Love & Other Carnivorous Plants

by Florence Gonsalves

Smiling, she stops the car. “I’m just kidding. I promise there won’t be any more tests for the whole weekend.”

  I breathe a sigh of relief. “Good.” I take my backpack off and get into the passenger’s seat. She leans over and kisses me hard on the lips, which sends my heart into overdrive again.

  “Watch out!” I lean away from her and the door digs into my back. “My dad is probably dressed up as a curtain trying to see what we’re up to.”

  She rolls her eyes and peels away from the curb. “Danny, you are way too paranoid. We’re, like, five houses away from yours and besides: No guts, no glory.”

  “I don’t have any guts.”

  “Yes, you do. You just have to stop ignoring them.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “Okay, are you ready for the manifesto of the weekend?” Bugg asks when we make a pit stop at a creepy gas station. The pumps seem a hundred years old and the ice cooler looks like a place to store dead babies—babies killed by the girl in charge of the cash register, who’s staring at us and twirling an unlit cigarette with her acrylic talons.

  “Uh, I think so.” I skirt a used condom that’s stuck to the pavement like gum.

  “Good. Twizzler?” Bugg holds the pack out to me while she fills up the tank. I nod and take one, then she reaches into her back pocket and starts reading from a piece of notebook paper.

  “The manifesto goes like this: During this trip there will be no body whomping, body wishing, or body whining. There will be no talk of the future and the amorphous garbage heap that appears to be our adult lives. There will be no mention of failure in the conventional sense, which prohibits talk of pre-med, pre–college degree, pre–fun sucked out of the rest of your life. Failure may only be mentioned in terms of failing to give a flying fuck about everything everyone else cares about. And lastly, most importantly, anything not fun is banned, strictly prohibited, exiled, and so on. In the extremely unlikely event that we do encounter something not fun, you brought the EpiPens, right?”

  “You mean a hypothetical EpiPen, right, for our severe, hypothetic allergy to things that are not fun? Because if you have an actual allergy to something, we’re going to be screwed. All I have are these.”

  We get in the car, and from my backpack I take out the two Bic pens I labeled EPI # 1 and EPI # 2 with Sharpie.

  Bugg clutches my makeshift medicine to her chest. “You’re my kind of girl, Danny.” Even though it makes no sense because objectively speaking I’m very dull, I’m starting to believe that somehow, miraculously I am her kind of girl. As she pulls out of the gas station, I decide that unless there’s some hidden excitement I can’t see in myself, it’s safe to assume that girls like Bugg and Sara need someone like me: a flat surface off which they can shine.

  When she’s back on the highway I happen to glance at the dashboard. “Do you have any idea what the speed limit is here? This isn’t the autobahn, you know.”

  Bugg lets her hair out of its ponytail. “We have to drive fast while we’re young because our nucleus accumbens will never be this large again.”

  I watch the curls swirl around her like a frizzy aura and try to figure out what the hell she’s talking about.

  “Did I mention I was a neuro major before I dropped out?”

  “You didn’t, but I invite you to use normal terms.”

  “The nucleus accumbens is the pleasure center of the brain,” she starts, as if a nucleus accumbens is as well known, as, say, an elbow. “It’s biggest when you’re a teenager but after about twenty-five it starts to shrink. So basically nothing will ever feel this good again. Not driving fast, not having sex, not eating pistachio gelato. This is our time, Danny. You have to let it consume you.”

  “I don’t know if I believe that.” I’m certainly being taken over by one part of my brain, but I don’t think it’s the nucleus incubator or whatever. “Besides, I’d sincerely like to believe that this isn’t the prime of my life.”

  “Google it if you don’t believe me. It’s also why, as a cohort, we’re more likely to take risks. It’s not that we don’t know any better. It’s that our rewards are greater.”

  I tighten my seat belt and wish she’d put hers on.

  “One day I’ll have to stop smoking cigarettes and selling weed and living off my parents’ money, but now is not that time. Right now fun is the only worthwhile objective. We hardly have the cranial capacity for much else.”

  We finally get to the house on the Cape where we’re apparently going to be having all this fun. We park in the driveway, which is paved with crushed shells, and Bugg takes a big suitcase out of the trunk.

  “How long are we staying again? Because if I recall, you insisted I bring only a backpack.”

  “Relax, Danny. I had to bring more supplies than you did, being the master planner and everything.” She gets the key to the house from under a fake rock and we go inside. “Home sweet second home,” she says, turning the lights on, and I try to take it in without seeming provincial.

  Every room is full of weird, expensive-looking art, particularly the living room, which houses a nearly life-size sculpture of an octopus. The ceiling and floors are wood, which makes the whole place smell like a log cabin but in a nice way. I keep my mouth from gaping open and follow Bugg upstairs to the master bedroom, where there’s a hammock swing hanging from the ceiling. She plops down in it and opens the window so we can hear the ocean.

  “This place is perfect,” I say, then walk over to the wall behind her and squint at a photo in a thick gold frame. “Is that you?”

  “Sure is. Right before my parents made me go to fat camp.”

  “I wish my parents would send me to fat camp.”

  Bugg plants her feet on the ground and says sharply, “You think you have it hard, but there are people in the world who are more than ten pounds overweight. Having been one of those people, it sucks when you complain about being fat when you’re not.”

  I want to grumble that it’s still hard. That part of what makes it so hard is that I don’t technically have anything to complain about. Everything wrong with me is entirely in my head. I look at my feet, shifting back and forth on my heels.

  She goes on. “I’m not ashamed that I’m still overweight, or that I used to be more overweight, as if it’s some moral failing not to be a size six.”

  “Obviously it’s not a moral failing,” I agree, but isn’t that how I’ve been treating it?

  “People should mind their own business about other people’s bodies, including their own body.”

  “Okay, okay, I’m minding mine.”

  It feels like our first fight but without the satisfaction of her doing anything wrong. Fights are stupid when you’re the only one to blame.

  Just as it’s starting to feel like this trip won’t be much fun after all, Bugg gets up and opens the French doors onto a roof deck. “Come on, this is the best part. It’s only big enough for two people and maybe a bottle of wine, which I happen to have.” She goes into her suitcase and takes out a bottle and cups. “Not that I drink, but this is a special occasion. Look.”

  We take our shoes off and I tilt my head up. There’s no light pollution, just stars and lots of them, like someone dumped a jar of sugar onto the sky. I hold my cup out as she opens the bottle and pours me some of the pink bubbly liquid. Then I take a sip and try to get my eyes to adjust to infinity.

  “It makes me feel so small, but I love it. Every time my parents try to guilt me into getting a ‘real job,’ I remind myself that they don’t have all the answers. They’re just as tiny as I am.”

  “That must suck. My parents smother me with unconditional love, so I take it upon myself to lay the pressure on.”

  She pats my head and I don’t think she’s angry anymore, though her voice is thick with condescension when she says, “Being driven is an ego trip, Danny.”

  “Well, sorry I’m not enlightened yet.” I pace back and forth, and the shingles are scratchy under my feet. “You know what, fuck enlighten
ment. I’d just like to have one pleasant afternoon.”

  We sit down and she crosses her leg over mine, giving me the chills. “Let’s play a game.” She doesn’t wait for me to respond. “How about truth or dare?”

  I take a gulp of wine. “Truth or dare gives me anxiety. What’s the point in playing a game you can’t ever win, but have ample opportunities to lose?”

  “Because it’s fun. If you don’t do the dare or don’t answer the truth, you have to drink, okay?”

  “But sometimes wine makes me throw up.”

  “Okay?” she asks again.

  “Fine.”

  She perks up, and really it’s very dangerous to be around someone so beautiful. “Truth or dare?” She scoots closer to me, giving me minor heart palpitations. “Truth or dare, truth or dare, truth or dare?” she sings.

  I don’t know which is worse. I’d do a pros and cons list but it’d probably end up being a list of cons. I go ahead and tell her something true to loosen me up. “I feel like I do this great impersonation of an onion and it works well with most people, but you’re so determined to cut through every last layer.”

  She wrinkles her nose. “Onions are gross. Can’t you be a layer cake instead?”

  “The metaphor doesn’t work like that. Plus, cake makes me hungry.” I’m about to say more, but in light of our recent conversation, I figure I can spare us both the self-deprecation. This is going to take some getting used to.

  “Fine. But you still didn’t choose. Truth or dare?”

  I can’t wriggle free from her gaze, but if I’m being honest with myself, I don’t want to. “Truth.”

  “Wrong choice,” she says, swirling her wine then tilting her glass back.

  “You’re not the Goddess of Truth or Dare. You don’t get to determine my truth-or-dare fate.” She inches closer to me and my lips tingle where she’s kissed them maybe a hundred times total. Not that I’m counting. I drink a little more and the wine makes me feel warm and relieved, sort of like when you pee yourself, but without the damp embarrassment.

  “Dare, then,” I say and try to get a full breath in. The energy between us is charged and it’s about 96 percent sexual. I’m a little afraid of it: hands shaking, chewing at the inside of my lip scared of it.

  “I dare you.” She pauses for suspense. “Tell me the whole story behind St. John’s.”

  “That’s not a dare! That’s a truth.”

  “I know, but I thought I might need to dare the truth out of you.”

  I feel a pinch on my arm and slap a mosquito trying to suck me for my last drop. “Can I have more alcohol first?” I ask. “This is the sort of game you need to warm up for.”

  She looks into her empty cup. “Screw it, let’s do it.”

  We go downstairs and she steals wine from her parents’ wine cellar—wine cellar—as well as a mega straw from, like, 7-Eleven. She plops it in the bottle and offers me a sip when we’re back outside. We go sip for sip until the bottle is halfway done, and when we’re nice and tipsy she goes, “I think I told you a few weeks ago that I’m not technically supposed to be drinking? It’s what landed me in St. John’s both times. Well, technically attempted suicide got me there, but I wouldn’t have tried anything if I weren’t drunk.”

  “Oh, shit,” I say, instinctively taking the bottle from her hands. “Should we stop?” I do recall that she said technically she shouldn’t be drinking, but how was I supposed to know that technically meant she had a serious alcohol problem? And technically, does that mean I’m a bad influence on her because we’re drinking now?

  “No, it’s fine. Drinking and depression is just a bad mix sometimes.”

  I try to get a read on her, but the light from the house isn’t enough to see much. Plus, when you’re tipsy everything serious seems much less so.

  “This past time was my second time at St. John’s, because I got insanely drunk and threatened to jump out of my ex-girlfriend’s window, apparently. I was blacked out so I don’t remember it.”

  I swish the wine in my mouth, not knowing how to respond to something like that. “Er, the one I met?”

  “That’s the one.” She takes the bottle from my hand. “And before that I tried drinking a cocktail of Benadryl and highlighter fluid.”

  “But why?” I look over at her and try to figure out which part is the messed-up part so I can take it and save her from herself.

  She shrugs. “I wanted to see if I could glow in the dark.” Her eyelashes are casting a shadow on her cheeks, and I try to see her pupils through the darkness.

  “But how could you ever not want to live? You’re so beautiful and smart and talented.” For the first time I realize I’m kind of lucky, in a screwed-up way. Though at risk of rotting teeth, nothing that got me into St. John’s was a matter of life or death. I was sick of myself, sure, but I never wanted to not be a self at all.

  “It’s so stupid,” she says, looking away from me and bringing her knees into her chest. “Like I was built with a self-destruct button.”

  “I know what you mean.” I feel around my chest as if I can locate mine. “It’s crazy how the little rotten part can go in and spoil the whole fruit.”

  I try to keep myself from blinking so that I can really see her, see all her hurt and all her light and how they’re not separate things. “You’re staring at me so intensely,” she says, laughing, and for the first time she looks something that I can’t quite place.

  “Sorry! I’m trying to be a good listener.” She tilts her head and I decide that what she looks is fragile. I look down at the bottle of wine with the straw sticking out of it. “Are you sure it’s fine that we’re drinking? You’re not gonna pull a Virginia Woolf and go walk into the ocean, right?” Suicide jokes probably aren’t in high demand, but I don’t know how else to talk to her about something so serious.

  “Nah, I’m all better now,” she says, chewing on the straw. I look at her dubiously. “Seriously. Besides, I need a little depression or my poems are cotton-candy shit. All artists need darkness, don’t you think?” Bugg pulls a pre-rolled cigarette from her pouch of tobacco.

  I watch her light it and sort of want to try a little. “That sounds like a bullshit excuse, but I don’t know. I don’t do ‘art.’”

  “Sure you do. I’ve seen you scribbling in your journal, and the stuff you’ve been working on in Cynthia’s class is getting good.”

  The smoke is thick as it leaves her mouth. I try to watch it disperse, but by the time it enters the night it’s wispy, then gone.

  “I don’t know what my thing is,” I say. “Nothing stands out as my hokey new-age passion like writing does for you and tennis does for Sara. I guess I’ve been too occupied trying to be Valedictorian of the World. Also, can I try that?” I ask, and she gasps theatrically. “What can I say? You’re a bad influence.”

  I take over her cigarette, inhaling, exhaling, and suppressing my nausea. When I realize I’m not going to throw up, I kind of like the buzzy feeling in my head.

  “My turn with the cigarette and your turn with the St. John’s story,” Bugg says cheerfully. I shake my head and she takes a last drag then puts the cigarette out, scarring the gray of the roof darker. “How about a new dare, then?” She doesn’t wait for me to answer, which I’m seeing as a trend. “I dare you to kiss me.”

  My heart short-circuits, if that’s a thing a heart can do. “That’s even worse than sharing loony bin stories,” I say, not because we haven’t done it before but because I’ve never initiated anything. I’ll probably miss and nab her in the lower jaw and be sentenced to my virginity for the rest of my unarousing years.

  She pretends to clutch her heart. “Ouch! Well, fine. Have it your way. I’m going to change into pajamas.”

  I watch her go and try to talk my heart out of beating so fast, but all that goes to shit as soon as she comes back out wearing this maroon satin nightgown thing that makes it impossible not to look at her.

  “That is not pajamas,” I breathe. She
sits down next to me and her cinnamon and cigarettes smell mixes with what I hope is my shampoo smell and not my sweaty armpit smell.

  “What’s going to happen tonight? ’Cause like I said before I’m not very good with surprises and I think maybe we should talk first or wait, no, let’s not talk, maybe—”

  She puts my hair behind my ear. “I’m going to kiss you now before you talk yourself further up your own asshole,” she says. “Okay?”

  I nod and close my eyes. She puts her lips on my lips and I fall into the dream of her.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  It’s nothing like the times we’ve kissed before. I mean, it is, because it’s the same parts and stuff, but being in an unfamiliar place makes it feel like I’m someone unfamiliar too. It’s the sort of kiss you lose all sense of time and place in, where space bends around us and leaves us to ourselves, whoever we are.

  “Come on,” she whispers.

  “Where are we going?” I look around the roof at the two empty bottles of wine and realize I’m quite drunk.

  “To the bed, silly.” She pulls me back into the house.

  In what’s probably her parents’ bedroom, I wrap my arms around her neck and draw our bodies closer together. Her back is soft and smooth and I try to undo the hook of her bra, but I’m starting to think my fingers have become lobster claws. She takes pity on me and unclasps it, then in a gracious survey of the situation, takes her nightgown off too. I’m left with the very manageable task of turning out the lights. We sit on the bed side by side.

  “Take your dress off,” she says.

  “It’s a smock,” I whisper, but I’m kind of buying time. Normally I try not to be naked even around myself.

  “Are you okay?” she asks. “Do you want to stop? None of this is mandatory.”

  “No, no, I know.” I’m trying to figure out how you tell someone they’re about to swipe your V card. She traces the outline of my lips with her fingers and I notice they’re trembling a little.