The Infinite Noise

by Lauren Shippen

  He waves his hands above his head and spins around goofily. I can’t help but smile.

  “Oh joy,” I laugh, rolling my eyes. “Just what I wanted.”

  My dad does one more twirl, his eyes twinkling, and I’m reminded of all the ways that he and my mom used to make learning fun when I was a kid. I feel my smile get bigger and a knot in me loosens.

  “It’s good to see you laugh, Adam,” he says, smiling warmly at me.

  I know he doesn’t mean it as a jab—I know he’s just happy that I’m happy—but I’m suddenly self-conscious of my own joy. Oh, right, this is what this feels like. Why is this usually so hard for me to get to?

  My smile cracks just a little and I feel the water start to wash over me again, pressing me down. I watch the small collapse reflected in my dad’s eyes.

  9

  CALEB

  I hate this I hate this I hate this I hate this I hate this I hate this I hate this—

  “Mr. Michaels?”

  Mr. Collins’s voice snaps me out of my hamster-wheel brain and I look over to his desk to see him giving me a pleading look, like his eyes are telling me, Just say something, kid, you’re making an ass of yourself. Because right now I’m standing up at the front of the class, silent, my sweaty palms making the ink smudge on the papers in my hands.

  Oral presentations are not a strength of mine. I’m nervous already—I don’t like public speaking of any kind—but everyone is giving their presentations today so everyone is nervous. And now I have Mr. Collins feeling nervous for me, which is a whole weird different thing than just feeling someone else’s emotions. Feeling when someone else is anxious is one thing, but when they feel that way on my behalf, it’s like I get stuck in this weird feedback loop where I’m nervous and then I’m nervous that I’m nervous and then I get self-conscious about being nervous and that makes me more nervous and … well.

  I hate this I hate this I hate this I hate this I hate this I hate this I hate this I hate this—

  “Shakespeare’s Macbeth is a grim contemplation of fate versus free will—”

  I’m reading on autopilot and my voice is shaky. It makes me feel so small and stupid. My hands are trembling and my mouth is so dry and I hope the sound that’s coming out is coherent because I’m pretty sure I’m blacking out from the stress.

  My body feels like it’s filled with bees. Bees that are moving through the molasses in my veins and using the sludge to build a hive in my stomach. At any moment, I’m going to move my mouth to form the word “Banquo” and a whole swarm is going to come pouring out instead, attacking the class and earning me an F.

  At least then I wouldn’t have to finish this goddamn presentation.

  10

  ADAM

  “—so, yeah, um, on the fate side, we have the actions of the—the Three Witches…”

  Oh god, I hate this. He looks so uncomfortable and I can hear the nerves in his voice and it makes me want to both run away and hide and also go up there to give him a hug. Caleb isn’t the type of guy who swaggers through the school like the hotshot that he easily could be, but he’s confident. He has every reason to be: rising football star, reasonably good student (or at least, he used to be), nice guy, solid family, crazy good-looking. How could he not be beloved?

  Seeing him like this—anxious and unsure of himself—is like seeing a bird with its feathers plucked clean. There’s something naked and vulnerable and wrong about it. I don’t get why he’s so scared. English is the easiest AP by far, and we all know that oral presentations don’t count as much toward your grade as the essay assignment. I know a lot of students hate giving presentations, but he seems freaked beyond reason.

  Caleb keeps clenching his hands, making his already crumpled notes wrinkle even further. He’s barely looking at the pages, his eyes darting around the room like he’s expecting someone to leap out from the shadows and attack him at any moment.

  “As for Lady Macbeth, we can see, that, uh … we can see…”

  His eyes widen and he looks frantically back at his paper—oh god, he’s lost his place. This is like watching a slow-motion car crash, except the person behind the wheel is the cutest guy in your class, who can raise the temperature of the room a few degrees by lifting the corner of his mouth in a smile, and watching him crash and burn is maybe the worst thing anyone could witness.

  He’s tripping over his words as he looks up in terror at the class. And for some godforsaken reason, he’s now staring right at me. Again. I’m holding on to my notebook for dear life, feeling the edgings of it cut into my palms, hoping that either I’ll pass out or he’ll pass out or the whole class will just drop dead, but he looks so scared that all I can do is stare back and try to silently communicate, You can do this. I believe in you. And it’s true. I do. My entire body is full of the wish that he gets through this, that he doesn’t give anyone reason to make fun of him like they make fun of me, that he doesn’t have to feel like crap when he leaves this classroom. Every atom I contain wants to see him succeed, and with that anxiety comes just the slightest bit of relief—like air is filling me up for the first time in days.

  When I walked into school today, I’d been numb to the frantic stress around me. Now, I’m boiling over with nervous energy and the strange relief that comes with feeling something for the first time in days. Watching Caleb struggle is painful but also a much-needed jolt of adrenaline.

  I’m completely frozen in place, worried I’ll be trapped in the amber of this stress-filled moment forever, when his shoulders relax slightly and he looks back at his notes and continues. The whole thing takes maybe seven seconds, but it feels like a hundred lifetimes. As he gets back into a groove (or as much of a groove as Caleb can get into when giving a presentation, I guess), I’m a giant exhale personified. I feel wrung out, like I just absorbed all his stress simply by watching him go through that moment of panic. And god, I still have to give my own presentation.

  I hate this. And I smile, just a bit, because that’s something.

  11

  CALEB

  Wow, Adam is really good at this. I mean, I knew he was a bit of a brainiac, but he just got up there and opened his mouth and all this super-smart stuff started coming out in this easy, confident way that I’ve never seen him pull off around, you know … other humans.

  I guess we’ve never been in a class where we’ve had to give presentations before. We shared a math class for a few years, but then he got onto the advanced track and now I think he’s in AP calc, which I am for sure not. The only other subject we have together this year is Latin and you can’t really speak Latin, so it’s not a class big on oral presentations, thank god.

  It’s weird, we’ve been in school together for five years now, at least, and I don’t know that much about him. His parents are big-deal doctors or something and I guess he wants to do medicine too because he’s taking all the AP science classes with Caitlin. She gave her Macbeth presentation first, to the surprise of no one, and completely nailed it. I like Caitlin—she hangs out with the team sometimes and she’s smart and intense in a way that’s sort of comforting. I don’t have to try so hard with her because she always seems to know what she feels. Sometimes the emotions get really big and make me feel out of sorts, but mostly she’s chill.

  Adam’s feelings are big too. They rush into me whenever we’re in the same room, like they’re demanding attention. His emotions are massive and unwieldy in a way that’s frustrating but also … I don’t know. They make me feel things. Like, feelings of my own.

  Jesus, that’s dumb. The Great Amazing Feelings Boy strikes again.

  But I think that’s why I’ve been so much more aware of him this year than in the past. At the beginning of the year, I thought I was completely losing it. Because I was feeling all this stuff and didn’t know why, and on top of it, sometimes I felt like there were these arms or tentacles or something that would reach out and wrap around me and make everything confusing. I was on a roller coaster—I di
dn’t know what was up and what was down, and it wasn’t necessarily bad, sometimes it was thrilling, but I also felt like I was going to throw up half the time.

  Right now, Adam seems to actually be enjoying himself for once. Normally he’s so sad. Like, really sad in a way that I can’t begin to understand. Sad in a way that sometimes stays with me all day, even when I leave school and everyone else’s feelings wear off. But as he’s talking about Macbeth, there’s a confidence to him that I’ve never felt. And a joy. He’s not just good at this—he loves this. After I take a second to wrap my head around that incredibly foreign concept, I realize I like the feeling. It’s a bit like how I get when I’m playing football or talking about Harry Potter with Alice—like there are these bubbles moving through my veins and sugar on my tongue, cotton candy on my fingertips. It’s light and full all at once and always moving forward. Energetic.

  That’s how Adam feels right now—like a bird has spread its wings inside of his chest and is ready to take flight. It’s strong and fragile all at once. He knows what he’s doing and it’s almost like I can feel the rhythm of his heartbeat—steady but fast and excited in a way that I could tap my foot to. His enthusiasm is electrifying, even if it’s for something as annoying as Shakespeare. I find myself admiring him a little for it—he doesn’t just want the good grades, he genuinely cares. I don’t know why that’s a relief, but it is.

  He finishes with a flourish, landing his point (whatever the fuck his point was—it all went over my head, and I got a bit hypnotized by the way the rhythm of his heart matched up with the movement of his lips), and he rocks forward a bit on the balls of his feet as he lowers his notes. The smallest smile crosses his face and he gives a not-subtle sideways look at Mr. Collins.

  “Very well done, Mr. Hayes,” Mr. Collins says with a nod of his head, giving Adam a genuine grin.

  The curve of Adam’s smile widens and I can feel the warmth of pleasure rush into him at Mr. Collins’s comment. It feels like winning a football game or solving a hard math problem on my own.

  Adam relaxes, leaning back on his heels for a second before walking back toward his desk. The smile has shrunk in size but not feeling—it’s now just a private smile for himself. Well, and me. But he doesn’t know that.

  As Adam walks down the aisle between the desks, resident blockhead Bryce pulls the old “cough and say an insult” trick, coughing out, “Suck-up,” just as Adam walks past him. It’s so dumb and childish, and a lazy insult on top of it, so I expect Adam to brush it off. That’s what I would do. But instead I feel him cave in, like someone has put their fist around the bird inside his chest and squeezed until it breaks. The familiar wave of deep blue sadness descends on him once again, this time streaked with angry red lines. He resents Bryce and he resents that he cares what Bryce thinks. But he does—he does care. He cares so much that his smile disappears with no sign of returning.

  Bryce’s smirk follows Adam as he slumps down into his seat and then Bryce turns back around to laugh with Justin. They’re both idiots. I know that they’re my teammates and all, but they bug the hell out of me sometimes. I can feel Bryce’s stupid, shiny victory and I have to push against the impulse to laugh with him. His self-satisfaction pokes out the corners of my gut—it doesn’t fit and I know it’s because I’m not letting it fit. I don’t want to be a part of this, but his dumb feelings are making themselves known to me whether I like it or not.

  The rest of the class passes in a haze as the black sludge creeps in on me once more, but with an extra stomach-dropping edge to it. Usually it’s dark and heavy and oppressive and all of that sucks, but this is worse somehow. It’s not dark, it’s … the absence of light. Like some sort of void. It doesn’t weigh down on me, suffocate me. It’s empty—just total nothingness. But it’s sucking me in and I feel like if I go inside of it I’ll stop existing entirely, and that scares me, but at the same time it would be a relief.

  The bell rings.

  “All right, everybody, nicely done today,” Mr. Collins says with a clap of his hands as he stands up to open the door. “Have a good weekend. Mine will be spent reading your Macbeth papers, so, for my sake, I hope you made them interesting.”

  “Shakespeare is always interesting, Mr. Collins,” Caitlin quips as she breezes past him, Jessica rolling her eyes as she leads the way out of the classroom.

  “See, that’s the kind of quality brown-nosing you all should aspire to,” Mr. Collins says enthusiastically. “Nicely done, Ms. Park.”

  “I do what I can,” she responds, not even looking back as she walks through the door.

  I’m stuck in my seat, concentrating on not getting sucked into Adam’s black hole. I’m facing the front of the class but I can feel him angrily shoving his books into his backpack behind me. I try to focus on my own annoyance instead of Adam’s feelings. This keeps happening—he feels sad or angry or whatever and somehow I end up carrying all of that and it’s so fucking unfair. Why can’t he just push everything down like everybody else?

  Adam gets up and rushes out of the classroom, expertly avoiding the leg that Bryce had stuck out to trip him. I mentally cross my fingers that Adam will take the void with him, but I know it’s a hollow wish. I’m caught in his orbit and it’s going to take me the rest of the day to shake this off.

  I pack up my things and move into the hall, not paying attention to my surroundings, but then there’s a sharp, red spike of anger that comes shooting out of the swirling vortex of despair. My head snaps up to find the source.

  “What, do you think you’re better than me or something?”

  Bryce is growling, looming over Adam by the lockers. They’re clearly in the middle of some sort of argument, and Adam, the idiot, is staring right back, his body ready for a fight. Adam isn’t necessarily small—I mean, I’ve got a bunch of inches on him since I hit my growth spurt this summer—but Bryce is an offensive tackle. He’s huge. And there’s Adam, clenching his jaw and staring Bryce down like they’re evenly matched. I’d be impressed, if I didn’t think I was about to watch Adam get pummeled into the ground.

  “I didn’t say that, Bryce,” Adam spits back, moving just the slightest bit forward. Ooh, that was stupid. The drumbeat of Adam’s fear is pounding in my head—he’s all false confidence and bitterness and this will not end well.

  Bryce draws himself to his full height, puffing out his chest and looking down at Adam like he’s ready to step on him.

  “You think because you stand up in front of the class and say a bunch of smart-ass nonsense that you’re better than me?” There’s that hot-cold black sludge again and I think it’s Bryce’s. Oh. He’s insecure. Bryce is worried that he’s dumb.

  The next spike of anger is so strong, so piercing, that I’m starting to get worried that Adam is gonna snap and attack the guy. The angry heat is starting to sink into my pores and I feel myself filling with lava—I’ve gotta get ahead of this.

  “Hey, c’mon, Bryce, just leave the guy alone,” I say weakly, taking a step toward them.

  Adam’s anger is momentarily taken over by the yellow-orange of surprise. There’s something else there too. Something softer and a little … squirmy. I don’t have time to think about what it might be before:

  “What, don’t tell me you liked this nerd’s presentation?” Bryce scoffs, but I can feel the heat of nervousness from him.

  “Who cares, Bryce, just go to third period.” Based on Adam’s building lava and the tangled, anxious frustration coming from Bryce, I don’t think my stepping in is doing much in the way of calming things down.

  “Chill, Michaels, I’ve got a free period next. I could do this all day,” he singsongs, getting into Adam’s face as Justin chortles behind him.

  “Well, as delightful as this is, I don’t have a free period, so I’ll just be on my way to calc now.” Adam rolls his eyes, a pretty ballsy move in my opinion, and starts to move out of Bryce’s shadow.

  “What would you do with a free period anyway? It’s not like yo
u have anyone to hang out with,” Bryce taunts, fist-bumping Justin. The King of Weak Insults strikes again and I’d be moaning at the cliché of it all except I can feel the comment lance right through Adam’s anger and hit him in the blue place. The wind gets knocked out of me for a moment and the sting of the insult feels close to actual physical pain. It’s like I’m watching Adam bleed out in front of me and I can’t do anything to stop it.

  “Shut up,” Adam growls, rounding on Bryce. His anger is still there but it’s erratic, pieces of it flying all over the place before getting sucked into the quicksand of hurt.

  “What are you gonna do about it, Hayes?” Bryce goads. “The way I see it, it’s two against one, and I don’t think you could phone a friend, even if you wanted to. No one’s gonna come running to save a freak like you.”

  I take another step toward them, ready to intervene, but moving closer means being hit with a wave of angerfrustrationsadnessdoubt that turns me inside out. Before I know what’s happening, words are coming out of me.

  “Just leave him alone, Bryce, can’t you see he’s sad enough?”

  The hallway goes a bit silent. I hadn’t even noticed there were other people there, but students are still milling in between classes and it seems we’ve drawn a bit of an audience, because people are starting to whisper and a few of them are openly staring. Guess I was a bit louder than I meant to be.

  But none of that matters when I feel like I’ve been punched in the stomach. I want to throw up and also maybe start crying, and that’s so stupid because it looks like Bryce has stopped his bullheaded quest to get into Adam’s face. He’s staring at me weirdly, like I’m some sort of alien. Or maybe he’s staring at me that way because I look like I might throw up and/or cry. He nudges Justin’s shoulder, says, “C’mon,” under his breath, and they walk away. I’m left facing Adam and then I realize why I feel the way I feel. Adam’s eyes shutter as he looks at me, the life drained from his face. My stomach is in knots and I don’t know if it’s mine or if it’s his but it makes me want to collapse on the floor right then and there.