“I’m not that complex.”
“On the contrary, you’re so exclusively complex that you only have one predominant behavior.” He kept the camera rolling, but set it on the ground in front of his feet. He leaned closer to me, his eyes electrified by lightning and something of an entirely different kind of nature. “Hate. It encompasses you, but barely scratches the surface of who you are. And I’m still not sure how that can be.”
I didn’t want to be repetitive even to my own conscious, but this guy. This presumptuous guy. He was roundabout, complimenting me like he always did, sprinkling his assertions with arrogant assumptions. It used to make my skin itch. Now, it was comfortable. It was the kind of lightning that only bothered the sky.
“So I’m a little complex.”
“No kidding. I can’t tell if you hate because you’re inherently hateful, or if hate is your love language.”
“What about you, huh? You’re surprising.”
“No, I’m not,” he mumbled.
“No? I see a kid refilling his Prozac and find out that this guy has a cool talent, awesome moms, a girlfriend, whether or not he wants one, a baby on the way, and he’s clinical.” I shrugged. “Doesn’t make much sense.”
“I’m sorry my depression isn’t listed on the periodic table of logical depression. Do I have to draw up a map of why I feel the way I do, or can we accept my defects as one of the unexplainable mysteries of life and let them be?”
“No, I get it. People always want reasons. My therapist always asks me, ‘What was your initial trigger?’ and I used to not answer, because I didn’t know. But then I just got tired of the nagging and this idea that misery must be attached to reasons why, so when she asked me for the thousandth time, I said, ‘Birth.’?” He laughed. “Yeah, my therapist hates me. And not in the love language way.”
“My therapist always tells me, ‘To have a friend, you first must be a friend.’?” He yanked a blade of grass from the ground and tied it around his thumb. “That’s it. That’s the eighty-dollars-a-session advice that I couldn’t possibly get anywhere else, like from my moms or a minivan bumper sticker.” He looked at me as lightning struck behind the trees of his neighbor’s house. “I guess loneliness is my hatred. One screwed-up movie we’re in, huh?”
I looked away right as more lightning exploded, rosy hues kissing the gray. The flashes were like light bulbs across the atmosphere, like the gods were paparazzi taking pictures of the lost and broken little humans wandering aimlessly beneath their thumbs. I looked at Snake, who had snatched up his camera to make sure he got the perfect shot. I hated myself for thinking it, hated myself for not hating how stupidly happy I felt beside him.
And I couldn’t help but think of how pointless it was to live in the imaginings of lightning, to believe that they were fireworks and the universe made them so that we could be futile little humans in love with our own futility.
“Her name was Bree,” I whispered against the show.
Snake turned to me, setting the camera down as the lightning simmered. “Who?”
“My trigger, if I had to pick one.” I watched a cloud be torn apart by the sparks. “The friend thing never worked much for me either, believe it or not. I guess my good looks and general charm were too threatening.”
His eyes rounded at charm, and he chuckled.
“I met Bree in the bathroom on the first day of seventh grade after I spilled Cherry Coke all over the crotch of my pants. She offered me her gym shorts to wear for the rest of the day so it didn’t look like I’d peed terminal red piss all over myself. We sort of had to be friends after that. The only problem with friends is, you care about them. A lot. And then they get hit by a drunk driver a few weeks into freshman year and die before they were ever given a chance to feel the things the rest of us get the opportunity to feel all our lives.”
He gasped under his breath. “Holy shit. Wow. Um . . . yeah. That’s . . . I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. I get the feeling I would have ended up miserable regardless, but it sucks for her and her family, you know?” I ripped up a chunk of grass and tossed it to the side. Snake sat completely motionless, not bothering to do that thing people do where they pretend they understand. It’s ridiculous how much trouble people have admitting that they don’t understand everything. “Anyway, when something like that happens, there’s no good way to move on. So I did my best. Tried to bury myself in schoolwork and books and stuff, but it all felt, well, useless.”
His mouth morphed into a sad smile.
“So I started hanging out with this guy in my geometry class that I’d known since he was just a nerdy kid in kindergarten. But I couldn’t help but notice he wasn’t such a hopeless dork anymore. He was awkward and cute and told me lame stories about the space robot invasion from his favorite comic book. And I didn’t care about the robots or the book, but I cared about the nerdy boy who did. Especially when he told me he loved me and said that he wouldn’t ever leave like Bree did, and that even though he was moving to Vermont at the end of the summer, I would still be a part of his life. But then when he moved to Vermont, I never heard from him again. Saw online that he had a girl there he’d been talking to all school year, the daughter of this guy his dad knew, and that was it. He never talked to me again. And there I was believing that I had someone who would never leave, and he was never really there to begin with. That’s when I realized that caring isn’t a way to survive. It doesn’t prevent pain, it encourages it.”
I looked at Snake. His lids were heavy, but not like he was tired. Like he was hurt. Sad, even. “That was my trigger. Absence. Realizing its inevitability. I cared too much about Alex from geometry, and he left. It’s human nature, I suppose. Temporariness. Tightropes into oblivion.”
“The Onslaught.”
I tried to smile at him, but knew I looked unhinged. “One point for complexity, right?”
He was exuding multiple Snakeisms at once. His pervasive staring. His Twizzler chew. His grin that wouldn’t even complete a full upward turn because it was defiant toward the mouth that made it. “I never imagined there was a point in time when Reggie Mason was anything other than a total misanthrope,” he teased, trying to lighten the dark cloud I’d tossed over the evening. “That’s not one point for complexity. You just won the whole complexity game.”
“What about you?” I asked. “What’s your kryptonite of choice?”