26. Mina
That thing happens again, where my mind goes empty and hums.
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Yes,” I say again, “I’m sure.”
“Okay.”
Something about his voice makes me pause and look up at him.
“Are you?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I’m just. I’m nervous?”
I pull on his hand, so he gets on his knees, too. I put our foreheads together.
“It’s just me.”
He puts his hand in my hair, behind my ear.
“That’s the thing. It’s you.”
After, we lie in my bed together, both out of breath, in a bizarre state of shock.
I’m not going to pretend that I haven’t ever thought about this moment before. But all I feel now is immobile with surprise, a total humiliation for whichever one of us will have to break the silence, and absolute dread of what they will say. I think if it’s me, I will open my mouth and something massive and irreversible will come out.
When we were growing up, before we were too big for my twin bed, we would sleep head to toe. Whenever I couldn’t fall asleep, I would close my eyes and imagine how his face might look, down at the other end of the bed. Long, light lashes, sparse, decisive freckles, the mole under his right eye, the hair right at his temple, so blond in childhood it was almost white. I’d done this since I was so young that it never seemed wrong or romantic. Then one night, when I was twelve years old, in that strange twilight between sleeping and waking with his striped socked feet an inch from my nose, I thought about what it would be like to kiss him. I was so embarrassed, it woke me all the way up, and I went and got sick in the bathroom.
I can feel him looking at me now, but I cannot turn my head. I look at the ceiling, the morning light against the dark molding.
“What is this music?” he asks. We both listen. I try to focus on the words and not the huge thing settling over me, or maybe it is coming from inside of me, clawing its way out, after all these years.
Where has the time all gone to?
Haven’t done half the things we want to
“It’s my dad’s,” I say. “He had a big record collection. He loved old musicals.”
“I didn’t even know you had a record player.”
“I can’t remember the last time we used it.”
“What’s this song?” he asks. I’m about to say I have no idea, but then I recognize it.
“Some Other Time.”
The lyrics are as clear as if they’re playing in the room with us. It must be comically loud for my mom, downstairs.
“Why do you think she put it on? To set the mood?” he asks.
“No, I think just to give us privacy.” I sit up and reach for my shirt, try to feel normal, put my feet flat on the floor. “I can’t remember the last time there was music in the house,” I say, just to say something. I stand, pull on my shorts, and turn around to face him.
He’s lying in my bed with his hands behind his head, watching me. When he sees my face, his falls. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing—”
“You should get dressed—”
“I only wore my underwear here.” He laughs, and I try to laugh, too, and then I feel like crying. I turn around and find a big T-shirt for him. He watches me carefully as he pulls it over his head.
“Hey,” he says, “are you okay?”
It’s a Two Docks High Science Olympiad shirt, with a periodic table on the front. Underneath, it says, “WE ARGON TO BARIUM.”
“Yes, I’m fine,” I say, “but I think you should go.”
He looks at me, bewildered. “Go?”
“Yes.”
“Right now? After we just—”
“Oh, don’t be like that.” I turn and pretend I’m going to make my bed. “You’ve had sex plenty of times.” I feel panicked, like if I’m not alone in the next thirty seconds, I’ll explode.
“Not like that.”
I keep folding.
“Look, if you want me to go, I’ll go, but I think we should figure this out together.”
“Figure what out?”
“Will you please look at me?”
I try to.
“This was always going to be hard,” he says. “I mean, it was always going to be confusing and different, but if we want it to work, then—”
“What do you mean, if we want it to work?”
“Well,” he says, “if we want to, like, be together—”
“Caplan, we can’t be together.”
“Why?” He is looking at me like he’s genuinely confused.
I close my eyes. “Because. You don’t see me that way.”
“I do!”
“Since when?”
“I don’t know, since, well—”
“Since you got jealous of Quinn? Since Hollis dumped you?” Pick one, I think. Pick A, or pick B, turn in your test, and go home.
“I don’t know when it changed, but it changed, okay?”
“But then it could change back! And it doesn’t even matter, because we’re graduating in six days, and it doesn’t make sense to… to hold hands and go to prom and then say good-bye.”
“We… we won’t say good-bye,” he says slowly. “We’ll figure it out.”
“And then we’ll, what? Start dating? And do long distance?”
“I thought you might go to Michigan?”
“So we’ll fall in love and live happily ever after?”
He looks at me for a long time. “Do you not like me, that way?”
When I don’t answer, he says, his face stricken, “Did you not—not want to—do you wish we hadn’t—”
“No,” I say. “No, you asked me like every ten seconds if I was sure.”
“I asked you twice.”
I go back to the bedsheets. “It doesn’t matter if I like you that way or not.”
“Mina, if you don’t, then just tell me, okay?”
“It’s like Quinn said! There’s something fucked up about us. It isn’t normal.”
“What’s so bad about that?” he asks. “We’re, you know—okay, yeah, maybe it’s a little intense or unusual, but—”
“A little intense?” I’m laughing even though I don’t find it funny at all. “Caplan, a therapist would have a field day. A little intense—it would be wrong, it would be unhealthy and ill-advised—”
“Ill-advised? Jesus, what’s so bad about it?”
“Take your pick!” I yell. “Your daddy issues or mine—”
“Oh, come on—”
“Your savior complex, my intimacy issues—it doesn’t matter if it’s our fault or not, it’s just the way it is.”
“BUT WHO CARES!” I’m glad he’s yelling and not looking at me the way he was before. “Why do you have to be so smart about everything, all the time, why do you have to analyze it all, none of that matters!”
“Of course it matters! We aren’t equals!”
This pulls him up short.
“You can’t be with someone,” I say, “who isn’t your equal.”
“How can you even say that? What are you even fucking talking about?”
“I’m alive because of you.”
“Mina—come on—that is just—”
“It’s true!” I yell at him. “You know it’s true. That’s why you stayed over so many nights, and you know it—”
“Mina, stop—”
“You slept on my floor for a week in eighth grade, because you knew what I would do if you left. You knew. And no one else was there to stop me but you.”
He doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t look away, either.
“Admit it,” I say. “Don’t lie.”
“I didn’t know for sure. But I—yes, I worried about it. Is that so bad? That I was scared of—that I would have done anything? To keep you here?”
“No. No, it isn’t bad. But it isn’t love.”
“Well, what is it, then?”
“It’s obligation.”
We look at each other for a long time. His face could turn me inside out.
“What am I supposed to do, then?” he asks. “What am I supposed to do with all my… you know. My feelings for you?”
I wish I’d given him any other fucking shirt. He looks too funny. Too real. Too himself, and I feel a sob working its way up my throat.
“You handle it,” I say. “I’ve done it for years.”
“Mina, if you feel the way I feel about you—I don’t care whether you think it’s good or bad. I need you to tell me.”
“YOU don’t even feel how you think you feel!”
“WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?”
“Taking care of someone isn’t the same thing as caring about them! You’ve… you’ve Stockholmed yourself into thinking you have some kind of crush on me when it’s—when that’s just—”
“It’s not a crush.” He looks at the wall. “Sometimes I wish you’d just turn your brain off.”
“See. There you go. You don’t like me. If I did that, then I wouldn’t be me.”
His face is still turned away. I brace myself for what he’ll say next. Then, without looking back, he just leaves. I hear him go down the stairs and out the front door. The music shuts off. I lock my door, in case my mom tries to come talk to me. My hands are shaking. The house is silent again.
Like an obedient and practiced crazy person, I turn on the shower, get in, and wait for the panic attack. But it never comes. I sit down under the water and lean my head against the glass door. I try not to think of how he looked, turned away from me, the set of his jaw, like he was trying not to cry. I press my forehead harder against the glass. How could I have said things to him, to make him look that way? What kind of person am I?
I’m pressing too hard, and the door swings open. Water spatters the bathroom floor. I watch it for a second and then pull myself up. I shut off the shower, use my towel to dry the tile, and get into bed all wet. It isn’t us, I think, or our friendship that is so intense, or so heavy, or so wrong. It is me. And whatever kind of person I may be, that is why I had to do it. Because he deserves better.
My mom knocks quietly on my door. I ignore her. Hollis texts me and asks me if I’d like to come to her graduation dinner tomorrow night. She makes clear it is just girls. I realize I don’t know the rules. I had sex with her ex-boyfriend. If she knew, maybe she wouldn’t invite me, so it wouldn’t be fair to go. I reply right away that I have a family obligation, because if I wait to do it, I’ll cave. It is this, inexplicably, that finally makes me cry.
In a dizzy circle, my thoughts chase one another. I want to go to Caplan and say sorry, but I cannot take any of it back. And it isn’t worth hurting him again, and maybe I won’t be able to a second time, but I must be able to, over and over, if I want to be his friend, and then I arrive at the truth at the bottom of it all. We will never be friends again, never in the same way. I close my eyes and try to let my body feel as still and as heavy as possible, so I do not stand up and run to his door.
Quinn texts me and asks if he can come over to talk. I tell him not to worry. My mom texts me from downstairs and asks me what I want to eat for dinner. I tell her I’m not hungry.
Later, when it is dark, and I must have fallen asleep, she knocks.
I forget, in my drowsiness, that I am self-quarantining and open the door.
“Can I come in?” she asks. She’s holding a pizza box.
“You look like a deliveryman.”
I step aside, and she comes and sets the box right on the floor. She sits in front of it and waits for me, and I feel too weary to protest so I go and sit, too. She takes out a slice.
“You don’t like pizza,” I say. “It upsets your stomach.”
“That’s true.” She takes one bite and hands it to me. I eat it slowly and hope she will not ask me about the circus of dramatics that have played out in our house today. The music, the door slamming, the shouting, like a Broadway show. She doesn’t say anything, though. She just sits quietly, until she is satisfied that I’ve eaten two slices. Then she takes the box downstairs, telling me on the way out that the rest will be in the fridge if I’m hungry again later.
I do not exactly feel better, but I am less hollow, and less shaky, and of course, not entirely alone, as I sometimes pretend I am.
At midnight, I go down in the dark for another slice. I pause as I shut the fridge door. There are two new cards stuck there, underneath Chrysanthemum. I slip them out of their magnets to look at the backs. In my mother’s looping hand, faded, written years ago—Jane Eyre and Anne of Green Gables. These are the books I wrote my final English paper on. My mom must know this, since she was at the honors award ceremony. The Anne of Green Gables card is from the 1980s. The Jane Eyre one is from 1923. I take them to the table and inhale two more cold pieces of pizza while familiarizing myself with the list of names. Then I slip back upstairs and root around in my closet until I find what I’m looking for. It’s creased and frayed at the edges—a borrowing card from the original Brothers Grimm collection of fairy tales, the last one she gave me before she stopped working. An unnerving, gory bible for a seven-year-old, but I wouldn’t put it down, and my mother didn’t mind. More than not minding, she understood. She understood more about me than I’d realized, if she saved Jane Eyre and Anne of Green Gables for me all those years ago, knowing someday I’d read them and someday I’d love them. I take the Brothers Grimm card back down and hang it up with all the others, adding to our little graveyard.
Somehow, though I’ve spent all day in bed, I manage to fall asleep, drifting off on thoughts of orphans, and bloody heels in golden slippers, and why Cinderella would have run each night from the ball when faced with all she’d ever wished for.
The next morning, I make myself shower again, not to cry this time but to wake up. On and off throughout the night, I thought about the weeks, frankly the months, growing up, when my mother had no idea if or when I was eating. I decide she is trying, and so will I. I brush and braid my hair and dig out a hideous old pair of glasses, to look like myself, because my usual pair are still at Hollis’s.
I go downstairs, make coffee and toast, and see a new card on the fridge, a bit apart from the others. I notice right away its number is in the same Dewey decimal group as Jane Eyre: 823.8. English fiction, 1837–1900. The title is Middlemarch by George Eliot. I haven’t read this one yet and don’t know who George Eliot is. I go to the bookshelf in the living room and scour it for ten minutes before realizing the book is already laid out for me on the coffee table. It’s been several weeks since I opened something new. I’ve been meaning to, but have been very busy contending with nonfictional people and all the uncontainable, irreversible mess of knowing them. I don’t know what makes me do it, but I take Middlemarch with me into my dad’s study and turn on the record player. I pick the first thing I touch, without looking at it. Then I start to read.
Eventually, my mom comes and stands in the doorway.
“This song was playing when you were born,” she says.
“Really?”
“Your dad brought his Discman to the hospital to distract me.”
“What’s it called?”
“‘La Vie en Rose.’”
I listen to the lyrics for a minute.
“It’s not very me, is it?” I say. I mean to be funny, but it comes out too sad.
“You can understand it?”
“I’ve taken French since ninth grade.”
For a moment, I’m afraid she’ll cry, but instead she comes and sits next to me on the arm of the big chair. She reads over my shoulder, a bit slower than I do, but I pause before turning each page, to be sure she’s ready. Eventually, I let my head rest on her shoulder.
“I owe you an apology,” she says suddenly. I realize she’s gotten to the end of the chapter before I have. I read to the bottom of the page before answering.
“What for?”
“I didn’t want to worry you, or hurt you, more than you were already hurting, so I just…”
“Avoided me?”
“I thought I was helping you. By keeping things from you. I don’t think I was.”
“It’s all right,” I say. “I kept things from you, too.”
She dips her chin at me and waits with her eyebrows raised. I feel so steady and so comfortable with her there next to me, on the arm of his big leather chair. In front of us on the desk is a photo from their wedding, all his school friends, lifting her over their heads like she’s crowd-surfing.
“Can I tell you another time?”
“Of course,” she says. “I’m not going anywhere.” When she stands up to make lunch, I follow her, moving to the couch with my book.
I realize that I’ve miraculously forgotten, in all my distraction, to read the last page first, as is my tradition whenever I start a new book. I flip ahead.
Later, washing my hands in the kitchen and looking absently out the window, I see Caplan and Quinn walking down the block. They look unlike themselves, and serious, but at least they’re not swinging at each other. Caplan is still wearing my periodic table shirt. I move away from the window as they draw closer, and return to the couch, to my mother, fast asleep, and to my book, which is, despite my miserable attitude, excellent.
I’m irritated that the day feels long and lonely to me. This is how I used to spend all my days, and I never minded before.
Just as it is getting dark, someone rings the doorbell. Caplan always uses the knocker. He said in fourth grade that it made him feel like a knight at a castle, but perhaps he is doing this to get me to come to the door. I go warily and peer through the viewer, but it’s not Caplan. It’s Quinn. He waves at me. I liked him. I liked that he liked me. Does that mean I liked him? Does everyone else need to ask this question? Shouldn’t a person just know it, when they like someone? Whatever it was, it was a flicker. Caplan is a forest fire. I open the door.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hi.”
“Sorry to just drop by. I was in the neighborhood, and you weren’t answering texts.”
“That’s okay,” I say.
“I just, you know, wanted to apologize.”
“You don’t have to. It’s okay.”
“Right, but I want to.”
“I can’t really tell at this point,” I say, looking past him at Caplan’s house, where thankfully the windows are dark, “whose fault it all is.”
Quinn smiles. “Me, neither, I guess.”
I try to think of something else to say and end up looking at my feet.
“I also wanted to say—you know, no hard feelings, and in the spirit of that—if you still wanted to go to prom, I would.”
“Are you trying to get laid?”
He blinks at me and then explodes into laughter. It takes him a second to come back together. “God, Mina, you’re fucking funny.”
“Thank you.”
“And no, I meant as friends. I’m not an idiot. I’ve known for a while.”
“Known what?”
“Well, after you and Caplan kissed, that night at Ruby’s, you didn’t kiss me again.”
“We kissed after that, I thought—”
“Well, sure,” he says, “like I kissed you, and you were nice and kissed me back and stuff, but it’s not the same, you know. You can tell when someone is like, Hell yeah, I want this, versus, like, Sure, why not?” His hands are in his pockets, like it’s nothing.
I struggle for a moment, and then I throw my arms around him. “Thanks for knowing that,” I say.
He hugs me back. “I think that’s, like, the bare minimum, right?”
“Right,” I say.
I pull away and try to compose myself.
“So, whaddya say,” he says, “prom as friends?” He pulls something out of his pocket—a little bundle of what look like flowers, made of gauzy fabric and tissue paper, in pink and blue and green. They’re tied together and bound to a length of ribbon.
“Did you make this?” I ask.
“It’s supposed to be a corsage,” he says.
It goes without saying, no one has ever brought me flowers. It is not something I ever thought I wanted or cared about, but I suppose lots of people think that, until someone is standing in front of you with them. Even if they’re the wrong person.
“That’s—that’s so—thank you,” I say. “But I think it would be best, for everyone, if everything just went back to normal. Plus, I never even got a dress.”
He smiles a little sadly and looks down at the corsage.
“And you keep that. Give it to someone else. You deserve your hell-yeah.”
He nods. “All right. Fair point. So do you.”
“Wait,” I say, suddenly remembering, “stay right here.” I run up to my bedroom and return with my hands behind my back. “I got you something, too, and it really wouldn’t be right to give it to anyone else or for you to go to prom without it.”
I hold out the little red ball in one hand.
“Is that—”
“It’s a clown nose.”
He stares at it and then looks up at me.
“Mina,” he says, “you may be weird, but you have a really cool way of doing things.”
He leaves then, loping toward his skateboard that he’s left on my lawn. He rattles down the walk and does a little jump over the curb, off into the twilight, with the nose in one hand and the flowers in the other.
Monday is Senior Skip Day, which works just fine for me. I try not to look online—a bad habit I’ve developed since Hollis posted the picture of me and made me an Instagram account—at the posts of everyone at Little Bend. There are videos of them swinging on the rope with its big knot at the bottom and jumping in. It’s tied to the highest branch of a maple on the banks, reaching out over the river where it curves and runs the deepest. They lie out on the banks and cheer for each other when someone swings particularly high or lets go of the rope at the top of its arc. I don’t see Caplan, but I’m positive he’s there. Especially if he and Quinn have made up. In one video, Hollis climbs the rope like she’s in gym class, all the way to the top, where it meets the maple. Then, she lets herself drop, slicing toward the water from that impossible height. I tell myself I would hate being there, all things considered. I’d never jump. Not in a million years.
I know next they will go to Pond Lake. It’s customary for the seniors, the fun tradition-oriented ones, to stand together in a line on the dock that faces west, into the sunset, and dive off and race to the dock on the other side. I used to go and watch them with Caplan and our moms when we were young. It’s the sort of thing the whole town comes out to see. I decided somewhere around middle school that it was cheesy and stopped going. Still, I watch the sun’s progress across the sky, make up chores for myself, and try not to think of the one year I can remember best: on my father’s shoulders with a sparkler in my hand, watching the teenagers who seemed so grown up to me then. They tossed themselves out, dark against the pink blaze of the sky, into the flickering water, that space between, impossibly vast to me.
Just as I am settling in for the day to feel peacefully bored and sorry for myself, the house phone rings, strident and jarring. No one ever calls our house phone, except for my grandparents. I sit in my chair at the table, where I have been pretending to read and actually looking at all my classmates’ Instagram accounts like a freak, and glare at the phone on the wall as it rings and rings.
Without forming any sort of plan, I stand up so fast I knock over the chair and pick up.
“Hello, Nana. Yes, I’m well. Actually, I’m excellent. I’ve decided I will not be going to Yale next fall. Yes. Yes, I know that. No. Actually, I am listening. I’m just not changing my mind.”
She asks to speak to my mother.
“Of course. Just a moment.”
I carry the phone with me up the stairs and enter her room without knocking. She’s lying in bed, on her computer. I hold out the phone.
“Who is it?”
“Who else would it be?” I say. “I’ve told her I’m not going to Yale. Now she wants to talk to you.”
My mother looks at the phone for a long time. I can sense my grandmother growing irritated, miles away, but I do not care. I don’t care about anything except my mom, taking over, taking the phone, being in charge. She moves the covers aside like she’s in a dream, stands up, and walks past me. I stand there, still holding out the phone, sure she’ll return. Then I hear the front door open and close. I hang up.
I try to convince myself that this was a win. I decided, and I told them, and I didn’t need any help. I didn’t need anyone else.
Then I get into her bed, where I haven’t been since I was a child, and sob. I was convinced I’d cried as much as one human girl can possibly cry in one lifetime, but this time, I outdo myself. I really go for it. It is almost impressive. I yell and weep into the pillows, and ruin the silk sheets, and kick the phone off the bed, and promise myself, swear, that I will never put my head on her shoulder again.
My phone rings in my pocket, and I pull it out to turn it off, but then I see a missed call and several texts from Caplan.
hi
i know we’re not talking right now and you obviously want space from me and I’m trying to do that
but your mom just walked into our house like
freaking out
and I wanted to make sure everything is okay and if you need someone we can pause, again
ignore these texts, if not
all right they’re going into my mom’s room and they’re talking about you so I’m gonna eavesdrop because that’s what I’d want you to do for me
if you don’t wanna know, stop reading now
wait
it’s about yale
they’re calling your grandparents
omg
ur mom just told them you’re not going
she says it’s ur decision and that you need a fresh start
holy shit
she just said
“frances, i don’t give a fuck what you think”
is frances grandma or grandpa
sorry doesn’t matter
all right that’s all
i hope it’s okay i texted you
i bet whatever you did to make this happen it was awesome
rock on
i miss you
I start to type and then delete so many different things. Each one is too much and then not enough. In the end, I say thank you for the space, and thank you for telling me. Almost immediately, he responds.
do you want to go to the dock jump?
i know it’s not your thing but asking just in case
I stand and slowly reverse the wreckage of my meltdown, to put off responding. I place the house phone on the nightstand, retrieve the pillows from the floor, and remake the bed. Her laptop has also slipped off onto the carpet and sits open on the ground. When I pick it up, the screen comes to life. I can’t help but read the email’s subject line. Someone wants to open a children’s library in East Lansing. The screen of the computer glows at me, a window into the museum of another life, where a distant little sister of myself in a far-off universe used to live. I would lie between my parents in bed in the mornings, and we’d quiz each other on the Dewey decimal call numbers: 398.2 for my fairy tales; 741.5 for my dad’s comics; 823.7—my mom’s favorite, all the Jane Austen; 567.9 for books about dinosaurs. I couldn’t tell you why I remember that one.
Then my mom would say, They need me at a library in Oklahoma, Arizona, California, and my dad and I would say, No, too far, don’t go, but we were only joking, and she knew it. I’d say, Come home with stories, and she always did.
Once the room is in order and the bed is tight and fresh again, I look at it for a moment, and then I climb back in. I lie there until my mom comes home.
She crawls in next to me.
“It’s all taken care of now,” she says. “Don’t worry.”
“Thank you,” I say.
“I’m sorry I left.”
“That’s all right,” I say. “Sometimes you need a friend to hit Send.”
We lie together in her bed for a few minutes.
“Will we be okay with money?” I ask eventually.
“Oh, I think so,” she says. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, you and I don’t really get out much.”
I laugh into my hands, under my cheek.
Then she says, “I’ve been thinking about working again. There’s a new children’s library opening.”
“I know,” I say. “I snooped. Your computer was open.”
“Well,” she says, “they’re also looking for a new librarian, for the public schools in Two Docks.”
“That’s interesting,” I say.
“I thought so, too.”
We are quiet then. Our breathing syncs up.
Eventually, she says, “I don’t want you to worry about money. The house is ours. Not much they can do about that.”
“It is?” I ask. I run my fingers along the thin perfect line of stitches on the pillowcase.
“Oh yes. Your dad made sure of that early on. Aaron was a planner and a worrier, like you. A bit of a doomsdayer, honestly.”
My fingers go still. I cannot remember her ever telling me something like this.
“I guess it’s not really fair to tease him now. When he can’t defend himself.”
“I don’t think he’d mind,” I say.
I can’t quite see her face, in the dimmed blackout-curtained world of her room, half hidden under the blanket. I think she is smiling.
She says, “So what are you thinking you’ll do?”
“About Caplan?”
“About college. Where will you go? Michigan?”
“Oh,” I say. “Right. I don’t know yet.”
“Well, I can’t wait to see.”
To my surprise, I find myself saying, “Me, too.”
We fall asleep there, just like that, at 5:00 p.m., and that is my Senior Skip Day.