Kissing Ezra Holtz (and Other Things I Did for Science)

by Brianna R. Shrum

  After my fourth detention session this week, I had planned a pretty epic evening of art-ing alone in my room. But the second I shut my door and set up a canvas, my stomach revolted. Like looking at a cup of vodka when you have a hangover.

  I look at that canvas, smell the paint, run my hands over the brushes, and all I can see is what I don’t get to have.

  I can’t do it, I just can’t.

  Not—not right now.

  I flip my easel so it faces the wall, like that will ease the sickness in my gut, and quietly put away my paints and brushes.

  I sit back on my bed and flip through a book that I can’t really get my brain to fully process, pop in some headphones and listen to fourteen seconds of three separate songs, scroll through social media.

  I’m floundering.

  Apply to school. Create a portfolio. Select a major. All of these are things I can do, easily even. But the thing is, once you get over the intimidating decision paralysis of those things, you’re done. You’re supposed to be, at least. And now here I am again, in the Before phase. Wondering, and deciding, and . . . I guess I should be researching schools again. Scrolling through majors, careers, planning a whole new future. I’m here in this awful limbo where I absolutely did not plan on ever being again, and I just don’t know how to hack it.

  So I don’t.

  I consider, for a moment, calling up one of my friends, seeing if there’s anything going on tonight. A party some-where, something I can crash and get the classic, Ohhhhh Amalia’s here! DO SOMETHING WILD! TURN EVERY-THING UP! reaction when I walk in. My friends always love it when I show, and rarely remember to actually invite me, except as an afterthought. This weekend’s invitation from Brent was a once-in-a-blue-moon kind of thing; usually if I get intentionally invited, it’s more like what happened last Thursday. They remember me, not as a human to sit around and watch a movie with. Not as like, a friend. I mean, I’m their friend. They’re my friends.

  But it’s not the same.

  They—people, I guess, just in general—tend to view me as more of a walking, talking, cayenne pepper. I mean, it’s fine; people have lives and everyone in the cool kid group has about a billion friends and I think everyone just assumes I’ll show up if I want. I’ll just magically know what’s going on because I’m a magic pixie who knows all the Cool Shit going on in school. It’s not an insult or anything.

  It’s not.

  But the second I go to pull up a text chain, I stop. I can’t handle them tonight. I can’t handle my smoker friends either. And honestly, I couldn’t go to a party even if I wanted; it’s the beginning of the semester and if I’m slacking off already, there’s no hope for me.

  Besides, not that they’re not my friends, but I just . . . I’m in such a crappy mood staring at this flipped easel that I really need to talk to someone who knows me.

  I call Skylar.

  “Hey hey, Picasso.”

  I smile and it’s pathetically sad. “Hey.”

  “You okay?”

  “Skylar.”

  “Yeah.”

  It’s on the tip of my tongue. I almost open my mouth and say, I’m dying because I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with my life and maybe you can fix it. Tell me what to do. But of course I don’t. It’s embarrassing. Plus it feels a little like a betrayal, having kept something like this from her for so long—not that I’m obligated to tell her everything about my life. But still. It’s all too much to talk about so I say, instead, “What would you do if you couldn’t be a musician?”

  She’s quiet for a minute. Then: “Well I have a couple back-up plans in place if that’s what you mean. I’m realistic. Not many people get to be professional musicians; I know I might have to teach or work at a music store or something. Why?”

  “Nothing,” I say. “No reason.”

  She hums her skepticism through the phone. “You’re nervous.”

  I sigh, regretting the call already. It’s not Skylar’s fault she doesn’t get it; how could she? But I’m pre-emptively done with all of it. “No, that’s not—”

  “You always do this.”

  I frown. “Do what?”

  “You spook,” she says. “You’re afraid to go to art school because you’re afraid to actually take the leap and become an artist.”

  I cough out this half-offended noise. “I do not spook.”

  “Yes you do.” I can see her say it. See her toss her hair and adjust her posture so she can look down her nose just a little. “Since I’ve known you.”

  “Okay, that’s bullshit. Who was the first person to jump when we all went cave diving last summer? Or when you and Sasha and Brent were too scared to go on that ghost tour downtown? Or when—”

  “No, Amalia, that’s exactly it. You’re absurdly brave when it comes to stuff like that. The immediate stuff. The adrenaline. All the things that make you edgy or whatever. But stuff like this? Stuff you really want? You back down.”

  I’m silent. I don’t even know how to mount a defense without exposing my own secrets.

  Sometimes, Skylar is a little too much for me. I don’t know if that’s the right way to put it. She’s just . . . she’s free with what she thinks, and she thinks a lot. Skylar is an introvert, and an observant one. She knows people in a way that I honestly never have and never will even though I’m the one who likes being around them. Who likes to do things and light up a group. Skylar, though, she’s always watching, thinking, analyzing. And I hate it when she stabs right into me like this.

  All the things that make you edgy or whatever.

  Jesus Christ.

  I like adrenaline and people and being the center of attention in a circle, and I like heavy artsy eyeliner and making out and weed and weird eccentric documentaries. I like finding cool, bizarre stuff (like ghost hunting, or the medieval torture museum or whatever) to pass the time instead of just cruising up and down the street. And that, what? Makes who I am less real? Makes everything I love nothing but a collection of things that make me edgy? I breathe in, I breathe out. I almost regret calling. But she’s not trying to hurt me. If she knew I was already this wounded, she wouldn’t have said this to me.

  I am impenetrable.

  People know they can always be honest with me.

  I am tough and cool and I’m not so fragile that I can be hurt and that’s refreshing, and of course it didn’t hurt my feelings. Of course it didn’t.

  This is me we’re talking about.

  “It’s . . .” Skylar exhales and it kind of sounds like it hurts. “It’s exactly what happened when we broke up. I don’t like talking about that and I’m over it and you’re over it, I get it, but you spooked. I told you I loved you and you freaked.”

  That surprises me; she never talks about us. Not who we were when we first met. “That’s not . . . Skylar.”

  “It’s fine. It was two years ago.” Her voice is a tiny bit hoarse and I don’t know what to make of it. “It’s just that you said it back. And I knew you wanted me as bad as I wanted you, or I thought you did. But then days later, we’re just done.”

  “We weren’t good for each other.”

  “I know,” she says. “I get that now. Hell, I got it then. We’re really different and we both exhausted each other when we were a couple, but that wasn’t why you ended it. That’s what I’m saying. You ended it because you spooked.”

  I breathe into the phone for a minute. She’s not one hundred percent right. But she’s not one hundred percent wrong either.

  “Sky, I gotta go.”

  “Oh. Yeah, oh—okay.”

  I turn off my phone. I’ll make it up to her later.

  Skylar and I were a wreck. She is type-A, ambitious, over-achiever, serious. Bold. Confident. She might be an introvert, but she does well with people. They tire her, but she likes them.

  And I am everything in the exact opposite direction. Being with Skylar, romantically, made me feel like a slacker. A jerk. A weirdo, like a vapor of a person. This cool shadow
of a human who was there to liven up a situation and then disappear while she lived her important, non-weird, non-snarky, success of a life. Skylar didn’t mean to, but she always made me feel like less. Like the lucky one.

  Maybe that’s bullcrap. Maybe it wasn’t her making me feel that way, it was me. That’s probably closer to the truth. It’s probably wildly unfair to put that on her, because my brain is a jerk. But either way, that’s how it was, and I did spook when I felt myself falling for her. Because it would have been a disaster in the long run.

  We both know it.

  Maybe she’s right, though. Maybe it’s because when it comes down to it, not only am I lazy, but I can’t commit to anything.

  I don’t know.

  Gracious, why is everything always at least a little painful?

  I run my hand over my phone.

  I punch in my passcode when it goes dark.

  I call up Marisol, because Marisol has weed.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Chemical reaction (n.): The process by which one substance is transformed into another.

  A similar phenomenon, known as the Yaabez Reaction, occurs when the substance of one’s life is transformed into another, with or without a lead scientist’s involvement.

  “Dad,” I say.

  He grunts in response but doesn’t really form human words. He’s in the zone. My dad sculpts on the side, and he’s never really made much money at it, but he loves it. He’s good at it, too. Probably where I got it from.

  Well, definitely where I got it from; it didn’t come from my mom, who could not be more mathematically, unartistically-minded.

  I pull up a chair at the kitchen table.

  “Mom’s gonna kill you.”

  “She’s not gonna kill me.”

  I raise my eyebrows and look pointedly at the table, which, despite his best efforts to cover it in newspaper, is peppered with little bits of clay and who knows what other detritus. “I’m pretty sure I heard her threaten to divorce you if you ever sculpted in the kitchen again.”

  He smirks. “Was that what you heard? Or was she talking to you about your paints?”

  “Mom can’t divorce me.”

  “She can disown you.”

  “True.”

  He very intentionally continues his sculpting, hands coated in mud. Or what looks like mud. This has never been my forte; I’ve tried and everything comes out looking lumpy. Then again, my dad is terrible at painting, so who can predict what the art gods are going to bless you with? It doesn’t matter the medium, though. The point is: we’re artists.

  Dad was the only one who really got it when I got denied to art school. He was the only one who could feel what I was feeling when all of that stabbed me in the gut. The only one who gets that art runs in your blood and it becomes all you can think about, everything you dream about. He works in wildlife management, and I just . . . I don’t know how he does it. He loves it, I think, but how. How do you build a life around your second choice?

  I grab a tiny lump of gray clay and twist it around in my hands.

  “Foolish,” he says. “Now you’re implicated.”

  “You did this on purpose.”

  He says, “You think I would betray you?”

  I narrow my eyes and he grins. Dad looks a little older than he is—a few more wrinkles at the edges of his eyes than a person would guess someone his age would have. A little grayer at the temples and flecked through his neatly trimmed beard (that Mom INSISTED he grow. I do not have any desire to know why). He’s balding, too, but he’s handsome. He’s a handsome guy.

  He says he’s glad he’s Jewish because the kippah he sometimes has reason to wear covers his bald spot.

  I usually tell him to keep dreaming; they don’t make kippot that big.

  Then he grounds me.

  Anyway, his eyes wrinkle when he smiles and it just makes him look older, like always, but that’s also how you can tell it’s real.

  I say, “What are you making?”

  He says, and I mouth it with him, “A golem.”

  “Again? You know how it went last time.”

  “What can I say?”

  I poke at the clay. He eyes me.

  “What’s wrong, Ami?”

  It turns out that there are a number of ways to turn Amalia into a nickname. If there is one thing I have learned on this earth, it’s that. Behold the sage’s wisdom.

  I shrug. “Nothing.”

  He turns back to his clay and grunts again. It’s a clear disagreement. I’m not sure I want to talk about it, really, but I’m positive I don’t want to be quiet, don’t want to be by myself. I need a human, and the human who won’t tell me I live my life just to do things that make me edgy is my dad.

  I sigh. Use my thumbs to press eye divots into my little clay ball. I run my nail over it to give it a scary little mouth. It’s smiling. It’s kind of cute, in a skeletal way.

  “How do you do it, Dad?”

  He glances at my weird little clay demon. “Well, I’m good at sculpting, Ami.”

  I roll my eyes and shove his arm. “No. I just . . . you work for the division of wildlife.”

  “Mmhmm.”

  “But you love art.”

  “Mmhmm.”

  “I just . . .” I blink down at the clay and squish it back into a ball. Then I roll it in my palms, over and over and over until it’s smooth again. A perfect sphere. “How, Dad? How did you come to terms with knowing you couldn’t do the thing you loved?”

  His brow furrows. He picks up a little tool I never bothered to learn the name of because, like I said, I do not sculpt. It’s like a paintbrush almost. But also, a tiny tiny torture device. A long skinny wooden stick with curved sharp metal on the end. He slices into the face he’s sculpting, working on the nostrils. Then a little scar over the eyebrow.

  “Who says you can only love one thing?” he says.

  I grind my teeth together. It’s not what I want to hear. What I want to hear is: I regret it, my daughter. I wish I’d had the courage to try and try again, against all odds, and I have a magical solution for you that would have given me what I wanted when I was your age. If only I’d been smart enough to try it! I am a father and therefore wise and good at fixing all of your problems. I say, “Art is what I love, Dad.”

  “So go to a state school. A regular college. Do art there.”

  “But I wanted to go to art school.”

  “We all want a lot of things.”

  I groan. “It’s hard. Why is everything hard?”

  He starts making the tiniest marks outside the scar. I can’t even really see the difference on the surface of the clay. But he can.

  He says, “You don’t have to go somewhere prestigious to be an artist.”

  “To be in a gallery?”

  “No.”

  I say, “It’s not just that. I wasn’t good enough to get into nine separate schools, Dad. Not even waitlisted. If that doesn’t prove I should have some kind of backup, what does? How am I going to make it? I’m not good enough.”

  Dad actually chuckles, and then I’m annoyed. “What?” I say.

  “Amalia, get a backup if you want a backup. Because maybe you’re right. Making a living from art is hard. Not many people get to do it. I didn’t do it. I found something else I loved, and I know it’s impossible for you to imagine that managing the fish population at the lake gives me anywhere close to the satisfaction that art does, but it does. And that’s not the worst thing in the world. To go to work doing one thing I love, and keep the other at home, just for me, that is what I want.”

  “So you’re telling me to give up.”

  “I’m not telling you to give up. I’m telling you to find something else you love. Or something you like. Something you can see yourself doing in your life. And do that. And don’t give up on your art; do both. Maybe you can be a painter; maybe you can get that life from the world. How do I know one way or the other?”

  I rub my hand over my nose and streak i
t with clay. “I feel like my options are being decided for me. That someone else is making calls for my life.”

  “Sounds like life, kiddo.”

  “That’s it?”

  He stops. And he turns to me. “What do you want me to tell you? That you can do things exactly the way you pictured? You can’t.”

  I recoil.

  He sets his clay-coated hand on my shoulder. “I’m telling you what you know. That your dream was to do this one way, and now you have to do it another. That’s not the worst news.”

  “It feels like it is.” My eyes start to sting.

  “No. The worst news, to me, would be watching you give up altogether. But I know you. You won’t. Get the life you want even if it means taking a different route to get there. You can do that; I believe in you.”

  Now I want to cry but not so much because it hurts.

  It’s an ache, not a gaping slash in my chest.

  I want to cry because that is what I needed to hear. That someone . . . someone believes in me. There’s no magic that is going to fix everything, that’s going to make any of this easy, that’s going to suddenly give me Skylar’s life or fix the number of things that are wrong with me.

  But.

  My dad believes in me.

  Even given the lack of useful advice today, that’s something.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Methodology: The most ideal set-up for a study is double-blind. Meaning, neither the scientists nor the participants know who is being manipulated and who isn’t. Less chance for tampering when no one can tell what factors are at play. Theoretically, that leads to a cleaner experiment. Practically, well, sometimes it means no one has any real clue what’s happening to them at all.

  Tonight, Sunday night, I’m going to Ezra’s. Partly because I haven’t really gotten the chance to talk to his dads in forever, and I’ve always liked them. And partly (largely) because Ben was so content milling around the house and, after his show of goodwill the other day, I didn’t want to dampen his day with “that tightass” showing up, so I did a secret act of kindness and offered to meet Ezra instead.

  Ezra doesn’t live too far from me. I have to map it—though, why did I? The guy meticulously typed out directions to his house that were better than Siri could have given me. Even though Maps exists. Sometimes, I swear, Ezra is like thirty years old.