Life by Committee
Corey Ann Haydu
Dedication
To my cherished friend Honora,
who is brave enough to share her secrets
and kind enough to listen to mine
Secret:
I haven’t eaten anything but celery and hard-boiled eggs in three days. I want to be as skinny as my little sister, and I’m pretty sure I can do it.
—Zed
Secret:
I have gone to the doctor seven times this year without telling my parents. Just in case I have cancer.
—Roxie
Secret:
I brought my mother’s $100,000 ring to college, and I wear it as a necklace when I am going to parties. Clearly, she has not given me permission. Nor would she.
—Star
One.
Hey, Tabitha? I have a secret, Joe types.
What is it? I type back. We’ve been chatting for three hours. My fingers hurt, my eyes are watery and strained, I have the light buzz of a headache, and it’s well past midnight. Joe and I have been chatting almost every night like this, hours on end, for almost a month. In school we smile closed-mouth smiles at each other, and sometimes he finds an excuse to cup his hand over my shoulder for a moment. But at night I sit wrapped in an old quilt and braid my hair, unbraid it, and braid it again. We tell each other everything we’re thinking, and everything we were thinking during the day. Sometimes the pauses in between our words are so long, I have to get out of the computer chair and pace the room, brimming with the restless energy of falling in love.
Tonight I’m so focused on the screen, it seems the whole world has turned bluish and backlit, and I don’t think I’ve even taken a moment to blink. He just finished telling me about the money he’s been saving up to take a trip to New York City on his own. I didn’t know jocks wanted to leave Vermont. I didn’t know they went places by themselves. What’s even better is I told him all that and he just said LOL and told me that the things I say surprise him.
What I really want, though, is to hear his secret.
You can tell me what you’re thinking, I type.
I don’t want to say, Joe responds at last. I exhale sharply.
It’s okay, I type. My hands grip the sides of my laptop. I know he’s going to say it tonight. I know we are about to cross from something fun and bad and flirtatious to that other thing. The real thing.
When I say it, we can’t go back, Joe types. I don’t trust myself.
It is delicious, pulling this out of him. I’m glad it’s so late and quiet, and that the world keeps going but Joe and I are both glued to our computers, waiting for something terrifying and real and secret on the screen.
I can’t figure out what in the world to say to make him spill his feelings, what possible combination of sentences will make this moment last. So I sort of tap out words and delete them. I settle on: . . . ?
Another long pause. That wasn’t right. I need something else. Like, a poem. Or something quick and heart-stopping that will arrest him, trap him right in this moment and make him love me.
We’re in it together, I write. Press send. Wait.
Wait.
Wait.
I am falling for you, Joe writes. I want you. I’m questioning everything.
I can’t sleep. My mind is buzzing from the conversation with Joe, and by three I’ve made the executive decision to stop pretending to sleep and grab my newest copy of my favorite book, A Little Princess. I head to Cate’s office, where I love to curl up with a book, and start doing my active reading.
Active reading is this thing they started making us do at my crunchy private school as soon as we transitioned from picture books to chapter books at the beginning of second grade. Back then, active reading meant starring words we didn’t know or drawing smiley faces next to parts of a story that we liked or laughed at. Now we’re expected to write notes in the margins, ask questions on the dedication page, and underline, asterisk, and highlight anything that “hits us emotionally or intellectually,” according to Headmaster Brownser.
Headmaster Brownser cares about our feelings. He wants us to share them. He tells us so all the time. It doesn’t make people at school any nicer, not really, but it means we do a lot of lame trust activities and keep journals and had an entire unit on Feeling Identification in seventh grade. As if by seventh grade a person doesn’t know the difference between anger and sadness.
I’m not into trust falls or school-wide bonding picnics or most other things Headmaster Brownser likes, but I am really into active reading. I totally active read for fun. Like a hobby. And I love it when other people active read. So I do what I do best: break the binding on A Little Princess and start marking it up. It is the most beautiful book in the world, and as soon as Sara’s handsome captain father starts buying her furs and dolls and gifts of every kind, to keep with her when he leaves, I tear up.