I’ve been struggling to write this summer for a number of reasons that I keep listing out.
The primary reason is that I’ve been a lot busier than expected. I’ve had a lot of travel to do and a lot of people to see. All of that is generally well and good; that is, after all, kind of what life is all about— seeing people and going places. It does pose a bit of a complication though when you are the kind of writer who needs to sit down for hours on end, in one specific place, listening to one specific song, etc, to get your work done (like myself).
There are other complications too that I will have to work through beyond just finding a new routine. One is that the song I’ve been listening to for these last few go-rounds (“Helmet” by Steve Lacy) isn’t packing the same punch that it used to, and I have yet to find an adequate song to replace it.
Another problem, I think, comes from my struggle to write about Able Maker. A phrase that keeps coming to mind is “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all”. It may already be apparent that I don’t have very much nice to say about Mr. Maker, even years after the fact. That being said, I didn’t have much nice to say about either of my 9th grade boyfriends, and I got through that just fine. The difference is, I suppose, that there isn’t some beautiful homo-love story playing out beneath the surface of my relationship with Able. There isn’t something beyond it that I was looking for. For a time, I loved him. For a time, I thought he was the world. But he was also my introduction to the true, insidious darkness that so many experience when dating men/boys. In the end, there wasn’t a clean and clear lesson, only more confusion and hurt. I still think it’s an important story to tell, especially in the context of this piece, but the fact that it is so ~not fun~ has made it difficult to face.
Then there is the pressure. I’ve had a few people (who I find more or less important) tell me that they’re going to keep an eye on this blog. Old friends and authors, etc. It’s very flattering, but it functions as sort of a jinx. Like when you want to show someone something you’ve been practicing for days, but then the fact that they are there watching causes you to mess up. That’s sort of how I feel.
Which leads into my final problem: my crisis of the self. I’ve been playing the comparison game a lot. With my band, I compare myself to other local artists and ask myself what they’re doing that we aren’t. I drive myself crazy because we don’t have the gigs or the photographs or the content. Then I meet writers and I hear about what they’re accomplishing: getting published in magazines, getting inducted into halls of fame, and I wonder if I still have time (at the ripe age of 26 to accomplish such things. Then I see all these people I know from school getting married, and I feel like I need to get married. I feel like I need to quit my job. I feel like I need to get rich. And then I spiral on and on and on.
I know it seems silly to feel like you’re running out of time when you aren’t even thirty, but I can’t help the world we live in. I might want to have kids, but if I want to make that happen, I only have a decade or so, and once I pop those out, I fear my personal life will vanish. And even if I don’t want to have kids, my ten-year high school reunion is next year, and I always figured I’d have at least one mediocre book published by that point, but the odds of that aren’t looking great either.
I know it’s all silly, but these are the things that wrinkle my skin and make my hair fall out. All I can do is fight against them.
***
Milkshakes with Able and Pedro Pete became a weekly affair.
We had rehearsal every weekday after school except Friday, making it the perfect day for the outing. After school each week, Able would appear at my locker, casually waiting for me to finish packing away my books. Then the two of us would venture to the first floor to find Pedro Pete amongst the crowd.
We would walk down Franklin side by side by side, taking up the entire sidewalk. When pedestrians came from the other direction, Able would proudly shout “single file— INITIATE,” and the three of us would fall in line, Able in the front, me behind him, and Pedro Pete behind me. We would always stop by the Little Free Library, and we would pick out another dense academic text (with a red cover if one was available), and after our milkshakes we would try and fail to read them while taking up space in the lawn chairs by the DU quad.
The books inevitably found their place in my locker, where I had an impressive collection growing, each following Monday.
This was one of many parts of my new life that I was starting to romanticize. I liked the idea of having a couple of friends that I could consistently count on seeing outside of school; it was new and comforting. Sure, in South Carolina I’d had friends who I saw and spent time with outside of school often, but the trouble was that any hang out always had to be initiated by an invite. Those invites were dreadfully uncomfortable to send, because there was always the chance that they might get declined. Having friends I spent time with every Friday meant there was no possible rejection, only the rare possibility of a change of plans, which was something I could handle.
School was romantic to me as well. I felt an unprecedented control over my image, like I could be the exact person I’d always suspected myself to be.
For one, I had all sorts of new-old clothes (hand-me-downs and Goodwill treasures) that I felt reflected the true me better than anything I’d ever had before. Little black dresses with lace trim, oversized bowling shirts, cropped long sleeves in muted fall colors. I’d taken to wearing my hair in little black bows and wearing a modest amount of smudgy dark make-up around my eyes, so that every day I could present as a real tumblr grunge girl.
I had the music to match. Over the summer, my mom had gotten me my own Spotify premium account, so I was no longer restricted to the playlist of pop punk I had downloaded on my phone. The world was now open to me, so that I could ascend to the level of manic pixie dream girl before only seen on the screen.
I listened to The Smiths (I know) every day on the way to school, while taking pictures of the pastel sunrise for my new aesthetic blog. Between classes I listened to Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground while feeling superior to my classmates, like I knew something about culture that they were all missing out on. All except the other theater kids, who were happy to engage in the charade that we knew something everyone else didn’t; that the 1980s were a golden era (aside from anything that may have had to do with Ronald Reagan).
Life was like the perfect performance. At school we all wore leather jackets and sang songs from Rent at lunch. People thought I was interesting and cool and different, because for a moment I was. At home I grieved with my grandmother and aunt, and we held movie marathons on the weekends. I took pictures of dead things on my phone because I thought it was beautiful and morbid.
It’s hard to say how much of the new me was real and how much of it was for show. That’s the thing about teenagers. Half of their identity is inherent, and the other half is made up of bits and bobs they pick up from the world around them and try on for size. It’s kind of ludicrous to expect a teenager to be authentic, because if they were authentic, they would all still act like the small children they were not long before. Their peers, and the world at large, expect them to be people more or less, but no one tells them how to do so. So they watch movies and TV shows and listen to music and go online, and they copy and paste the parts that work and disregard the parts that don’t. They build avatars of the people they would like to be perceived as, and they rehearse these parts day in and day out until eventually it just becomes second nature.
So I was a mysterious girl who listened to The Smiths on the way to school every morning, because cool girls in movies listened to The Smiths. I watched old movies in my free time, and I idolized the way life used to be, not because I had any nostalgia for these decades past, but because it was cool to do so and because these were the movies that fit into my tumblr aesthetic. I wrote poetry about being sad, because it was cool to be sad and I posted it online next to pictures of flowers and my shoes. And this became who I was.
I was deep, and I was sad, and I was happy to be around other deep, sad people.
I was still texting with Bella at this time, but we didn’t have any classes together, and she wasn’t in with the theater crowd, so our interactions were more or less limited to the screen and the occasional wave in the hallway. I wanted to get to know her better, but I feared that our relationship was reaching the point of stagnation. Anyway, Able was occupying most of my time. We would consistently spend an hour or so chatting or walking around after rehearsals, and though I still wasn’t sure if his interest in me was romantic or friendly. As rehearsals went on, it also came to my attention that one of Rosa’s baby-rockstar ex-boyfriends was developing a crush on me. He was playing an unlucky mage who was slaughtered in every scene he appeared in, and though I didn’t quite feel the same way about him, I found the prospect of him liking me interesting. Suffice to say, I had a lot on my mind, but not a lot of directions to move in.
Like Rosa, I learned in my time with Able that he too had a good deal of exes from 9th grade (a quantity that made my two 9th grade ex boyfriends seem baby-ish in comparison), and most of them did theater with us. The only ex who didn’t do theater with us was a senior the previous year and had graduated— he was also a boy, which I found deeply compelling. I liked that Able had a bi-curious side to him (it was probably my favorite thing about him), because it made me feel like we had some common ground, though it wasn’t something he acknowledged often. Like Rosa, I also thought that it was sort of admirable that he was on such good terms with all his exes (one of them was even his “best friend,” as he put it); I thought it made him seem very emotionally mature.
I started to become suspicious of his feelings for me after about three weeks of knowing him. It was a Friday, and we had finished our milkshakes; we were walking back to the school to attend one of Botticelli’s monthly poetry slams. During the open mic, Able was planning to read a selection of haikus I’d written about Halloween while Lucky played a classical guitar accompaniment. At the time, we all thought this was a wonderful and fresh piece of performance art, and I was eager for anyone to see it. I was texting Bella to see if she would be there and when she told me she would be, I squealed with joy.
“Are you texting her again?” Able asked with one of his signature eyerolls.
I told him I was.
“Let me text her,” he demanded, grabbing for my phone.
I held the phone out of reach, shifting it from hand to hand to avoid his grasp.
“Let me! I am the master of the game! After I text her, she will practically fall into your arms!”
“Why do I not believe you?” I asked, but it was too late. My phone was in his hands, and he was running down the street and around the corner with it.
I chased after him, but he was gone, out of sight.
“What the hell is wrong with him?” I asked Pedro Pete, who was leisurely making his way down the street behind me.
Pedro shrugged, “It would be easier to make a list of things that aren’t wrong with him.”
When Able appeared from the alleyway, he handed me back my phone with a troubling smirk. I opened my texts immediately and saw that he’d sent Bella a number of terrible messages, all with the shared sentiment of I am not interested in you whatsoever!
Frantically, I texted her again apologizing and sending the obligatory my friend stole my phone texts. She responded to all of them in one succinct:
haha, you’re all good :).
Luckily enough, it seemed like I truly was all good when I got to the poetry slam, because despite Able’s bids for my attention, I had one of the longest conversations on record with Bella that night. It wasn’t anything of substance, just one of those flirty nothing conversations you have with someone you might want to be something with. But I got to see her smile, and I got to sit next to her for a moment, which was enough to make me hopeful.
At the end she said, “I want to ask you about something.”
“What is it?” I asked, again bordering on too eager.
“Not right now,” she said, “remind me next week.” Then she winked and dissipated, and again I was left with the theater folk.
The next week homecoming tickets went on sale. At that point, the only school dance I’d been to was a winter formal with my gay friend from middle school at which we did very little dancing, and mostly argued over which DC and Marvel superheroes were the most OP. Suffice to say, I was itching for a dance with a little more actual dancing and maybe even the possibility for some romance.
I had a feeling that Able wanted to ask me and I was hoping that maybe that was what Bella wanted to talk to me about. I’d decided that I would say yes to whichever one of them asked me first. The problem was, tickets were $15 dollars the first day, and the next day they would go up to $25. The price of tickets was going to continue going up as the date of the dance approached. I wanted to wait to buy my ticket until someone asked me…but tickets were only on sale at lunch, and I didn’t want to pay the ten or more extra dollars if I ended up being wrong about both of them.
So at lunch, I texted Bella asking if it was a good time, but she said “after school would be better”: bust. Then I spent about three-quarters of the lunch period hinting to Able that I was going to buy my ticket soon, so that I could get it before the prices went up. In response, he twiddled his thumbs and looked around the room nervously.
When there were only fifteen minutes left in the period, I announced to the room, “Okay, well, I think I’m going to go buy my homecoming ticket now.”
“Wait!” Able nearly shouted.
My heart skipped. I was sure this was the moment.
“Let me go with you,” he said, “…to get tickets.”
“Sure,” I answered.
We walked together down the steps to the ticket office.
“Are you excited for the dance?” I asked.
“Sure… as excited as I am for anything, I guess.”
I didn’t know what that meant.
When we got to the ticket office, I stood to the side and waited for him to go first, hoping he would purchase two tickets and give himself away.
He foiled my plan when he said: “After you.”
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“I insist,” he said, gesturing for me to go ahead of him.
I had to physically restrain myself from sighing as I walked up to the window.
“One…” I began, eyeing Able at the edge of my vision. He was kicking at the ground with his hands in his pockets, avoiding my stare. “Yeah, one ticket to the dance, please.”
“Okay!” the senior salesperson said, snatching my cash and handing back a cardstock ticket.
Able followed after me, buying his own single homecoming ticket, and that was that.
***
At the end of the day, I waited by my locker for Bella to find me. Able beat her there.
“I have to talk to you about something after rehearsal,” he said, “can you meet me at the park?”
It was a stage combat rehearsal that day; everyone except the narrator was required, which was why I had to meet him.
“Sure,” I shrugged.
I saw Bella approaching, and I tried to signal to Able to get lost, but he didn’t get the hint. I could see she had two homecoming dance tickets with her. This time I was really sure that this was my moment. I tried to press the wrinkles out of my shirt with my hands, and I fixed the hair behind my ears.
“Hey,” she said, cool as a cucumber, leaning up against the lockers.
“Hey,” I blushed. “Could you give us a moment?” I asked Able.
“Of course,” he said. He moved only six inches away.
Bell began, “I know this is kind of out of nowhere…maybe you weren’t expecting it…”
My heart was pounding with excitement. I knew I was right. This was the moment.
“I was wondering if—”
“Milkweed!” Able cut her off. “Sorry,” he said without a hint of apology in his voice. He looked at me then down at his shoes. It was untied. “Could you tie this for me?”
I looked back at Bella. I was humiliated, but I didn’t know what to do. I knew that I should have told him to get lost for real. I knew I should have told him to mind his business… but I didn’t. I got down and I tied his shoe for him.
“You know what… never mind.” Bella turned and walked away.
I was stunned.
“That was weird,” Able said.
“No! You’re weird!” I began storming off to rehearsal.
“I’ll see you after, though, right?”
Of course, he did see me after.
I met him at the park, per his request, and he took me to a bench by the lake.
“I know you told me you don’t really like anyone at the school,” was the beginning of his speech.
It was true, I had told him that in the previous weeks.
“But I don’t think that’s true. I think you do like someone. I think they like you too.”
For a moment, I thought he was talking about Bella, and I was mad again.
“I think you like me. And I think we should date.”
“Are you asking me to the dance?” I asked, mostly shocked that he let me buy my own ticket earlier that day.
“Kind of…I was expecting us to start being a couple. Like boyfriend-girlfriend.”
“But… you do want to go to the dance together.” I was struggling to wrap my head around the ticket thing. I couldn’t believe he let me buy my own ticket to the dance, though I supposed it would have ruined his whole plan if he’d had to ask me earlier.
“I would like us to start dating now, then I would like to go to the dance. Then I would like to keep dating after that. Boyfriend and girlfriend.”
“Okay, sure,” I agreed. “So we are going to the dance together?
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