“Aaron?” Dr. Sengupta says from the front of the classroom. It might be empty, it might be emptying. Aaron doesn’t know. He can’t move his head.
Hmm, he thinks. This is new. This is interesting. It’s petrifying because he literally cannot move and if he had feelings left he would feel so very deeply scared.
“Aaron?” Dr. Sengupta repeats, and it’s as if Aaron is watching a movie about a boy whose life is falling away. What the soundtrack is saying is that this is that pivotal point in the story, the point after which the die is cast and there’s no going back. This shakes whatever part of him is still sentient, and it snaps him to attention.
“Yes,” he says.
“Are you okay, Aaron?”
“Fine,” he says. “Yes. I’m fine.”
He gets up and walks toward math class thinking, Well, this isn’t great. This thing where he couldn’t actually move. Was he just being dramatic? Could he have moved if he’d really tried? In the end he was able to, but it felt like it took everything he had. He remembers how he stared at the wall the night before he went to the bridge, like something had taken over his body—was this the same thing? This is the kind of thing he’s supposed to share with his father, who is just the kind of father with whom one could share such a thing. But he’s an idiot loser and that’s not going to happen.
Before he walks into his Spanish class, he texts Tillie.
The response comes fast.
Aaron is numb, but not too numb for research. So he looks it up.
He doesn’t.
Aaron meets Tillie outside Nathan’s Famous on Surf Avenue. He feels like a pain in the ass as he waves tentatively, and she meekly waves back, looking like someone on the worst blind date ever.
“I’m sensing a pattern?” he says lamely, pointing at the sign.
“What pattern?”
“Fatty foods?”
She fixes him with that blank, unreadable look. She says, “Ha.”
The cold response weakens the layer that’s currently swaddling the bone-crush-best-worst-friend thing in his gut. Aaron stares at his feet and makes up a story.
She must be thinking: How long till I can drop this idiot? I have no patience for this weird guy. I only came here because he’s so pathetic and he’s gonna kill himself and I can’t have that on my conscience. And can you believe he actually made me travel an hour just because of some stupid joke about the lowest point in New York City? Get me the fuck out of here. This guy is so not worth my time.
Tillie’s throat feels so tight, like if she opens her mouth, she might scream. Somewhere along the way on the Q train, Tillie pictured Amir, and he got stuck in her head. Even though Aaron told her he’s gay and Amir is … Amir, she cannot understand what in the world made her open up even a little yesterday. Last time she did this, it didn’t go well, and when Aaron makes some infuriating comment about fatty foods that hits way too close to her inner cow, she’s out.
But then she remembers yesterday. The way they seemed to understand each other without judgment. Her heart tenderizes just a smidge.
She rolls her eyes and leads him into Nathan’s as she says, “Yes …”
He breaks into a relieved smile and says, “… and.”
They get to the counter and examine their options. Aaron looks disappointed when the order arrives.
“So these are actually just hot dogs,” he says once they settle in.
Tillie looks at their hot dogs and wonders what else they’d be. “Um. What?” she asks.
“Nathan’s Famous hot dogs. They make them sound like they’re special, but I’m pretty sure they’re just intestines like any other hot dog.”
“So, moving on.”
He laughs. “I’m just saying. I hate things like that. That seem special but aren’t.”
They eat in silence for a while, and then she says, “Like people.”
“Like people?”
“People who seem special, but they aren’t.”
“Yes,” he says, not at all sure what she means but sure it means something.
“Yes.”
After lunch, they walk the boardwalk in silence. Aaron wants to ask why she came. Would he have done this for her?
He’d like to think he would have, but it’s hard to say, really. A girl he just met yesterday writes him while he’s in Spanish class and says, Hey, I need you. Meet me in Brooklyn? Hard to say what he does. And yet he gets it. The inscrutable bond of the bridge. Makes you do screwy things.
“So remember yesterday, when we said maybe let’s not talk about it?” Aaron says.
“Yeah?”
“Let’s maybe instead … talk about things? Because I meant it earlier. I couldn’t move. In physics class. There was this part of me that was looking down at myself and I feel like if I didn’t move the moment I did, I would have been paralyzed. Which is pretty much freaking me out. And the truth is …”
He stops walking. She stops, too.
He drops his head and starts weeping. Full-on weeping.
Tillie feels stuck, watching him cry. She hates this about herself. This obvious contradiction, that she’s a feminist and so completely against the idea that men have to be strong at all costs but in reality she doesn’t want to see a boy or man cry unless a piano just fell on him. But she can feel the pain in his face.
It’s just them. On the boardwalk. Other people who may or may not be walking by cease to exist. Aaron weeps. Tillie watches. And finally she just says “Shit” under her breath, and reaches out, grabs his arm, and pulls him to a nearby bench, one that faces the surf and the empty beach, empty except the gulls haplessly seeking hot dog buns and spilled liquid from the abandoned soda cans on the sand.
They sit and he weeps in near silence, and she sits there and looks out at the ocean, wondering about the connection between this water, the Atlantic, and that water, the Hudson, where she almost landed yesterday. The thought shivers her.
“Sorry,” Aaron says. He dries his eyes, looks out at the water. “I’m at land’s end.”
“Yep. We are.”
“So, um, if you want to go. If you just—don’t want to be here. With a loser idiot who cries to strangers, who is so pathetic—”
“Oh my god. Stop,” she says. “You’re not. Or if you are, so am I. I want to be here, okay?”
“Sorry,” he says again, and she sighs, and he laughs.
“You are sorry.”
He laughs some more, and the laugh turns into a convulsion, which turns into more tears.
“Yes!” he finally says. “I’m deeply, deeply sorry. My whole life. I’m the problem here.”
A woman in a sanitation outfit leans down to scoop some of the hot dog bun detritus into her black garbage bag. A couple gulls flap their wings powerlessly.
“The gull lobby is not going to be pleased with these sanitation people stealing their food,” Aaron says.
“The gull lobby?”
“You know. Big Bird.”
Tillie smiles. Even depressed, this is a silly boy. She thinks of Britt. Who is also silly. But unlike Aaron, Britt has never felt the need to apologize for her existence. And while Tillie loves that little sister of hers, at a moment like this, watching a boy who can’t stop saying sorry, and being a person whose apology is unspoken but nevertheless eternally internalized, she is also really, profoundly jealous of her self-assurance.
Aaron takes a breath and explains his existence to the ocean:
“Sometimes I honestly can’t even explain what it is. It’s just this thing. This feeling in the pit of my stomach. It’s disappointment with myself. That I’m not better. That I’m not someone people like more, or someone who’s more talented, or better loved, or worthy of the attention I seem to need just to survive. To be more like my fish, but the human version.”
“More like human fish?”
He rubs his forehead. “I love my fish. I have a sixty-gallon tank and—currently—seven goldfish. There’s Britney Spearfish, Tina Tuna—”
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br /> “Oh my god,” she says, and she rolls her eyes, and her face heats up a bit.
He cracks a smile. “You’re going to leave now, aren’t you?”
She stands up like she’s about to walk away, then sits down again.
“So anyway … they just—swim around all the time. You know when you look at something and you know there’s no sadness there? That’s my fish. There’s a nobility to being a fish, I think.”
“Fish nobility.”
“They aren’t swimming around in a circle thinking, Oh, kill me. This is so boring. Which is exactly what I’d be thinking. That’s the connection, I think.”
She crosses her legs and leans back on the bench. “You know what? I actually really get that.”
“You do?”
“I do.”
“Ugh,” he says. “It’s hard because the problem is me. Obviously.”
Tillie scratches her forehead in a way she hopes translates as Yes, I, too, am the problem without her having to say it.
Aaron goes on. “I have no real problems. My dad has enough money to survive, even after quitting his bank job and becoming a social worker during his midlife crisis. I have a scholarship to Fieldston. I don’t get bullied, and, I don’t know. It’s like I know I should be happy, but nothing gets through.”
She does something that surprises her then. She touches his knee lightly with her fingertips. Then she removes her hands and averts her eyes, embarrassed. She shouldn’t have touched him. She hates when people touch her without her permission. But yeah. It just sort of felt like it was a moment that she needed to make contact a little.
“What about the gay thing?” she asks.
“Huh? What about it?”
“Is that a problem in your life? I mean, is it an issue?”
He shrugs. “Maybe for other people. I mean, at Fieldston it’s pretty much a nonissue. The guys who would disagree with it or whatever? I don’t like them, either. They leave me alone because they know if they didn’t, they’d get in trouble. So I feel safe. At home, I have my dad, who is the gayest straight guy I’ve ever met. He goes and sits with other men and they work on themselves, I guess, and it makes him—well, it’s made him better, to be honest.”
“I should get my dad to do that,” Tillie says ruefully.
Aaron hears it and knows intrinsically that there’s a story there. He looks her in the eye, and she looks away.
Instead of trying to fill the silence, Aaron waits.
Eventually, Tillie asks, “So … what are we gonna do?”
Aaron hears the we. He likes it. It’s been a long time, or maybe since never, that another person other than his dad has referred to him as part of a we. He looks up at the sky. “I have no idea.”
“What have you been doing? Because whatever that is, it isn’t working. Maybe do the opposite?”
“Solid advice.” Aaron rubs his eyes.
“I’m super good at fixing other people—just not so good at fixing myself.”
“Yeah. I’m kinda like that, too.”
Tillie crosses her legs. “So—and I say this because I know it’s a super-healthy idea, and most psychologists would suggest it—how about I fix you, and you fix me?”
“Ha. Totally. We’ll fix each other. That’s not codependent at all.”
He expects her to laugh along, or say something equally sarcastic. But instead she looks him right in the eye and says, “So, you know you’re depressed, right?”
He turns to stare out at the ocean. The blue-green rising and falling, the mist kicking off the waves. It’s so beautiful, and it’s like he can’t access the beauty. He can’t feel it, internalize it. It’s part of a scene and he’s not in it. And something about that makes him not do what he would normally do, which is to explain the intricate difference between depression and his thing. Because he’s different. He’s not a statistic or a case. He’s Aaron, and no textbook can quite explain Aaron’s thing, and definitely not in one word.
Instead of saying that, he sighs and says, “I don’t know. Maybe. Sorry.”
Tillie slumps back on the bench. “So what’s the opposite of what you’ve been doing?”
“I don’t know. I go to school, I go home. I write songs and no one listens to them. I lie to my dad. Well, more like, I don’t tell him what’s up.”
“So the opposite for you would be to not go to school, not go home, not write songs, or maybe have people listen to your songs. And telling your dad what’s up.”
“Yeah, well, the last isn’t gonna happen. So maybe not going to school? Instead I—”
“We,” she interrupts. “Have adventures. Go explore life. Starting tomorrow. How do you feel out here?”
He thinks about it, staring at the sky. “Not terrible, I guess. I don’t feel like I’m about to be paralyzed in one position, so that’s something. I mean, it’s kind of cool talking like this. I never, ever, ever talk like this with anyone.”
“Sometimes I do with my mom, but I feel like—maybe I should grow the fuck up and talk like this with a friend and not my mom?”
“So. Talk. What about you? Are you depressed?”
Tillie bites her lip and chews on it a bit. “Well, yeah. I mean, non-depressed people don’t almost jump off bridges, do they? But it’s like, there are reasons. I feel like shit because—never mind.”
“What?” he says.
“You don’t need this, on top of all that.” She motions circularly at his body.
“I kinda do, actually. I’d love a vacation from my own shit right about now.”
She looks out at the ocean and thinks: Am I doing this?
And then she realizes: No. Not yet. She smiles, looks down, and shakes her head.
“It’s funny,” she says. “In art I can say things. But in life? I tend to keep my room pretty pink.”
“I am guessing that means something to you. Maybe you could let me in on it?”
She kicks the ground and says, “Next time, definitely.”
CHAPTER 3D: APRIL 19
On Friday morning, Tillie finds herself thinking that compromise is a dangerous, ill-advised concept. She thinks this as she climbs a steep, narrow, circular staircase, eyes averted as much as possible from the random elderly butt right in front of her face, tugging her tuba case behind her.
On the train home last night, she and Aaron came up with a plan of how to do the opposite of what they’ve been doing with their lives. The specifics were hammered out via text around midnight.
The answer is compromise, in a way. Or perhaps it’s just proof of their insanity, because the specifics that came up when they decided to simultaneously have Aaron text the activity, and Tillie text the place they’d do it, don’t make a ton of sense.
Which is why she’s lugging her tuba to the top of the upper tower at Belvedere Castle in the middle of Central Park on a Friday morning. When she emerges into the open air of the observation deck, there’s Aaron, who is cradling his laptop like it’s a football.
“Hey,” he says, smiling brightly.
She scowls at his brightness. He didn’t just haul a cumbersome tuba case up a steep, narrow, winding staircase. She lays the instrument at her feet and wipes sweat off her forehead. “Let’s just do this,” she says.
He raises an eyebrow. “That’s not—no. The whole purpose of this is to be happy.”
She wants to kick him. Or something. This is what guys do. They fundamentally misread her moods and say exactly the wrong thing. Of course girls are terrible, too. Why is everyone terrible?
This last thought makes her crack a smile.
“What?” Aaron says, smiling back.
“Hard to explain,” she says. “I’m busy having thoughts that ignore my own innate awfulness.”
Aaron shrugs, unsure what to do with that comment. While she opens her massive case and takes out her tuba, he opens his laptop and perches it on the edge of the northern deck, overlooking the empty softball fields of the Great Lawn. He tinkers with windows until
he finds Guitar Pro, where “The Palm of Your Beautiful Hand” is waiting.
No way is he going to do “Walking Alone” again. Too soon. “Palm” is a safe bet. He performed that at the talent show last year, and some kids he didn’t even know came up and said they really liked it, that it had this cool retro vibe.
Aaron watches as Tillie puts the mouthpiece in the receiver. “So I don’t exactly know how to do a duet with a tuba,” he says, “but seeing as you can actually play your instrument—”
“I’m really not good,” she says.
“Seeing as you couldn’t be less proficient at the tuba than I am at the—whatever—I’m thinking I should probably just play you this song I wrote and maybe you can figure out how to harmonize?”
She uses her throat to blow a whisper breath and hits a placid, funereal F as a response.
He laughs.
“What?” she asks.
He shakes his head. There’s something hilarious about the noise that just came out of that instrument, which is nearly as big as Tillie, but he’s pretty sure nothing good can come from saying that. “No,” he tells her. “It’s good.”
She cocks her head to the side. “Yeah, sure.”
“So can I play you the song?” he asks, a little too willingly.
She nods, her face blank. He pauses for a second, looking at her as if trying to figure out if it’s safe. Then he presses play. He closes his eyes in concentration, his head down.
Tillie listens carefully to the intro. What she hears is a guy who plays chords on the keyboard as opposed to notes, and she’s not sure if he does that because he wants to or because it’s the limit of his ability. Her gut instinct is the latter. It sounds as if he’s doing what he can, and when the drumbeat comes in, she is relieved.
Then he raises his head and sings, and it surprises her that he’s singing, live.
We sit across from each other and stare
And look right through each other
We’re searching for something far too deep
The price of which is much too steep
The lyrics are kind of cerebral. His voice is: It’s hard to explain. It’s not pleasant or unpleasant. What she hears is someone who can carry a tune, but what his voice doesn’t have is inflection. It’s like the lyrics and the singing of them don’t connect. Instead of feeling the song, what she senses is that he really, really wants people to like it. Or him. Or both. And recognizing that makes her like him more, because she knows that feeling, that wish to be seen and loved, and she gets in a nanosecond that he probably hasn’t gotten that sort of response much, because, let’s face it, it’s not a great song, not by any means. It’s … okay. Its heart is on its sleeve, which is lovely, but the words are not inspired and in general there’s an old-school feel to it. He sings a verse where he actually says something about having “the butterflies” and it reminds her of bad theater. Its sincerity also makes her kind of love Aaron.
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