Six More Months of June

3. Caplan

I knew Hollis was going to follow me to the trash cans. That’s a good thing about being stuck on the dance floor with someone. You know their moves.

When I turn around, she’s just standing there looking at me. I wait for her to talk, but she won’t. Hollis does conversation like she’s playing chicken.

“You shouldn’t litter,” I say.

“You had to do the video with Mina?”

“Why do you care?” I say.

“Like together? In a pair? Like fucking wedding vows?”

“You broke up with me.”

“Oh, you noticed?”

“Hollis.” I pinch the bridge of my nose.

“What? What do you want, Caplan?”

“I want you to take Quinn’s fucking hat off,” I say to my hand.

She pulls it away from my face, takes the hat off, and tosses it to me. She’s sort of glaring and sort of smiling.

“You didn’t have to do that to Mina. In front of everyone.”

She stops smiling.

“If you wanted me to come to your birthday party, you could have just asked me,” I say.

“Maybe it isn’t about you. Maybe sometimes I’m just nice.”

I snort.

“Would you have come to my birthday if I’d just asked you?”

“Well, yeah. We’ll always be like. Friends, yeah.”

I’m messing with Quinn’s hat in my hands. I make myself look at her. She looks like she’s about to cry but doesn’t seem embarrassed at all. For a second, neither of us says anything. The bell rings.

“And I didn’t break up with you. I said we should take some space. To think,” she says.

“Well,” I say. “Have you? You know. Thought?”

She laughs. “I wasn’t the one who needed to think.”

“So you did it to see what I’d do.”

“Yeah.”

“Just to get a reaction out of me.”

“Mm-hm.”

“Well. That was sorta childish, don’t you think?”

“Oh my god.” She throws her hands up. “Caplan, of course I did. What, have you never liked someone who is totally neutral about you?”

She waits for me to respond. I really hate that. When I can feel her leading us somewhere, setting me up to say something specific.

“Okay, fine, congratulations, you are the biggest grown-up of all, the least jealous, the least emotional. Good for you.” She starts to walk away.

The freshmen trickle out into the lunch yard in little clusters, glancing over at us.

“Can we go somewhere else to talk?” I ask, rocking back and forth on my heels. “Did you drive today?”

“I am not skipping class to go sit in my car and listen to you call me a child.”

“I didn’t call you a child. I said you did something childish.”

She stares at me. She shakes her head and starts to turn.

“And I’m not,” I say, really much louder than I’d have liked to, “I’m not neutral. About you.”

“Thank you. Thank you so much. That’s beautiful.”

A full table of freshmen stare at us openly.

“Really, you should write that down. You should write a whole book. You should—”

“What class do you have right now?” I ask.

“Study hall.”

“Hollis, Jesus, can you just—? I want to talk, I came over here to talk to you. Can we just—”

“Just what? Have the same fight again? Why?”

“Because fighting with you is fun and interesting.”

“Okay.” She makes a face like, And?

“And I miss it.”

She glares at me for another second, a classic Hollis look, furious, blazing, so fucking pretty.

“And I’d rather fight than not talk to you.”

She blazes at me some more. Then, she sighs and walks right past me. She’s almost at the parking lot before she turns back. “Well. Are you coming?”

Here is the story of how Mina and I became friends. It starts with her being a child genius, and my being an evil little prick. We met in second grade. It was one year after my dad left us and we moved from Indiana to Two Docks, Michigan, into a small, square, white house on Corey Street, directly across from a redbrick castle with a blue front door and a big brass knocker. For me, given the way I was turning out, this was just in time.

No one ever taught Mina to read. She was a PTA legend. One day, when she was like three years old, and I was probably still learning to talk, she was in the car with her mom and her dad. They were arguing about something and they missed their turn. She called out from her car seat that Alpine Street was back that way. When they asked her how she knew, she said she saw the sign. They spent the rest of the afternoon driving around pointing at street signs in our town, and she just rattled them off—Willow, Gates, Brighton—silent gh like it was nothing—Huron, Muncie, Beaufort, fucking Beaufort.

I remember wanting to smash my nuggets into the face of the lady telling the story the first time I heard it. Why was she taunting my mom with lore of this freak genius who lived right across the street from us, this Mozart of chapter books, when her own son was seven and a half years old and could not, for the life of him, get his b’s and d’s straight? After that night, my mom constantly suggested playdates or plans to get our families together. I was sure she thought hanging out with Mina would rub off on me and make me smarter. Looking back, I think maybe she was just lonely without my dad and looking to make friends, even before she knew Mina’s mom would soon be raising a kid on her own, too. I don’t know.

Meanwhile, we had entered into the hellscape of reading out loud in class. I was already good at soccer and kind of ran shit on the playground, so it was probably awesome for the other kids to see me down bad and eating my own humiliation every day when we’d go around the room in a snaking train for doom with the teacher pointing at each one of us in turn. I always got through like four words. Then everyone would laugh, and the teacher would move on. That fall, we had assigned seats next to each other. After my caveman stutter, in a cruel and obvious twist of fate, it would be Mina’s turn. She had a really nice, clear voice, didn’t speed up to show off on purpose, and didn’t monotone or forget when to breathe. She sounded wise and peaceful, but also like there was a secret she wasn’t saying, something else just behind the words that she knew all about and would maybe tell us someday. She wasn’t particularly popular, but everyone liked to listen to Mina read.

Anyway, I hated her guts. It felt to me, at eight, obsessed with myself and my own take on the world, that she was doing it on purpose and that she existed to make me look bad, in quiet opposition to the natural rules and order of the world in which I thrived. She would literally read during recess. This point especially infuriated me. Recess was for yelling and running and kicking balls. Stuff I was awesome at. And so, I internalized all my tiny rage, and I bullied her. I was a coward, and bad with conflict even then, so none of it happened to her face. But to anyone who would listen, I called her a nerd, and a freak, and a loser. Obviously not super creative, but it was surprisingly easy to bring everyone on board. I called her four-eyes and bug-eyes. I said her freckles were a contagious geek disease. I said her hair was so long and dark because she was a witch. I waged my war on her entirely underground, and overnight, other kids were repeating it all to her face. Mina was different and special. I pointed this out, and we all turned away from her.

She bore it all like a fucking boss, which only made me more mad. She never reacted, or cried, or told anyone. It was like she couldn’t hear us at all, or if she could, she didn’t care. That’s how far above us she was. Then, on Halloween, when we all came to class in costume, she wore giant fake glasses that magnified her eyes and colored in all her freckles with green and black, and of course, she wore a witch’s hat. It is difficult to explain, at the time, how baller this was of her.

A week later, Ms. Levi decided to rub it in my face, which probably altered the course of my life. She held Mina and me after class before lunch one day and explained that from now on, we would be in our own reading group, just us two. Mina and I were going to be reading partners. Even though I was the class dunce, I was smart enough to know that this was because Mina was brilliant and I was stupid and I needed her help. I stormed from the room, and Mina came running after me.

“Wait! Where are you going?”

“To recess, to be with my friends. Leave me alone.”

“Just hold on a minute.” She was panting, jogging to keep up with me. “What is making you sadmean?”

“Sadmean?”

“You’re sad, so you’re being mean.”

“That isn’t a real word. Why are you so weird?” But she had confused me enough to get me to stop walking. I wanted to understand. I didn’t want to feel stupid. “Is it different from just plain-old mean mean?”

“Yes. I wouldn’t talk to you if you were being mean mean. I don’t have time.”

I looked at her, and I felt guilty. It was a brand-new and deeply uncomfortable feeling.

“I’m sorry I called you weird.”

“It’s okay. Everyone does.”

“I’m sorry for that, too.”

“Well, that’s silly. It’s not your fault.”

I was quiet.

“People called me weird way before you moved here.”

This should have relieved me, but I just felt worse. “I’m sorry about your dad, too.”

“Oh,” she said. “Thank you.”

I shuffled my feet. She wouldn’t stop looking at me. It made me nervous.

“I met him once,” I said. “He gave me a shot.”

“Well, that was his job,” she said.

“Yeah, but it didn’t really hurt.”

She eyed me skeptically. “Shots always hurt.”

“Well, this one was not so bad. Cause of how your dad did it.”

“How he did it?”

“I just wasn’t scared,” I said, annoyed now that I’d said anything.

“Well. I always thought he was a good doctor. But it’s nice to know from someone else.”

“Sure.”

“So. Why are you sad?”

I sighed. “Because reading is impossible. I’d rather get ten shots than read one page.”

“Do you really mean that?”

“Almost, I think,” I said.

“Well, you’re wrong. And you’ll see.” And with that, she was off down the hallway, and then I was following her.

We had this homework where we were supposed to read for thirty minutes every single night. That afternoon, Mina crossed the street and knocked on my front door, and my mom let her in. She marched into my bedroom, completely at home, with the first Harry Potter under her arm.

“You gotta be kidding,” I said. “That’s like a billion pages long.”

“It’s a good story, so you’ll be happy that it lasts.”

And for the next thirty minutes, timed out exactly on my new waterproof digital watch, we read out loud to each other. Mina would read five pages, and I would read two—stumbling, slowly, but reading all the same. She was right, it was a good story, and the thirty minutes went quick. That night, after dinner, I was wandering around the house, wondering what would happen next to the boy who lived in the cupboard under the stairs.

“I’m going for a walk,” I announced. My mother appeared out of nowhere, blocking the front door with her arm. She was in her scrubs, fresh off a long shift at work.

“It is almost eight o’clock, Caplan. You’re going nowhere.”

I sighed. “I’m going to see Mina Stern. Across the street. I need more reading help.”

These were magic words. My mother smiled this annoying grown-up smile and let me pass. I crossed the street in the dark, a little breathless with the lateness and strangeness of my successful escape. I stood for a moment at her front door, feeling awkward. I wandered around the side of the house till I saw a high window, slightly open. White curtains with little silver stars were floating out in the breeze. The roof that jutted out over the side porch just under the window was only a foot or so from the top of her jungle gym, so I climbed up and called out toward the stars. The curtain was tugged aside, and there she was, in a purple nightgown covered in planets and rocket ships. I took exactly one second to be startled by the blue of her eyes without glasses, and then she slid the window open farther and asked me what in the world I was doing, and was I looking to fall and break my neck?

“I’m here to read,” I had said. “I gotta know what happens next.”

And you’ll find that there are certain things you cannot go through without becoming friends. Fighting a fully grown mountain troll is one. Reading the entire Harry Potter series out loud together past bedtime is another.

“What are you thinking about?” Hollis asks me. We’re lying in the back of her car with the seats down and a blanket up against the trunk’s window.

“Mm, nothing,” I say, not opening my eyes.

“It’s fascinating,” she says, “that boys can actually think about nothing.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like I’ve realized you have whole periods of time where you are literally, like, not having a thought. You’re just zoned out. White noise.”

“And you don’t ever have that?”

She laughs, her head bouncing up and down on my stomach. “No, I’m kind of always having a thought.”

“That sounds exhausting.”

“Mm-hm.”

“You need a nap, I bet,” I say, pulling her up closer to me. “What are you thinking about now, then?”

“I’m thinking,” she says, tucking her chin on top of my shoulder, “that it’s actually inherently childish to call your girlfriend childish. It’s sexist.”

“So are you my girlfriend again?”

She smiles into my shoulder. I pull her onto me so that she’s lying flat on her stomach. She lines up her arms and legs with mine and our faces press together, cheek to cheek, so I’m looking one way and she’s looking the other. She pushes her palms down flat into mine. This is our tradition, our joke about cuddling when you’re in a car, maximizing surface area and space, touching as much of each other as possible. “I want no part of my body to touch the literal back seat of my family’s car,” she’d said the very first time we did it. To be fair, Hollis drives a massive white Suburban. Quinn once told her that if that was the car her parents were going to buy, they were expecting her to have sex in it. She threw something at him and said it was so she could pick up all her younger siblings from school. I can remember that day so clearly, early fall our junior year, Hollis swinging her car keys around on a long TDHS lanyard, freshly licensed. We’d lost our virginities pretty recently to each other. The whole conversation at the lunch table, the acknowledgment that we were having sex, made me turn bright red. Everyone was giving me shit, but Hollis didn’t seem embarrassed. She looked actually very pleased with herself. Proud. I remember that it made me feel so good. So cool.

“You’re all sweaty,” she says.

“Well, so are you.”

“No, that’s your sweat, not mine. I’m covered in your sweat.”

“Gross.”

We lie there happily for a bit.

“I can’t believe you’re thinking about the ‘childish’ thing right now.”

“I’m not anymore. It was a passing thought. It was passing through before, right when you asked me,” she says.

I consider it.

“Well. You’re right, I think,” I say, “but say some more about it. For my white-noise boy brain to understand.”

“I’m not saying I was behaving super well. I was just thinking your word choice—”

“My word choice. Jeez—”

“Childish. It puts you so far above me.”

“Well. I don’t think I’m above you. At all.”

“Good,” she says. “You’re not.”

“This time, actually, I was under you. That was a fun switch-up.”

She smacks her hand down onto mine.

“To be clear,” she says, “I was being childish. And I knew it. And you knew it. And I want you to be truthful. And to call me on my shit. I just want you to feel sexist while you do it.”

I burst out laughing. It makes both our bodies shake, which makes her laugh, too.

“No more stunts to figure out how I feel, then,” I say.

“Maybe if you ever just told me how you feel, I wouldn’t need to go there.” She scoots down so she’s propped her elbows on my chest with her chin on her hands.

“Caplan.”

“Yes.”

“Will you come to my birthday?”

“Yes, Hollis. I will.”

“Is our fight over?”

“You tell me.”

She kisses me. Somewhere in the car, my phone starts vibrating.

“We should probably go to class,” she says, rolling off me.

“Oh, whatever, second-semester seniors,” I say, fishing my phone from the front seat. There’s a missed call from my mom. She’s also texted me about a hundred times.

You have an email from your Michigan Portal!

Then,

CALL ME!

Then,

I LOVE U no matter what.

“Oh, fuck,” I say.

“What?” Hollis says.

“No, nothing.” I scramble to pull my boxers on, socks, shoes, shirt, then tug my shoes off again to put on my pants. I almost kick Hollis in the face.

“Cap, hey, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing, nothing,” I say. “I just forgot about something I have to deal with. I gotta go, I’m sorry. I’ll text you.”

“Wait, I have to go, too. Just give me a sec,” she says, messing with her bra.

“You’re telling me you don’t want to take your time, brush your hair fifty times, and use your face misty thing and stuff?”

She narrows her eyes. “Fine, go.”

I’m halfway out of the car already, but I kiss her again. Then I book it for the school side door, praying someone will be hanging around to let me in.