by Karen Rivers
“Ugh,” you said. “Hang on.”
You threw up again, the acid burning your tongue, somehow stinging inside your nose. Again and again, until you were empty.
You were in Paris to play in a band festival, which turned out to be no different from every band festival in America that you’d ever been to. Parisian band students were just as awkward as all the other ones, maybe even more so. Their instruments all creaked and groaned and they, too, coughed and sneezed and waited too long to start and dropped their music. They all sucked. Or maybe it was just that everyone was good, which made it seem like no one was. The first-place band was from Sweden. They were a small group, mostly blond and thin and pale as ghosts. Their music wafted around the room like it, too, was thinner and more ethereal than everyone else’s.
Your band placed third, no thanks to you. You only pretended to blow into your flute. The music that your friends played rose and fell around you and you sat there, faking it, and hating your hangover and wine and hating yourself for hating Paris and for not being self-assured and silkily confident or blond and wafty. Hating yourself for not measuring up to everyone else is one of your main things, right above Googling possibly deadly diseases you might have and collecting weird death stories. Everyone needs hobbies! That’s what your mom always says, even though she probably wouldn’t classify hypochondria, a fascination with the dumb ways people die, and self-loathing as the best options.
The smell of your stale metallic spit inside the flute’s mouthpiece made you suddenly need to puke again, halfway through The Prisoner’s March, a clangy piece of music that Mr. Appleby claimed to have composed. It was long and loud and in a minor key. You had to run for the exit, nearly falling into Charlie while he performed his deafening solo saxophone riff. You made it only as far as a potted plant that was stage left. Mr. Appleby caught your eye. He shook his head slowly, depressed by you and your weak stomach and lame, noiseless flute performance. “Hey,” he mouthed.
You are why your band didn’t win.
Later that day, you all took a tour of the Eiffel Tower and you fainted on the lower observation deck after you’d fallen behind the group. Something very odd happened; it was like your brain was being prickled by pins and then everything went white in slow motion. When you came around, a French security guard was nudging you with her foot. “Ça va?” she said. No one seemed very worried, so you got up woozily and pretended nothing had happened. Pretending awkward things didn’t happen is your superpower.
It came to light later that Kath wasn’t with you while you were unconscious because she was having real, actual sex in a bathroom with her crush object, the Right Max. That’s why you lay there, dreaming, while sandaled tourists stepped over you, unconcerned. (What did they think? That you were pretending? That you were actually enjoying lying with your face pressed on the glass, Paris dizzyingly far below you?)
Kath thinks you’re mad because you’re jealous, which you aren’t, not even close. The Right Max is really no better than the Other Max: His freckles crowd out his skin and he is always picking at the cuticles of his fingernails. Worse, he has dry lips that look like they’d crack and break open on impact. His breath always smells like onions or old coins.
He’s definitely not in the same league as Josh Harris.
Not even close.
Later that day you saw the Right Max making out with Melody Hartwell in the lobby of the hotel. Either Kath lied to you, or Max is a worse human being than you previously thought. But you don’t care, because you fainted at the Eiffel Tower and she wasn’t there to save you. She put someone else first. She put a boy first. And that broke the ONE rule you two have always had: Girls before squirrels.
She picked a squirrel.
Over you!
And you were in real, genuine distress!
He wasn’t even a good squirrel.
In that split second when you woke up, your cheek pressed against the cold smooth floor, the feet of everyone disregarding you, you were entirely alone. Abandoned.
You’re also mad about the wine. The wine had been Kath’s idea. Maybe you’re allergic. Or maybe it just doesn’t mix with your arthritis medication.
Anyway, Max is shorter than she is. She can do better. She will do better. One day. No way is she going to end up with Max Onion-Coin Breath. Not a chance. He has a future selling cars at his dad’s dealership.
But Kath?
Kath has a future in everything.
3.
The plane dips and you shriek, but under your breath, like a silent dream-scream, paralyzed in your mouth. What comes out sounds like a burp or a quack, a duck with indigestion.
Perfect. You roll your eyes at yourself, add one more thing to your mental list of the ways in which you are the Most Awkward Girl Alive.
That could be a great subtitle for a graphic novel about you, which maybe you should write instead of this pretty embarrassing thing about Josh Harris. Elyse Schmidt: The Most Awkward Girl Alive. It would be more honest.
In the book, you’d wear a cape, but you’d always be tripping over it. It could end when you fall out of a tree, trying to save a kitten. You quickly sketch a possible cover for it in your sketchbook and then slowly begin coloring in the letters with a crosshatch of black ink. There’s something about the way the pen makes its soft, inky sound against the paper that calms you down, slows your pulse, makes you less aware of the fact that the only thing separating you from certain death is the metal tube that you’re sitting in.
As if to emphasize this, the plane lurches again.
Josh Harris stirs but doesn’t wake up. You wish he would, just so you wouldn’t feel so alone, here at the back of the plane, behind all the action. You’re incredibly, mind-bogglingly terrified of flying, as it turns out.
“Huh,” you say, out loud. You chock it up to yet another phobia for your lengthening list. By the time you’re old, your list will be long enough to stretch around the world. Of course, by then, you’ll probably be agoraphobic and housebound. You’re already scared of crowds and of being touched.
You breathe in deeply. Too deeply. Are you hyperventilating? Better question: Is the plane safe? Kath could talk you down, but you aren’t talking to Kath, which makes you even madder, that she could leave you alone back here, quietly freaking out.
You should have guessed that you would be afraid, seeing as how you’re scared of so many things: sharks, heights, crowds, murderers, horror movies, being stuck in an elevator (unless you’re with Josh Harris), accidentally eating a poisonous mushroom, ghosts, the impending apocalypse, being kidnapped and kept prisoner in some creep’s basement forever, meteors hitting the Earth, what will happen if the sun burns out. Oh, and also cats. No one understands that last one, but it’s the way they look at you with their slitted eyes and how they seem to be plotting your demise, or at least waiting for you to die from natural causes so they can eat you.
You stand up with your head bent awkwardly at the neck to avoid hitting it on the bulkhead. You need to see better, so you can assess if anyone else, like you, is wishing they had a paper bag to breathe into. You make yourself breathe through your nose. It’s mouth breathing that causes hyperventilation, which causes fainting. You learned this from Google when you searched for “why do I get so dizzy when I’m anxious.” Life must have been very hard for people before Google, you think.
Anyway, no one is doing anything very interesting. Mostly people are watching the same movie on their screens. Dozens of Benedict Cumberbatches tip their hats and wink. Some people are eating. A mom is comforting a baby who is crying. A lot of people are asleep. It all looks normal, or what you assume normal to be on a plane, so there must be no reason to worry, which does nothing to stop you from worrying.
You hate this plane.
You hate traveling.
But it’s better, you suppose, to find that out now than later, after you’ve pi
nned your identity on being a free-spirited, traveling hitchhiker, sleeping in hostels and hoisting a backpack, exploring Southeast Asia and having short romances with bearded boys from Australia and Scotland. You’re kind of relieved about this, actually. It’s one more person you don’t have to be. There are so many options. Ruling any of them out makes the whole prospect of “deciding who you’re going to be” slightly less arduous. Besides which, no one gets murdered more frequently than free-spirited hitchhikers.
You pop your earbuds back in and crank the Hoppers. Josh Harris has been wearing a Hoppers T-shirt and you’d thought that, maybe, the Hoppers could be something you have in common, a band you could go see together. If. When.
The trouble is that they are terrible. The violin bows scratch chalkboard-squeaky against the strings, sawing back and forth until your teeth clench so hard your jaw pings. You pause the sound, but you leave the earbuds in, dialing through some options. Your dad has uploaded his favorite song, which is by Guns N’ Roses: “Sweet Child O’ Mine.” He used to sing it to you all the time when you were a baby. You smile. Your dad is a goofball and you miss him and you can’t wait to see him. When the song ends, you hit pause and listen to nothing. Nothing is probably exactly what you and Josh Harris have in common, after all. If only you could get sort of comfortable, maybe you could sleep. You shift but you’re careful to keep your arm on your side of the armrest. You’re careful not to touch him. Because, Josh Harris. Josh Harris! If this were a graphic novel, there would be an exclamation mark floating over your head for the entire duration of the flight. You flip the page in your sketchbook and quickly draw yourself in this very seat. Then you draw an exclamation mark over the you on the page. You widen your eyes. Then you draw Josh Harris, staring at you moonily. You draw a thought bubble over his head.
Elyse Schmidt is adorable! you write.
Ha. You wish.
You scribble over it quickly and thoroughly. Where is the line between a crush and full-on crazy? That’s the question Kath keeps asking that you should also ask yourself.
You allow yourself to look at him properly for the first time since you sat down and then you blush. Again. You can feel the heat of it creeping up your neck, onto your cheeks, making your eyes water. You look out the window to distract yourself. There is nothing to see but white clouds thinning and thickening and thinning again, which reminds you of how you fainted at the Eiffel Tower, how everything first turned white and then the whiteness wouldn’t let you go. Even thinking about the Eiffel Tower makes you light-headed and pissed off. Now you’ll be like one of Pavlov’s dogs, fainting every time you see it on TV or in a movie. Great. You put your sketchpad into the seat pocket in front of you and stare at it, your favorite pen clipped to the front. Then you take it out again. You can’t stop yourself.
The graphic novel you are slowly, almost accidentally, creating is called ME AND JOSH HARRIS: A LOVE STORY, a title that was sort of meant to be a joke but also not exactly funny. How can something you want so bad be a punch line?
“That’s bananas,” Kath said, when you showed her. “You should at least change his name.”
“I can’t. Then it wouldn’t be real. Anyway, it feels more proactive than mooning. It’s like that book The Secret. I can secret it into being true. Maybe. Theoretically. Anyway, isn’t it better to turn it into, like, creative output? It’s not like I’m going to get it published or something. It’s not like he’ll ever see it.”
“Imagine if you do sell it!” She started laughing. “And his dad orders it for the bookstore and then says, ‘Son, this book has your name on it!’ Then they open up the first page and realize that it is him, and you, and—” She had to stop talking because she was laughing too hard to continue. Then she made that “you’re nuts” sign with her finger, twirling it at her temple, crossing her eyes.
“Stop!” But you were laughing, too.
It was funny. It is funny.
But it is also maybe true love.
You flip to a clean page and start drawing a random scene. It’s like drawing your daydreams. It doesn’t mean anything, it just comes to you, a fleshed-out scene, and you feel compelled to put it on paper. This one is you and Josh Harris at some kind of a dance. You’re wearing a strapless dress. He’s wearing a tux but the tie is half hanging off. If Kath saw it, she’d get the giggles again. “You have no idea what having a boyfriend is really like!” she’d say. “I love eighties movies, but real relationships are not like Molly Ringwald and Andrew McCarthy staring longingly into each other’s eyes! Fully half of any relationship is feeling annoyed that the other person hasn’t texted you or if they gave you a cold sore or something. Did you know cold sores are really herpes?”
Kath is an expert because for three months—August, September, and October—she was “in a relationship” with Charlie “your hair is like baby feathers” Martin. Poor Charlie. She didn’t sleep with him, though. She barely even let him touch her. If she did have sex with the Right Max, it’s big news. BIG NEWS, all caps. You don’t feel old enough to have sex. You aren’t ready. How can she be ready when you’re not?
Anyway, this is just fiction that you’re drawing. It’s fantasy, not real life. It doesn’t have to include the boring parts or the irritation, which you know exists. You live with your parents, for goodness’ sake. They fight constantly. They can turn a perfectly normal question like, “Is there any orange juice in the fridge?” into a reason to draw up divorce papers.
But you don’t want to marry Josh Harris. You want to fall in love with him. That’s different.
You go back to your drawing and add confetti falling from the ceiling. You draw people watching you dance, clapping like you’re winning some kind of dance contest in an old-fashioned movie, where you’ll get a trophy and your photo in the local paper. You give yourself Molly Ringwald’s hair.
Sometimes you think you were born in the wrong generation. Everything about the now is too techy, too modern, too fast, too soon. You barely even like texting. If you had a choice, you’d always “forget” your phone. It just seems like so much trouble to stop what you’re doing, to type things out painstakingly with your thumb, which is usually aching. Maybe the people who like it just don’t have Junky Idiotic Arthritis.
You draw a big banner on the page: THE GREAT 1980s DANCE-OFF. You add some ruffles to your dress to make it look more ’80s. You make your hair bigger. You give Josh Harris wild, huge hair, but it’s obviously a wig, slipping sideways on his skull. Come to think of it, there aren’t a lot of black people in those ’80s movies.
You’ll have to tell Kath when she’s talking to you again. She must have noticed. How many black people were there in Say Anything? Sixteen Candles? Pretty in Pink?
Zero.
“That sucks,” you mutter, and add a bunch more people of all different races into your drawing, but you don’t add Kath. “You aren’t invited,” you tell the back of her head. “You can go hump Max in the bathroom.”
You keep your body angled to hide the pad from Josh Harris. If he were to wake up, he would see what you are drawing and you would die. Instantly. People die in weird ways all the time. They say that no one has ever died of embarrassment but you know differently. A maid in the 1800s was caught stealing in front of a group of people and she collapsed right there, dead. The cause of death was officially recorded as “embarrassment,” although maybe it was less true embarrassment and more adrenalin and probably something like Long QT syndrome, which you know a lot about because you’re pretty sure you have it, and one day in gym class, you’ll keel over dead yourself.
Anyway, if Josh Harris knew how obsessed you were with him, you’d get a pretty big jolt of adrenaline, too, and then . . . flatline.
You close the sketchbook. Sitting here for eleven more hours seems impossible and also like heaven, because of him.
The window has a tiny hole in the outer layer of it. You put your nose clo
ser to it, to try to breathe fresh air. The air outside must be as sharp as mountain air, or what you imagine mountain air would be like, which is just better: cleaner, colder, fresher. You press your finger against the little hole. The window feels ice cold. The hole is definitely there on purpose, but why? It seems dangerous to have that there, a pinhole opening between you and the open sky. You picture it spidering open, like a windshield crack, then collapsing, the vacuum it created pulling you out into nothingness.
You want to say something about the hole to Josh Harris.
He’s still sleeping. You want to touch him so bad. Before you can stop it, your hand casually reaches out on its own accord and rests on Josh Harris’s leg, which jumps like the frog that you had to pith in biology class two weeks ago. You quickly pull your hand back and frown at it.
You should probably pith your hand. Are hands pithable?
You say the word pith out loud, which is strangely satisfying. Pith, pith, pith. It’s a much gentler word than murder. You think about karma and about how that frog died, his tiny chest heaving, looking for air that wasn’t there. You think about Josh Harris, who is so stupidly gorgeous, even when he’s sleeping. Maybe especially when he’s sleeping.
Thinking about Josh Harris is the background soundtrack of your life, an entire album called Thinking about Josh Harris.
The one good thing about Paris is that you have a whole new set of memories of Josh Harris to add to your growing collection. Moments when you caught his eye; casual things he said to you. Like, “Schmidt, did you see Fitzy throwing up those poor, small snails? They died for no reason. Tragic, right?” Then the time he caught your eye across the restaurant where you were picking at a plate of dry chicken (wasn’t French food supposed to be sooooo good?) and held it for a good ten seconds too long, then grinned and you knew exactly what he meant. The highlight: Sharing an elevator with him (and five other people) and during the ride down to the lobby, he rested his hand on your head in a way that made you never want to move again. That had to mean something. What did it mean? Does Josh Harris like you? Maybe a little? Or is it just that you’re so short and he’s so tall that it’s where his hand naturally landed?
