We Should Hang Out Sometime

by Josh Sundquist

  So yeah, I was different, and there was nothing I could do about it. But when you’re faced with a significantly life-altering negative situation you can’t control, you grasp at the little things you can control. The little opportunities where you can make choices for yourself. I couldn’t choose to get my leg back, no, but I could choose to ask my youth pastor about the schedule without telling him my hip-disarticulated leg was the reason I was asking.

  This is why, instead of explaining all this to Joe, I was just like, “Yeah, that’s probably good advice. But seriously, though: What are we doing after dinner?”

  Joe sighed and then smirked. “The talent show.”

  The talent show had been announced before the retreat, in case people wanted to bring their clarinet or whatever, but no one knew when in the weekend the event would take place.

  Except, now, for me. Dinner, then talent show: leg on.

  “Okay, cool, thanks,” I said.

  At the talent show, Joe Slater himself had an act, one where he awarded “Most likely to”–style superlatives. He would say someone’s name and then make a reference to something funny that had happened at the retreat, like Most likely to walk into a spiderweb on the hike or Most likely to snore, and then everyone would laugh and cheer.

  “Josh Sundquist,” he read off his list. “Most likely to ask, ‘What are we going to do next?’”

  He impersonated me using an annoying little kid’s voice. I felt a stab of betrayal, like Joe had revealed a secret I’d confided in him. But it was my fault. I had chosen not to tell him why. I was confident he would have happily given me the entire schedule printed on a sheet of paper a week in advance of the retreat, if that’s what I wanted. And if he had known, certainly he would not have made a joke about it in the talent show. People will bend over backward to be helpful and accommodating if they know it’s about your disability.

  But I had chosen to keep the reason a secret because it was about my disability. Because I didn’t want to be a burden. Because I didn’t want to be different. And ironically, this had led to both of my rules being broken. Even though I never told him why I was asking, I had clearly become a burden to Joe. Otherwise he wouldn’t have given me the “award.” That was the joke here: I had asked so many times that I had become annoying. And a burden. And because none of the other students had overheard me asking Joe for the frequent schedule updates, no one actually got the joke, so they didn’t laugh at my award like they did the others. My award was met with awkward silence, and then a smattering of applause. Which made me feel very different indeed.

  I stole a peek at Sarah Stevens. She was staring at me. When our eyes met, she looked away.

  Chapter 3

  As far as periods of life go, middle school gets a lot of hate. But there’s one really, really good thing about middle school, which is that if someone likes you, there is a 100 percent chance that you are going to find out, because he or she will tell someone who will in turn tell someone else, and after five more minutes everyone within a fifty-mile radius, including you, will know about it. And fortunately, gossip travels just as well through the social fabric of a church youth group as it does through a school.

  As it happens, I found out that Sarah Stevens liked me through instant message. I was talking to Tony, who had heard it via instant message through Sarah’s best friend, Eileen Adair. So the information was very close to the source. In fact, it had never progressed beyond the level of best friends, so it was pretty much guaranteed to be true.

  I replied to Tony with an excessive amount of unnecessary punctuation, like, ARE YOU SERIOUS!?!!!???!?!!????

  Tony was indeed serious, and furthermore, it turned out Sarah Stevens was pretty serious, too—at least serious enough that she wanted to go out with me. Yes. You read that correctly. Sarah Stevens wanted to go out with me. This bit of information, also revealed via Tony, boggled my mind. I stared at the computer screen in disbelief, my face alternating between slack-jawed shock and wide-mouthed grin.

  Sarah Stevens liked me! She liked me after all! She had lied in truth or dare—I was the one she liked!

  But as amazing as it was, none of it mattered. Because I wasn’t allowed to date until I was sixteen years old.

  Mom and Dad had always had that rule, since I was little. No dating until you’re sixteen. So from the beginning, my interest in Sarah and whether or not she liked me back had been a purely hypothetical exercise. But what if… what if… they would make an exception for Sarah Stevens?

  Conservative is the very best description of my parents, for that is what they are in every sense of the word. Not just politically and religiously (although that, too), but also environmentally (we always had a rotting compost pile of peels and skins and other food scraps in the backyard, which Mom used as fertilizer for her vegetable garden) and economically. Especially economically. For example, let’s say there’s a mouse living in the kitchen. My mom will set out one of those little disposable wooden mousetraps with a piece of food on it and catch the mouse. But rather than throw the whole mess away, like most people would, my mom removes by hand the bloodied, partially decapitated rodent carcass and then cleans, disinfects, and resets the mousetrap so she can reuse it, rather than throw away the first one with its dangling mouse appendages and spend a dollar—a dollar—to buy a new one.

  Both my parents are wire-frame skinny, my mom because she’s a raw vegan, and my dad because he’s married to one. As men grow old, the waistline of their pants tends to sink down beneath an expanding gut, or if they stay thin, their pants creep up on their chest. I’m confident my dad will fall into the second group, eventually turning torso-less, just a gray-haired head and bean-pole arms popping out of a pair of wool trousers hiked up to his armpits like a strapless dress.

  But I digress. The point is that as extremely conservative people, my parents want everything to stay the same. Or, even better, to return to the way things used to be. So, as I learned at a young age, if you need to persuade them of something, one technique is to frame your argument around the idea that you are making a case for these values.

  I made my opening statement the next Sunday while we were driving home from church in our minivan. Mom and Dad were up front. My nine-year-old brother, Matthew, was beside me in the way back, and in the middle sat my five-year-old brother, Luke, and a car seat containing our newly arrived baby sister, Anna.

  “So you know how we’ve always been friends with the Stevens family?” I asked my parents.

  I paused to allow them to mentally confirm that yes, we had indeed always been friends with the Stevenses. In fact, Mom and Dad would no doubt be remembering that the Stevenses had been in our homeschool group for a year when Mrs. Stevens homeschooled Sarah. And as I said before, Sarah’s brother Jim had shaved his head for me when I had cancer. Now he and I were in the same Boy Scout troop. Dad and Mr. Stevens were tennis partners. So obviously this was how things had always been.

  “Yeah…” said Dad, in a tone that said, I know you’re trying to set us up here, I just haven’t figured out how yet.

  “Well, I thought of a great idea to ensure that our families remain close,” I said in my best “mature young man” voice.

  “What’s that?” asked Dad.

  “I should go out with Sarah.”

  “Go out with her where?” asked Mom.

  “We wouldn’t go anywhere,” I said. “I mean, we would just be boyfriend-girlfriend.”

  “You mean like go steady?” asked Dad.

  “I don’t know what that means,” I answered.

  “It’s when you stop dating multiple people and date just one girl,” said Dad.

  “Why would you be dating multiple people at the same time?” I asked.

  “You know, like maybe you take Betty-Sue out on Friday and take Barbara out on Saturday, and then you decide you want to only go out with Barbara,” he said.

  “So you’re cheating on Betty-Sue?”

  “No—no, I said…” Dad stammered
.

  “Then you’re cheating on Barbara?”

  “No, you’re dating both of them.”

  “At the same time? Do they know about each other?” I asked, confused.

  “Yes. No. I mean, maybe they do. It doesn’t matter. Not unless you’re going steady with one of them, which means you aren’t dating anyone else.”

  “Okay, well, people don’t do that anymore,” I said. “Now you only go out with one person. No one dates more than one person at the same time.”

  “Hmm,” said Dad.

  It was not lost on me that the subject had been changed. “So anyways, can I date Sarah?”

  “We’ll have to think about it,” said Mom, her go-to phrase for a soft, kindhearted no.

  “All right, well, just so you know, she likes me and wants to go out with me, so if I’m not allowed to go out with her, that might make our friendship with the Stevens family kind of awkward,” I said.

  The friendship we’ve always had, I could’ve added, but by the way Mom and Dad glanced worriedly at each other, I could tell I’d already scored a direct hit on their conservative fears.

  In the coming weeks, additional rules and boundaries were set up “for my protection.” No touching, other than hugging, which had to be brief, no lingering. No seeing her without adult supervision. Not more than twenty minutes on the phone per day. Yeah, fine, whatever. I agreed to each of their stipulations with all the thought and care I put into reading an update to the iTunes User Agreement Terms and Conditions.

  It was a big night, one of the biggest of my life, so I chose my very coolest clothes. I wore my light blue suede skater shoes, both of them, one on each foot, because I was wearing my leg. Over the top of said prosthesis I chose my cool jeans: dark wash with a wide, straight cut. I’d bought them at T.J.Maxx for thirty-six dollars, a purchase that had required not buying any other clothes for three and a half months in order to save up—because my parents gave me a thrift-store-sized clothing budget of only ten dollars per month to buy all my clothes.2 A subcommittee composed of Eileen and Tony had arranged for this to be the night. Furthermore, the subcommittee had agreed that Sarah would say yes in response to my question. Even so, I was insanely nervous as I walked up to her before youth group started.

  Signaling that she had been waiting for this moment and wanted it to be semiprivate, Sarah took a few steps away from her group of friends, meeting me halfway across the room. She was wearing her bright red ski jacket and a big smile. I felt the effects of adrenaline as I walked toward her, real leg, fake leg, real leg, fake leg: the tightness in my chest, the constricted blood vessels, my pulsing heart pumping blood into my flushed cheeks.

  “Hi,” I said. We did not hug. In fact, we remained well out of each other’s personal space, like strangers talking on the sidewalk at a bus stop.

  “Hi,” she said, still smiling.

  “Will you go out with me?” I had rehearsed the words enough times that they tumbled out on top of each other in one simultaneous burst. Fortunately, since she had been expecting the question, Sarah was able to decipher my meaning.

  Her smile broadened, if that was even possible. “Yes!”

  I nodded a few times in thoughtful approval. “Cool.”

  I gave her a high five, like a handshake sealing a gentleman’s agreement. And then I walked away.

  I want to be clear, though: There was a lot of thinking in between those two sentences, in between the high-fiving and the walking away.

  I thought: Nice! Cool! We’re going out. So… now what? What am I supposed to do now? Hold her hand? Talk to her? But what would we talk about? What do girls like to talk about? Makeup? Glitter? I didn’t really know. I had never thought about this part. I had always thought about whether she liked me, and whether she would say yes if I asked her out. Never about what would happen if we were actually going out.

  Ergo, I walked away. Fled the scene. Hit and run.

  I found Tony. He raised his eyebrows expectantly.

  “She said yes!”

  He gave me a high five.

  But when youth group started a few minutes later, Sarah had disappeared. Just vanished.

  Part of me was sad. I had wanted to sit near her, or maybe even in the chair right beside hers, during the talk. Let other people wonder if we might be going out. That sort of thing. But a bigger part of me felt wonderfully, gloriously relieved. With Sarah gone, I didn’t have to worry about talking to her or holding her hand or wondering how I was supposed to behave now that we were going out. It was a lot of pressure, this going-out business, and not having to actually interact with my new girlfriend definitely made the having-a-girlfriend part way easier.

  The next day, while I was doing my schoolwork at my desk in my room, I thought about Sarah, how she was at school with her friends. I wondered if maybe she was thinking about me, especially now that we were going out. I wondered if she was bragging to her friends, Josh Sundquist asked me out last night! We are totally going out now! I hoped so.

  That afternoon, I went online and waited for Sarah to sign in. Finally, late in the afternoon, an instant message popped up on my screen. But it wasn’t from Sarah. It was from her BFF, Eileen.

  hi, sarah just wants to be friends, the message said.

  It knocked the wind out of me. I didn’t know what to say in response. Finally, I typed:

  Me: are you breaking up with me?

  Sarah’s BFF: well sarah is. but she still wants to be friends.

  Me: why?

  Sarah’s BFF: because she values your friendship

  Me: no i mean why is she breaking up with me?

  Sarah’s BFF: she thinks going out will hurt your friendship.

  Me: ok thanks for telling me.

  I signed off and went into my room and shut the door and cried into my pillow. My first relationship. Ended after twenty-three hours, almost before it even began. I was angry and confused and sad. Why hadn’t she told me herself? Why did she have her friend tell me? And why over instant message? She could’ve at least had the decency to ask her friend to break up with me in person, or through a carefully worded handwritten letter on embossed stationery. An instant message just seemed so casual, so cheap, like our relationship was a crumb Sarah was wiping off the table with a flick of the back of her hand. She still wanted to be friends? Really?

  A few weeks later, I deleted my instant messenger account. I was done with chatting online. It was too easy to be someone you’re not, to say things you wouldn’t otherwise. Like how you liked someone, or how you wanted to break up with them. If you weren’t willing to say it to me in person, I didn’t want to hear it from you online.

  After those twenty-three hours, our families weren’t as close as we used to be. Things changed after all. Oops. Sorry, Mom and Dad. And so I was left alone with my questions: Why didn’t Sarah give me a chance to prove myself as a boyfriend? And where had she disappeared to at youth group after I asked her out?

  HYPOTHESIS

  Subject behavior—breaking up with me approximately twenty-three hours after the initial onset of our romantic relationship—suggests that she may not have had romantic feelings toward me to begin with. This would indicate a possible error in the chain of gossip that had led me to believe such feelings existed.3

  Interview with subject is required to validate hypothesis.

  INVESTIGATION

  Chapter 4

  I arrived before Sarah Stevens. It had been more than ten years since Sarah and I “went out” for twenty-three hours. I didn’t count her as my first girlfriend. If I did, she would be my only girlfriend, and having had one twenty-three-hour girlfriend is much sadder than having had no girlfriends at all. So that’s what I told myself: I’ve never had a girlfriend. If it doesn’t last at least one day, it doesn’t count.

  That said, Sarah Stevens was still a significant blip on my romantic radar, and all these years I’d been curious to understand why she broke up with me so fast. So there I was.

  It w
as a few days before Christmas. I looked out the windows of Starbucks and saw the snow on the sidewalk. It would be a white Christmas, something you don’t see very often in Harrisonburg, Virginia. Sarah and I were both in town visiting our families for the holidays. I had sent her a message on Facebook a few days before about getting coffee.

  She arrived late, following a string of apologetic text messages about not having a car, her dad having to drive her, and his driving very slowly in the snow. She walked in wearing a beret that suggested—accurately—that she was now an actor living in New York. We hugged (no lingering, of course), ordered drinks, and sat down by the window. We caught up on the facts: She just got cast for a production of Les Misérables. What part? Cosette, one of the leads. What was her living situation? Looking for a new roommate on Craigslist. How was it being back home? Reminds her how much nicer people are here in Harrisonburg than in New York. That sort of thing. It was easy to like her and to see why I like-liked her back when I was thirteen.

  I couldn’t really think of a particularly smooth segue, so I began with, “It’s weird to think we were… you know… sort of like together for a little while there in middle school.”

  She laughed. I noticed she had this two-syllable chuckle that was always perched just beneath the surface, ready to jump out at the slightest sign of humor. Hee-HUH.

  She said, “Actually, since I was going to see you today, I went through my old diaries at my parents’ house. I found some stuff about you!”

  I had to resist the urge to jump across the table and grab her shoulders and scream, What? I’m in your diary? You read it this morning? Tellmetellmetellme!

  Instead, I responded with deliberate restraint, one eyebrow cocked in casual curiosity. Interested but not desperate. “Stuff about me, you say?”