“For reference, that’s the only sensible way to answer that kind of question.”
“Rack the balls, dickweed,” I said, and for that night, at least, we were friends.
TWO GAMES LATER, MARIE-HELENE DRIFTED OVER IN time to catch me in the middle of a yawn.
“Long night?” She did that pretty-girl thing where she casually slid under my arm.
“No,” I told her as August took his fifth shot in a row. “I’ll win in the end.”
I wasn’t sure if I believed that. But Simon did. Simon liked how soft she was, too, and after a moment, I caught myself playing with the ends of her hair.
Honestly, it felt nice. Simple. When did I start thinking a good relationship had to be complicated?
Friendship I understood. There had to be an arc there, some kind of story that the two of you were telling just by being together. Something made up from what you wanted from the world and what you got instead. A story you reminded each other of when you needed to feel understood. I saw you in the quad that day, mine would go. I’d always thought you would be blond. I always thought you’d be my twin sister. My other half. And then I met you, and someone killed the meathead down the hall, and you became something else to me. Because other than our friendship, I felt like I had nothing to show for this year. Like I was a circuit board where all of the tangled cords ran straight to Charlotte Holmes.
And still it wasn’t just a friendship. When I’d met her, I’d stopped looking at girls in the way I used to, and I used to look at girls all the time. More than look—I made out with them in my room to Radiohead turned all the way up. I texted them to say goodnight. I was a good boyfriend, while the relationship lasted—though it never lasted long. Still, they were never my friends, not the way that Holmes was, and I didn’t know if what I was feeling was a kind of reversion to my former self. Was I re-becoming fifteen-year-old James Watson Jr., a pair of tickets to the Highcome School Spring Fling in my pocket? I was so much more now. I was past all the hopeless crushes, my inability to separate friendship and love.
Wasn’t I?
I’d been thinking for so long that what I wanted from Holmes was—everything. Like this thing between us was a Wonderland rabbit hole, that we could fall endlessly and never hit the bottom. I wanted us to belong to each other, completely, in a way where no one else could come close. Maybe I felt this way because she was so strange and private and still, somehow, had invited me in. Me, out of everyone in the world. Maybe it came from how we met, the two of us together in a foxhole. Maybe I wanted her to be my girlfriend because I didn’t see what could happen if I found myself wanting someone else. I wanted a stamp to put on our file: All boxes checked. No one else needed. She didn’t want me to touch her, but she wanted to be near me all the time. Closed circuit. Keep out.
Son of a bitch, I thought, and it wasn’t just because August had won this round, too.
“Too bad.” Marie-Helene leaned against my chest. “If you’re ready to give up, I can introduce you to someone. My drawing professor’s here. He doesn’t do video installation the way you do”—Thank God, I thought, I couldn’t BS a professor—“but maybe he could talk to you about Sieben admissions for next year?”
August was silently racking the balls for another game.
“I’ll be right back,” I told him, because the person Marie-Helene was waving at was the man I’d deduced to be Nathaniel.
“Okay, Simon,” August said, and I remembered how not-simple any of this was.
THAT WAS HOW I FOUND MYSELF STARING AT A SET OF charcoals in an industrial loft five blocks away.
“Think about form,” Nathaniel was yelling. “Think about style.”
“I’m thinking about killing him,” I told Marie-Helene, who looked horrified. Holmes would have snickered, but Holmes wasn’t there.
After an interminable hour listening to him gas on about creating from your gut, really feeling the rawness of the world in your work, I sympathized a bit more with Holmes and her aversion to expressed emotion. Talking about your feelings was a lot different from talking about “feeling” in the abstract. If this is what being an artist or a writer was like, maybe I wasn’t one after all. Especially if it involved growing some neck-beard. Nathaniel’s was as lush and overgrown as moss.
I decided that if this was the guy that Leander had been kissing, he was doing some serious slumming.
But Marie-Helene and the rest of his coterie hung on his every word. I understood why—he listened to his students’ opinions, knew things about their lives. He teased Marie-Helene about her “new crush” within minutes of meeting me. I thought about Mr. Wheatley, my old creative writing teacher, and how good it felt when he’d taken an interest in my work last fall. (Even if he’d feigned that interest for his own messed-up, villainous reasons.)
So maybe Nathaniel was a blowhard. He seemed like a nice guy, underneath it, and I sort of felt bad knowing that I was the villain in this situation.
Unless he was a villain, too.
“You should come to Sieben next year,” Nathaniel had said to me back at the party. “You’re a nice kid. Smart. I can tell that you’re smart. As usual, these miscreants are having a late night Draw ’n’ Drink tonight and they’ve talked me into coming along. Why don’t you show me what you’ve got? I can put in a good word for you with the admissions committee.”
Hence, we’d gone a few blocks over to this industrial loft, which maybe belonged to Nathaniel—God only knew—and now I was holding a piece of charcoal the way I held a cigarette the one and only time I tried to smoke one. Which, for the record, isn’t how you hold a cigarette or a charcoal.