FAMOUS PROPHETS
Part 1: Perpetual Adoration (Teenage Hands)
In the bright dark of the desert’s starry night, Nadine heard the sound of the Voice arriving from far away, hurtling toward her with breathtaking speed. She sat up and brought the wristwatch she kept on her bedside table up to her face: it was three a.m.
The detail of exactly how awake Nadine was at three a.m. would be seriously scrutinized later. After all, hearing voices in your dreams is totally normal phenomena. But Nadine insisted to Sister Darla that she was as awake as one could reasonably be at three a.m., that, in fact, she had been singularly aware of her awakeness in that moment because she usually fell asleep quickly and slept through the night.
“Help me clarify for myself: three a.m. was when you checked the time?”
“Yes, Sister Darla.”
“But not when you woke up.”
“I guess not.”
“Do you remember how long you were awake before you looked at your watch?”
“Maybe like five minutes.”
“So two-fifty-five is when you woke up.”
“Two-fifty-four and thirty-eight seconds,” Nadine deadpanned. Sister Darla ignored her, focused as she was in scribbling out an illegible record of Nadine’s account. Such concentration pushed her bushy eyebrows together into one quivering thing. A feeble lamp illuminated Sister Darla’s work, producing light so weak that the old nun had to bring the page so close to her face that ink rubbed off on her bent nose.
“Were you anxious, Sister Nadine? We’ve been very busy with the retreat going on.”
“Not anxious…On edge. I woke up quick and was on edge. But I didn’t know why.”
“Maybe something happened the day prior? And it was bothering you?”
“No, Sister Darla, the day before was fine. It was probably just that I’m not used to waking up in the middle of the night.”
This was the truth but with one detail omitted: Nadine had woken at two-fifty-five a.m. from a dream where she orgasmed. The dream lacked imagery or context but impressed upon her an embrace of bodiless feminine affection, an all-consuming carnal thing that euphorically surged against Nadine’s walls, a fully unchecked stimulation that took it to the limit, over the edge, over the edge…She’d opened her eyes and reached down to feel the wetness on her fingertips. Simultaneously she became aware of the sound of the Voice arriving.
“You heard a sound and you knew a voice would follow?”
“Maybe part of me did. But I was discombobulated. It’s hard to be sure in retrospect.”
“But you didn’t think to yourself, ‘Here comes a voice.’”
“No, I did not. I wasn’t thinking anything.”
Yes–no thinking when she woke up from the dream. No need. Just silence and the residual feeling of being an incarnation of tragedy, a heightened player, of being seen by one who is devoted to your rise and fall, who stays to the end because losing you is beautiful, too. No other state of mind or body could have received the Voice. The volume of its arrival was low at first, but increased rapidly. Nadine assumed, by way of non-thought, that it was either noise pollution from the nearby Papago Freeway or a solitary driver passing by on the nearer Aguila Road. But when the sound, the rising woosh, endured past plausibility, Nadine sat up in her bed to see if any of the other girls were awake, hearing this, but they were all fast asleep. That’s when it registered that the sound was just for her.
“Did the volume of the sound hurt at all?”
“It stopped just short of that.”
The moment it got too cacophonous, loud like Nadine was laying under a waterfall, the noise cut out altogether to be replaced by a meaningful quiet, the presence of absence, like how the crackle at the end of a record’s grooves signifies the lack of music. Then the Voice spoke.
“Repeat again what she said.”
“I am Saint Clare of Assisi.”
“How did she sound?”
“Italian.”
Sister Darla shot Nadine a disparaging look. The shadows cast by the lamp made her expression remarkably ghastly, and Nadine had to stifle a laugh. They were close enough there, on either side of the tiny table in Sister Darla’s tiny room, that Nadine would only have had to lean an inch or two forward to kiss that mug. Gravity had not been merciful to Sister Darla, had melted her face down to a congealed mass of wrinkles and folds. Nadine knew how bulldogs could sometimes suffocate on their copious jowls–she wondered if Sister Darla lived under a similar threat. It was a mean thought, but Sister Darla was impenetrable as far as subjectivity went. She was a monolith of selfhood, totally dedicated to her station. If Sister Darla had ever felt longing, it was in a time that existed out of memory.
“No jokes, girl.”
“I don’t know. She sounded like an adult woman.”
Upon declaring herself, Saint Clare hadn’t seemed pressed for a response. Her presence lingered patiently within Nadine, exuding the contentment of a new homeowner running their hands over the bare walls of the house, projecting all their hopeful futures onto the empty spaces. Right away Nadine knew that Saint Clare was the dream–the dream foretold Saint Clare.
“How did you feel? When you heard the voice.”
“...”
“We’ve read accounts of people who heard the voices of saints. Can you corroborate any of those?”
“I can’t even begin to answer that question, Sister Darla.”
Because how could Nadine do the moment justice? She didn’t want to even try unless she could impart it perfectly. It was the most beautiful thing anyone had ever felt.
“Alright, we can return to that. We’ll have to. What did the voice say next?”
“Jess Garcia wants your faith.”
“And you recognize that name.”
“I do.”
“What is your relationship to her?”
“I knew her in high-school.”
“Friends?”
“Friendly.”
Jess Garcia was the same year as Nadine. For all four years of high-school Jess played flute and was on the soccer team. Only Jess’s dad was present for her graduation. Before every homecoming dance, five or six of Jess’s friends, plain girls with large thighs, congregated at her house to get gussied up. They occupied the basement with their music and pubescent hysteria, participating in the ancient feminine tradition of ruthlessly deprecating the self while fanatically flattering the others in the group. If one girl made a remark about her own oily skin, she had been inspired to do so by the sight of another girl’s flawless complexion. Then all the girls would descend like birds of prey on the subject, dispelling the negative and gorging on the positive. Each girl had their turn being the object of distaste and the example of beauty. Dad was only allowed to come down when the pizza arrived, and he had to announce his presence at the top of the basement stairs, a rule he relished toying with by saying weird things like, “Fee fi fo fum, I smell the pizza of Dominos,” or, “Alright girls, I’m coming down, hide your drugs and guns.” This the girls tolerated good-naturedly. Jess liked that her Dad was silly around her friends. Silly was better than strict (Melissa’s dad) or detached (Jane’s dad). She could see how he enjoyed being a part of their night, even in this minor role, the goofy dad who got the pizza. Plus it showed Jess’s friends that her dad could be happy even without her mom, that theirs was a circumstance that could still generate contentment.
From the back of the gymnasium, Nadine watched Jess Garcia and her friends enter, chattering nervously as they negotiated a passage through homecoming's throng of gyrating bodies, looking for the best place to plant themselves for the night. Nadine watched Jess Garcia and her soccer friends and hated them. She was jealous of how smooth their brains were that they could enjoy this. Nadine wished she was as stupid as them. For Nadine to look like Jess Garcia did on the dancefloor, jittery and laughing and possessing a drive to enjoy herself, she’d have to perform–a perfect waste of effort, she knew, because it’d be a performance for only herself. No one cared one way or another about Nadine’s happiness, so why fake it? No one knew Nadine well enough to know if she was faking it, so why bother? Through red-rimmed eyes Nadine glared at Jess, who represented everything that should’ve been easy but wasn’t. Could someone like Jess ever understand Nadine? If they left the dance together and took a walk through the woods and confessed everything, would they become girls who could help each other make it? Nadine knew Jess’s mom had left. Pain was a wonderful matchmaker. Jess probably longed for protection, too. She spoke so quietly in class. She seemed always preoccupied with something just out of frame, a thing residing beyond the border of most of their classmates' range of consideration. That’s where I live, Nadine thought. You can’t see me, but that place you go is where I live. They could both be understood, but between Nadine at the back of the gymnasium and Jess under the multi-colored light was an unnavigable expanse of fear, so Nadine, then fifteen, went home and told herself to remember the night as a symbol of shame.
When Saint Clare said Jess Garcia wants your faith, Nadine wept with the breadth of ecstasy. Dignity was bestowed to a place within her she had forgotten was debased. A sense of continuity was restored. When Nadine caught her breath, Saint Clare was gone and it was four a.m. Nadine had collected herself and gone to Sister Darla’s quarters to report the miracle. By the time Sister Darla’s preliminary questioning was done, it was five-thirty a.m. and Nadine had to be reporting for duty in thirty minutes. Permission for her to sleep in was granted, but Nadine said she didn’t need it. And besides, it was going to be another busy day. They needed every nun on deck to make sure the retreat ran smoothly. Nadine excused herself to the bathroom to freshen up. A long shower was in order.
The sun crested over the White Tank Mountains to shed light on Tonopah and the jewel in the township’s crown, the Our Lady of Solitude Monastery. Also under the surveillance of the mountains was the otherwise flat landscape that stretched dizzyingly into various horizons. Further east was Phoenix, just a hour’s drive away once you hit I-10 E, which itself was only twenty minutes from the monastery. Another notable landmark nearby was the Palo Verde Generating Station, the country’s largest producer of electricity. Certain people said you should never get too close to the generators because such large quantities of electricity, even when contained, was lethal to the human brain, which ran on electricity and could be easily fried if even a single tendril of electricity escaped the station and struck you. There were reports of victims who were only on the perimeter of the generators and yet still suffered a full cognitive scramble, personality swapped or language forgotten or unfortunate incontinence. But that was a fringe community of thought.
Laying parallel to the monastery was the Silver Star Ranch, a favorable piece of land that boasted rare spreads of greenery and humble bodies of water, acting as a very nice backdrop for monastic life. The grounds directly surrounding the monastery were manicured by nature of the environment–only a couple shrubs and flowers dotted the pristine flats. The road leading to the monastery ended in a cul-de-sac that fed into a concrete walkway that clumsily cut through the dirt to the entrance of Our Lady of Solitude Monastery. Erected in 2010, it was a building that tastefully balanced modern and medieval tastes. The walls were made of sandstone that altered in shade, lending an imperfect, naturalistic feel that was contained by the precisely calculated lines outlining the whole thing, perfect pillars and arches, perfect roofs and windows. Its architecture was silly and immaculate, an honest reflection of the ambition of the interior.
By six a.m, the day’s heat had almost fully hatched from its post-dawn incubation. Nadine barely dried herself from the shower so that the lingering moisture could keep her cool for however many minutes before vaporizing against the sun. She donned her habit there in the bathroom, noting with distress how past-due it was for cleaning, the bottom of her tunic frayed and dusty, the pure white of her coif and wimple stained by what looked like a bit of mustard, a bit of olive oil. Nadine assembled herself and inspected the results as she brushed her teeth. She despised the headpiece, in particular the wimple that wrapped around her chin and neck, making the skin there perspire and itch terribly. She also hated how the wimple pressed against her cheeks to make them look bigger than they were.
“Wimple,” Nadine hissed with disgust, hurriedly making futile adjustments for comfort before bursting out of the bathroom. It was almost six-thirty a.m., the time deliveries arrived, and Nadine had been assigned to help unload. As she made her way through the monastery to get to its rear, where the delivery drivers parked themselves, Nadine gave morning greetings to everyone she crossed paths with, all heading to their own chores, and it was soothing to hear her voice sound so friendly and assured when on the inside she was feeling vacant, deep as a well–not a bad feeling, but definitely a preoccupying one. Intentionally Nadine chose a route that would take her through the chapel. She entered through one of the side-doors, opening it slowly and peaking around to make sure she wasn’t bothering anyone. The only other person there was Sister Casey, sweeping and doing pew checks, making sure everything was in place for the eight a.m. mass. Sister Casey looked up, smiled at Nadine, and gave her a slight nod before returning to the task. Nadine smiled back and, despite being pressed for time, sat in the nearest pew to have a meditative moment in the chapel.
The white walls were positively glowing, enthusiastically bouncing the light coming through the stained glass windows lining the upper-walls of the chapel. A three-pointed arch, the kind where the lines start straight then curve into a point at the top, framed the altar, which was handsomely constructed with polished red and brown wood. The lamb of God pranced in the middle of the altar, guarded on either side by busts of Saint Clare and Saint Francis, the patron saints of Our Lady of Solitude Monastery, portrayed in crowns and colorful robes. Nancy took deep breaths in through her nose and out through her mouth to instill peace within herself and within the chapel. Her eyes rose to the stained glass windows that depicted the story of Saint Clare and Saint Francis, each image pieced together in mostly white and gold shards, while the glass that framed each window was a royal purple. There was Clare asking Francis to help her live life according to the Gospel; there was Clare getting her hair cut and changing from a golden gown to a plain robe. Saint Clare’s motto was that she would only be a bride to Jesus Christ and that she would live in purposeful poverty. This lifestyle attracted other women and they became known as the “Poor Clares”–they still were, there in Tonopah, Arizona. None of this information was new to Nadine, but it all hit different that morning. The gay connotation was unmissable.
Part 2: Learn of Me (Great Transgression)
Nadine who Jess and I went to high-school with is a nun now.
“She’s been a nun for five years,” Jess told me. Her tone in bringing this up was like she was reporting on the weather in Kathmandu—interesting enough information, maybe, but not super salient to our side of the Atlantic. “So like since 2018.”
“Oh, word?” I replied, keeping my eyes on the road. A summer storm had descended upon the twenty-eight mile stretch of 295 South between Portland and Brunswick, rolling through in that spontaneously immense way where it’s all at once that quarter-sized raindrops splatter themselves against your car and your wipers turn frantic in their effort to upkeep. Mine squawked and shuddered with each pass, somehow finding friction to complain against on the drenched windshield. Some cars put on their emergency lights and pulled over to wait out the onslaught, but most commuters, myself included, pressed on at a decreased speed. My rule of thumb with these summer storms was that the relationship between intensity and duration was a negative one. Since this one was so violent, I felt confident it would subside soon. Going under the overpass near Exit 20 generated a dramatically fleeting silence, like in war films when a soldier goes underwater in the midsts of cacophonous gunfire and bombshells and such, and in that moment both the soldier and the audience get a bittersweet taste of a reprieve from the loudness before, bam, the soldier’s head is back above water and we know he’s truly back in the shit.
If Jess nor I seemed properly impressed by Nadine’s commitment to sisterhood, it was only because we lacked proper precedent to juxtapose the news against, as neither of us knew Nadine that well in high-school. She could have been a practicing Orthodox Catholic back then too and we would’ve missed it. If Jess told me that she herself was Buddhist all through high-school I would have to believe her. Faith was simply not a popular topic of discussion for reasons I’d chalk up to a benign combination of secular disinterest and religious discretion. Stigma suggests that people with religion in their lives are deliriously eager to get everyone else in on it, as if they’re running a righteous ponzi scheme. I never found that to be true, at least not here in the Northeast.
A rusted white pickup truck flew by in the left lane, spraying us with even more rainwater and exuding the aura of broad contempt that white pickup trucks seem to inherently possess regardless of driver.
“Chill bro,” said Jess, addressing the truck. “You’re gonna make it.”
“He’s rushing to get home in time to beat his wife.”
(These are the kinds of assumptions white pickup truck drivers draw to themselves.)
Being passed by the white truck treated Jess and I to a view of the copious stickers decorating its bumper and rear window, most of which were an army of mischievous Pissing Calvins tasked with drowning the Biden/Harris administration in urine.
“That’s so awesome,” I said, not totally without sincerity.
“Teddy,” said Jess. “Ask me how I knew about Nadine being a nun.”
“Jess: how’d you know about Nadine being a nun?”
“She messaged me. Out of the blue.”
“And into the black,” I hummed. “Are nuns allowed to message?”
“Well if you listen to the rest of the story you’ll understand how there was an outstanding circumstance that allowed for it.”
“Oh, okay.” To focus both on the road, which was as obscured as ever, and Jess’s story, I had to turn the music down, which irked me a little since I had very intentionally put on this album for Jess to listen to because I was into it and wanted to see if she would be into it too. “Damn. It’s still coming down,” I announced, referring to the rain. I wasn’t so convinced of my rule of thumb anymore.
“So I get a message from Nadine on Facebook of all places.”
“Ew.”
“Her profile picture hasn’t been updated in like ten years. It’s her at fifteen. Holding up a My Chemical Romance shirt or something.”
I cringed. “Weird for a nun to sin so hard like that.”
“Teddy, you have to shut up! Point is: Nadine messaged me saying, ‘Hi, it’s been a while, I’ve been a nun living in a monastery in Arizona since 2018.’ And then, in the same message, she flat out says: ‘A saint came to me and told me that you want my faith.’”
“Want my faith? What, because you’re gay? She's gonna salvage your soul?”
“Nadine wouldn’t know I’m gay. I wasn’t out in high-school and she’s been doing monastery life since she and I graduated.”
“The word is monastic.”
Jess made a violently grotesque face in my direction. “Don’t distract the driver while he’s navigating hazardous conditions,” I warned, reaching over to cover her face with my hand, which Jess swatted away with an annoyed whine. “I said do not!” I repeated, laughing while also pumping the breaks to accommodate for an overly-cautious driver. “See that’s the thing,” I moaned. “People think an excess of caution equals an excess of safety when that’s simply not the case. Abnormal driving is a liability whether it’s too fast or too slow, Jess; I hope you’re taking notes. An argument could definitely be made that the mindset of the too-slow driver is more toxic than the too-fast driver, because we have been conditioned to know that when we are driving too fast, we are doing wrong. But when you’re doing wrong on the road, you’re probably actually more tuned-in to your surroundings because you’re feeling self-conscious about doing wrong or you’re on the lookout for police or you just don’t want to get into an accident. Contrast that mindset against the too-slow driver who is probably complacent, right? They think, ‘Well, nothing can go wrong if I go slower than the speed limit, it’s speeders that die,’ and they just turn their brains off and trundle on down the road. They’re letting themselves off the hook, excusing themselves for being a less diligent driver.”
“Noted, Teddy. Noted. I’ve carved your words into mine own flesh so that I shall never forget them. Thank you so much. Thank you thank you thank you!” Jess took on a sexually aroused affect for the duration of her sarcasm, ramping up her performance until it sounded like she was orgasming with her last ‘thank you.’ It was distracting to say the least. Jess was sitting with both feet up on the seat, their soles touching each other so as to make a triangular shape out of her legs, which was possible for Jess because of her short stature and limberness gained from years of soccer, and with the frayed jean shorts she was wearing, the kind where the pockets poke out like white flags signaling surrender against denim distress, there was a lot of skin on display that triangulated attention to certain zones of the waist-down that I didn’t want to be caught paying attention to.
That I wanted to fuck Jess Garcia was my secret.
I hated verbalizing that word fuck–I’d never fucked a girl. I’d been inside, but never fucked–That sounded like I was trying to kill her. But I had to put it that way, I want to fuck Jess Garcia, blunt and off-putting, so as to properly disabuse myself of the notion that Jess Garcia would want me inside. What a surprise when she was hired at my work. Jess Garcia still lived in Maine? Didn’t she go to college to become a bioengineer? Why did she want to work at a toy store in the Old Port, tourist central? Coastal Toyz, where bedraggled sunburnt parents took their terrorist children as a final measure of pacification? Because Jess Garcia wanted to be an artist now. Work was just a thing she did to pay the bills. Her passion lay in the chunks of time she got to work on her graphic novel, so why not work at a place as dead-end as Coastal Toyz? I understood–I’d applied to Coastal Toyz with the same logic.
Two of our high-school years overlapped. Jess entered her junior year at sixteen when I started my freshman year at fourteen, and while we never really crossed paths, though our school was small enough that we both knew of each other. It was funny getting acquainted with someone who was essentially a stranger but with whom there was an extremely potent shared experience. We were veterans of adolescence who’d fought on the same battlefield, just at different ends. We compared and contrasted our high-school memories to assemble a fuller picture of those years for each other, to see new scenes of a movie we’d seen a thousand times. Turns out Jess Garcia had always been gay. So had Charlie Thibeault, Gregg Pelletier, Maggie Labbay…etc., etc. We agreed that we were probably the last generation of high-schoolers to assume they were all straight. But I was definitely still straight. Miserably straight, I’d joked.
Attraction occurred and I was complicit in it. Being attracted to Jess was the best part of my work day, the only redeemable aspect of time spent re-arranging overpriced lobster plushies and being of service to upper-middle-class wretches and their uncompromising spawn. I saw her belly button a lot, which to my sensibility was as titillating as a nip slip. None of Jess’s shirts seemed bothered by their assumed task of coverage, so I was afforded glimpses of her belly, or the crease of her back, in the un-seldom moments where she had to stretch her torso, reaching to dust one of our taller shelves or lifting boxes of toys from out back to restock. Jess had gained weight since high-school, making her body soft and generous, a place I wanted to go and squirm around in. I knew it was called curvy but I had another name for it.
Around this time, I began experiencing a lot of synchronicity with the sentiment, If you love someone you should tell them, give or take alternate phrasings. Without me looking for it, it was finding me: songs on the radio, movies in the theater, friends’ anecdotes, novels I was reading. This was funny to me, because if ever there was an exception to this adage, it was me wanting to fuck a lesbian. But I understood how, more than it was dogma for romantics, If you love someone you should tell them was a call for pragmatism, a time-saving technique and a twin to the equally reductive, If you love someone you should let them go. Both warn against romantic solipsism–nurturing a weird love that only exists to you–and both are reminders that a real tango takes two. Remove your love from the air-locked fantasy of your mind and place it in reality to see how it fares. How it fares is how it is. Chart your course from there.
Did I love Jess Garcia? I’d love her if she fucked me! That much was certain. But nothing felt more pointlessly destructive than admitting my attraction. Was real ‘love,’ then, to say nothing at all? To keep making little sacrifices every time I felt those hot nudges in my gut? Die on that cross? That didn’t feel right either. I was only a boy. Why was it so unfathomable, so unbearable, to submit to the absolute platonic? To silently adapt to it without making a scene? That wasn’t hell. It wasn’t even purgatory. All it was was not getting everything I ever wanted.
It was still raining.
“So wait,” I said. “When did Nadine send you those messages?”
“Literally yesterday.”
“And have you responded?”
Jess shifted in her seat and gave me a coy side-eye. “I have.”
“Saying what?”
“Asking for more details. I’m very curious.”
“Ha,” I said. “You’re probably going to get a sales pitch. I hear the church is resorting to some pretty insane measures these days to get donations.”
“Yeah, maybe.” Jess seemed preoccupied with something outside the car, but I couldn’t see what it was through the rain.
“So crazy,” I said to say something. “I would be pissed if it were me who got that message. Very presumptuous. Someone telling me I want their faith? Like, thanks, I guess, for knowing me better than I know myself.”
“Right,” said Jess. She leaned her cheek into the palm of her hand and tugged on her mess of jet-black curls. “Thanks again for the ride. You won’t have to do this much longer, my car is supposed to be out of the shop tomorrow or the next day.”
“Oh, no problem, any time. My pleasure.” I was experiencing the sensation of slippage, like when you’re trying to get up an icy hill on shoes with poor grip. I turned the music back up. “Do you like this?” I asked Jess, nodding to the space between us, where the music was.
She considered it for a minute, then looked at me with a mild mix of curiosity and concern. “It’s very sad.”
“Yeah…” I said, trying to hide the defensiveness in my voice, “But it’s a cathartic sadness. A happy sad.”
“I like how your music taste can be described by degrees of sadness.” Jess said this with genuine satisfaction, like she’d found a missing piece of my puzzle. For me to argue against such an astute observation would be like applying force to a Chinese finger trap: resistance was entrapment, so I just blushed and turned the music back down.
Soon we were at Exit 28 and I was decelerating from slow to slower. The storm had doubled our commute time from thirty minutes to an hour. I rolled down Brunswick’s Pleasant Street and into town. This was our neck of the woods, not our exact municipality (our high-school was a town over), but the municipality with a main street to hang out on when you’re fifteen and looking for small ways to convince independence. I would’ve been able to navigate these neighborhoods unconscious. Jess could direct me to her and her dad’s house just by way of associations: “Go in the direction of Coffin Pond…past the road where the animal shelter used to be…we would go that way if we wanted to go by the river.” She could say these things and I knew what she was talking about. It was a method of communication more closely resembling lyric than prose, as her words were imparting as much information as the evocation of the words being spoken. For Jess and I, Coffin Pond wasn’t just a marker on a map–it was an image and an invitation to memory.
Eventually I pulled into her driveway that the storm had flooded. The wind and rain hadn’t become any less incessant. I put the car in park and, out of habit, turned it off, which I immediately regretted, as the absence of engine-noise and subsequent heightening of rain-noise conjured a strange intimacy that anyone who’s been in a turned-off car in the rain with someone else can attest to. Jess rummaged through her backpack and I turned on the overhead light. No-one looks good under a car’s overhead lighting. Shadows hung from the creases under Jess’s eyes like engorged insects. There was the scab of an already-popped pimple on the upper ridge of her cheekbone. Noticing these things did not dissuade my attraction, and that also felt like intimacy.
“Just checking here…” she murmured.
“Take your time.”
“Okay, yup, got everything.” Jess peeked out the window at the small lake accumulating in her driveway. “Fuck, dude. We have got to get our driveway repaved, this is so bad.”
“Yeah.” To my dismay, my voice came out soft and wavering. Oh God, Teddy, what are you up to?
Jess caught it, too. She diverted her attention from the driveway and found my eyes. I felt like I was standing atop a tall cliff with one end of really long rope tied around my ankle and the other end tied to an anchor I’d just thrown over the edge. I could see the rope uncoiling, uncoiling, and though I wasn’t falling yet, I surely would be, just as soon as that rope uncoiled all the way…
Neither of us said anything and Jess wasn’t leaving the car. I refused to be the first to speak. This would not be my fault!
“Teddy, are you alright?”
“Yeah, totally! Why?”
“Because you sound like you’re about to cry.”
“I have allergies.”
“Okay…” Her affirmation double-spoke doubt. “Is this at all about Nadine’s message?”
That confused me. I didn’t see how Nadine’s weird message could pertain to me at all. Suddenly I was driven to overshadow Nadine. Her presence in this car was mucking up something already mucked. That sort of haplessness, the naivete towards doing something correctly, was my big impression of Nadine from high-school. While it’s true that I barely knew Nadine then, my perception of her at that time was actually more solid than my perception of Jess, who, to my memory, was merely a cardboard cutout in the hallways. But Nadine had been on the cross-country team with me. Even as the newcomer in the fall of my freshman year, I, on sight, claimed superiority over Nadine, two years my senior but a funny looking girl, pale and in possession of an incongruent body that was gangly but not skinny, dense but not strong, topped off with a pin head and glasses that anyone who was actually serious about running would have replaced with contact lenses. Nadine never came to practice in proper exercise clothes. She’d have on Converse with ridiculous checkered laces–‘street shoes,’ no good for running at all–a cotton t-shirt, and what she wore on her legs was always the worst, like khaki shorts or sometimes even jeans. It was hard to have sympathy for someone who was doing so few favors for themself. Quickly I caught on from the other boys how to make fun of Nadine behind her back. Softly sing-song-ing, “There goes my hero,” when Nadine passed us in the opposite direction was a surefire way to get a laugh. Her gait was uncomfortable to watch, sweaty and clumsy, and it seemed to paradoxically require more effort than the stride of the better runners who flew by with grace. It was so painful to watch that it made you want to antagonize her. Get your shit together! How can you be suffering so much when you’re not even good? At least try to posture at dignity, my God! Her poor athletic performance was a weakness of character. In a race Nadine would wear the expected expression of exhaustion, but on her face it looked petulant and dumb. The most charitable thing I ever heard someone say about Nadine was that she was like the team’s beloved lame dog. I never saw her talk to anyone but the coach.
Nadine’s intrusion into my personal business with Jess felt like an extension of her role on the high-school cross country team, and I felt the familiar feeling of exasperation when Jess brought up the message Nadine had sent. Frankly it was the dumbest shit I’d ever heard, an undignified plea for attention. She’d probably just had a dream and figured she could get some mileage out of unraveling it into some miracle narrative. A nun…it was demented, the career path of someone who lived in a fantasy world. I’d have pitied Nadine if she weren’t so fucking annoying.
Rain pounded on the roof like hands of people I’d locked out. “Actually, no,” I said. “It’s not about Nadine’s message, that’s…nothing to me. And I don’t have allergies, either.” I felt the anchor tug on my ankle.
“Yeah, I know you don't have allergies.”
“Jess, don’t hate me–”
“Okay…”
“This is stupid.”
“And getting stupider.” She laughed, nervous for me, not herself.
“Right. Ah. Sorry, but Jess I have these feelings about you that are more than friendly.”
Nothing had to happen, because I saw it all before it did: Jess, stunned, searching my face for any trace of insincerity, then looking down at her hands in her lap, the little tattoos on her thumbs wriggling while she fidgets under the stress of concerted thought, crucial thoughts seeking to predict every path of every feeling, where anger will take her, where disgust will take her, sympathy, reciprocation, hilarity, all of it, before asking me, “Teddy, you really like me?”, to which I respond, “I know you’re gay but it’s been killing me,” and she says, “Killing you?” and I say “Literally killing me,” and I’m aware of my hard-on, so Jess is also aware of my hard-on, because somehow it’s always like that, it sends out a signal, like when you can feel a gun in the room, and then Jess reaches for me, puts her hands on my face, cups my cheeks, and I don’t do anything because I’d sworn this wouldn’t be my fault, but then Jess does kiss me, oh insane pleasure then, when soft lips choose mine, and it’s mere seconds before my greedy hands start to colonize, my fingertips feigning at shyness when they brush her knee, palm on the thigh with no objection, skiiinnn, I’m feeling skin, I’m reaching for her waist, locating that funny little shelf of flesh ousted by a tight waistband and running my fingers along it, conscious enough to be placated here–if you cop a feel, Teddy, you’ll regret you did–and the self-control is a good choice because Jess pulls away right then and makes her face visible to me again–I should’ve turned off that fucking overhead light–and she runs her hand through my hair, but very clinically, like searching for lice, then she says, “That felt like nothing to me.”
“Nothing,” I repeat.
Illustration by Liam Stride, @yikespanthercooze on Instagram.
Comments