Layoverland

by Gabby Noone

  “We were co–class presidents,” he explains. “One person is automatically given the position for having the highest GPA in the class; the other is elected, well, out of popularity.”

  “Let me guess which one you were.”

  “Yeah,” he says, rolling his eyes. “But Laura and I became really good friends. I definitely thought about us becoming, like, involved . . . romantically . . . but I don’t know . . .”

  “You don’t know what?” I press.

  “It just seemed impossible,” he says.

  “How? She was literally just begging you to come over to her house to Netflix and chill!”

  “We were from two different worlds.”

  Caleb squints and looks away toward the large cafeteria windows with stunning views of a fountain shaded by oak trees. Typical Brentwood.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask. “I’m sure this wasn’t some Romeo and Juliet thing. You went to the same school. She was comfortable acknowledging you in the middle of the cafeteria.”

  “She was cool and I wasn’t!” he blurts out, turning back toward me. “It was as simple as that. It was acceptable to talk at school, but . . . Why am I even explaining this to you? You’re my age. Don’t you understand the ridiculous hierarchies of social behavior when you’re trapped in high school?”

  “Well, Laura was clearly very okay with you not being cool. Why didn’t you make a move?”

  “She just always asked me to hang out at the worst possible times, like the night before a test or right before our applications were due or . . .”

  His memory changes again. Now we’re in the school library. He’s sitting across from Laura at a wooden table.

  “So will you please just humor me and come on Friday night? How many times do I have to invite you to things? You never come when I ask you,” she says, looking up from a laptop. “Pleeeeaseee.”

  Someone out of sight shushes her.

  “Shooosh,” Laura parodies, putting her manicured finger to her mouth. “Please?” she says, this time quieter, turning back to Caleb.

  “I have . . . plans . . . every Friday afternoon, so I have to stay in Friday night. You know I’m taking the SAT on Saturday morning. I should be studying the night before.”

  “You can come out for a little bit! You know, studying the night before the SAT doesn’t help you. If it’s not lodged into your brain by then, you’re screwed. And I’m sure, given that you seem to have started preparing for the SAT as soon as you came out of the womb, you’ll be fine.”

  “I’m not big on parties,” Caleb admits. “I hate being around drunk people.”

  “So why not get drunk too? You know, that’s the only way you’ll ever fit in,” Laura says, smiling sarcastically. Caleb raises his eyebrows at her.

  “I’m kidding! I’m just kidding,” she continues. “Seriously, I understand. It’s totally chill if you don’t want to drink. Everyone always appreciates a designated driver.”

  I cluck my tongue at the irony of Caleb being a designated driver. I can’t help it. He’s too mortified watching his own memory to even notice anyway.

  “C’mon, Caleb!” she says. “You’re just saying no because you like making me beg, huh?”

  Silently, I glare at Present Caleb and wave my hands palms up. He just rubs his eyes.

  “Yeah, yeah. Maybe I’ll stop by,” he says to Laura, turning back to his clunky prep book.

  The memory changes again.

  Now we’re sitting in the back seat of what I assume is his Range Rover, aka My Death Machine. His past self is sitting in the front seat of the parked car and his hand is drafting a text.

  I lean forward and read over his shoulder in a way that would be too close for comfort if it were actually Caleb and not just a memory.

  He’s composing a text to Laura that says Guess where I am . He backspaces the winky face and changes it to an exclamation point instead. Then he backspaces that again, leaves the text without punctuation, and just stares at it.

  “Oh my god, send it already!” I yell in his completely oblivious ear.

  “Can you please stop editorializing my memories?” Present Caleb says next to me, cowering in the back seat.

  “Fine.”

  We follow Past Caleb as he gets out of the car and walks up the driveway toward a beige ranch-style house on a quiet street.

  He rings the doorbell, but no one answers. Instead there’s just the sound of girls squealing and the thumping noises of an EDM remix of a Cardi B song. He jiggles the handle and the door’s unlocked, so he lets himself in. As he walks through the formal dining room, which houses a table littered with red Solo cups, and then the kitchen littered with even more cups, people look up with a hopeful glint in their eyes at his face, then register that it’s only him and immediately go back to their conversations.

  It’s a look I’m familiar with myself, that look that makes you feel totally irrelevant and unwanted when you walk into a room.

  Caleb moves on through the whole first floor and past the sliding glass doors leading to the back patio, looking for Laura, I assume, but she’s nowhere to be found. He walks back inside, tries the handle on what I guess to be the powder room, sees that it’s locked, and walks up a carpeted staircase to another bathroom with the light on and the door slightly ajar. We follow him into the bathroom and he locks the door behind us. Even though our bodies are only illusions, the room feels too crowded with me, Present Caleb, and Past Caleb all inside.

  Past Caleb looks at himself in the mirror and shakes his head, a shake that says, Why did you even bother coming here? Then he takes a deep breath and stands in front of the toilet, putting the seat up.

  “Uh,” I say, turning around to stare at the door. “Can you skip this part, Caleb? I know I said that everything that happens in your memories stays here and you should be honest, but really, you don’t need to go this far into detail.”

  “Hold on,” Caleb says, a look of agony on his face. “This is, unfortunately, important.”

  Right as Past Caleb is about to unzip his pants to pee, he freezes at the sound of a girl giggling and then a boy going “Shush.”

  “Shooosh,” the girl says, then giggles again.

  Caleb turns and stares at the tacky seashell-print shower curtain for a moment, then shoves it open. Laura is sitting in the tub fully dressed, but the blond guy next to her has his pants down and she is clearly about to do something to him that would definitely get her sent to Hell, according to that one nun at Caleb’s elementary school.

  “Caleb?” she asks, squinting up at him.

  “Uh. Sorry,” he mumbles.

  He pulls the shower curtain closed so forcefully that it rips off its hooks and falls onto Laura and the other guy.

  A strangled noise comes out of Past Caleb’s mouth.

  We follow Past Caleb as he sprints out of the bathroom, down the stairs, and out the front door. Then the memory ends, though I’m guessing maybe he walked himself off a cliff out of embarrassment and there’s been a mix-up with his passport and that’s actually how he died.

  “Is that enough for today?” Caleb asks as we float in blank darkness. He has the energy-zapped look of someone who has just run a marathon.

  “Not so fast. What happened with you two after that?”

  “Nothing,” he says. “We never talked about it. I mean, I’d hoped that maybe Laura was drunk and hadn’t even remembered I’d walked in on her, but I pretty much avoided her after that.”

  “Why didn’t you say something?” I ask.

  “What was I supposed to say? ‘Sorry I walked in on you about to give Derek Carter a blow job’? ‘I should’ve knocked even though the door was ajar’?”

  “I mean, yeah?” I say.

  “That would’ve been so weird! It’s not like we were dating or that she even knew I liked her. She
was free to hook up with whoever she wanted!”

  “So why did you pull that shower curtain back? You knew you were going to find something you didn’t want to see, didn’t you?”

  He says nothing and just pushes his hair back, then begins to slowly claw at it.

  “You wanted to have an excuse to never talk to Laura again because that meant you’d never have to actually confront if you liked her or not. It was an easy out.”

  “That’s a bold assessment,” Caleb scoffs.

  “Your SAT score, your grades, those are all things you can prepare for or quantify with numbers, but you can’t quantify your feelings. Feelings are so fussy, so unpredictable. If you admitted you liked Laura, you could get hurt. It was something you couldn’t control, huh?”

  He stares up at me, his jaw slack.

  “Damn,” he whispers.

  This is it.

  The pain and the torment I’ve wanted him to feel all along.

  “You’re so good at this!” he blurts out, smiling. “That’s, like, such a spot-on assessment. I never thought of it that way. Were you a therapist in your past life? Jeez.”

  I look up at the nonexistent ceiling and suppress a scream.

  “So was that it?” he asks. “Was that the thing that’s been holding me back from moving on to Heaven? My repressed feelings?”

  “No, Caleb. You’ll know when it happens,” I say. “I’m pretty sure we’re just getting started.”

  23

  I’m brushing my teeth when Jenna comes into our tiny bathroom and sits down on the toilet directly behind me.

  “Um,” I say, my voice muffled by toothpaste. “Can you not?”

  “What?” she says, the sound of her pee hitting the toilet bowl. “This is what roommates do!”

  I spit out my toothpaste in disgust. Also out of necessity, but mostly disgust.

  “No, they do not!” I yelp.

  I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand and storm out without rinsing. At home, I would hardly give a second thought to Emmy using the toilet while I was brushing my teeth. Except for when she’d flush while I was in the shower and the water would go freezing cold.

  “Have you ever thought about what would happen if you died while on your period?” she asks from behind the bathroom door, unfazed by my reaction. “Like, our bodies are frozen in time, so does that mean you’d have your period the whole entire time you’re stuck here?”

  I hear the toilet flush and the faucet turn on.

  “This is kind of random, semi-related, but you know how in Twilight, Edward says Bella’s blood is like his own personal drug? So, like, what happens when she has her period? I feel like Stephenie Meyer never properly addressed this and I just think about it so, so much. . . .”

  “Jenna,” I say when she emerges from the bathroom. “We need to set some boundaries.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, knock before entering and don’t pee while I’m already in the bathroom and, most importantly, do not try to engage me in a conversation on the menstrual politics of the Mormon propaganda known as Twilight.”

  Jenna opens her mouth to speak but is interrupted by a knock at our door.

  “Who is it?” she calls.

  “It’s Caleb,” the voice behind the door answers.

  “How does he know my room number?” I whisper to myself, my stomach doing a somersault.

  “I gave it to him,” Jenna says matter-of-factly. “I invited him over to hang out with us.”

  “And why would you do that?” I say, pulling her back inside the bathroom to muffle our conversation.

  “I went around the airport today inviting basically everyone I saw who is our age to come hang out. I’m trying to start a support group slash social club. I thought about calling it the Minor Mixer, but that sounded too depressing, so I’m calling it the Gone Too Soon Club.”

  “Oh yeah, that’s not a depressing name at all.”

  “I invited, like, ten people,” she says. “But I guess Caleb is the only one who took me up on the invite.”

  “Jenna, this is what I’m saying. Boundaries. If you want to invite people to our room, you need to ask me first because I am your roommate and this is a shared space.”

  “Hello?” Caleb says, knocking at the door again.

  I stare down at my orange pajamas I only just changed into.

  “Pretend I’m out. I’ll stay in here until he’s gone.”

  “I don’t get it. What are you so worried about, Bea? What do you have to lose?”

  I put the lid down on the toilet seat and sit on it, hugging my knees to my chest.

  “Ohhhhh. I get it. You like him, don’t you? But he makes you nervous because you’re not sure he likes you back. . . .”

  I start to open my mouth in protest, but then I realize just letting her believe this interpretation is much easier than explaining the truth.

  “Yeah,” I say, looking down at the floor, fake bashful.

  “Okay. You stay put here. I’ll grill him and you can eavesdrop.”

  “Wait, Jenna, n—”

  She ignores me and bursts out the door, slamming it behind her. Even though I’m not happy about this plan, that doesn’t stop me from crawling on the floor and pressing my ear to the bathroom door.

  “Hiiiiiiiiiiii,” Jenna says, her voice high.

  “Hey,” Caleb says. “Sorry, am I early?”

  “No, not at all. People have been . . . coming in and out.”

  “Cool,” he says, but his voice is wary. “Is Bea around?”

  “No. She’s . . . in an emergency staff meeting.”

  I have to admit, I am pleasantly surprised by the efficiency and believability of this lie.

  “Why?” Jenna presses. “Do you need to talk to her?”

  “Oh, no,” Caleb says quickly. “Just wondering. You know, since you guys are roommates.”

  “Of course.”

  It’s silent for a moment. I can’t see it to confirm, but I imagine it’s awkward.

  “Do you wanna come in?” Jenna asks.

  “Uhhh . . . sure.”

  “Take a seat!”

  I squint through the hinges of the door. Jenna is gesturing to the edge of my bed. Caleb sinks into it.

  “So, how’s . . . being Bea’s roommate?” Caleb asks.

  “Oh, it’s great, for the most part.”

  Excuse me?

  “What do you mean?” Caleb asks, his voice amused.

  “She’s just so guarded,” Jenna says loudly. “I want her to open up to me. I mean, she knows everything about me, but I don’t really know anything about her other than that she died in a car accident.”

  “She did?”

  “Oh no,” I mutter without thinking.

  Caleb turns his head toward the bathroom. Jenna clears her throat, commanding his attention.

  “Anyway, you spend more time with her than I do these days. Has she told you anything interesting?”

  “Mmm. Not really. The only personal thing she’s revealed is that she went to Bible camp once.”

  “That makes so much sense. Sometimes, I feel like she has a connection to the divine world. It’s like, who knows what’s going on in that mind of hers?”

  I throw my hands up in the air, as if Jenna can see me.

  “Yeah. I get that,” Caleb says. “For the most part, I find her really easy to talk to. Like, easier to talk to than anyone. Then sometimes it’s like she’s somewhere else. She can be kind of . . . distant.”

  Well, if I knew this was going to be a roast, then I would’ve brought some marshmallows.

  “Not in a bad way,” he corrects quickly. “It’s just, and please don’t tell her I said this, it’s like sometimes she can’t stand the sight of me. Then other times, I get the sense that she’s
. . . flirting with me?”

  “Well, do you want her to flirt with you?”

  “If our roles were reversed, that’d be totally inappropriate. If it were my job to spend time with her, it’d be totally creepy if I were flirting with her. That’s, like, workplace harassment.”

  With this, Caleb stands up and begins pacing, out of my line of vision.

  “Yeah, but it’s not your job,” Jenna insists. “It’s hers.”

  “I’m just saying things,” he says with a nervous laugh. “Who knows what they mean? My sense of reality is pretty much nonexistent these days.”

  “So? You’re still not answering my question, Caleb. Do you want her to flirt with you or not?”

  As I wait for him to answer her, I get this weird feeling in my stomach, like it’s filled with butterflies wielding tiny knives.

  “I don’t feel comfortable answering that question,” he says finally. “Not to be rude.”

  “Oh my god, you totally want her to flirt with you! You like her! You like like her.”

  “Um, so when are more people arriving to this party?” Caleb says, his voice squeaky. “Can I use your bathroom?”

  I hear his footsteps approaching the door. The knob begins to turn.

  “Wait!” Jenna yells.

  Under the door, I see his feet pause.

  “Our toilet is clogged,” Jenna elaborates. “Some Jell-O didn’t sit right with Bea and . . . well, we’re waiting on a maintenance person to come fix it.”

  “Oh. Okay. You know what? I’ll just head back to my room then. I’m pretty tired anyway. Good night, Jenna.”

  “Night!”

  I hear the hallway door open.

  “Oh, and Jenna?” Caleb calls. “Please don’t tell Bea anything we talked about tonight, if that’s okay? I don’t want to make her uncomfortable.”

  “Of course!”

  I wait for the door to slam shut and then I count to thirty.

  “First of all,” I yell at Jenna, bursting out of the bathroom, “‘some Jell-O didn’t sit right’ with me?”

  Jenna reaches for Sprinkles and holds him up next to her face.

  “We’re sorry,” she says in a baby voice, pouting.

  “Save it.”