There is such a thing as loneliness. You can argue about it as much as you like, my boy, but loneliness is a terrible thing. Though actually of course it doesn’t matter a damn.—doctor ivan chebutykin
“Rebekah!” someone called through the rain. “Where are you going?”
I turned, hoping the raindrops would disguise my tears. Christian Miles, hands in his pockets, leaned against the wall under the brief overhang. Thousands of thoughts swirled in my head, but I had nothing to say. I bit my trembling lip and stared at the damp darkness beside the clubhouse.
“Wow,” Chris shook his head and walked away from the shelter of the roof. He paused at the steps, but when I did not run, he descended to me in the parking lot. “It must have been pretty bad.”
“You’re getting wet.”
“You’re crying.”
“No, I’m not,” I choked on a sob. “I hate crying!” I buried my face in Chris’s chest and wept. “Marianne—sometimes she’s just—I don’t know—she doesn’t know how hurtful some of the things she says are—am I really her lapdog? I just thought we were friends. And Cole—”
Chris sighed and grabbed my shoulders. His clouded green eyes bored into mine, “What did he do now? Are you okay?”
“No, no, nothing like that. ” I shook my head and tried to compose myself. “I’m just such an idiot. He freaks me out—my skin crawls whenever I’m near him, and I still went on this date ’cause I have no sense. I guess he’s been telling everyone we’ve, like, I don’t know what, but now I’m a slut apparently and . . . Please just take me somewhere quiet and shoot me!”
My face was again pressed into Chris’s jacket. He stroked my hair, like he had done on Friday when he was Kulygin and I was Masha. “No, Bekah, you’re not an idiot. You look for the best in people, and that should be emulated, not exploited. Besides, all my guns are in
I sniffed, “I’m being silly, but I’m sad that I spent six hours making this night beautiful for everyone else, and I have nothing.”
Chris checked the time on his cellphone, “You know, the night isn’t half over yet.”
“You should get back to your date.”
“My—oh, Nicholette. We just went as friends. She’s got a huge crush on Jeremy Delacruz, and I think she’s doing her best to seduce him as we speak.”
Now it was my turn to be confused, “Nicholette?”
“Nicholette Hastings? I thought you knew I went to this with her.”
It took a few moments to sink in: tough-girl mechanic’s real name was Nicholette.
“Don’t laugh so hard, Bekah, you’ll suffocate!”
But I couldn’t help it, Nyx’s froufrou given name had unhinged something deep down in my diaphragm region. I imagined that her parents had expected her to grow up to be like, well, Nicholette Brown. “You just made my month!” I gasped between giggles.
Chris tilted his head, “I hope you’re month’s a little better than that.” When I hadn’t stopped laughing after forty-five seconds, Chris gave in to the urge to laugh at me laughing. His laugh was mostly silent shaking with a few bursts of “Ha, ha!” We eventually calmed down, especially since I did start gasping for air. I stared at Chris’s mouth—like Marianne, he had a very wide smile with lips that looked more strong than pillowy . . .
With a flourish, Chris stepped away from me and offered his hand with a bow, “May I have this dance?”
I was confused, and then I realized that while I was crying and we were laughing, the cheering and screaming seeping from the clubhouse had been replaced with music: Dawn Baxter (from Raleigh, North Carolina; majoring in English), one of Marianne’s opponents, was covering the Frente! cover of “Bizarre Love Triangle.” My wet skirt made a sucking noise as I pulled it from legs to curtsy, “I’d be honored, Theodore.”
I had expected Chris to pull me into the obligatory waddling-bear-hug, but he had other things in mind. His right hand held my back; the left held my hand. With my other hand pressed into his right deltoid, Chris led me in some sort of crazy two-step. Most of the time I was three steps behind him, so he would swing me around to again meet his chest.
“These lyrics are depressing,” Chris leaned to my ear to say.
“Aw, it’s beautiful—unrequited, unconditional love and all that.”
Cheering and whistling replaced the music. We stopped dancing. Chris closed his eyes and lifted his face to the sky; rain coursed through his hair and down his face. “That song was originally by—”
“New Order, I know.”
“You do?” Chris wore a question on his face. He smiled again—I could get used to his smile—and suggested, “We should be friends.”
“You’re right, we should.”
We stood still in the parking lot regarding at each other. The applause and cheers swelled to a fever-pitch, then gradually subsided. Scraping and shuffling sounded from the clubhouse. Music started once again, this time pumping from the sound system: Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy.” Chris twirled me around the parking lot again.
“Where did you learn to do this?” I demanded as Chris dipped me towards the ground and swung me back up again. “I mean, lots of guys at BYU dance, but they’re all stiff, and you just got here.”
“From this guy in Albuquerque, Gabe. When we were in middle school, his grandma signed him and his sister up for one of those city-kid summer camps in the mountains, and he came back knowing how to dance with girls. He soon found out that dancing with girls can lead to other things with girls.”
“Yep, dancing makes females go all gooey inside . . .”
“Oh, I’m sorry, maybe we should stop.” We stopped.
My cheeks were hot; I pressed my freezing fingers against the sides of my face. “Um, so, are you still in touch?”
“With who?”
“Your friend, Gabe—do you still talk a lot? Is he still in
Chris stepped back. If, for a moment, his eyes had been clear and deep in the semidarkness, now the windows of his soul were shuttered tight. He shook his head and looked up at the impenetrable blackness that began just above our heads, “No, Gabriel Delatorre is a was now.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I breathed, stepping towards him. “I shouldn’t have brought it up. Please forgive me? You’ll never have to talk about it again if you don’t want—”
“Shh!” Chris held his hand over my lips. “It doesn’t matter.”
The damp chill finally overtook the warmth of new friendship. We left in Chris’s car before the activity ended.
* * * *
When we drove out of the clubhouse’s small parking lot, we were at a loss as to where to go. We ended up traveling up past the temple and critiquing at the huge, varied houses in the northeast
“What time should we get back?” Chris asked, nodding at the broken clock on his plastic-wood dashboard. The car interior was an interesting mix of old and new: a black box with little dials sat on the dash, the seats had cigarette burns in them, and the speakers were large, round, and shiny. “There’s a subwoofer in the trunk,” he told me when he saw me fingering one speaker’s taut surface.
I stopped feeling the speaker. “Well, we’re probably good if we’re in the condo, and not together, by eleven-thirty. Visiting hours are ’til twelve tonight, and it’s raining, so Marianne and Graça will arrive just after midnight.”
“Ooh, you’re good.” Safe in the car with the heater blasting, we watched the storm rage outside. “Do you want to see a picture of Annie when she and I were little?” Chris asked suddenly. He leaned over me and pulled a wide, flat box out of the glove compartment. Inside was a stack of pictures. He handed me the top one.
By the pale map light, I saw in the photograph two small children with identical curly golden haloes and identical smiles shining through the spaghetti sauce smeared on their identical faces. They embraced each other with tomatoey hands. “Wow,” I laughed, “I’ve never seen Marianne messy—even when we were ten! Can I see the rest of your pictures?”
Chris handed me the box and stared at the bubbles in the car’s velveteen ceiling.
“Oh, is this your mom and dad?” I asked. In the picture I’d picked up, Karen Anderson, her abdomen bulging under her white dress, bared her teeth in a frozen smile as she stood beside a wedding cake. A man just on the brink of movement stood to her left in a white tuxedo, his red hair styled in an unfortunate bouffant. A few inches of chilly air yawned between them.
“Yep, that’s them twenty-one years ago. Annie and I were born two months later.” He shook his head and a few drops of water fell from his hair on the snapshot. “Their marriage was never a happy one.”
My body turned towards Chris, I pressed my elbow into the seat and patted his fist with my hand. “I don’t know, but maybe all families are difficult and unhappy.”
Eyes large and serious, Chris held my gaze, “There’s all kinds of families, Bekah, and they’re not all unhappy. They can’t be, or people wouldn’t live in families.”
“At least we all have a chance to create our own marriage, our own family, no matter what we’re born into.”
Chris studied the ceiling with determination.
Face reddening, I shuffled through the remaining photographs. Most of them featured Chris and Marianne in various stages of childhood, always together, always covered in pumpkin innards or jam or mud. The last two were different. One was a poorly posed portrait from a junior high dance—Chris stood awkwardly in a white t-shirt and jeans with his stiff hands on the hips of a solemn girl wearing too much makeup. Her tight, short purple t-shirt read “Babe” in glitter. Her hair was straight, long, and very dark, her skin was brown, her brown eyes were wide set, and her figure was chubby, chubby as mine had been before it graduated to curvy.
The last picture was a snapshot taken by a poor amateur. The tops of the subjects’ foreheads were cut off, but they were obviously Chris and a male relative of the girl in the previous photo. Both appeared to be about fifteen, yet their dull skin was pulled a little too tight against their prominent skeletons, even for teenage boys. The sunlight glared, and sweat glistened on their bare arms and faces. Neither was smiling: Chris’s hard green eyes challenged the camera, and the other’s lids drooped with solemnity. Despite the apparent heat, their heads were covered with watchcaps as black as the tattoos on their biceps. I had already seen the crab with crash written inside its shell on Chris’s arm, and the other guy’s was a crab too, except the shell read gabe. Around Gabe’s neck was the silver chain that now peeked out from Chris’s unbuttoned shirt collar.
I looked up; Chris was watching me look at the pictures. His body was stiff and still. One by one, I laid the pictures back in their box. “So the tattoo’s kinda a friendship thing?” I ventured.
“You could say that.”
“Oh.”
Chris sighed, “When I was a teenager, Bekah, I didn’t really go to church much.”
Now it was my turn to take a deep breath before I said something I didn’t mean. “But now—you do go to church? I mean, you believe . . .”
“Yes.”
“Oh.”
Chris snapped his seatbelt back on and restarted the engine, “We should get back.”