by Matthue Roth
“I’m just one of the guys,” she told me, one of those first nights, shortly after we’d started hanging out. “Guys are less fake than girls, and I just get along with guys better.” No, it was slightly after that. A few weeks after we started hanging out, right after we’d started telling each other all our secrets. By this point, I’d known to look past the ponytail and skirts, to pay attention to the secret parts of her and not the parts that were there for cover.
So why me? I asked myself constantly. Why were we like this, and why were each of us not like this with other people?
Larissa had an answer for that. She had an answer for everything. “Because, really, I’m not that much of a guy,” she said. “Not on the inside. I’m something completely different, something else entirely. And on the inside, you’re not completely a guy, either.”
She meant it as a compliment. She didn’t need to explain that to me—I knew it already. Girls spoke their own private language, had their own secret values and their own way of understanding each other. They thought emotionally, not like wrestlers and barbarians and every guy at my school. I was only just beginning to figure that out. What girls did, what guys did, and where Larissa and I fit in on the scale. Or if we were on it at all.
She watched me staring off into the distance, sitting still on the end of her bedspread, withdrawing into my own mind. “Stop that,” she said. Already, she could tell how my brain worked.
“Stop what?” I said. Already, I was in denial.
She flipped over backward. She extended her arm past her head, then stretched off her bed to where her computer sat. She hit a few wrong keys, then found the right one—the volume. The music got louder.
“You’re thinking too much. Get up and dance,” she said. She hopped up, feet on the bed.
“What?!” I yelped. I didn’t dance. Dancing wasn’t something that people like us did. Dancing was a boring thing, an ordinary-people thing, something that people did who were trying to be sexy and made themselves utterly unsexy because of their lame self-idolization.
“No,” she said. “Dancing is the highest form of listening to music. Of standing there and letting the music guide you, turning your brain over to it, letting the instruments have the same power over you that the lyrics do and letting it decide which way your hips swish and your sides turn and your arms swing.”
“I, um,” I said. “I don’t think my hips can swish.”
“Shut up,” she said, “and nullify yourself to the music.”
Johnnie McKenna was on the speakers, one of our favorite singers. She had this catchy, evasive, staccato way of singing that wasn’t scatting or rapping or talking really fast, but it was more or less all of those things, and sometimes she’d let loose an entirely heart-gripping confessional line and follow it up with an easy doo-de-boppa-poppa-doo and then her fingers would fly on the guitar like she was strangling it. It was both the angriest and the most joyous thing you’ve ever heard.
My hands were inside her hands. I let her pull me up. She was warm, and her skin was smooth, and as she moved her chest was bouncing and I forced myself not to notice. She wrapped her fingers around my palms and shook my arms with her arms and I closed my eyes and I tried to listen to the music, I tried not to think about anything else, I tried not to think at all and let my body think on its own. I tried to dance.
sidekicks
My days were spent avoiding high school, or existing in a dazed-out cocoon trying not to notice that I was in high school. And the nights, occasionally I convinced my father to drive me to Larissa’s house—I couldn’t drive yet—and the other times I talked to her on the phone until one of our parents kicked us off. When we were in contact—hanging out, talking, thinking of each other—the rest of the world disappeared.
But there was always this sneaking suspicion, somewhere in our interactions, that each of us had other things in our lives, things that were not each other. Somewhere in the mix, we must eat, sleep, go to school, talk to other people.
*
One night at her house, she staged the revolution. It getting to be autumn. School had become regular, an expected thing, and so had our friendship. “You should introduce me to your friends,” she casually commanded me.
“I’m so not going to introduce you to my friends.”
“Come on! Sometimes I feel like, I don’t know. Like a dirty little secret.”
I gave her a look. That day she was wearing a white fairy dress with lace and paisley and cut-out flowers atop a sheer something. She looked like a Victorian fable.
“Larissa,” I said, “no one would ever think anything about you is dirty.”
She punched me. Did I say she was a fairy? Her punch hit like a bullet.
“You know what I mean! Like a Stephen King book. Like a monster that only you can see.”
“Ooh, I kind of like that. And together we go around hunting ordinary people and eating their fingers?”
“Seriously! Don’t you think it’s weird? I know all your deep dark secrets, but I don’t know any of your friends.”
“I don’t know any of your friends.”
“That’s because my friends are boring.”
“Well, my friends—” And here I pulled back and I thought long and hard; I tried to see my friends as if for the first time, as if seen through the eyes of a girl who, though respectably weird herself, was not at all a social outcast. She had none of the stigmas we did—no fluency in Battlestar Galactica code and 133tspeak, no Weird Al songs memorized, no horrible wardrobe that still retained elements of our mothers’ style choices. I wanted her to realize: I wasn’t ashamed of her. I was ashamed of everything but her. “My friends are my deep dark secret. The few friends I have, anyway.”
She lunged at me. Knocking me over and onto my back, skidding halfway across her bed, her body hovering over mine, her face grinning with a Cheshire madness and filling up my entire field of vision.
I felt all the blood drain from my face. I felt blood pooling in places I didn’t want to think about.
From her predator’s perch, Larissa lolled her head around casually. Thankfully, blessedly, she didn’t seem to notice my sudden discomfort. To her, we were still just friendly old Arthur and Larissa, bouncing on each other like Winnie-the-Pooh and the denizens of Hundred Acre Wood.
“Come on. Introduce me. Show me around. I want to know everything about you, Arthur! I want to be a part of your life. What are you doing tomorrow night?”
Tomorrow night was Friday night. Friday night was movie night with Damon.
“Uh...going to synagogue?”
“You are not.”
“I am! I’m going to be a junior rabbi.”
“And I’m going to be the Torah scroll. Come on, Arthur, what are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing! Well...Damon.”
“Damon isn’t nothing! I mean, he doesn’t sound like nothing.”
So: Every Friday night that we didn’t have anything else to do—which was to say, every Friday night—Damon and I hung out. Usually we had no specific plans. No: usually we had very specific plans, which began with me throwing myself on his sofa and grabbing control of the remote.
Damon and I had grown up together. He was, if anything, even more of a misanthrope than I was. I’d watched every episode of Doctor Who, but he’d memorized all the dialogue. I liked science fiction, but he was into science.
I warned Larissa about him. But what could I do? She was determined. And when Larissa is determined, the only thing that gets in her way is a natural disaster.
This Friday was wildly rare in that Damon and I had actual plans—concrete, can’t-miss, real-world plans. It was the premiere of the new Robot Braveheart movie. Damon and I had seen every Robot remake together since Robot Citizen Kane.
Now, the difficulty was this: Larissa and I had been making self-deprecating but genuinely interested jokes since the project was first anno
unced. (It was to be directed, we both noted, by a young, attractive, oddball director who Larissa had a crush on and whom I wanted to be.) The Robot movies were pure Damon and me, but Robot Braveheart fit Larissa’s and my strange aesthetic perfectly: self-mocking, ultimately pointless, but still good-heartedly weird. Larissa and I didn’t take ourselves seriously, but within that, we took ourselves incredibly seriously. On the other hand, Damon was heady, intellectual, and couldn’t tell a joke when it spat straight in his face.
I wasn’t sure if Larissa was ready for this. But that Friday night, once we were seated and the coming attractions started up (all of them were advertising stupid romantic comedies and drunken buddy movies, of course; we dismissed them all by rolling our eyes at each other) Larissa and Damon surprised all three of us by getting along perfectly.
After the movie we all went home. Larissa and I called each other’s house phones at 11:42 exactly. We picked these arbitrary times to call each other, times when our parents thought we were asleep and when they would probably be asleep, too. Then we synchronized our watches and made sure to call each other at the exact same minute. Usually one of us would dial, and the other would pick up before the phone had time to ring.
At 11:40 I fondled the phone beneath my covers. Pressed to my hip, fingers grazing the buttons.
At 11:41 I forced myself to wait.
At 11:41 and a half, I started to dial.
Immediately I felt the telltale vibration. A fraction of a second before the ring sounded, I picked up.
“What did you think?” I asked.
“He’s a little self-centered,” Larissa said. “He’s really smart, but he thinks he’s even smarter than he is. But he’s sweet. I think he’s one of us.”
“‘One of us’?” I tried to keep my voice steady and impartial. “Really? Like, inner circle?”
“Not inner inner circle,” she said—meaning, I knew, her and me. “Still, he’s good people, I think. He thinks the same way we do. When he talks, I can sort of see where some of your thoughts came from.”
Cool, I thought. I decided to take that as a compliment.
I was a little bothered when Damon asked for her number, and a little more bothered when Larissa was okay with me passing it along, but we settled into a new normality. They talked, and it was cool. And it was even cooler when I found out they’d been talking about me—things I’d said, my ideas repeated. Without me being there, even. Like I had somehow achieved sentience beyond the limits of my unmuscled body and pale skin—or, no. Just like I was a superhero. People mentioned my name without me being there.
People were talking about me.
strange
friends
in places
At first I thought Larissa and I would become each other’s universe. Then I realized our plans were bigger than that, way bigger. We were creating a new universe together.
One by one, the pieces fell into place. Damon was the first piece. And this guy Crash Goldberg from my Thursday night gaming group, whom I’d always thought was a drug addict or completely insane. Turns out he was just bored. One day Larissa and I came across him in a used bookshop, reading the Kierkegaard book we’d been after—it was called Either/Or, and he’d written it pretending to be two completely different and opposing philosophers—and we hung out for the rest of the night, Crash pretending to be each of them (or, at various points, both of them at once).
A few weeks later came Larissa’s friend Mitch. He went to our Hebrew School. He was in different classes than we were, having gone to Hebrew day school until a few years ago, but we hung out during the breaks sometimes. I’d never really given him a second glance—he wore clothes that were popular, and his body was neither scrawny and pathetic or fat and pathetic—but Larissa spoke up for him. They’d known each other since kindergarten; he used to steal extra pints of apple juice for her, and they’d escape together to the playground during naptime.
Between classes, when we ran out to a convenience store to get snacks, Mitch tried to order in Klingon. That sold me. His mother was an author who’d written a semi-famous feminist science fiction novel in the Seventies. That, too, was a solid resume builder. And Larissa and Mitch had been friends centuries ago, which meant that he had witnessed a valuable piece of Larissa’s past, something I would never get to experience. Bringing him into the group, maybe, would let me witness another piece of Larissa—the same motive, perhaps, for her wanting to meet my friends.
Larissa and I introduced ourselves to each other’s friends slowly, one by one. We weren’t snobby about it—the first time we hung out with Crash, for example, was completely an accident—but at the end of the night I turned to Larissa and said, “Well, what do you think of him?” and she reached over and tousled Crash’s hair (Crash was still there) and said, “I think we should keep him.” And so we did.
Sometimes we went downtown, walked around the streets with the bookstores and the bars, the youngest people on the street by twenty years easy, content to swim in the ambiance. Sometimes we went to independent movies, or (occasionally) a concert of a band we’d never heard of, but the alternative newspapers said would be good. Sometimes we just sat around one of our houses and drank strange drinks we found in the all-night supermarket. It sounds boring, and maybe it even was, but we were too happy with ourselves to notice. In the jumble of not fitting in anywhere, we’d found a place to fit in.
One night Larissa said as much to me. At the end of the night, after Mitch had driven home and we’d dropped off Damon and were on our way to dropping off me, she told me: “I think we’ve done it. We created a real-life X-Men.”
“We have,” I said, awed, the full grandeur of the statement sending chills through me. “We’re like a losers’ club. The only thing we have in common is that we have nothing in common with anybody else.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” said Larissa. “I mean—it’s not the only thing we have in common.”
“Well, you and I have our connection. But not everyone else on the team has to be psychic, right?” I said. “Like Cyclops and Emma Frost?”
Only later did I realize that I might have made a mistake—in the heat of the moment, it hadn’t occurred to me that Cyclops and Emma Frost weren’t really co-psychics; they just shared a psychic bond because they were a couple. And only later, later later, did it occur to me that maybe it wasn’t a mistake at all that I said it, but me wishing aloud, or maybe even asking her what she thought about it.
But I don’t think that’s true. I think, in the moment, we really did build something together—a world, not as big as New York City, but as big as we needed it to be.
places i can breathe
The whole world was different now. I was bursting with secrets, a whole other life. When I came home to my parents I didn’t just avoid them because I didn’t want to deal with them, I avoided them because there were things about my life I didn’t want them to know—things that were neither naughty nor illegal, but still fell into the category of Things My Parents Should Not Know.
And it wasn’t just Larissa, either. It was everything about my new world. They wouldn’t Forbid Me From Hanging Out With A Girl—actually, they’d probably be happy I wasn’t gay—but still it felt like something I needed to protect them from, something I needed to keep entirely mine.
*
Dinner on this particular night was lasagna. It was one of the better family dinners—not quite pizza, but almost. My mother did most of the cooking. It used to be my dad, but he’d gotten a promotion at the factory that got him home even later, and since my mom did morning shift at the pharmacy, it fell on her shoulders. The lasagna had that sticky burnt cheese that invited gnawing, long stringy strands that you could collect on the edge of your plate and gather into a single lumpy mouthful. And then there was the pasta part, which was also good, and none of the vegetables used in lasagna ever tasted too vegetabley. Garlic bread on the side, made from a long Italian loaf toasted hard, and the meal was
a bona fide winner.
The only down side, in fact, was my parents themselves.
THEM: How was school today?
ME: Good.
THEM: What’s Damon doing these days?
ME: Nothing.
THEM: Are there any good Youth Group events coming up?
ME: I wouldn’t know.
I hadn’t gone to Youth Group in years. Literally a year and a half. Larissa, too—we’d both found that, rather than being lumped together with other people who weren’t that much like us, we’d much rather prefer to be alone. And so instead we wound up hanging out alone, together.
We spent a lot of time downtown. Not doing anything special. In fact, purposely doing nothing. Mostly in coffee shops. Mostly while already highly caffeinated. We often talked about taking a bus to New York for the night—it was only two hours each way, and the bus stop was a few blocks away from our favorite cafe—and we dared each other constantly about it. The art, the freaky people, the bands playing in submerged coffee bars. New York was like the world as we’d create it ourselves, if only because New York in our heads was a world we’d created ourselves. The more we talked about it, the more it almost seemed doable: leave Philly at 7:00, get to Manhattan by nine, spend half an hour wandering around and get home at 11:30? Even for us, it was a little too crazy.
