibly be that perfect. “You are human!” I exclaimed.

  “Yeah, well,”—she turned back to her bed—“that’s all you’re going to get out of me. Divorce is hard enough without succumbing to my every petty whim.”

  “So there’s more?” I clutched my chest in mock horror.

  She climbed back up into the middle of her giant king-size bed and sat in the middle of a wide spread of manila files and papers. Before I got home, she had been working.

  In her comfy pants and ratty college sweatshirt, my mother would look like a young woman sitting there cross-legged, with her thick brown hair piled on top of her head in a messy bun—if you didn’t look at the bags and dark circles under her eyes. Every one of the files spread around her, some of them practically exploding with paper, was an actual kid. Documentation of their life, their problems, the plans in place for them.

  I moved closer to the bed and watched my mother’s face as she turned pages and read, then turned some more. Every few seconds she would type on her district-issued dinosaur-size laptop. My mother spent her whole life helping people. Every hard case that came across her path—even me.

  But never herself.

  I leaned forward until my elbows rested on the bed. “Did you eat?” I asked, even though I knew she absolutely had not.

  She raised her eyes and looked at me with a confused expression, as if I had asked a strange question or pulled her from a deep dream. “Dinner?”

  “Yes, Mom.” I fingered the edge of the file near my hands. “Dinner, food, sustenance? Everyone does it now.” I flipped the folder’s cover open and closed, open and closed. “Food is pretty popular these days.”

  She gave me her look.

  I smiled.

  She sighed. “No.” She reached over and closed the file I was messing with and held her hand on it so I wouldn’t start annoying her again. “I haven’t eaten yet.”

  “I brought home leftovers. After the big reveal I didn’t have much of an appetite.”

  This got her attention. “From Tony’s?”

  I nodded. My mother was a fiend for the lasagna there—exactly what I had ordered.

  “Lasagna?”

  “Yep.”

  Her shoulders actually wilted with joy. “Would you heat some up for me?”

  “Sure.” I glanced again at all the work. “But don’t you want to take a break?”

  She sighed again. “I would love to. Unfortunately I think if I did, I’d never come back.” She rubbed her hands over her eyes, pressing the bags and purple circles in a way that made me wish it were already summer break and my mother could actually get some sleep. “I still have two reports to write before tomorrow, and an entire case file to catch up on for a new student.”

  I stood up, fairly certain I knew exactly who she was talking about. My eyes scanned the files around her more closely now. “Ok
ay,” I said trying to sound as casual as before. My eyes finally found it, the file right in front of me, the file I had been fiddling with. “I’ll bring it up here.” On the small tab, his name was scrawled in blurry blue ink.

  Porter Creed

  My heart thundered so hard inside my chest, you might have thought he was actually in the room with us.

  I stared at the file—it was huge. Three times as thick as any of the others.

  “Can you grab me a coffee too?” she asked, not bothering to look away from her report.

  Normally I would get on her case about drinking caffeine this late, but I nodded instead. “Okay,” I said, and kept staring at Porter’s file. What on earth could be in there? Why was it so huge?

  I looked at my mother, completely engrossed in work, then back to Porter’s file. There was no way, not in a million years, not under any circumstances she would let me read that file.

  And would I even want to?

  I stepped away. “I’ll be right back.”

  She nodded, but I could tell she hardly registered that I was still in the room.

  In the kitchen, I pulled a plate from the cupboard and opened the small cardboard box I’d brought back from Tony’s.

  I hadn’t seen Porter since that day in the library. His jacket was still hanging in my locker at school. Every day I had waited in calculus for him to show, scanned the cafeteria for him at lunch, but he never came.

  I grabbed a fork from the drawer and shoveled the heavy brick of lasagna onto the plate.

  He had been absent for three days straight.

  I opened the microwave and put the plate inside, remembering at the last second to cover the food with a paper towel so my mother didn’t have an aneurism the next time she used the microwave and there was sauce and cheese exploded all over the inside. I keyed in the time and hit Start.

  Was Porter sick?

  While the lasagna rotated around and around, I took a mug from the cupboard and put it under the coffee machine, inserted the single-serve coffee pod, and hit Start.

  While I waited, I leaned back against the island in the center of the kitchen. Porter’s file was upstairs. In my house.