by Adi Alsaid
“Julia, we’ve been best friends for five years. It’s never once felt off. Why now?”
She stretched her legs out in front of her. “Because the universe hates happiness?” She wiped at her eyes. “That’s not even true, though. Things have been great between us, haven’t they?”
“The past week has been great, Julia. But there’s something wrong here. I can’t think of things to talk about with you. I don’t know how to act around you. And, yes, Gretchen’s on my mind. Too much for it to not mean anything.”
He was not ready to see her face crumple into tears. He’d seen her get sad once or twice. But this? This was uncharted territory. He thought back to the night of the “BEER” party, how hurt she’d looked when he called her a cliché. This was like that, but worse. She hid behind her hands and wept.
His chest felt emptied out. Outside, the sun was still shining, and it felt weird that moments like these could happen in the daytime. Fights, like phone calls delivering bad news, those only happened in the middle of the night, didn’t they? Shrouded in darkness?
Julia stood up from the bed and went over to the box of tissues on his nightstand. She wiped her tears and blew her nose, then took a seat at his desk chair, composing herself. Dave could only watch.
“I don’t want to be miserable with you, Dave,” she said, scrunching a tissue in her hand. “I want to be with you. More than anything I’ve ever really wanted. I think things have been a little off, yes. But I also think maybe we can fix that.” Another tear started to scurry down the bridge of her nose and she quickly brushed it away, not giving it a chance to interrupt. “But I don’t want to start getting paranoid about whether you want to be with me or someone else. I don’t want to start analyzing your every action. I don’t want us to start hating each other because we don’t know how to be in a relationship together.” She tossed her scrunched-up tissue in the garbage beneath his desk. “I think this can work between us. I really do. But I’m going to let you decide, because otherwise I’ll always have the doubt. Are we going to try this out, or do you think we shouldn’t?”
After a long moment with his eyes closed, his head resting back against his wall, nausea knotting his stomach, Dave let out his breath. When had everything he’d ever wanted changed? “I love you, Julia. But maybe I’m not supposed to love you like this.”
WITHOUT HIM
JULIA WAS ON her side, staring at the map on her wall. The dads came by and tried to convince her to come watch a movie with them downstairs, but she couldn’t bring herself to step away from the bed. She wanted the comfort of the room slowly darkening as the day went on without her. Burying her head beneath her sheets, she imagined the folds of the cloth as caverns, imagined that she was underground, if only to give herself something to think about to ease the pain. For hours, she didn’t move. She tried to empty her mind of Dave, though she had no idea how. She’d been thinking about him for years.
This hurt. In a way she couldn’t shake, in a place she couldn’t pinpoint, this hurt more than anything Julia had ever experienced.
MESS
DAVE SETTLED INTO his bench at the harbor. He’d skipped school for the second day in a row because he thought staring out at the cool waters of Morro Bay might be comforting. The bubble tea he’d bought an hour ago was on the ground by his feet, almost full. He’d made a mess of everything, and it served him right to sit there and feel every little bit of guilt that came his way.
MORE OR LESS
ANYTIME SHE COULD get away with it at school, Julia lived within the world of her headphones. For days now, music had been playing almost nonstop. Whenever she was forced to hit pause, the air around her was fraught with tension. No one else seemed to notice it. In fact, everyone else seemed to be drunk with happiness. That sense during school Julia had had only a couple months ago that everything had been dipped in butter, that time had slowed down to a torturous crawl, it had disappeared. The end of the year was in sight and everyone but Julia was giddy for it.
She waited in her car in the parking lot until the bell for first period liberated her from seeing Dave, and even then she’d still be late, waiting until she knew he would be seated dutifully in class. If she saw blond locks anywhere on campus, she turned the other direction. During lunch, she steered clear of the tree house, choosing to sneak bites of her sandwich by the graphic novels in the library, or leaving campus a couple of steps behind the throng of seniors who were known by their first names at the pizza shop.
Music was her solace and her refuge, and rather than trying to cheer herself up, she found herself playing the saddest music she owned. Songs about breakups and their messy aftermaths offered the most consolation. When John Darnielle would sing to her, something like, I will get lonely and gasp for air, and send your name off from my lips like a signal flare, she’d think to herself: Goddamn right. People were always belittling teenage heartbreak. But heartbreak was heartbreak was heartbreak.
What was almost as bad was the increasingly obvious fact that she had no other friends. She and Dave had clung to each other for so long and now she was alone. She ate by herself. She drove home by herself. Her phone’s battery life seemed eternal thanks to inactivity. At night, when she felt like crying, Julia watched the Travel Channel, wrote her mom e-mails, asking when she was going to come. When she reread them, they sounded desperate. Even as she wrote them she knew they were desperate. She had fantasies of her mom whisking her away from San Luis Obispo right after graduation, taking her on a trip around Southeast Asia. They were cinematic clichés, these fantasies. Her mom pulling up in a Thelma & Louise convertible right on the lawn of the ceremony, honking the horn, scarves blowing in the wind, though Julia did not own a scarf. Sometimes, Julia felt like an only child wishing for siblings, like a girl making up imaginary friends.
Thursday morning, she was convinced she had exactly this to look forward to for the last month of school. Lonely moping, tearful nights, music, music, music. She was sitting in her car, waiting for the first period bell to ring when Principal Hill walked out into the parking lot and she was forced to pretend to be on her way. She gathered her bag and walked in a hurry through the front doors with her earbuds in, then walked straight past homeroom, not daring to look inside. She checked her e-mail again and her hear leapt when she saw her mom’s name come up. She almost smiled for the first time that week.
Then she opened the e-mail and saw that it was long, and tears immediately formed in her eyes. Her mom was only wordy when she was apologizing. Julia skimmed the e-mail, looking only for that “no” she knew was in there. When she found it she wiped the tears from her eyes and slipped her phone into her bag, listening harder to the music. This was all she could handle right now. Just the world inside her earphones.
Skipping class and just doing laps around the school would probably get her caught. The school librarian was famously lax on almost every rule except for only allowing you in the library if you had a pass. She flirted with the idea of sitting in Dr. Hill’s office, since he was outside, but she wasn’t feeling particularly bold, so she decided to go hide out in the tree house. She was looking forward to the few hours of uninterrupted solitude on the floor among the pillows. But when she walked inside, she jumped at the sight of Mr. Marroney sitting at the counter, grading papers.
He was so hunched over the stack of papers that he almost looked humpbacked. A blue ballpoint pen rested in his hand, streaks of blue ink all along his forearm, like he’d been testing out the pen or had no idea how to use it. He turned around, sensing her presence.
Julia stood at the entrance, frozen. She saw his mustache move. For a second she didn’t even understand that he’d spoken, she just thought that was something his mustache did that she hadn’t ever noticed before.
“What?” Julia said, pulling an earphone out.
“I asked if you’re supposed to be in class.”
Julia shrugged. “Are you?”
Marroney chuckled and tried to cap his pen but ended up adding a blue streak to his hand and then dropping the pen through a crack between the floorboards. “This is my free period. I like coming up here to do my grading. I’ve heard that I have you to thank for this place.”
“Not really,” Julia said. She looked over her shoulder, wondering if anyone had seen her come out to the tree house. Then she set her bag down on the floor and nestled down by the pillows, out of view. “I’m just gonna hang out here for a while; please don’t get me in trouble.” She got ready to put her other earphone back in, maybe take a nap.
“I was just thinking,” Marroney said, swiveling on his stool to face her, “that you’ve been very distracted in class. Even more so than usual.”
“Oh, just the end of the year, you know,” she said with a shrug, hoping that was enough to get him to go. A couple weeks ago she would have done anything to keep him there and have more to tell Dave about afterward. But now she couldn’t see the point in laughing about it on her own. Music kept playing in one ear, a sad soundtrack that she wanted to envelop her.
Instead, Marroney crossed his arms in front of his chest and furrowed his brow at Julia, the way he did when anyone in class didn’t seem to understand his ill-conceived math jokes.
“I’ve been teaching long enough to know when a kid is distracted and when it’s something else. Are you okay?”
Julia’s instinct was to laugh. And for a second she even smiled, amused at the thought that the teacher she’d basically harassed was concerned for her well-being. Then the smiled faded and she found a knot rising in her throat because he cared enough to ask, though she’d pretty much made his life hell for a few weeks. Her mom didn’t give a damn but Marroney did. Julia tried to stifle the sob that she felt coming on, but was powerless against it. The last few days, she had felt completely abandoned. Dave felt like he’d just disappeared from her life, and as for her mom, Julia wasn’t even sure she had ever been there. But now, looking at Marroney, who seemed not frightened or uncomfortable with her breakdown, but concerned, Julia realized that if she was alone, it was her own damn fault. She’d closed herself off from everyone but Dave, and this was what she got for it.
Sinking into the pillows around her, Julia let loose. She covered her face with her palm, tasting tears, struggling to breathe normally. “Song for Zula” by Phosphorescent was playing through the earphone she still had in. It was a fitting song; it made her heaving gasps for breath feel justified.
She could have reached out to her dads, or maybe even to Brett, or to the dozen other people who’d surprised her in quiet ways since the Nevers began. Apparently, she could even have reached out to Marroney, who was maybe a perfectly cliché math teacher, but had heart enough to ask her if she was okay. Her mom would probably make fun of him like Julia had, but her mom was kind of an asshole, and Julia was done wanting to be like her.
By the time the song played out, Julia had regained some control. She looked up at Marroney, who did not look frightened or uncomfortable.
“No,” she said finally, chuckling to keep something else from taking over again. “I’m not okay. I guess I wasn’t hiding it too well.”
“I only started worrying when you stopped joking around.” He shifted his weight, putting a foot up against the wall and struggling not to lose his balance. “And just now, I guess.”
“Maybe I just ran out of material,” she said.
“If that ever happened, I’d really be worried about you.”
“I will take that as a compliment.” Julia removed her second earphone and wrapped the cord carefully around her phone, slipping it in her bag and knowing that it would be a knotted mess when she pulled it back out. “You really want to know?”
“Please.”
Julia wiped her cheeks dry. “You remember the only guy at the Broken Bean who was more embarrassed than you were by my performance?”
“Dave. Your friend.”
“Yeah, my friend.” She sighed and brought her knees up to her chest, hugging them close for comfort. “The gist of it is, I’m in love with him and it’s not going to work out.”
Marroney nodded, looking down at his lap. He ran his forefinger and thumb over his mustache. “It’s always hard to tell whether you kids are bored or in love. I guess it’s about fifty-fifty, but I can’t ever tell. I figure that most of the time I’m over-romanticizing, since I was your age when I met my fiancée.”
Julia felt a flush of embarrassment that she hadn’t even paused to consider Marroney’s personal life when she did all those things to “seduce” him. “I hope she didn’t see the cupcakes.”
“Oh, worse than that, she was at the coffee shop.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.” He seemed to consider this for a second and then shook his head. “It’s not okay. But, you know. Don’t worry about it. Tell me more about Dave.”
Julia rested her head back against the wall. “Typical high school drama. Love unrequited, other women, sex on the beach.” She felt herself blushing immediately. “Sorry.”
Marroney chuckled through his own blushing. “I’ve gotten good at taking what you say with a grain of salt, so we’ll pretend that was just a joke. Let’s stick to the emotions and leave out physical descriptions.”
“I don’t know what to say. The emotions are not good.”
Julia looked over Marroney’s shoulder at the always-blue sky, slightly tinged this morning by a few streaks of dark fog clouds coming in from the bay. She rested her cheek on the top of her knees. Julia hadn’t ever felt nauseated by sadness before. “I don’t know how you can be best friends with someone for so long, be in love with each other, and have things fall apart so quickly.”
Marroney nodded. He leaned back against the counter, his legs stretched out in front of him, a large coffee stain on his pants. A quiet moment passed, and Julia thought that maybe he had nothing else to say. She closed her eyes and thought of Dave in homeroom, not listening to music the way they always did, thought of their literal lack of connection, the days it had been since the white cord of her earphones had stretched between them. She thought of his hands, thought of Gretchen. Then Marroney spoke. “Human beings are more or less formulas. Pun intended. We are not any one thing that is mathematically provable. We are more more or less than we are anything.” He massaged his mustache for a second. “We are more or less kind, or more or less not. More or less selfish, happy, wise, lonely. Just like things are rarely always true or never true, we aren’t ever exactly one thing or another. We are more or less.
“It’s like that in our love lives, too. We like to think we’re formulas that even out exactly, that we are perfect matches with each other. But we’re not. We match up with lots of people, more or less.”
Julia groaned. “That’s deep, but how is that helpful?”
Marroney laughed, just as the bell rang, the sound muted by the tree house walls but still an insistent cue to leave. Julia stood up, brushed herself off as Marroney uncapped his pen. “The equation might not balance out, even if you and Dave are more or less a match.” He gave her a smile, then turned back to his papers. “Think about it.”
o o o
School let out and Julia had not listened to music since the morning. All day long, she’d been turning over Marroney’s words. She’d written down formulas in her notebook that made no sense, even to herself. She’d crossed out her writing and torn the pages out and then gone searching for the crumpled sheets in her classroom’s trash bins, only to toss them again. By lunch, though she kept trying to organize her thoughts, she knew exactly what she was going to do.
She gave herself the last two periods of the day to think it over. She repeated the phrase “more or less” so many times to herself that the meaning attached to the sounds was s
tarting to fall apart. She read her mom’s e-mail fully, then deleted it without a response.
When school let out, she searched the crowd for a blond ponytail. She spotted Gretchen headed toward the exit, a black backpack bouncing on her shoulders. Julia squeezed past the crowd of slow movers, saying, “Excuse me,” and immediately pushing through the oblivious groupings of people blocking the hallways. Before she could second-guess what she was doing, she found herself walking right behind Gretchen. She needed to say what she had to say before she lost her conviction to do what was right.
When Gretchen turned around, Julia knew right away that she was getting exactly as much (or as little) sleep as Julia was.
“He’s yours,” Julia said, unable to stop herself. Despite the pain at the sound of the words, there was an enormous relief. “I don’t want to give him up. But I know him better than anyone else. I could have had him, once. I almost did for a little while. But you have him now. No matter how I feel, he wants you.”
Gretchen’s mouth opened slightly. Dozens of people passed by them, oblivious to the conversation. Julia wondered where Dave was, what he was thinking or doing or hoping. She missed the sound of his laugh, though it’d only been a few days since she’d felt him do it right against the side of her neck, the warm exhalations turning into a series of kisses that had seemed endless at the time. “You two are the better equation.”
CEILINGS
IT WAS THURSDAY evening, and Dave was watching the typical crowd at the harbor. Road trippers on their way to San Francisco or L.A. stopping for some pictures of the bay, twentysomething couples sitting at the coffee shop, families taking strolls. Some surfers were getting changed out of their wet suits, their boards, gleaming with salt water and wax, propped up against the sides of their cars. Dave could barely people-watch without thinking of how often he’d done this with Julia, how many hours they’d spent on the bench just watching the crowds pass by. He’d pretend to look at something happening in her direction so that she’d be in his sight. Sometimes he’d count to see how long he could go without looking at her, the game always losing steam after about fifteen seconds, when he couldn’t keep himself from it any longer.
