What to Say Next

by Julie Buxbaum

  “I think your signal is in Morse code,” I say with a smile.

  “When I was eight, I taught myself Morse code. The clicks are highly irritating.”

  I lean over and for no reason I can think of—maybe because I have nothing smart to say, maybe because with David I feel like someone else entirely, I want to be someone else entirely—I take a lick of his ice cream. The vanilla part. He stares at my lips, as shocked as I am.

  “Sorry,” I say. “I liked your order better.”

  “The cold medicine is not for me. Just to be clear,” he says.

  “Wasn’t worried.”

  I wonder what would happen if I looked into a mirror right now. Who would be staring back at me? Did time just leap forward with that single lick?

  —

  Later, when I’m home in my room working on a problem set, though it’s long past time to go to sleep, I receive my very first text from David.

  David: I am usually anti-text, but I thought I’d make an exception.

  Me: I’m honored. Why the staunch anti-text stance?

  David: I have trouble conceptualizing the idea of words traveling like this. And I worry that how they sound to me might sound different to you. I’m not good with tone.

  Me: I should know to expect a real answer from you. But still. It’s surprising.

  David: When you ask a question, you get an answer.

  I take my phone and snap a quick selfie. Me in my pajamas, hair in a bun on top of my head, giving him a thumbs-up. Far from a pretty picture, but I think it would offend David if I put a filter on it. I press send.

  Me: Is it easier for you if we communicate in pictures?

  There’s a long pause, and I wonder what’s happening on the other end of the phone. Did his mom just come into his room asking why he hasn’t yet gone to bed? Is he looking at my picture, disgusted by the messy, pudgy girl who keeps overstepping his boundaries? I keep thinking about how I leaned over and licked his ice cream cone, and hate that person, the me of just a couple of hours ago. Presumptuous and flirtatious, when I had no intention to be either with David. I didn’t realize I could like myself even less than I did this morning.

  I wait another interminable minute.

  David: :)

  David: That was my very first emoticon. Or emoji. Must Google to learn the difference.

  Me: Finally something I know and you don’t!

  David: There are lots of things you know and I don’t. You obviously have a very high social IQ, for example.

  Me: Thanks, I guess. You obviously have a very high IQ IQ.

  David: 168 at last check.

  Me: Sometimes I can’t tell if you are joking or being serious. Why aren’t you sleeping? It’s late.

  David: Something else I’m not so good at.

  Me: Me neither. Especially lately.

  David: What do you do when you can’t sleep?

  I pause. Realize if I were texting with, say, Gabriel during those two weeks we went out last year, I’d respond with something casual. A nonanswer. Maybe an emoji of a lamb to show counting sheep. Or a funny GIF. There would be no reason at all to stop and think about the truth.

  Me: Right now, homework. But usually I think about the accident and what happened to my dad.

  David: Why would you do that?

  I stop writing again. Look at my fingertips. Wonder what they have to say. I seem to act on impulse around David. Nothing premeditated. Who licks someone else’s ice cream cone? Honesty is not the best policy.

  Me: Ever press a bruise?

  David: Of course.

  Me: Well, it’s partially that.

  I put down my phone and then pick it up again.

  Me: But it’s also like a puzzle. I want to understand when it could have been stopped…if it could have been stopped. What was the very last second someone should have put their foot on the brake? It doesn’t matter, really.

  David: Of course it matters. It’s an open loop. I hate open loops.

  Me: Me too.

  David: I could help you figure it out. If you really want to know.

  Me: You could?

  David: Of course I could. It’s not rocket science. It’s just physics.

  I pull up the picture of the crushed Volvo on my phone. I force myself to look at it, and my whole body shudders. And then I close my eyes and hit send.

  At breakfast, Miney is again wearing her odd-duck pajamas. She’s sulking because my mom woke her up this morning, even though she is legally an adult and has nowhere she needs to be. The cold medicine I bought is still unopened on the countertop. Something is wrong with Miney, but I’m starting to think it’s not congestion.

  “Be careful with the texting. You could put yourself in the friend zone,” she says.

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “She licked your ice cream cone. That’s called flirting.” Miney freaked out last night when I told her about that. She kept repeating, No way, no way, over and over again and clapping her hands. To which I had to say, Yes way, yes way, until she believed me. It was her idea to start texting Kit in the first place, and I have to admit now that I’ve started doing it I’m not sure why I was ever opposed to the idea. I no longer have to suffer through that thick silence while I translate what people are saying into what they mean and then wait again while I process the appropriate thing to say next. Leave it to modern technology to find a brilliant work-around to my social problems. With the obvious exceptions of my parents, Miney, Kit, and Siri, whose hands-free capabilities are helpful when driving, if I could I would text all the time and never speak out loud again. “You want to kiss her, right?”

  “What?” I have lost track of our conversation. I was thinking about how if Kit called me her friend, then I would have multiplied my number of them by a factor of two. And then I considered the word flirting, how it sounds like fluttering, which is what butterflies do. Which of course looped me back to chaos theory and my realization that I’d like to have more information to provide Kit on the topic.

  “Do. You. Want. To. Kiss. Her?” Miney asks again.

  “Yes, of course I do. Who wouldn’t want to kiss Kit?”

  “I don’t want to kiss Kit,” Miney says, doing that thing where she imitates me and how I answer rhetorical questions. Though her intention is to mock rather than to educate, it’s actually been a rather informative technique to demonstrate my tendency toward taking people too literally. “Mom doesn’t want to kiss Kit. I don’t know about Dad, but I doubt it.”

  My father doesn’t look up. His face is buried in a book about the mating patterns of migratory birds. It’s too bad our scholarly interests have never overlapped. Breakfast would be so much more interesting if we could discuss our work.

  “So if you want to kiss Kit, that means you want her to see you like a real guy,” Miney says, and points at me with her cup of coffee. She’s drinking it black. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with Miney. Maybe she’s just tired.

  “I am a real guy.” How come even my own sister sees me as something not quite human? Something other. “I have a penis.”

  “And just when I think we’ve made progress you go and mention your penis.”

  “What? Fact: I have a penis. That makes me a guy. Though technically there are some trans people who have penises but self-identify as girls.”

  “Please stop saying that word.”

  “What word? Penis?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you prefer member? Shlong? Wang? Johnson?” I ask. “Dongle, perhaps?”

  “I would prefer we not discuss your man parts at all.”

  “Wait, should I text Kit immediately and clarify that I do in fact have man parts?” I pick up my phone and start typing. “Dear Kit. Just to be clear. I have a penis.”

  “Oh my God. Do not text her. Seriously, stop.” Miney puts her coffee down hard. She’ll climb over the table and tackle me if she has to.

  “Ha! Totally got you!” I smile, as proud as I was the other d
ay for my that’s what she said joke.

  “Who are you?” Miney asks, but she’s grinning too. I’ll admit it takes a second—something about the disconnect between her confused tone and her happy face—and I almost, almost say out loud: Duh, I’m Little D. Instead I let her rhetorical question hang, just like I’m supposed to.

  —

  Day five and Kit is again at my table. Which means she has sat here, with me, for an entire week. Five consecutive days. This makes me elated, a feeling that is as good as it is unfamiliar, especially at school.

  “So I just want to say something to you and it’s kind of embarrassing, but I think I just need to get it off my chest,” Kit says, and I can’t help it, I look right at her chest, which is small and round and perfectly proportional. I have imagined what she’d look like without her shirt on, what is hiding there under her bra, which I guesstimate is a size 34B, and it takes effort for me not to think about that right now.

  Of course, it’s disrespectful to think about her breasts when she is sitting directly across from me and trying to tell me something. I’ll think about them later, when there’s no chance of her knowing about it.

  “I’m sorry about licking your ice cream cone yesterday. That was sort of, I don’t know, inappropriate,” she says.

  “You don’t have to be sorry,” I say, wondering if this is the equivalent of her taking back her flirting, and a tiny, immature part of me wants to scream out: No backsies! “I’m happy to share my ice cream with you anytime.”

  I look at the food in front of me—my chicken sandwich, a bag of chips, a banana—and wonder if I should offer up something as a gesture. I like sharing food with Kit. It makes me feel like we are in cahoots, an expression that had little meaning to me until recently.

  “Okay, then,” she says.

  “Okay,” I say, though I have no idea what it is, exactly, we have just agreed on.

  “You’ll be proud of my lunch. It’s exceptionally well balanced.” Kit takes a paper bag from her backpack and presents me with one small cup of Greek yogurt.

  “That’s it?” I ask, suddenly worried that she is not taking proper care of herself. I preferred it when she was overeating. “No leftovers today?”

  “Nah. We had cereal for dinner last night. It’s like my mom has forgotten how to cook or something. Not that she cooked all that much before, you know, before, but now it’s like feast or famine in my house. Excessive amounts of takeout or nothing at all.”

  “Do you know how they make Greek yogurt?” I ask her.

  “No, and I don’t want to know,” she says, and the smile still on my face gets a little bit bigger. I like that Kit tells me what she does and doesn’t want to talk about. It keeps me from going on about stuff she’s not interested in, which according to my mom and Miney is one of my biggest problems: I don’t always notice when other people do not share my fascinations.

  “Okay, then,” I say, a callback to her earlier use, since that technique is often used in movie banter. “We could discuss string theory instead.”

  “Nope. Not that either.”

  “We could start on the Accident Project,” I say, because I am eager to help Kit understand what happened to her dad. I’ve read all about the five stages of grief and I assume this endeavor means she’s already moved passed denial.

  “Not here. Not at school.”

  “Okay.”

  “So that history quiz? If you tell me it was easy I will smack you.” I think about Kit hitting me, and it doesn’t sound altogether unpleasant, because it would mean her hand would have to touch my face. We have only touched twice. On Monday, when I helped her stand up in the concession hut, and yesterday, when she linked her arm with mine on Main Street.

  “It wasn’t hard,” I say. And then she does it. She really does it. Kit leans across the table and playfully taps my face with the palm of her hand.

  One early summer morning, when I was four, my mom took me to the Y to go swimming. Before then I had refused to get into the pool: too many kids screaming, and splashing, and throwing around fluorescent polyethylene foam cylinders—Miney called them “noodles,” but they were neither edible nor harmless. That day the pool was deserted and I was wearing Wonder Wings, which disappointingly bestowed neither the gift of wonder nor of flight and were tight and unfamiliar. I complained, already imagining the red ridges they would leave behind on my arms, but then my mom held my hand and we stepped into the water, and I felt that first cold gasp. I somehow got the courage to put my face right into the pool, all the way past my ears, and the world went blue and dimmed and muffled and finally, finally quiet.

  This is my home, I remember thinking. This. Here. Where there is room to breathe but no air. This is my home.

  And that’s exactly how it feels when Kit’s palm touches my face. Like swimming for the very first time. Like discovering the magic that is water. Like coming home.

  It turns out clichés are clichés for a reason—they are true. And this one is most definitely true: You never know what you’ve got till it’s gone.

  Jack and I are in my dad’s den, which is half office, half man cave, and it smells like before in here. We are looking for papers. A life insurance policy, information about our mortgage (though I don’t even really know what a mortgage is), bank account passwords. All important stuff Jack claims will likely be found in a single file. My mother, who has clearly reverted back to stage one, denial, or maybe pre–stage one, bacon, has taken to her bed, stuffed with an array of pig products. She’s left us alone to this masochists’ exercise.

  Too many memories in here. On my dad’s desk, there’s a photo of me at the age of eight proudly holding up a rainbow lollipop the size of my head at Disney World. One of my dad and me all dressed up at my elementary school’s father-daughter dance, which I turned around as soon as we walked in so I didn’t have to look at it. Another of just him and my mom, on their honeymoon, looking ridiculously young and in love, my mom’s arms, still elaborately hennaed from the wedding, thrown around my dad’s shoulders on top of a mountain. And last, my favorite picture of my family taken at my mother’s fortieth-birthday party, which is now face down: My dad is holding me on his hip, even though I’m ten and way too big to be carried, and we’re all laughing at a joke he just cracked about my mom getting too old for him. We look happier than anyone deserves to be.

  Jack and I shouldn’t be in here violating this sacred space, but my mom needs our help. When I was little, I used to beg to play in this office, right here on the beige carpet by my dad’s feet. I’d promise—cross my fingers, hope to die—not to make any noise and to let my father do whatever mysterious things he came in here to do. Of course, I never kept my mouth shut. I’d ask inane questions—did he know that octopus blood is blue? that male sea horses carry their babies?—just because I wanted to hear my dad’s voice, I guess.

  I loved the sound of his voice: deep and gravelly. The sound of home.

  “Sea horses can carry up to two thousand babies at a time, though it’s usually closer to fifteen hundred. And octopus blood is blue because it has a special protein to make them able to live in extreme temperatures. Now out, Kitty Cat. This is a no-kids zone,” my dad would say, ushering me through the door.

  I tell myself that it’s okay to be in here. That I’m not a kid. Not anymore.

  And my father’s blood, it turns out, was neither blue nor red. It was a coppery brown. The color of dirty pennies.

  —

  Jack and I work in silence. We have three bags: keep, donate, trash. Occasionally one of us will pick something up, like the random silver rabbit my dad used as a paperweight, and ask the other with a wordless shrug where it should go. Keep, I point, more times than I should. It’s not lost on me that I have no problem staying quiet in here now. The room seems to demand it.

  I tear up when I find a file marked Kit. Inside, there are ten years’ worth of my report cards kept chronologically, pictures of my mom and me, the certificate declaring me a N
ational Merit semifinalist, the project I did for Culture Day in kindergarten, where I drew my family holding hands and colored my dad in with a peach crayon, my mother with a brown one, and me half and half, divided straight down the middle. On my forehead, I drew a Christmas tree bindi. The picture became a running joke that my left side is Indian and Sikh and my right is American and Episcopalian.

  “Get your left side ready,” my dad would joke. “Mom is taking you to temple tomorrow morning.”

  This file is proof of that which I already knew: Our lives were good. Maybe even perfect.

  And then, in a simple folder, I see a five-page, single-spaced legal document. I read it. There must be some mistake. This cannot be what I think it is. Jack sees my face and comes to read over my shoulder.

  “Oh crap,” he says. “You shouldn’t. I mean, I didn’t know he even…Kitty Cat, don’t read that—”

  “My name is not Kitty Cat!” I yell, though this is not Jack’s fault. It’s my dad’s.

  On the top of the page are written the words Petition for Divorce from the Bonds of Marriage. I may not officially be a grown-up, may not be able to accurately define the word mortgage, but I am not stupid. I know what it means. And I know what this word means too, found under a section entitled “Grounds” in underline and bold: adultery.

  —

  I run up the stairs two at a time and bang on my mother’s door.

  “Mom!” I scream, and run into her room before she even says to come in. The tears are flowing down my face, and I hate myself for it. I’ve kept it together for five weeks, have not let a single person see me cry, and it’s this that finally makes me break. Half of my friends have been here. Annie’s parents got divorced. Jack is divorced from Katie.

  Marriages fall apart all the time, but I never thought it would happen to my parents. They seemed above that somehow.

  And then it hits me that ironically there are no real consequences. My dad is dead. I don’t have to deal with two homes and complicated weekend arrangements and awkward Thanksgiving negotiations. This changes nothing about my future.