“Yeah. But experiences are better than the replications, aren’t they?”
“Our experiences are just replications of other people’s experiences.”
“Nothing new under the sun.”
“That’s from the Bible.”
“I know.” He smiled. “My family doesn’t really smoke hookah next to a statue of Buddha while listening to a Celtic orchestra.”
“Good,” I said, smiling back at him. “Celtic orchestras suck.”
He steered us toward a white-blossomed tree that was vomiting flowers onto the water and took his foot off the pedals to let us drift. Then he looked at me kind of intensely and said, “This is where I take the time to make an absolute fool of myself to apologize for making an absolute fool of myself.”
“Sounds foolish.”
“Oh, it is. And I probably won’t come away from it a better person than before, but I need to tell you I’m sorry for not showing up to Carla’s birthing class the other night and making you liable by association. I would say symptom of depression, but I’m starting to think depression is a symptom of me.”
“It’s not a symptom of anything,” I corrected him. “And you can’t control Disconnect, Snake. I’m not judging you for it.”
“Disconnect?”
“The third stage. I look at it in three stages. Disconnect is where you were the other night. It’s that nonfunctioning state where you feel nothing. Numbness. You just want to listen to music that makes you miserable and take Prozac and sleep for eternity. So I get it. You’re not really up to taking your pregnant girlfriend to a parade showcasing the miracle of life when you feel like dying.”
He was watching me intently. His boring eyes seemed less boring every time I saw him. I couldn’t tell if it was because he was getting better or I was.
“I like the way you see it,” he said, pumping his feet to spin us in gradual circles. “When I first got on Prozac, my moms started blaming themselves, like I needed something they couldn’t give me. I think they felt powerless, or something. But it’s because they were viewing it all wrong. We don’t always feel pain for a reason. Sometimes we hurt because it’s better than nothing. We hurt to feel alive.”
“I think that’s where you and I are different. When I got on Zoloft, I might as well have been diagnosed with cancer as far as my mother was concerned. I was a lost soul. I didn’t have Jesus. I needed to pray. Karen blamed it on everything and everyone but me. It’s like she couldn’t accept that maybe I hated to feel because it’s overrated. I didn’t need feelings, I needed the world to slow down.” I reached over the side of the pedal boat and picked up a blossom. “The world’s too fast to stop, though.”
“It feels pretty slow out here.”
“Yeah.”
I didn’t expect that I’d feel the same. But he was right. Somehow, he was right. We weren’t spinning.
“Feeling’s not overrated. I don’t think you do enough of it.”
“And I think you do too much,” I argued, tossing the blossom to the water. “We only have a scrap of useful passion. It’s a shame to spread it thin.”
He didn’t answer. We bobbed toward the bank again, but he successfully steered us back onto the pond and toward his house. This time, he pedaled slowly. He went slower than he had on the way to the quiet side. I could tell that he didn’t want to waste his moments. But I almost wondered if our moments were better off wasted. Empty. Wouldn’t it have been better that way? To let our feelings drain so that nothing could be lost when the moments were over?
“How was it?” he asked. He didn’t seem himself. Nervous, even. “The class? I’ve been to a few, and they were the closest semblance to physical torture I could imagine.”
“I ended up between Carla’s legs while she pretended to push a child out of her body to a techno beat. The torture was very much physical.”
I didn’t mention what Carla told me at the mall, about the feelings she might have still had for Snake. Telling her secrets felt like sticking a thumb on her bruises. As a person with a lot of wounds, I knew how badly that could hurt.
“She texted me yesterday,” he said. “She wasn’t upset with the way things ended. I kind of got the feeling she was relieved to be rid of me.”
“I hope you know you’re not really broken up. And you’ll never be rid of each other, either.”
“Do you want me to be with her?” He stopped pedaling again and was calculating my reaction under disheveled hair. “You act like you think we should be together.”
I didn’t know if want was a term I would use. And I knew that want was all he used. And it was the most honest and unusual question, but it didn’t have an obvious answer.
“You know what I think? I think we’re too young and imperfect and unpredictable to decide who should be with whom and who is the proverbial ‘one’ and what draws us together apart from the simple bias of human obligation to the concept of love. So I don’t care if you’re with Carla, or convincing yourself you’re without her, or pining after wants you can’t obtain because the bias of love falls short on you. You can want what you want, but there are some things that never change. And Carla’s presence in your life is one of them. So, the answer is no. I wouldn’t say I want anything in particular.”
He didn’t grin. The one time I was brutal to a fault, and he wasn’t cheerful about it. But he wasn’t thrown. Rather, expectant.
“Who am I to forsake obligation?”
“No one.” I rubbed my eyes. I couldn’t believe I was about to say it. “You actually have one more obligation.”
“What’s that?”
“You need to take Carla to prom.”
He almost laughed. “Um, what?”
“Personally, I find it ridiculous. But Carla is wired to need it, and you should know all about that.” He was watching me with more feeling than I liked. Like everything else he did, it was too much. “Friday night. Take her.”
His blue eyes were too dull against the water, and the sun was brighter than he would ever be, and he lied to himself every day, and he was too presumptuous, and I was pointing out all of his flaws because I was beginning not to notice them anymore. It was like the first time I met him. He was beautiful and average. Only this time, minus the average part.
“I really, insanely, undeniably hate you in the best way,” he whispered.
“Reggie!” Karen called from the grass. She had the picnic blanket rolled under her arm while my family headed uphill toward the street. “Come on. We’re leaving.”
The pedal boat reached the dock. I turned to Snake, and he lifted his hand. “After you,” he said, motioning for me to leave. Every ounce of me protested.
I jumped out of the boat and clumsily climbed onto the dock without his help. I didn’t need it. He was crawling out behind me when I took off and sprinted toward my mom. I didn’t look back.