The Infinite Noise

by Lauren Shippen

  That stings more than I’d like to admit, and I see my flinch reflected on Caleb’s face. That bugs me even more—why should he look hurt over something he said?

  “And just because you’re the jock,” I counter, “doesn’t mean you have to be so emotionally stunted!”

  The flinch is bigger this time and the bottom of my stomach drops out.

  “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” he bites.

  “Look”—my voice drops—“I’m sorry, okay? I’m just confused.”

  Caleb closes his eyes and breathes deep.

  “I know, I’m sorry, I—” He swallows his next words again and it makes me want to shake him until they fall out. “I’ll—I’ll see you at school tomorrow, yeah?”

  “What—”

  “I’ve gotta go meet my mom. Thanks, uh, thanks for the hot chocolate—” He’s backing away now, color high on his cheeks, eyes darting around the way they do when he’s nervous. He’s about to bolt—the soft breeze has come and the fragile thing is being blown out of my hands.

  “Caleb—” I start, not knowing what magical words could make him stay.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow, Adam,” Caleb calls out as he walks backward away from me, before turning more nimbly than I would have thought possible. I’m left watching his hunched letterman-ed shoulders rushing away down the brick path.

  Only when he reaches the edge of the park do I remember that he paid for our drinks and yet he was the one to say thank you.

  I might be shit at this whole “being a friend” deal.

  27

  CALEB

  “And that’s when Principal Stevens broke us up and threw us out.”

  I deflate further into the couch as I finish telling Dr. Bright my story. Her hands are folding in her lap, the crease between her eyebrows as pinched as when I started. The traffic-cone orange of her worry has softened a bit, turning into that glowing pulse that always reminds me of my mom. It’s cut through with the treacly syrup of pity. I want to snap at her, tell her I’m not some sad little boy who lost his temper, but instead I bite the inside of my cheek and wait for her to say something.

  “You said you don’t remember pushing Henry the first time—what happened, exactly?” Her head tilts and the pity gives way to bubbly curiosity. I relax at this return to normalcy—Dr. Bright trying to figure me out is way more comfortable territory than Dr. Bright worrying about me.

  “I don’t know, I just—I got so wrapped up in the anger, I guess. I pushed him before I even had a chance to think about it.”

  “Was it similar to when you got into the fight?” The orange glow pulses stronger, pushing the curiosity to the edges. Dammit. Why does she have to care?

  “No” is my knee-jerk response, but then I think about it for a second. “Yeah, I guess, maybe a little. It’s just hard when it’s coming from all sides, you know? Henry was angry and Caitlin was angry and so was I and that just made it impossible to push away. I know you’ve told me to try and separate my feelings from everyone else’s but it’s really hard to do that when I’m feeling the exact same thing.”

  “Did Henry’s and Caitlin’s feelings feel like your own?”

  I shrug again. “Not really. I don’t know, it—it sort of hurt?”

  “The feelings hurt?” A surge of traffic-cone orange.

  “I mean, not hurt hurt.” I squirm a bit on the couch, the heat lamp of her worry making me sweat. “Just, like, it didn’t feel right in my body.”

  “You’ve experienced that before, correct?”

  “Yeah, I guess, but this was just—it was just way more intense.” I avoid looking at Dr. Bright because I can tell she’s doing that thing where she just stares at me in silence until I start talking more. But I can’t keep talking. I don’t know what to say.

  I don’t know how to describe what it was like. I don’t know how to explain the feeling of being squeezed into a space that’s too small while at the same time being pushed apart by everything that’s being poured into your body. I don’t know how to tell anyone what it’s like to be in the middle of trying to figure out your own feelings when all of a sudden, something you don’t recognize invades every corner of you and starts tossing your stuff out to make room for their own.

  It’s having a stranger take you over except it’s not a stranger, because you recognize pieces of it, you’ve felt this all before, except this isn’t like that because it’s not yours, it’s theirs, and now you’re stuck with a funhouse-mirror version of yourself living inside of you.

  How the fuck am I supposed to explain that?

  So I don’t. I explain something else instead.

  “Okay, maybe it wasn’t more intense this time, maybe it’s just that … I guess I thought I was doing better.” I had meant to deflect but now there’s something else bubbling up. “I thought I was, you know, regulating shit better, and I guess I’m not because this totally dragged me under and there was nothing I could do. I hate that, I hate feeling powerless and like I’m gonna fuck up and not even know it—not even have a say in what I’m doing. And I hadn’t felt like that in a little while and, yeah, I knew that going to the dance might be risky but I like Caitlin, even when I don’t totally like her feelings, but I just wish—”

  I snap my mouth shut, only just realizing what I was about to say. Dr. Bright’s curiosity is dancing toward me again, but it’s shoved aside while I deal with my own surprise and confusion.

  “You wish what, Caleb?” she probes.

  “I wish Adam had been there.” I breathe out, still taken aback by the truth of that statement. I didn’t know that. I didn’t realize that’s what had been missing. That I’d been vulnerable to Henry’s gross emotions because Adam wasn’t there. “It’s—it’s easier when he’s around or whatever.”

  “It’s easier to regulate other people’s feelings?” she asks, and my skin itches at the question.

  “Yeah.” I nod. “Yeah, it is. Is that—is that weird? That I like his feelings that much?”

  Goddammit, another thing I didn’t plan on saying. That wasn’t what I meant at all. I meant to ask if it was weird that he made things easier but another truth came out instead, masquerading as a question.

  “Do you think it’s weird?” Dr. Bright tilts her head.

  “I think this whole fucking thing is weird,” I scoff.

  “Caleb.”

  “I don’t know, okay? I don’t know anything!” My hands flop uselessly in my lap in my exasperation. “I don’t know why Adam makes things easier or why I like being around him or if that’s weird or if I should think it’s weird or if other people think it’s weird. I just know that it’s been better this past month. Everything’s been better.”

  The silent stare is aimed at me again—she knows I have more to say.

  “And I guess I know that it’s always sort of been there.” I try to stay nonchalant. “Like, even before I got to know him, there was something. I didn’t—it wasn’t comfortable yet, you know? I didn’t know how his feelings fit inside of me but there was something about them. Well, ever since this whole thing started up at least. I don’t know that I ever really noticed him that much before. But then it was like … once my ability started up, it was like there was this buzzing feeling I could never turn off. It only got quieter when we were in the same room.”

  “Was it a good buzzing or a bad buzzing?”

  “It wasn’t good or bad. It was more that I just knew he was there. And then when I could tell his feelings apart from other people’s, I was … I was curious, I guess. There was something about it that made me want to know more. And that’s not usually how it is—normally, I just want to get away, be by myself. But, even when I don’t get what he’s feeling or he’s feeling crappy, it’s like his feelings make my own feelings make sense to me.”

  I’m grimacing at my own rambling but I don’t know how else to put it. Something about Adam makes me feel whole in a world where other people’s emotions make me into
a human jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces are from different boxes.

  “Like how we were talking about the colors a little while ago,” I try to explain. “If he’s blue and I’m yellow, being around him makes everything green instead of just a mess of a bunch of different colors smashed together and I guess … I guess I just really like being in that green place. It’s just really … things are clearer when they’re green. They’re easier to understand. Like getting to the green helps understand the yellow even better, you know? God, that sounds really dumb, doesn’t it?”

  “It doesn’t sound dumb to me,” says Dr. Bright, and I don’t feel the lie-detector buzzer go off. “It sounds like the two of you have a very meaningful connection.”

  “Yeah, whatever.” I roll my eyes. “I’m probably just gonna fuck it up anyway.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “I’m pretty sure I already have. We hung out earlier today and I was so weird, I know I was, and I don’t know what to do about it.”

  Silent stare. The rest comes out in a rush. Damn, why does that always work on me?

  “I told him what happened at the dance and I was kind of sloppy about it and mentioned that I couldn’t help getting mad at Henry and Adam didn’t understand that—I could feel his confusion but also his, like, I don’t know, his curiosity about it? Except it wasn’t like the curiosity I get from you, it was sharper and rougher, like … scared, I guess.”

  “Suspicion?” she asks, her face perfectly calm. But underneath: bright traffic cone spike—no, a flare—a flare and a siren. I rush to put them out.

  “No, no, I don’t know if he’s suspicious—I mean, that’d be a weird thing to be suspicious about, right? There’s no way he could figure out what I am. But I think he thinks I’m hiding something. Which I am, but I don’t know how to tell him it’s not something bad without telling him what it is.”

  “Do you want to tell him?” she asks, and the flare glows steadily.

  “I don’t know,” I say honestly. “I don’t want to stop hanging out with him, I know that. But I feel like I’m just gonna keep being weird and he’s gonna realize he doesn’t actually want to be friends with me.”

  Dr. Bright puts her notebook down, folds her hands in her lap, and stays silent. But it isn’t the kind of silence that’s trying to get me to talk. There’s anxiety coming from her but she’s not nervous or scared. It’s a quiet anxiety, like she’s uncertain about something. Hesitant. I twist my own hands, cracking my knuckles and trying not to feel like I’m waiting for an ax to fall.

  “Caleb,” she says, not looking at me, which totally freaks me out. “You’re very special.”

  “Oh boy, here we go,” I mutter, having heard some version of this talk from her before.

  “I just want you to be careful.” She looks at me now, the orange concern replacing the hesitation. The flares and sirens are gone—this is warm, soft, caring concern, just close enough to condescension to make me itch.

  “So that the people who are interested in people like me don’t find me?” I snap, feeling that little zing of victory when Dr. Bright looks surprised. My triumph is snuffed out quickly by the towering black-red-orange burst of worry that catches in my throat.

  “My parents talked to me a bit,” I rush to explain, wanting to bring Dr. Bright down from whatever freakout she was about to have. Her shoulders rise as she takes a deep breath and the burst is gone as quickly as it appeared.

  “It’s not to say you can never tell anyone, Caleb,” she says softly. “I just want you to be careful.”

  “Yeah, that’s what my parents said,” I grumble. Her sympathy sticks in my teeth like toffee. “But I don’t understand—what’s the worst that could happen?”

  “You’re not in danger, Caleb,” she says, sidestepping the question completely. “But people like you are sometimes mistreated, and I want to avoid that ever happening to you.”

  Her words should freak me out but any fear is dampened by her cloying concern. I start to open my gummy mouth to ask more questions, but she quickly changes the subject before I can.

  “Why don’t we do some meditation?” I look up to see her smiling kindly at me, and it makes the toffee easier to swallow.

  28

  ADAM

  I’m shooting lasers through the back of Caleb’s neck in Latin but he has yet to turn around and look at me. Too scared to text him after the park yesterday, I walked into school determined to make things right between us. Instead I slunk to the back of the classroom and looked down when he rushed in late. I don’t know how to fix things—I’m not even sure things need to be fixed. I’ve replayed yesterday over and over in my head and I can’t put the pieces together. He got so worked up so quickly and I said something wrong without meaning to and now he won’t look at me.

  The class flies by without me conjugating a single verb, and before I can shove my books back into my bag, Caleb is out of the classroom. I hurry to follow him, seeing his back move swiftly down the hallway, when I hear someone call my name.

  “You okay?” I turn to look at Caitlin, confused as to why she’s talking to me until I remember that we’d planned to do more debate prep during lunch today. Looks like I’m spending lunch in the library instead of at the table outside that I’d started to think of as our table. At least I’ll be warm.

  “Yeah, I’m fine.” I shrug my bag onto my shoulders. “Just a little braindead from declensions.”

  “I always thought you were crazy for keeping up with Latin.” She shakes her head as she starts to lead the path down the hallway to the library. It’s loud—lockers slamming left and right, sneakers squeaking on the scuffed-up linoleum, people making lunch plans—but Caitlin doesn’t seem bothered by the mass of bodies and noise swirling around her.

  What is that like? To move so confidently through the world that you don’t even flinch when a football goes soaring over your head?

  And then I remember Caleb’s balled-up fists when he was describing how Henry was harassing Caitlin at the dance and realize I’m being narrow-minded and petty and just because Caitlin swishes her hair over her shoulders effortlessly as she glides through school doesn’t mean she never has reason to flinch.

  She’s talking about how Spanish is so much more valuable than a dead language like she’s trying to sell me a Rosetta Stone and I resist the urge to roll my eyes.

  “You’re not wrong,” I agree, “but I’ve got those pesky doctor parents who have lofty medical school dreams for me, so Latin was pretty much the option.”

  “Ah.” She nods sagely and looks sideways at me. “Aren’t parents fun?”

  I half smile as we step into the library. It’s like entering a weird parallel dimension where everything is muffled and musty. The noise from the hall fades away as we move through the shelves to the back table that we’ve been studying at for the past few weeks. We sit down, pulling out our lunches and settling into our usual debate prep rhythm, placing index cards strategically around the table and cracking open our notebooks. Technically, eating isn’t allowed in the library but, as always, no one is here. Not even the librarian.

  “How was your weekend?” Caitlin asks around a bite of her sandwich.

  “Eh”—I shrug, also chewing—“it was all right. Nothing eventful.”

  She hums like she knows I’m being coy and I realize the next step in this conversational waltz is for me to ask her about her weekend. But I already know. And I feel weird about that. Should I tell her I know? Or just wait for her to tell me? Caitlin and I aren’t friends, per se, but working on debate these past few weeks, we’ve become friendly. If I’m really doing the whole friendship thing with Caleb, who’s to say I can’t have more than one?

  “I heard the dance was pretty eventful.” I swallow, peanut butter sticking in my throat, colliding with the anxiety that’s already balled up there.

  “You did?” She looks up from the notecards and I give a sort of sympathetic grimace to let her know I’m on her side.
“Oh, Caleb told you?”

  “Yeah.” I nod, swallowing again, trying to get the peanut butter down. “He felt pretty bad about the whole thing.”

  I shouldn’t be spilling Caleb’s feelings to her but I need to talk about it with someone, anyone. I’m lost and confused and worried that everything Caleb and I were building is ruined, and I need a little perspective.

  “He shouldn’t,” she snaps, before sighing, her shoulder slumping. “Henry was the one being the jerk. Caleb did what he thought was right. He probably didn’t need to take it quite as far as he did but…”

  “At least it didn’t lead to an actual fight,” I finish.

  “Right.” She nods. “Though it was pretty close. If Caleb wasn’t going to hit him, I honestly might have. It’s good the chaperones intervened when they did.” She looks uncharacteristically downtrodden and I feel that powerless feeling again.

  “I don’t think anyone would blame you for laying into Henry,” I offer. “In fact, a good portion of the student body might throw you a parade.”

  She smiles a bit at that, pushing aside her sandwich to work the ponytail magic on her hair. I’m about to steer the conversation to the work we need to get done, but Caitlin’s frowning down at her notes, her mouth twitching like she wants to say something.

  “You and Caleb are friends, right?” she asks, looking up at me.

  “Um, yeah.” I nod, playing it cool, even though my stomach is swooping at the thought that other people see Caleb and me as friends. It’s not all just made up in my head. Caitlin has noticed. “Yeah, we hang out sometimes.”

  “Do you ever—” She stops herself but it’s not like when Caleb does it. She’s not swallowing around something that wants to burst free, she’s being tactical. Years of fierce competition for the top spot in the class have made me very familiar with Caitlin’s tactical face.

  “Do I ever what?” I press, completely unable to guess where this could be going.