The Infinite Noise

by Lauren Shippen

  Just like that, another semester is finished. And one with a minimum of unpleasant interactions. Also a minimum of any kind of human interaction, but having no friends seems a pretty fair trade for days with no surprises, no fights, no class periods spent crying in the bathroom. Not that I ever did that. Figure of speech.

  I step out from behind the stacks and immediately jump out of my skin.

  “Jeez,” I breathe, just barely stopping myself from clutching at my chest like an old woman. Caleb Michaels is standing on the other side of the shelf, looking far too calm for someone who was just surprised by another person in a completely silent library.

  “Oh, uh, hey, Adam,” he stammers. Caleb knows my name? I try to prevent my face from looking too obviously thrilled about that. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.” A blush blooms over his cheeks. Now he looks caught off guard.

  “No, it’s fine,” I lie, heart still hammering in my chest. “I just—I didn’t think anyone else was in here. It’s winter break.”

  “I needed a book,” he says simply, waving the copy of the collected works of Shakespeare he’s holding like it’s a novella, not the largest book in the library. I silently curse the long sleeves that are covering up his arms. “Want to get a head start on the reading for next semester.”

  “Oh, right.” I’m surprised and charmed by his diligence. He smiles sheepishly and the surprise gets edged out.

  “You know,” I start, emboldened by his smile and the quiet cocoon of the library, “you could just check out Macbeth. You don’t have to lug around every word Shakespeare ever wrote.” I nod toward the massive tome he’s holding, making even his large hands look small.

  “I know.” He laughs softly and my stomach swoops. His eyes dart toward me and he blushes even deeper before continuing. “But I figured, I’ve got some free time over the break, might as well see what the big fuss is about this guy. I’ve heard Hamlet is pretty good,” he finishes, eyes sparkling.

  “Yeah,” I laugh. “Yeah, that’s a good one.” I want to tell him that it’s my favorite, but Caleb’s eyes are fully meeting mine now and he’s smiling and I’m smiling back and time feels frozen and full of possibility. Caleb, impossibly, gets cuter the longer I look at him. The broadness of his shoulders feels softer, the clench of his jaw relaxes into a beautiful edge, and I can see flecks of blue in the green of his eyes.

  “What are you doing here?” he blurts, looking away and breaking the moment. “Don’t you have a free period at the end of the day? I thought you’d have been long gone by now.”

  “Oh, um, I—” I stutter, my brain still stuck on the moment that’s been shattered. Wait, how does Caleb know my schedule? I didn’t even realize he knew my name until two minutes ago.

  “No, sorry, it’s none of my business,” he says, his eyes getting big. “God, sorry, I didn’t mean … dammit.” He’s muttering to himself now and the blush has taken up his entire face. I have a sudden and urgent need to comfort him, to bring back the ease of just a few moments ago, which is the only reason I say:

  “I hide out here.”

  “What?”

  “Um,” I start, desperately wanting to backtrack, “no, not hide. I just … you know. Like to wait until the coast is clear.” Caleb’s breathing slows and something close to understanding crosses his face. He’s starting to smile again, softer this time, and it makes me bold.

  “You never know what uniformed sociopath is lurking just around the corner,” I say lightly. I’m expecting him to laugh or shrug or something at the dumb joke, but he just looks down, bringing his gaze, and mine, to the jacket he’s wearing. His letterman jacket.

  Oops.

  I’m about to say something more—take back the comment—but Caleb just shakes his head slightly before looking back up at me, hurt on his face.

  “I’m not—” he stutters, “I didn’t mean to—I, uh, I should get going.”

  He picks his backpack up from the floor, puts the book under his arm, and turns away.

  “No, wait—” I start weakly.

  “Have a good break!” he calls, barely turning his head to look back at me.

  Caleb rushes out, leaving the library empty once again.

  * * *

  The house is as empty as the library when I get there, which is the case about ninety percent of the time. That’s what you get when you have two neuroscientists for parents. They’re good people—and smart—but most of the time, I think they had me by accident. They love me, I know, but they love cutting into people more. How’s that for a family hobby?

  I kick off my sneakers into the front hall closet and make my way into the kitchen, not bothering to turn on the lights in the hallway. The house is wrapped in darkness and hush—the December sun having set thirty minutes ago—and I decide that the weather and the end of school both call for some hot chocolate. The encounter with Caleb still fresh in my mind, I grab our copy of Macbeth off the shelf in the library, thumbing my way through it as I put the milk on to heat. The book is well worn, a feat considering I’m the only one in the house who’s cracked the spine.

  It’s been a bit of an odd upbringing. Once I was beyond the danger age for swallowing small objects, I was given models of the human body as toys. For my tenth birthday, they handed me an anatomy textbook. A lot of people like their jobs, but my parents love medicine like you wouldn’t believe. They are endlessly fascinated by human beings and all the ways that we can be broken and fixed. Medical journals pile up in every room of our house because new information is being discovered all the time, and my parents have to learn every piece of biological knowledge that is out there.

  Thankfully, I did inherit my parents’ passion for knowledge. I just didn’t get the medicine bug. I love books, art, philosophy—all the “soft” fields, as my mother would say. My anatomy books gathered dust as I scoured through the family’s bookshelves for the rare volume on the humanities. They’ve got philosophers in spades, which is nice (something about having a “full appreciation for the human brain”) but the fiction selection basically boils down to the collected works of Shakespeare and some old science fiction, all untouched until I got my hands on them. I read Frankenstein for the first time when I was eleven and my entire world expanded outward. Probably why I have a bit of a fixation on the macabre.

  Or maybe it was just having parents who stick knives into people for a living that gave me my love for the grim and gory. Maybe that’s why I loved Frankenstein. Maybe that’s why I—

  No, stop it, Adam. Don’t go down that road.

  I take the milk off the burner and dig the cocoa powder out of the cabinet. I sit up on the counter with my hot cocoa, swinging my legs as I pull out my phone to post a picture of the perfect cup I just made. Not for the first time, I wonder what it would be like to have someone over—to make hot chocolate or bake with someone. To have someone light up the dark house.

  I roll my eyes at myself and that particular thought and hop off the counter to turn on the kitchen lights. Just because I get emo sometimes doesn’t mean I have to sit alone, in the literal dark, on the first day of holiday break. That’s a little too macabre, even for me.

  They don’t like that I’m macabre, my parents. For two people that are elbow deep in brains half the day, they have some funny ideas about how sunny-side-up their son should be. They think I should smile more, have more friends, hurt myself less. And I do. I do hurt myself less. That should be enough. I shouldn’t have to be legitimately happy on top of it. I’m in high school. No one’s supposed to be happy. If kids aren’t hurting themselves, they’re usually hurting someone else.

  I think of Caleb’s blush and furrowed brow when I said “sociopath” and feel worse than I have in a long time. Please, please, please let next semester be better.

  5

  CALEB

  “School starts tomorrow, correct?” Dr. Bright asks after a few moments of silence.

  “Yep,” I say.

  More silence. I’m getting used
to these standoffs. I just wish I was better at winning them. But Dr. Bright pins me with a stare and I eventually give in, every time.

  “I don’t wanna go back,” I mumble, face heating.

  “Why not?” she asks, like the answer isn’t obvious.

  “Because being in high school when you can feel everyone’s feelings is a complete nightmare?” I answer dryly.

  “You’ve made some good strides since November, Caleb,” she soothes. I sense it more in her emotions than her voice, and it grates. I don’t want to be soothed right now.

  “Yeah, whatever,” I bite.

  “Caleb”—there’s that stare again and the soothing hardens—“what have we talked about?”

  “Don’t deflect emotion with being an asshole,” I recite, and there’s a small, quick glow within the perfectly even Therapist Mode that Dr. Bright’s emotions operate in.

  “I don’t remember putting it quite that way,” she smirks, “but yes. When you’re overwhelmed or refusing the input from your ability, you respond with anger. And we don’t want a repeat of what happened with Tyler.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I sigh. “It’s just easier, you know?”

  “What’s easier?”

  “Feeling annoyed or mad at stuff,” I say.

  “It might be an easy way to push away the other feelings,” she tells me, “but it won’t help you process them.”

  We sit in silence again but this time Dr. Bright is the one to break it.

  “How was it being with your family the past few weeks?” she asks.

  “Um, it was good, I guess,” I say. “I mean, I feel like I’ve gotten used to their feelings, you know? So, like, I’m able to balance them a bit. But it’s not like that in school.”

  “What helps you balance your family’s emotions?”

  “Well, there’s only three of them, so that helps. And even when their feelings are annoying or whatever, I can kinda tell who they belong to. They’re familiar.”

  “Has the color system proved useful?” she asks.

  “Yeah, I guess so,” I say, thinking about how Dr. Bright feels warm and yellow right now. “Like, it doesn’t always make things easier, but it’s definitely something.”

  “Do you think that could help at school?”

  “I don’t know,” I admit. “There’s just so much. There’s too much, you know…”

  “Input?” she suggests.

  “Yeah, exactly. And so I can’t process, like, any of it, and that’s when I get overwhelmed.”

  She purses her lips and I feel the itchiness that I’ve come to know as Dr. Bright working through stuff in her head. It feels like I’m trying to solve a math problem I don’t understand.

  “The familiarity of your family’s emotions makes it easier for you to balance your ability,” she repeats. “Is there anyone at school who could do the same thing?”

  “What?”

  “Is there someone—a teammate or friend—who you feel comfortable around? Someone whose emotions you could focus on when you get overwhelmed?” The itchiness settles as she says this, like this is really a solution to my Problem.

  “Um, no, not really,” I admit. “I have friends and stuff but no one…”

  I find myself thinking of the last day of school, going into the library and knowing, just knowing, that Adam Hayes was there. And then he was so startled and his feelings were all over the place, but there was something—

  “No one…?” Dr. Bright prompts.

  “No one whose feelings fit,” I finish. “I don’t know that focusing on anybody at school is actually going to help.”

  “Well,” she says, “something to think about?”

  “Yeah.” I nod. “Something to think about.”

  * * *

  But I don’t have time to think about it, because the first few days of school are lost in a haze of other people’s bullshit. I got to English early today so that I’d have time to settle in before the onslaught of emotions, and it’s not exactly working. I have to close my eyes as the other students start coming into the room. I try to sift through the feelings; focus on the colors and try to figure out what I’m going to be up against for the next hour.

  Red. Anger. That one’s pretty obvious. And it’s an emotion that I’m super familiar with.

  Black sludge. I think that one is disappointment. But this is worse—this is dripping sludge. Hot and cold all at once. Ugh, I hate this one. I feel it all the time but I can’t figure out what’s different about it. And it makes me want to jump off a bridge.

  Soft blue. It settles behind my eyes and makes my head heavy. Exhaustion. Dr. Bright tells me that being tired isn’t a real emotion, but I don’t buy it. There’s a certain kind of tired—a bone-deep weariness—that definitely qualifies as an emotion.

  Off-white. Soft. Suffocating. Sadness.

  Red again.

  Black sludge.

  Black sludge.

  Black sludge.

  God, it’s literally the first week of the semester, can’t people just chill?

  Pins and needles under my skin. My breathing picks up. Traffic-cone orange. Stress.

  Oof, a lot of stress.

  And then.

  Quiet. Blue-green. Not sharp like red and orange, but deep. Endless. It fills me up, empties me out. Clears out the sludge, the pins and needles, but makes me tense. Restless.

  I open my eyes. Find his.

  Adam.

  6

  ADAM

  Caleb.

  Why is it that, for the past week, every time I walk into a room, he’s staring at me? It’s like he has some sort of radar—he catches my eye wherever I go. If I didn’t know any better, I’d assume that some dark, omniscient power was out to make my life miserable. Not that I am particularly bereft in the misery department. But this just seems especially cruel.

  His eyes. His fucking eyes. Sad and curious and beautiful and angry; like he’s angry that I’m there. Like he resents my existence. Part of me wonders if he’s still upset about the stupid library encounter last semester—the staring started just after that—but Caleb doesn’t seem like the type to hold a grudge. And yet here we are, a new semester, and his eyes are always on me.

  So who’s going to turn away first? Every time I want it to be him—I want to stare him down until he gets scared and has to look away. There’s something about him that makes me want to fight. But every time his eyes find mine, they look straight into me and make mincemeat of my insides. So I don’t fight; I cave. I’m always the one to look away first.

  Even if I wanted to fight, I couldn’t hold my own against Caleb Michaels. Not many people could. Tyler has been significantly subdued since the fight, and that’s Tyler—I thought the guy was fearless. I take one more quick glance at Caleb and try, for the thousandth time, to imagine him breaking a guy’s nose. I know it happened, but there’s something about it that just doesn’t compute. I don’t feel threatened when I catch him looking at me. I feel …

  Never mind. Not a productive train of thought.

  I walk toward the back of the room to my desk—conveniently and purposefully located behind Caleb so I don’t have to look at his face. The back of his neck is still visible and provides its own unique brand of torture, but it’s an easy battle compared to his eyes.

  Enough about him. What are we doing today? I squint at the board. We’re still on Macbeth. Good. No romance in that, not really. Just murder and politics, the best distractions.

  “I can’t believe he said yes! That’s amazing.”

  “Gee, thanks for the vote of confidence, Caitlin.”

  Perfect. Jessica and Caitlin have settled into the desks behind me and seem particularly excited about the day’s gossip. Yay, hooray.

  “Sorry, you know what I mean,” Caitlin says, trying to soothe her. “It’s just that taking the quarterback to Sadie Hawkins is kind of a big deal.”

  “I know!” I can hear the smile on Jessica’s face. I guess she asked Ryan to the dance, then
. Even I have to admit that they’ll make a nice-looking couple—with their shiny hair, tan skin, and perfect Colgate smiles. It’s exhausting.

  “Now it’s your turn,” Jessica says. “You need to grow a pair and ask him!”

  “Ugh, I know,” Caitlin says, “and I will. I promise. Just … let me get through this week. I need to nail this Macbeth project and then I’ll ask him. Seriously.”

  “Okay, okay,” Jessica concedes, “but you need to stop stressing about this paper. You already have an A.”

  “And I’d like to keep it that way, thank you very much.” I can’t see her, but I just know Caitlin is preening while she says this. I find her early-morning chatter irritating beyond belief, but the girl is smart. And she never lets you forget it.

  “Fair enough. Just don’t wait too long.” Jessica’s voice drops to a whisper. “Caleb’s one of the cutest guys in our class. Someone is gonna snatch. Him. Up.”

  I freeze. Mr. Collins has turned to us and started speaking, but all I hear is blood rushing in my ears. I should have expected this—I know I should have—but it still catches me by surprise.

  Caleb is the cutest guy in our class, even if I would be the last person to admit it (though the first one to think it). But he’s never dated anyone. I’ve never seen him so much as check out a cheerleader. For a while, I thought maybe I’d gotten crazy lucky, maybe Caleb didn’t want to chase girls like the rest of the football team, but now I’m not sure. He doesn’t check out anyone. Since the beginning of the school year, he’s gotten quiet and kept to himself and goddammit if that doesn’t make him even more appealing.

  7

  CALEB

  God, I feel sick to my stomach. What is going on? Ever since he sat down, Adam’s emotions have been a total roller coaster. Surprised, sad, angry, annoyed, and now disappointed again, but a little different. The sludge fills my veins and then freezes over. Hardens. What is he thinking about?