Carry the Ocean

by Heidi Cullinan

  His hand fell on my back again.

  “Jeremey, you can’t have a panic attack right now.”

  It was such a ridiculous statement I almost laughed, but it was too hard to breathe. It got easier, though, when he rubbed my back. The touch was hesitant, as if he didn’t know quite how to do it—but I still liked it. Emmet had a way of cutting through my fog, and I leaned into him.

  He let me. He doesn’t always want to be touched, but he was touching me now. He kept a heavy hand on my back, and then fingers brushed my hair. He crouched beside me, and he stroked me. Awkwardly, but he did it.

  It was wonderful. It made me, as the panic attack ebbed, a little aroused. And when he leaned into me, my leg against his groin—I realized he was aroused too.

  I looked up at him—and froze.

  He had his eyes shut, his fingers tangled in my hair and his erection pressed into my leg. His expression was still flat, but very focused.

  He was beautiful.

  Eventually he opened his eyes and looked down at me. His gaze was heavy-lidded, and for once he didn’t look away.

  He touched my lips with three fingers, and I shuddered.

  He kept his fingers there, tracing the outline of my lips. His gaze was off to the side, but somehow I could still feel him looking intently at me.

  “I need to tell you something important.”

  I nodded, trying not to dislodge those fingers.

  He rubbed the underside of my bottom lip. “I’m gay.”

  My heart flipped over. I’d figured as much, given the erection against my leg, but it was still a rush to hear it out loud.

  His fingers stilled, and I looked up at him. He kept his gaze on my mouth. “I’m not supposed to ask if you are.”

  I laughed—that was Emmet. Asking a question by saying he couldn’t ask it. Well, I could tell him, obviously. But it was still difficult to say the words. I made myself speak anyway. “I am too.”

  He smiled—again not meeting my gaze, but it made him so beautiful. “Good.”

  I touched his arm tentatively.

  He jerked away. “No light touches. But you can touch me harder.”

  I put my hand on his arm, a heavy touch.

  “Yes.” His hand on my back tightened. His erection against my leg grew as he leaned farther into me. “Jeremey, I’m attracted to you.”

  The words thrilled me though they didn’t tell me anything I hadn’t been able to figure out for myself. They let the feelings I’d been holding back come forward, made me bold. I gripped his arm. “Let’s…go to my room.”

  But he pulled away. “I can’t go into your room. It’s too messy.”

  Too…messy? I blinked at him. “You’re angry because my room is messy?”

  “Yes. I wanted to come see you, but your room is a disaster. I can’t be in there. No wonder you’re nervous. Nobody could feel okay in that room.”

  I didn’t know how to respond. It was true, my room was messy. The worst part was I’d picked it up before he came. In fact, I’d worked quite a long time at it. It had taken me all morning, and I’d had to take a nap afterward.

  I’d done my best, and it wasn’t enough. It might never be enough for Emmet.

  We could never live together, be together, because I was too messy. I was a mess.

  My breathing came sharp and fast, and I wanted to cry. Then I felt stupid for acting this way, which made me more upset. I shut my eyes, feeling the spiral opening in front of me, a dark slide leading into nothingness. Any second my mom would come upstairs, and wouldn’t that put the icing on the cake—

  Hands, touch—the sharp scent of Emmet filled my senses. When I opened my eyes, he was staring at me, right into my eyes, and I held still, breathless, transfixed.

  “Jeremey, we need a code. I can’t understand why you’re upset, but when you’re upset, you can’t tell me. Why are you upset right now?”

  Why was I upset? God, where did I start? Even thinking it overwhelmed me. How was I supposed to say it out loud?

  Emmet opened a notepad app and handed me his phone. “Can you type it?”

  Before I met Emmet, I would have said that was silly, typing when someone sat right in front of me. But it was commonplace for us, and I took the phone with shaking hands, tapping out my whirling, churning feelings as best I could. To Emmet, me needing to type because talking was too difficult wasn’t an invitation to comment on my freakiness. It was simply an obstacle to overcome.

  I’m upset because you’re upset about my room. I can’t clean it any better than this. I’ve tried. It was hard for me to do this much. This is my best, and my best isn’t good enough for you. I hesitated, shaking, then let out an unsteady breath as I finished. I want to be with you, be in my room with you.

  In fact, I’d long since kicked guilt over crushing on an autistic boy out the window—clearly he was ten thousand times more put together than me—and had developed some serious fantasies about making out with him. Now that I knew those fantasies could be reality, they were in overdrive.

  I kept typing. I don’t know how to fix this, and I’m afraid there’s no fix, and— I stopped, overwhelmed, and passed his phone back, all but dropping it into his hands.

  His response at first was no response. He read what I’d written, then stared at it a long time, not saying anything. Not rocking. Eventually he typed something too, and passed it over to me.

  E: I will help you fix it. Let me help you clean your room.

  What? Clean my—what? I frowned and typed back. He’d edited our conversation with a J and an E before our comments, so I put a J: before my reply.

  J: Why do you want to clean my room?

  He frowned at my comment and typed another quickly.

  E: You said that was the problem. I want to fix the problem. It will be tricky because it’s messy and that bothers me a lot, but I can get through it. I’m strong.

  J: But why would you want to clean my room?

  Now he looked exasperated. E: Your room is messy. I want to kiss you in your room, but I can’t until it’s clean. So I want to clean your room. Because I want to kiss you.

  I let my breath out in a rush.

  I kept staring at the words he’d typed, feeling dizzy looking at them. In my mind’s eye I saw Emmet pressing me to my bed, touching my face, my hair, kissing me. It was funny, because in my head he smiled at me in a subtle, rakish manner he never would in real life.

  I realized, though, he did smile at me like that, in his own way.

  I wanted that kiss. I wanted to do whatever I had to do in order to get it. But in the same way Emmet’s autism defined him, my depression and anxiety defined me.

  J: I’m embarrassed to have you clean my room for me. I should do it myself.

  Emmet made a subtle, quirky facial gesture which I’d come to learn was Emmet for raising one eyebrow. E: But you said you did your best. I thought you meant you couldn’t do more, like it was the same as the store, that your room was being too loud. Am I wrong?

  No, he wasn’t—I shook my head, too moved to type this time.

  He typed more. I don’t mind cleaning. You shouldn’t be embarrassed. I enjoy putting things in order. It makes me feel happy. It would make me happy to help you, Jeremey. Let me help you.

  I felt so overwhelmed—but in a good way. I took the phone. J: Emmet, you’re very good to me.

  He smiled, his stretched, lopsided smile, which I loved. He didn’t look me in the eye, but he didn’t need to. I understood.

  I typed one more time. When you kiss me, it will be my first kiss.

  It felt a little terrifying to say, but only a bit. Emmet read my note, smiled again, though not as wide. E: My first kiss too.

  Feeling bold, I typed, J: I want my first kiss.

  Now his grin was as wide as his face, and he hummed as he typed. E
: Then we’d better start cleaning.

  Chapter Seven

  Emmet

  Here’s something only Althea understands, and it’s why Jeremey’s room upset me so much. People think only humans and animals have feelings, but it’s not true. Everything does. And all the things in Jeremey’s room, the papers, the baskets, the books, the dirty clothes—they were all sad and angry, like Jeremey.

  When I look at an object, I can feel what it’s feeling. All things have feelings. I have a hard time knowing what people feel, but objects are a different story. When I was little, I had a favorite pen and a favorite pair of shoes, but I felt bad because the other pens were jealous, and the other shoes were sad when I didn’t pick them. I had two pillows on my bed, and I had to rotate between them each night, or they would pout.

  Althea and my mom argued a lot when I was little about whether or not this was okay. Althea said she did the same thing and she turned out fine. Mom said it was different for me, that Althea shouldn’t encourage me, and they went round and round about it. Usually Dad and I left the house to get ice cream.

  Now that I’m older, I don’t worry about the chair I’m not sitting in being jealous. That’s crazy, trying to make everything happy. They could have explained that instead of arguing whether or not knowing everything has feelings is okay. But picking up my room is a way to take care of my things. My room is never messy. As soon as I get out of my bed, I make it, even to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. When I’m done at my computer, I line up the keyboard and the trackpad. Everything is in its place. It makes everything easier, makes the things in my life happier. Makes me happier.

  A clean room would make things easier for Jeremey, but it made sense that cleaning was a challenge for him, because sometimes everything is difficult for Jeremey. I had to tell my mom to stop offering him choices for refreshments when he came to our house. He always worries he’s choosing the wrong thing. Noises are bad too. It doesn’t take much to overwhelm him.

  Jeremey’s room had to overwhelm him simply looking at it. I stood in the middle of his rug, trying to decide where to start. He sat on the edge of his bed, shoulders hunched.

  The bed. I decided that would be a good beginning.

  He helped me straighten the bedding, though I showed him how to make it perfectly, the sheets iron-straight, the pillows laid out just right. He had a headboard with shelves, which I thought was a bad idea since it made it too easy to be messy, but I didn’t want him to feel self-conscious again, so I simply straightened it.

  He had a lot of garbage in the room, things he needed to throw away but couldn’t. Jeremey did understand about things having feelings, but they overwhelmed him. We made piles of things to save, and things to throw away, and things to put away. I told him what nobody ever told me, that you couldn’t make all the things happy and could only do your best. That sometimes we have to say goodbye to things and miss them instead of enjoy them. I noticed the longer we worked, the more things he put in the throwaway pile, moving them sometimes from the saved pile. The more he put in that pile, the more he relaxed.

  “This is so good,” he kept saying. “It’s so easy with you helping. How do you do it? Why can’t I do this too?”

  I couldn’t answer that. It was complicated, plus I wanted to keep working, and I don’t like to talk while I work. Though I knew we weren’t going to finish that day. I suggested we stop, because he looked overwhelmed.

  “We can clean tomorrow,” I told him. “I’ll come over during all my green schedule times.”

  This only made him agitated, though. “I don’t want to stop. I want to fix it. I want—” He looked at my lips, and I knew he thought about kissing. But then he looked away, with a sad face. “I felt normal, while we were cleaning. I want to feel normal. I want to be normal.”

  I felt so many things for Jeremey right then. I wanted to explain to him that he was normal, that we both were, that we were just different. I wanted to tell him I understood about feeling frustrated, about not wanting to wait, but I needed to explain about rushing. I didn’t know how to talk to him about the kissing. He needed me to speak, but I couldn’t even with the notepad.

  That was when I thought of another way I could talk to Jeremey.

  On my phone, I pulled up YouTube and went to my video favorites. I played him “Carly’s Cafe”.

  Carly Fleischmann is a real girl, slightly younger than me, who has autism. She has severe autism with motor and speech disability, and she can’t talk unless she uses a computer. Until she was eleven, no one knew she could speak at all, until she used a keyboard to share words. Now she uses her computer all the time. She’s been on talk shows and has a lot of followers on Facebook and Twitter, and she’s written a book with her dad.

  She also has a YouTube account, and one of her videos is a kind of ad for the book, where it explains a bit of what it’s like to be autistic, for her. It isn’t the same for me exactly, but it’s still a good video about how disability makes you feel trapped. I thought about how hard it was sometimes for Jeremey to talk, of how much better it was when he typed, so I showed him “Carly’s Cafe”.

  The camera faces out like it’s Carly. We listen to her talk inside her head about how much she’d like a coffee, and she makes funny comments about the barista and other people in the cafe, but everyone talks to her as if she’s stupid. They don’t ask if she wants coffee, they offer orange juice or cocoa, and then they plan an afternoon differently than the one she wants to have. She can’t say what she wants, so she gets upset, and suddenly everything is too loud. The coffee grinder, the people talking, the water—everything is too much. Her sister leaves, and Carly reaches for the abandoned coffee, but her dad takes it away. Then he asks how he can help her, and the camera pulls back and you see her face.

  Carly’s face is wrong. It doesn’t match the smart, sassy voice she has in her head. It’s this way every day for her, thinking things no one can hear. No one understands how different she feels inside from how she looks on the outside. I understand that. Feeling things I can’t express. Like how much I wanted to explain to Jeremey how Carly and he and I are all normal, that it’s fine, he doesn’t have to be upset. But I couldn’t, so I let Carly show him.

  Jeremey cried.

  When the video ended, he took the phone from my hand without asking and replayed it. I watched his face this time, trying to read it. It was so complicated, and I couldn’t. I could tell he felt a lot of emotions, but they were too difficult for me to read. Eventually he put the phone down. He shut his eyes, took a deep breath. When he spoke, his voice was rough and shaky. “That’s how I feel. All the time. All the time.”

  I wanted to tell him I felt that way too, sometimes. I didn’t know how, though. So I talked about Carly. “She has a book. I have it. You can borrow it. I have it on Kindle and in paperback. Also audio.”

  He put his hand on my leg. He started to give a light touch, then remembered and gave a heavy one. It made me feel good he remembered. “Thank you for showing me.”

  I rocked a little. “Nobody is normal. Life is hard for everybody, sometimes.”

  “Yes, but not everyone understands like you do, Emmet.”

  I was the one who had so many feelings then. Loud and hot and cold and spiky and soft. I wanted to tell him, but I couldn’t. For the first time in a long time, it wasn’t my brain octopus slowing me down. This was me unable to talk, unsure of how to tell Jeremey how I felt. It made no sense. He’d told me he liked me too, but those feelings were louder than my octopus. Louder than me.

  To be with Jeremey meant managing my autism, my octopus and my feelings. It would be a great deal of work, all the time, more intense than the most complicated math problem in the world. Except this was so much more wonderful than any math problem could be.

  For two weeks, every afternoon I wasn’t in class, I went to Jeremey’s house to help him clean his room.
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  Gabrielle still didn’t like me, but she loved Jeremey’s room getting cleaned. She always stuck her head in to ask us if we needed anything, and when I told her we could use some plastic storage bins, she asked me what size and went to the store to get them. She seemed impressed when I knew the exact dimensions without measuring. She tried to feed me, but I get nervous about other people’s food, so I always told her no thank you. I usually brought a water bottle and tiny cooler with a snack, so I was fine.

  Jeremey was excited to get his room cleaned. By the end of the second day his headboard and space under his bed was all cleaned out, and I noticed he’d made his bed the way I taught him. When we got done cleaning every day, we sat on his bed together.

  We didn’t kiss, but we were both thinking about it.

  I wanted to kiss him, but I was nervous.

  I taught him ASL instead. The alphabet, to start, and several common words. He enjoyed it, so one evening I brought him over to my house and gave him my old flash cards so he could practice. I showed him where to find online videos too. We watched several together, so I could help him make sure he had his hands right.

  When the woman in the video showed the sign for I love you, we both blushed.

  This embarrassment was becoming a problem, and I didn’t understand it. We were both gay, and he’d said he wanted me to kiss him. Why was it harder now to try doing it than it had been before? I tried to look it up online, but nobody seemed to know. I asked on one of the autism message boards, but they only said I should tell Jeremey my feelings and ask permission to kiss him. I had told Jeremey my feelings, but the idea of asking if I could kiss him made me, my feelings and the octopus act like one of those cats in the old cartoons that sticks to the ceiling.

  I kept quiet, continuing to help him clean, teaching him ASL and some of my own signs. I showed him all my emotions shirts and told him what they mean when I wear them. I made him a small booklet with all my personal signs and shirts so he could study me. I asked if he had anything about himself he wanted me to learn, but he only shook his head and looked away.