The Art of Feeling

by Laura Tims

“I’m not indulging you right now,” I snarl. “You could’ve been seriously hurt. You were.”

  “Breaking news—” He pinches his wrist hard. “I don’t feel pain! So by definition, he could not have, and did not, hurt me.”

  “When are you going to stop believing that not feeling pain makes you invincible?”

  “When you do.”

  “I don’t think that!” I’m yelling now. Good—he deserves it.

  “Sometimes I wonder why I was born like this.” He’s not listening. “Maybe someone up there saw that I was special, that there was something about me that would make other people want to hurt me more than normal, and making it impossible to hurt me was God’s way of giving humanity the middle finger. Like, ‘Ha-ha, you can’t do anything to him, no matter how hard and how often you try.’”

  I swallow. “What have you even been doing for the last few days?”

  “Pills, mostly.”

  My rant dies in my throat as some submerged part of my brain recognizes what bothered me about him sprawled on the couch, covered in bruises.

  It’s that he looks like Rex.

  “What do you mean, pills?” I ask, even though I know exactly what he means, pills.

  “Adderall, specifically. It’s been sitting in a drawer, because I haven’t needed the distraction since I met you.”

  He twists toward me like he expects me to be impressed.

  Adderall, like Anthony sells. If I was boiling over before, now the water’s gone and I’m choked with steam. “You were buying pills from Anthony that day behind the Dumpster. That’s why you warned him about Trez, and why you went to that house. You didn’t want to lose your supplier.”

  “You’re not as good at hiding when you’re hurt as you think you are.” He sits up. “No one is, except me. Prey animals have evolved to show fewer outer signs of sickness and injury so predators are less likely to target them. Did you know that? It’s only a problem when people try to keep them as pets and don’t know it’s time to take them to the vet until it’s too late. You can demand I fake weakness all you like, but I should teach you how to conceal yours.”

  Now that I know, the signs are obvious, but it’s a high high, not a low high like Rex gets. The otherworldly energy, the flashing eyes. He really is an alien now, his mind spinning faster than planets and asteroids, faster than mine ever could.

  “It’s not . . . weakness,” I say. “It’s being human.”

  “Then I choose not to be. It’s not worth the trade-off.”

  “I hate to tell you, but you don’t get to choose.”

  “A scientist learns by watching mice; he doesn’t crawl on the floor and try to be a mouse. Because you’re wrong—I can never be a mouse. I’m different. Fundamentally.”

  “Eliot—”

  “I prefer watching to being anyway. Why bother getting messy with relationships when I can learn that people are stupid and shallow and selfish just by watching from a distance?” He attempts a smirk. “And yet watching you didn’t explain the mystery, so here I am, trying to be a mouse. I probably look ridiculous.”

  “What mystery?” I ask faintly.

  “You’re so normal! You’re so amazingly normal. There must be something distinctive about you I haven’t figured out, though, because I don’t like normal. . . .” The smirk shivers and falls apart. “But I like you.”

  He wouldn’t be saying this if he wasn’t high. I close my eyes. “If you knew everything about everyone like you think, you’d know I don’t want to talk to you when you’re like this.”

  “Exactly,” he shouts. “Because this is unfiltered me. You think I don’t have a filter? You have no idea. If I was a hundred percent myself all the time, you’d hate me, because I’m not designed for you or anyone else. I’m alone on an entirely other plane of existence where you wouldn’t last five minutes.”

  “You—”

  “Every day you see more pieces of the real me because you’re around me constantly and they slip out; I can’t hide them all forever. The longer you know me, the closer you get to hating me, like everyone who’s ever been around me constantly. Do you know what it’s like to be inherently hate-worthy? To listen to the tick of people’s timers counting down until they reach the built-in limit they have for your yourself-ness? It’s kinder not to waste their time and to show them who you are from the start, so you don’t lose track of the timer and get caught off guard when it suddenly goes off. I’m afraid I’ve wasted your time, Sam. I was selfish for once and tried to act like one of you, but the truth was always going to come out eventually. And I think I just heard your timer go off.”

  His voice is simultaneously despairing and prideful. I can tell he’s fascinated by how intellectual and tragic he’s made his own loneliness sound, but he’s not the great dark enigma he wants to be. He’s just a sick teenager who was left behind by the people he loved because he was too much work.

  I say the only thing I can think of:

  “That is so stupid.”

  Then I shoot out of the living room and outside, where I devour purifying gulps of fresh air. The sky is a waterfall of gold fire as the burned cake offers the last of its smoke to the sunset. Several houses down, someone is mowing the lawn.

  I walk. It hurts, but I don’t stop. Soon I’m whispering to my leg with each step, “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. . . .”

  Everything Eliot’s dealt with at school, that we’ve dealt with, is because he wanted to get high. I can feel sorry for him while recognizing that he’s a rich, entitled, pill-abusing asshole, and that even the other rich, entitled, pill-abusing assholes hate him because he’s also a pretentious, elitist, self-absorbed dick.

  I only sniffle a little bit. Lena would be proud.

  It’s not until the sunset washes out into a dark pink-blue that I sink to the curb, throwing down my crutches. My leg throbs predictably. I don’t want to think about Eliot, so I imagine Tito and his soft ears, and it helps until the Vicodin kicks in.

  I’m in an unfamiliar section of Eliot’s neighborhood, the doors of each house closed. Even though they’re just other people’s houses, it feels like they’re specifically shutting me out.

  I’m about to call Lena when I remember she’s in Northton today. Dad’s at work, and Rex is probably high, because getting high is the most important thing in the world to the people I love, and anyway I left his truck at Eliot’s.

  So I don’t move. The sky doesn’t care and continues to darken.

  After a while, a sleek car pulls up alongside me. Eliot rolls down his window, and here I am with my head in my hands like I was just widowed by war.

  “Go away,” I say.

  “Please let me drive you home. You’ll hurt yourself.” His eyes are mostly normal now, except for the guilt. “I promise I’m fine. It was already wearing off when you came over.”

  “You shouldn’t worry about a mouse like me from your higher plane of existence,” I snap, and then I hobble off, because I want him to feel bad.

  He follows me slowly. A minivan rumbles up behind him and honks.

  “Fuck off!” I scream at it.

  “I do need you,” Eliot says from his window. “For my experiment.”

  “What is it with you and experiments?” I whack his car with my crutches before remembering it’s a nice car. “What are you doing, spiking my food with hydrochloric something-or-other to see if it turns my hair blue?”

  “No,” he says in a voice that could only be called small.

  “Then what? Measuring how long it takes my timer to go off? Because when you average me in with everyone else, I’m pretty sure you’ve got a one-point-one-second time frame before you make everyone want to get as far away from you as possible—”

  I bite off the rest.

  His eyes are so sad.

  “That’s a fair assessment,” he says. “My experiment. It . . . ah. I was seeing if it was possible. For me.”

  The sound of him failing to string a sentence together is inherentl
y bizarre. “For you to what?”

  “To have a person,” he mutters, looking down. “To be fair, I did predict this. So that does strengthen my hypothesis that I’m right most of the time.”

  God damn it.

  “Get out of the car,” I say.

  He does, right away. I get in the driver’s seat, and he climbs back in next to me.

  “I’ll take you to your truck,” he says haltingly. “Then I won’t ever bother you again.”

  I lean over and hug him. Because he’s not a rich, entitled, pill-abusing asshole, or a pretentious, elitist, self-absorbed dick.

  Well, he’s a couple of those things, but not the worst of them. And most important, more than them.

  Still not used to my touch, he’s rigid, his pulse light as a breeze against my skin. Again I can’t believe a little fluttering like that keeps him going despite Anthony beating him, his parents abandoning him, and all his scars.

  “I was mad because I was scared, Eliot. I don’t want to lose you. I don’t think I could find someone else like you.”

  “I don’t want your timer to go off,” he whispers.

  “There’s no timer.” I guide his head gently to my chest. “Just my heartbeat.”

  He pulls back. “That is a timer.”

  “It’s not counting down to me hating you.” I’m wiped, but I also feel soft and spread out and protective. The kind of feeling that could make someone love themselves as well as someone else.

  “I know enough about you to know that I like you, and that’s not going to go away for no reason,” I tell him.

  “You say you know enough, but you don’t know everything. Not even close.” His shoulders are tucked as if there’s a blow coming. His body language says, Don’t get my hopes up. “Unless you have all the information, you like a version of me that isn’t real.”

  “When we met, you said I couldn’t give myself a fair assessment, because I’d be judging myself about stuff that doesn’t matter. Right?” I grip his arm. “There will always be a million things I don’t know about you. There were a million things I didn’t know about even my mom. But I know the important stuff, namely that you’re the right kind of person for me, and slowly finding out more little things is the fun part, because I know it won’t change how I feel. Maybe I won’t be crazy about everything I find out, but the important stuff is worth that. There’s no hidden bomb in you that I’ll eventually find and set off.”

  I catch my breath. I don’t think I’ve ever done that before, just barfed out words in a coherent stream.

  “And,” I burst out when he opens his mouth, “I’m already not crazy about some things. Like the smoking, and the Adderall—which you are never doing again—and being mean to people off the bat because you’re scared they’ll ditch you later when they find out you have mean thoughts. Everyone has mean thoughts, okay? Everyone is making judgments about other people all the time. You just treat it like scientific data when everyone else mostly recognizes that they’re first impressions, unreliable. You don’t know someone until you . . . get to know them. Duh. But you find that out by doing it, and letting people surprise you, and you haven’t, until now.”

  For a minute, our breathing is the only sound.

  “I’m glad it was you,” he says in the oddest voice. “That I got to know first.”

  Instead of thinking It’s because there’s something special about me like a smug jerk, I say, “I’m glad I was the first person you took a chance on.”

  “Imagine if it was some asshole. I’d have scrapped the rest of humanity and called it a loss.”

  I giggle. And then I leap up, banging my head on the ceiling, because the minivan behind us is laying on its horn.

  “Holy shit, they’re still there!”

  “Drive, drive!” Eliot shouts as I twist the key the wrong way twice and then drop it. The earsplitting honk keeps going until finally my brain remembers how to start a car, and we fly down the road.

  The minivan sets off at a crawl, like they want to keep their distance.

  “Why didn’t they just go around?” I shriek, and Eliot is crying laughing, and then I am, too.

  When we get back to his house, I ask him to give me every pill he has left.

  It’s not a ton, but it’s not a small amount either. I hold them over his toilet, tiny pink circles in my palm. I’m glad that meeting me meant he stopped needing the distraction, because meeting him helped me stop needing the blankness.

  “How often did you take these before you met me?” I ask.

  “Not as often as I smoke.”

  “Nobody does anything as often as you smoke,” I point out. “Why do you take them?”

  I’m hoping he doesn’t have a reason that will make me feel too guilty to throw them away, like Rex.

  He stands there staring at himself in the bathroom mirror.

  “Sometimes I think I don’t feel enough,” he says to his reflection. “Most of the time I don’t want to feel anyway, because that’s what people like Anthony want, so I get in the habit of not doing it. But then I worry I’m forgetting how. The pills remind me I still can.”

  It sounds like the blankness.

  I close my fingers over the pills. “If you really need—”

  He flips my hand so that they fall to a watery grave. “Now you remind me.”

  It’s like I become aware of a new organ, near my lungs but lower than my heart, pumping faster and spreading something better than blood through my body.

  Before I can blush, he blushes. He’s so pale that his face flames spectacularly scarlet. When he’s too cold or too hot, he gets paler, so maybe this means he’s at exactly the right temperature.

  “Let’s watch a movie,” I mumble, flushing the toilet.

  In the living room, we play a game where I close my eyes and pick something on Netflix at random. I played it a lot during my Major Depressive Episode, except then it wasn’t fun, just a listless inability to make decisions. This time it’s fun. We watch a terrible eighties movie about cowboys in outer space. Eliot analyzes the personality types of each character, and for once, he does it jokingly.

  Once the credits roll, I point at him and announce, “INTJ.”

  “I just told you the captain was an INTP.”

  “No, you’re the INTJ. You wanted me to guess, remember? I was bored when you were ignoring me and so I read through more type summaries.”

  I’d spent six hours combing articles, but he doesn’t need to know that.

  He smiles. “I thought you gave up.”

  “INTJ. The System Builder.” I open my notes on my phone and read aloud: “‘People often see INTJs as arrogant, when in reality they’re just confident in their opinions, having honed their mental database of specialized knowledge.’ Totally you. ‘Obsessed with improving their methods, they will study aberrations until they unravel them.’ I googled aberration, and it means ‘a weird thing.’”

  “I know what aberration means.”

  “‘INTJs’ interpretation of their own opinions as facts can mislead them in personal relationships. However, INTJs have a deep capacity for love, and the select few to whom they devote their time and effort are fortunate indeed. INTJs want others to make sense—they are frustrated and, at worst, condescending when confronted with seemingly illogical emotional impulses.’ Ha! You!” I thump the couch. “‘INTJs do not easily grasp social rituals, due to their naturally private nature and impatience with small talk and flirtation—’”

  He pushes my phone down.

  I sulk. “But it was just getting into how much you suck at romance.”

  “So tragic that we don’t get to hear that part.”

  “Tell me if I guessed right.”

  He slings his arm over the back of the couch. “All that personality-type stuff sort of seems like bullshit now.”

  I hit him with the pillow.

  “That hurts,” he says solemnly.

  “No it doesn’t!” I hit him several more times until he’s
forced to disarm me. The pillow knocks Eliot’s backpack off the coffee table, where it spills papers all over the floor.

  “It hurts emotionally,” he clarifies. “Did you think I was invincible just because I don’t feel physical pain? Please, Samantha.”

  “That was such an INTJ thing to say.”

  “Tell me that’s not as obnoxious when I do it.”

  “It’s twice as obnoxious because you’re twice as smug about it.”

  He winces. After a few minutes, he adds thoughtfully, “It really is bullshit, though. It’s just a list of traits on the internet, and your selection bias makes you pick out the ones that happen to apply to me. Though I am obsessed with improving my methods, now that it turns out my categories aren’t accurate. Apparently the only way to learn anything about people is by getting to know as many of them as possible. It’s very inefficient.”

  “Then you better get started.” I like the idea of Eliot surrounded by friends—until I imagine all the friends as girls. Luckily the internet says he sucks at romance.

  To avoid acknowledging the implications of this chain of thoughts, I get up and gather the fallen papers. Homework, and a piece of blank notebook paper titled GOALS.

  I don imaginary reading glasses. “First goal: stop being such a nerd.”

  He leans forward and plucks the paper out of my hands. “My therapist calls her idiotic activities ‘homework assignments’ because she thinks I’ll take them more seriously. So I do what I do with regular homework, which is hand it back with nothing but the title.”

  There’s no way.

  A lot of therapists probably do that.

  “Your therapist?” I say fake casually. “What’s their name?”

  “Dr. Brown. So named due to her close relationship with bullshit.”

  I force a laugh, too late.

  I guess it’s not that weird, that we have the same therapist. There can’t be that many therapists around here. I should tell him—we could make fun of her together.

  But then I remember the passage from her book.

  I sit cross-legged on the floor. “Do you like her?”

  He shrugs. “I’ve seen her since middle school.”

  “How? Didn’t you move a lot?”