Most people at FF.net except one supportive reader and a guest (once) have decided that no matter how often I ask for reviews - you know, some contact from these strangers who have me alerted (all 60 of them) - they won't review me. They won't tell me they're reading. They won't tell me what worked or didn't work, what's running through their minds... nothing. If I didn't have such awesome friends in Jenna and Emily, I'd probably go crazy. Emily, especially - she may as well be my own beta even though I promise to love Lauren forever and ever. She just has realllyyy insightful thoughts and criticism.
I'm thinking before I post another chapter on FF.net, that I will say I'm not posting more until I get reviews. This is all starting to get disrespectful, in my opinion. :)
Anyway, the chapter: Jeffrey's in it, and that makes me excited. I was practically meeting him myself and had never planned what sort of mannerisms he'd have or the way he'd talk... He won't be in the story much, but I like having this as a foundation for what comes in the future.
Also... that line about what we naturally imitate being as good as natural... it just came to me on the bus over a different subject, and I found some truth in it. I love giving "Erik" truthful things to say even though he's lost a few marbles.
HE’S (@) THERE
Chapter 45 – A Complicated Ritual
Mariam didn't need to ask questions to know what happened that night, or why she, presumably, had to walk home by herself, but this comforted me even less than if she hadn't a single clue. I still remember her eyes glimmering in the hallway light, wide, anticipating me to be the last one out, my shoulder patted by Mrs. Vardega. Once the door was closed and I could scarcely see in front of me, I imagined her turning back to face the lobby, walking on tip toes and cranking her neck. “Did I miss her somehow?” “Where's that brown hair and flower clip?” I imagined the innocent nature of her searching, the way a friend or a sister searches, and the way that I searched for her, preparing to flee like an outlaw at any moment.
This was just the opposite kind of impression of me that I wanted her to have. Stupidly, I had told her “sure, come backstage,” all to seem cool and untroubled; to assert that no one else's opinion mattered about this arrangement and that my opinion was that I missed her... So much for that being good enough.
It just wasn't good enough to want things like her friendship, or peace. Erik and I may have worked in words – in ridiculous, semantic wars, even – but to Mariam, it was actions that counted. I'd cancelled tutoring, I was tired all the time, I hadn't performed since the Fall, but this sacrifice was unquestionably heaviest on me suddenly, even if it was a sacrifice completed in only a few moments. I had no obligation to walk home with her, we had said our hellos and given each other our smiles and waves, so there was no way I should be feeling even remotely like I did the night I walked out of Winter Formal. Yet, the thought kept pounding on me that she was walking home alone, and here was I, watching a light turn on from high above, to help me see the way to the side door.
And Erik said: “the way it should be done is that we vanish together.”
He even carried me through the woods. I dared to think for a moment I was attracted to him for keeping me in such a consistent hold, never letting me slip even slightly. Of course, we didn't stay together long. He made out like he quite lamented that I didn't think I had time to perform that week, and I just went along with it. Yes, it was too bad...
On the way back, even on the arm of my escort, all I could think was “she's got to be online.” She always was. I could rush into the study and get on AIM so she knew I was home, and that she meant something to me.
But she wasn't there. I thought maybe in a few minutes she'd show up, and before I heard the sound of her signing in I'd just resort to an easy distraction, but eventually two hours had passed, and I was playing mindsweeper.
* * *
Mariam every so mercifully pretended I had never disappeared by the next time I saw her. I wasn't seeing her at school the way I used to, and she seemed to be having fun within a group of studious underclassmen during lunch, all of whom were connected in some way to Jeffrey and who apparently had a wonderful sense of humor. We mostly interacted on the internet for those first couple weeks, where I could comfortably chat with her for hours. I had to insist that, no, I didn't want to join that group during break (to which she grumbled about me being just as asocial as always), but she shouldn't feel badly. I had to stress it to a degree that caused paranoia in me about her somehow knowing Erik didn't want us to talk that she also could not spring upon me out of nowhere with one of them, or especially Jeffrey himself, in tow.
For just a little while, I was having my cake and eating it, too. I could play the “shy” card, and the both of us could be hyper-aware that we hadn't talked a month for a significant reason, so it was easy to be able to suggest we only talk online, to ease back in. After a day of fastening my eyes on the ground while I walked, or minding my phone for messages, I could share my trivial observations with her, complain, tease, or ask about all the things going on in her life. Ask about who these people were that she now knew. Ask who finally said they liked the other, and how. I consoled her about her upcoming driver's license test. She was hooked to some new HBO series, I forgot the name, and she told me I had to find it and watch it too.
It remained all about her, and that was satisfying to me right then because, whether we were willing it or not in the face of quite a complicated situation, she brought back a state of simplicity to my life during those little moments I could catch her.
She wanted me to meet Jeffrey, though. Several times in the hall, if she was alone, she'd wave at me or come say a quick hello, then give me my peace, but other times, there would be that sandy-haired boy locking fingers with her, and she'd send me a glance that was rather like a neon arrow, flashing and pointing to him. I don't know why, but I wanted never to meet him.
That probably sounds like a very bad way to feel, and I considered several times, out of frustration for this adverse reaction, that maybe I was jealous of him for having Mariam in my absence. This explanation never really held up, though, and it was only until I saw it all in retrospect that I realized I was uncomfortable with being face to face with him, in front of her. I was afraid it was all quite clear, now, who made her happier; that I now looked quite dim in front of her new star.
Maybe it sounded cute and typical to her that I told her I didn't want to be awkward around him, but this excuse was good for only one or two times. I'd have to say I was going to meet him, or risk looking apathetic, or cold. It wasn't the time to repeat anything she or I had experienced before, like feeling that something new and important was unwelcome to someone else, without a fair trial.
* * *
It was the next weekend that my parents told me they were thinking of going to Seaside over Spring break, which was fast approaching. It was a coastal town only an hour and a half away, where we had rented a cabin only last summer, and apparently my dad had been fantasizing about going back once weather permitted. My first reaction upon hearing this was that weather was not permitting, and to trust an Oregon forecast that was two weeks in advance about “clear skies” and “high lows” was mere self-deception, but my parents were weird. They didn't care. They went to the beach to eat at the restaurants and buy whale snow-globes. I was the only one who seemed to want to do what you were supposed to when you saw the coast – swim, get dirty, and complain endlessly on the way back about the wind and the sand that had once seemed so alluring.
When I threw out the notion that I wouldn't go with them, neither of them looked at me; in fact, they looked to each other instead, with sly smiles. I was certain my appetite was gone after that.
Erik, on the other hand, was quite interested, his appetite for something or other awakened, when I told him about this. It seemed to become something that held him over, because beforehand, I got the feeling that he was restless again. He'd began to talk a lot about insomnia, and apparently had a stack of resources on the subject that consumed his time when I was away from him. Starting a few nights after Mariam was with us backstage, he told me stories, in a casual manner that almost succeeded in disguising itself as playfulness. The stories were all unquestionably true, he said, and about people who couldn't close their eyes. I remember a lot of them, still: one man committed suicide by overdosing on over-the-counter sleep medication, by swallowing not one, but two bottles of pills. Another convinced himself he had fallen asleep and was lucid dreaming, attracting the attention of the police, but he escaped them very briefly before riding an elevator to the top floor of a business complex and jumping out the window. People who knew him said, despite his ravings to the police, he knew very well he was awake.
If the stories seem at all mismatched to what I usually experienced, it's true, and that's probably why Erik told them to me, just to get the blood flowing, and to get my attention, even if he recited them like bedtime stories. I couldn't make up my mind if he just had a bad sense of what to talk about before bed, or if he was just plain inciting fear in me for his own well-being, but at the time I simply worried. I'd become glad I was there, even if it meant skipping over all the things I used to enjoy, as if I'd just pulled him from the train tracks.
Well, as I was saying, he attached a certain weight to my parents' going away that made even me anticipate what it would be like. I had tried to arrange that he stay with me at my house, but quite unlike a few weeks prior, he was no longer interested in being there. He wanted me to be at the theater every night, but I figured along the way that I could convince him, when I went back to shower perhaps, that he could simply crawl into my bed.
* * *
I don't know how he did it, but the same bed, speaking of them, was transported from the basement to the attic by the time the break finally started, along with a lot of other things: chairs, tabletops, his books, the candlesticks that had been backstage, the rugs and flower vases and other decorative props.
When Mom and Dad left on Sunday, I had to reassure them it was no big deal they were going to Seaside without me, and that teenagers liked being alone. As soon as I said that, it all seemed to come together for them, and they proceeded to give me hugs and then order me to take their luggage to the trunk.
But then I went to the theater, used my key on the side door, and climbed the spiral stairs as suggested to me, and I found everything sitting up there as if I had just checked in to a resort.
There was a note on the bed that was shamelessly cursive like Edwardian Script font, indicating to me that he would be gone until eight, “running errands”, whatever that meant. For about twenty minutes, I stayed up there, lying on the bed, admiring this strange set-up. In the back of mind, I was considering why he had been doing such a thing for so long, first on the stage, then down below, then up here, perhaps because he suspected I liked it up here. I did. There were windows. I could see where we were; I could see who was coming. The room was three times as big and I could see something called light, even if today the clouds had been fading in and out.
But the room... It just kept making me think of replacements. It reminded me that one of 52 vintage clips was in my hair, and the butterfly necklace was around my neck. I'd seriously been on the verge of arguing with him a day ago: “why can't we stay at my house at least one night?” “Because you want to stay there too badly.” “Why can't I challenge you to live even somewhat like I do, but hardly the same, on a regular basis? Aren't you interested?”
Not all three nights in a row, no.
I sat up and went flipping through the books, which were stacked in boxes on the wooden table built into the wall in the back end of the room. He clearly had no respect for them. They were underlined and even corrected, and notes were written in the margins. “Absolutely false and reason why cases such as Lucy,” last name illegible, “deal with horrid side effects like sleep paralysis,” more I couldn't read, and then “should refer to 5th ed.” Maybe it wasn't his writing, I don't know.
* * *
When I eventually saw him that night, he was at my door at 6:30, blocking what was suddenly a downpour with his infamous black umbrella. I felt bad for my parents, wherever they were. He stepped near to me so that it cupped around the door frame and shielded our interaction from outside eyes, while his own were incredibly alert, moreso than I'd seen them for a while.
“You're going to come with me, and I'm going to measure you,” he informed me.
“Why?”
“Because you've lost your dress, and, in preparing you for a new one, this seemed like the most appropriate time to see you without one.”
“If things were not how they are, I'd slap you, Mr. Phantom.”
“Try it. You might be able to get away with it,” he said, his face completely straight. I laughed, but told him to come in and close the door. “Sorry, but I have dinner waiting, and, seeing as I paid for it, I have no intention of wasting it.”
“And you know that I would feel bad if you went by yourself. I see what's going on here,” I said, and I looked around the house just to jog my memory about if I'd left on any electrical appliances. “Let me get my coat.”
* * *
This was Sunday night. I went along with it because, restrictions about coming back to my house aside, he was making it quite fun for me. I was certain that my sacrifices had paid off, for the both of us. He was extremely reactive to me, and playful as if he had just woken from a sleep long enough to cure him.
“You know, I could probably just give you my dress size, Erik,” I told him, with my arms up, standing in front of the wardrobe mirror where I could watch everything he was doing. Very willingly I'd put on the night slip I'd planned to wear to bed and was eying myself to make sure all of my assets were smoothly out of view. But even so, I was stifling the unspeakable way I was excited inside. “I really don't think this is necessary,” I went on. He had the tape around my leg, just below my knee, but smiled to me in the reflection before answering.
“I think we both know we don't lead a life of necessity.” And then he continued while saying: “You can put your arms down. They've been up for five minutes and I haven't been anywhere near them for four.”
I obeyed, with began to shake my head disapprovingly at his conduct.
“You'd think you were making me a wetsuit or something.”
“Is it too much to want to know the actual size of you? Is it unjustified curiosity?” I gave him a look in the mirror that he was free to interpret, and he continued on with a faint grin, as if he had victoriously stated the truth, and he grew so proud of it that to sturdy me, he might say, his hand came to rest on the outside of my thigh. I could see it in the mirror, fingers brushing just slightly against my skin.
“If you were legitimately my tailor and I didn't know you, I'd file for sexual violations.”
“Well, I happen not to be, so what would that make this?”
“Sexual... invitations.” I stared at the ceiling just so I could get out the words with a straighter face, but I felt all contact between us cease as he set down the measuring tape.
“Ah...” He answered. He shuffled with the drawers in the wardrobe. “And would that still be an offense?” I sighed as if I pitied him greatly.
“I'm afraid so... You're in a lot of trouble.” I should have known that looking up like that just put my face right under him for the taking. He turned away from the wardrobe and leaned right above me, and I felt something touch me just above my crossed arms. I looked down and slowly unfolded them to take the offer – the tape – and he raised his hands before me, palms connected and fingers spread like bird's wings. Without thinking, I threw the tape around his wrists and he backed himself up while I held on to restrain him. I knew he was taking us toward the bed, and didn't care. We found ourselves tangled up in all the best ways.
At my age, I didn't really know yet the way two people's interactions, romantically, could be a spectrum like a slip'n'slide. What I mean is: if we were smiling so much, laughing so much, making jokes about wet-suits and what have you, it didn't occur to me that at this particular time he might be interested in all that stopping for an even greater gain. I somehow thought that the introduction set out the rules for the conclusion.
However, there came a time when fingers rolling up my slip were permitted to do so with more than just passivity, and I let go of the tape. I spread myself on top of him in a more self-satisfying way than I would ever admit, aware with a need for experimentation that so little separated my body from direct contact. But he was breathing harshly suddenly, and my slip was in folds, high above my waist. Instinctively, I started to roll off of him, but he turned on his side, and then steadied himself on top of me without pressing down all his weight, but his waist was in between my thighs. We kissed for just a moment longer, and then we were still and quiet. He planted his face in my chest and held my side in such a way that the fabric of my dress popped up in excess. I felt exposed but didn't dare say so, and whether he noticed or not, his lips ran down and captured the flesh in the dip of the front. I didn't know what to do to slow things down except speak.
“Erik, I...” I didn't truly have a thought at that moment, but I tried to have one anyway. “This all seems to've been one complicated trap.”
He took his time rising, then thought of a response. “Are you sure about that?” I knew what I'd done, but he didn't stop me. “I always understood a trap as one party disillusioning another into acting to the former party's benefit. It seems to me what you and I did was a complicated ritual, and I haven't known anything different since I first met you.” For a moment he looked amused before his eyes dropped to my neck, and then glanced, maybe to the window. The sky was finally dark blue, and the rain had quieted. When, exactly, I had no idea.
Somehow, I trapped – ritualized, perhaps – him into ignoring what we had started until the fire in me went away. And once it went away, we talked again, and I, in a way that was completely subconscious, was trying to figure out why I was talking to him when many other things could've been happening. I was asking if he realized I cared about a vision of him that he could have entirely fabricated, that no matter how it may have seemed self-evident that he owned his actions and his words, that his name and his facelessness would always negate them in some way. Then he told me something interesting. He said a person's face is not them – which I knew – but the face which they create is absolutely them. He said as soon as you choose, something real is born.
From there, I was reminded of something Mrs. Vardega said in my first year of acting: that the stage makes you realize what is real within fantasy, and what your own imitations and fronts are once you leave it. Once she said this, I began to question myself a lot, until I knew exactly what I was injecting into my conscience about my own life. I knew I had a unique way of interpreting the shadow in the corner of the room, of what it meant to find a note protected in tupperware on the trail at the park. I was looking for stories to present themselves by presenting mannerisms which invited them. The biggest transformation that had happened to me was I became aloof with others, untouchable, bizarre. I mirrored people I wanted to be like. I wore “the Phantom's” gloves as a freshman. And I was pretty sure Erik had inadvertently put me through Wits 101 this entire time. I wouldn't have been the girl last fall who handcuffed him with measuring tape. I wouldn't be here.
“I must say, I think you’re too self-aware; you're self-skeptical, and nothing will come of it,” he suddenly told me, just after I realized I was rambling.
“I just wonder if it's the fate of someone like me to imitate everything without being anything.”
Of course, he knew somehow that this applied to him, and he pulled me out of a reverie by squeezing the hand I'd given him, and he climbed a little closer.
“ You're not imitating everything. No one does that. They imitate very specific things that speak to them inside, stick to them without even a conscious decision to. I think what we naturally imitate is as good as natural. I think it puts a code on what is hard to explain. That's how you know who I am, Christine. That's how you know what to make of me.” He caught my attention suddenly and I focused on him with an inability to reconcile what he just said with my own interpretation of him. “I hope this isn't what holds you back. Then again, if it is, I feel I could do so much by way of convincing you not to let it do so any longer.”
“I don't want to talk about it,” I said right away. He bowed his head and kissed my hand, and then I reached out to his collar. “You look so uncomfortable like that.”
Later, I fell asleep on him and woke in the middle of the night to all the lights still on, and Erik in a rather awkward position with his arm under his body, holding something in his hand. I rubbed my eyes and came closer, until I realized he'd taken the clip out of my hair. Before I'd ever drifted, he'd told me to tell him when he had finally waited long enough.
* * *
The next morning, it was Giry who first crossed my mind. I called her when I was in the ladies room upstairs, taking my time. I figured at 11:00, after Erik and I had woken and spent the late morning having meaningless conversations halfway under the covers, never really bothering to finish our sentences between kisses, well... surely she was awake enough to iron out the details.
I hadn't planned to stay here all day. Mariam and Jeffrey would be waiting around the Waterfront park at two, where I would finally meet him. Neither of them had a problem with me bringing Giry along, so I successfully evaded Mariam trying to meet me anywhere in sight of Erik. Aside to I having some moral support, she was the only trusted person who could conspicuously pick me up and pretend she was my only company.
I did indeed have to iron out the details, however. She found herself not so sure if we could go through with this plan. She answered and I told her where I was. I said quite frankly that without her help I would have to cancel on Mariam and how it was the last thing I wanted to do. I had built myself up for it, just as Erik had built up my parents' absence. “Well, I'll be there at 1:30, then,” she finally agreed, sounding almost defeated. “I hope you're enjoying yourself over there.”
“Oh, definitely,” I told her, but it not seem right. We hung up afterward and I was looking at my bare feet on the tiles, to the vent above my head. There were goosebumps all over my body and there was no lock on the door. It did feel awkward leaving that room as I was, even promised that no one else was here. I still wished we could've stayed at home. I wanted all my things: all my brushes and hairbands I didn't even need, my stuffed owls, my teacups, my blankets. I did not really want to be here continuously for three days, but if I argued that I wanted him simply to be among all my other comforts, he would argue back that I had to stop trying physically to do what is “conceptually impossible”.
I went ahead with my plans, got ready, and, for breakfast we pulled a small corner table that he had added to the attic just in front of that circular window. In the neatest way that he possibly could, he brought us instant oatmeal and a bowl of sugar-sprinkled strawberry slices, and chocolate, even. I hadn't the heart to tell him I liked coffee first things first, but I drank the Darjeeling anyway. The theater was positioned in such a way that the sun rose facing its front corner, and so the light shadowed one half of the table and made the other half glow. He was hoping I'd sit there but, after the both of us discussing our aversion to bright light, he made the sacrifice, one I was quite pleased he made.
For weeks, I'd kept picturing the rings in his eyes from stark sunlight, almost unable to cope with how beautiful it was, and beautiful because it was exceptional, like finding crystal in a stone. While he proceeded to have a meager appetite and watch me discreetly, I would eat with my focus dropping down three stories to the entrance front, and then steal, utterly steal, a gaze as long as I could of his irises emblazoned.
He had a book behind his end of the table, I could tell. His shirt was open four buttons down and his sleeves were pushed up his forearms. The direct sunlight made his skin even out into a smooth ivory canvas, still riddled with scars like a cracked statue. He was always clean, but he never changed out of those stiff clothes, and any amount of undressing he did was because of me. I'd left him at four buttons down.
I felt I'd gypped the both of us, suddenly.
As that moment went on, if I could be honest, I began to wish sleeping with him wasn't so unthinkable by now. I wanted to, and yet I had hands that reached for everything but guarded my own body. I was sitting there not understanding a thing about myself or why last night was a series of pleasant escapes, and as my appetite dwindled, I was trying to resolve that during this little window of time I would sleep with him. Then he could be sure – and more importantly I could feel sure – that I was not in purgatory. It was not the place to be when someone was in love with you. And maybe, just maybe, this would be a form of insurance for what I was going to do that day.
When I'd had enough, I set down my empty cup, rose from my seat, and sat on top of him as casually as ever. When he set down his book, whatever smile he had raised while I was coming towards him washed right off, and I felt no hesitance to drop the casual pretense and hide my face into his shoulder.
* * *
Giry pulled up front not long after, and I was able to give him our vague plans for that afternoon and walk out the doors with a sort of serenity I had attained from feeling the pulse in his neck beat against mine, as if I had set myself like a clock to run for him down to the millisecond. For the first few minutes while I was in the car with her, I was still imagining I could feel it. I don't know why his pulse was such a fascinating thing to me.
At first, I thought her silence was to give me some space; perhaps I looked dreamy, perhaps I was trying to reconcile with myself that this meeting was entirely justified no matter how much I cared about him. Once I began to expect conversation, though, none of it happened until it would've been far too awkward not to, so she started asking me if I was excited.
“I'm definitely expecting it to be interesting,” I said.
“You'll like him,” she told me, but the fact that she knew this before me just contributed to my self-consciousness. But from there, we had a general conversation about what we knew of him. She said he loved to tease Mariam by stating he had anything she brought up about herself in common with her if it wasn't possible for him to, like his bra size and having quirky Iranian relatives (“at the end of the day, I'm proud of my heritage, really”). She warned me he'd learned I didn't like to shake hands and had been telling Mariam when “her mysterious friend” finally said hello him, he would engage her in the most formal handshake he could come up with.
My transition from Erik's heartbeat to this bright day with all three of them was very easy for all our way to Portland, and crossing the bridge, and going along Naito Parkway to find a decent parking spot. She finally found us somewhere once two o'clock had already passed by a few minutes, but when she stopped the car, she looked herself in the mirror as if we were on time. I had my hand on the handle of the door. “I think it's good you're seeing her,” she said, glancing at me with a confirming smile which dropped back down when her eyes met her reflection again. “It's really your right to do that, you know?”
“I know.”
“I just wish it wasn't a secret.” I could only stare at her while she put the cap back on her lip-gloss and gathered her purse in her lap. “Well, should we go?”
“I think you of all people know why this has to be a secret, Giry.” Something about what I said inspired a sudden lift in her features as if something was in disagreement with her, and she smiled humorlessly down to the space between us.
“Lily, I know that you and him both think you have a real relationship, so I don't really think these names and preconditions apply anymore. And if they don't apply, then it's a personal problem, between Mariam and whoever he is, and I don't really know what concrete reason there is for it, so it's making me uncomfortable.” I thought up a number of approaches in my head to reacting to this, all the while keeping my grip on the handle, but I fell short of ever speaking. “I mean do you know the reason why? Has either one of them made it clear, and is it really something you can't fix?”
“T-they both think the other isn't very good for me, I guess is it.”
“What proof would he ever have that Mariam isn't good for you?”
“You know, they're probably waiting for us,” I answered, looking away like I was in a hurry. “And I don't know.”
It was a spectacular answer that made me feel light as air on our way to the park, really and truly. Giry was quiet again, but worse than sensing she might be frustrated or even mad about my answer, it felt like she was contemplating how fundamentally wrong every move I made from hereon was, from a powerless vantage point. It was a jump into cold water to suddenly immerse ourselves in the carefree world that Mariam and Jeffrey had created and brought with them when they finally saw us; when how we were had to match how they were. They were both looking over the railing to the river and Jeffrey was cawing at some birds floating on top the water. It was Giry, Paulina, however she wanted to be called that day, who caught Mariam's attention, who turned to us still laughing. I almost think she didn't notice Giry, as she shouted “hi, Lily!” so loudly while we were walking forward. She was wearing her fur-trimmed marshmallow coat and bouncing up and down just like an Oompa Loompa again.
I knew when Jeffrey cut right between us, with his hand poised for a shake, that he was the one who asked her out, and probably as simply as one says “hello”. You could say there was a type of command in his eyes, bordering on aquamarine in this light, but it was not like the usual kind I had experienced. It was commanding like a fictitiously high-spirited sea captain. He was reminding me of being in a story, just like Erik, but a story from the farthest end of the library. I just reached for his hand before I could plan to be stubborn. He shook it long enough for Mariam and Giry to thoroughly register that I was letting it happen. “It's nice to meet you, Lily.”
I agreed it was nice to meet him too; the first time, through words and in a superficially agreeable sense; the second time, internally, when our meeting went on and I found I was able to mean the words. He was fresh-faced, younger than all of us, and it made it easier for me to accept his curiosity at face-value while he asked me all about myself like I had been missing for years. I wanted to know if he was aware Mariam and I had really been avoiding each other, because it seemed that he spoke of me like a busy person who was quiet even with her, but I couldn't ask.
He had a soft hair line, covered in dirty blond peach fuzz. I liked his blue collared shirt against his sun-touched skin and thought he did look like a comfortable place to rest her cheek. He wasn't too tall, so they looked well together, and it wasn't a strain for her to hold his hand, which she did the whole way. Luckily, I was able to keep my eyes off of that sight, but I began looking around in a blank fashion, trying to compare Erik to Jeffrey with these new observations.
I’d never thought Erik seemed old, but I did have a conception that he satisfied, about men always seeming older than their female partners. He didn't have any amount of boyish charm the way Jeffrey did. I suppose it’d be weird if he had. What did “boyish charm” even mean, and why did that make someone like Jeffrey endearing? It was more than looks or mannerisms. I guess it was a sense, as highly presumptuous that he was part of a typical nuclear family as this is, that he had seen his mother a short time ago. And I somehow saw in Erik someone who had been far away from a figure like that for a long time.
We went into a restaurant and he rubbed her shoulders to warm her up like he planned to start a fire from the friction, and Mariam's cheeks, already pink from cold air, rose up so high in a smile for a moment, just to him, that I felt I was looking when I shouldn't. Giry seemed used to the whole thing and had begun to act like this meeting had no questionable circumstances at all, and I tried to seem like her.
“Mariam. I feel like I hardly know you. Since when do you like going out to eat downtown?”
“It's just this one place. You just wait for the drink I get. It's like an iced chai tea with whipped cream in the entire thing.”
“Tea? Since when are you drinking tea?”
“Only this tea!”
“You drink beverages?!” Jeffrey chimed in. He had been ever so gradually nearing Mariam's hand with a pair of chopsticks, as if he planned to pick up her fingers, but she slapped down his hand and the look they shared resulted in her giggling.
“Jesus, you guys. I feel like I'm on a double-date,” I said.
“ Well, it had been our plan to get you and Pauly together, but...”
“She's already taken,” Giry replied in a sort of knee-jerk reaction, before I could laugh very properly.
“We could have a real double-date-” Jeffrey started.
“ It doesn't work that way,” Mariam cut him off, half-smiling, but having said enough to throw Jeffrey into confusion, and she realized it. “I mean the double-date thing. Me and Lily would be too shy about it.” He looked like he was ready to be curious again, but she saved us all again. “Well, I'm certainly not on a date with you, and never will be, but as long as we're here, I'm starving! What're you getting?”
* * *
After lunch, we did a lot of wandering and bantering about anything passing our way. I knew a lot about him, now. His idea of engineering (his desired field) was testing out hovercrafts, and he had a similarly adventurous spirit about everything he did. He referred to Mariam by her screenname from time to time, as he had met her online, and would would describe “the marimonster” as if she were an animal doing something peculiar or indecent in the wild. He was not 16 until next month. He had two older sisters who once covered every inch of his hair with barrettes. And he begged me to give him Baskin Robbin coupons.
Somehow we ended up at a comic store and where he was looking for something or other, I really wasn't paying attention, so Giry and I ended up strolling around, eyes jumping from cover to cover, on a stimulus overload. Mariam followed Jeffrey everywhere and they ended up having a long side conversation with the shop guy when he was asked for assistance. Giry was caught looking at a display with interest when I took out my phone and began a long text to Erik about going out to eat and chatting (just with Giry, of course), when he asked what we were doing. I knew that she could hear me clicking and clicking, even while I had wandered to a corner with my back turned. When I finished the text and turned around, she was right there, making note of where our company was, and brushing me on the arm. I faced her as she leaned into the wall, bracing myself inside.
“I really want to know why she isn't good for you to him,” she reiterated. I just didn't understand why Giry was laying it on me so thick, and with so much concern, and accordingly I rolled my eyes, quite on accident.
“He thinks she's stifling me,” I answered in a low voice, watching Mariam instead of looking at her.
“How?”
“Well, when we were fighting, I couldn't do anything with him without getting the third degree.”
“Then he's just mad she doesn't like him, is what it sounds like.”
“Wouldn't you be?”
“Oh, he can be frustrated, if he wants, but he's not acting like someone who-- Listen: do you think a boyfriend, a real one, the one who wants to be with you, ought to make someone feel like they can't talk to their best friend, even when there was a misunderstanding?”
“I don't think there's a misunderstanding. She doesn't want me to be with someone like him-”
“What does that mean?”
I was running out of steam, so I looked her in the eye, and now she seemed to be the one waiting for me to have the right answer, no matter how many times it took me to get it.
“That she's treated him like everyone else he knows, and I don't blame him for thinking what she's said is hurtful, and it's only made matters worse that he hates almost everyone. It's not about Mariam. He has a lot of problems, and a lot of reasons to feel people are dangerous.”
“I don't know if he's ready to be in a relationship, then. Frankly,” she uttered, directly enough to make my eyes avert, but my answer was quick and certain.
“No. No. I'm helping him. He needs me. If I don't help him, something will happen. A-and it would let him down right now if he knew I was doing this.” I really didn't want to talk anymore – her skepticism was legitimately hurting my feelings – but she wasn't through yet.
“You got in trouble for letting him down once, and he acted like his character, in a roleplay, and we let it slide, but if this is really the way you're telling me he is, then you've got to be afraid you'll press the wrong button.”
“I really don't want to talk about this right now,” was the card I played once again, as if it was a newly discovered solution from hereon. Jeffrey and his girl were reaching the front counter, and he spotted us briefly, almost inviting us to regroup with them.
“Lily, I don't see the chance that he's not going to figure it out.”
“I can't be afraid of him,” I told her, beginning towards them, and I heard her murmur right behind me.
“I'm just saying...”
* * *
At half past five, Mariam was riding in a shopping cart that we found abandoned on the sidewalk and Jeffrey had gone far ahead of us pushing her along and sometimes making her scream her head off, but I told Giry very bluntly that Erik was expecting me back. He began to text me repeatedly after we got out of the comic store, saying Giry “had stolen me quite enough,” and that I should probably like to rest before we went out again. I myself wanted to get back, and, although Jeffrey's aim was to make a good impression on me (which he did), he was clearly aglow with affection for my friend, and Giry and I had become a bit like chaperones. I was not even used to being in this position and didn't like it much. I would've been the one pushing the cart, but with him there, I felt I should keep my hands off of it. This was what I worried about.
He seemed to mean it when he said he hoped to see me again soon, though.
“Take care, Mr. and Mrs. Vanhorn,” I said.
* * *
We pulled up at the theater again when the sun was finally coming down. If our time together hadn't been so tense, I probably would have told her my plans, but it seemed more natural to keep it to myself. Really, I just thanked her for being around and keeping company with me while they both were smitten with each other, leaving out anything to do with our disagreement. If this was all just a warning that he'd be mad, I wouldn't hear of it. She was aware of something I wasn't, but it appeared to me at the time that she was unable to see how much stronger my bond with him had become, and so I refused to be scared. I let only one thought reach my core: that I wanted to go and find his heartbeat again.
They went to the beach to eat at the restaurants and buy whale snow-globes.
But then I went to the theater, used my key on the side door, and climbed the spiral stairs as suggested to me, and I found everything sitting up there as if I had just checked in to a resort.
“If things were not how they are, I'd slap you, Mr. Phantom.”
“Try it. You might be able to get away with it."
"I think what we naturally imitate is as good as natural."
You could say there was a type of command in his eyes, bordering on aquamarine in this light, but it was not like the usual kind I had experienced. It was commanding like a fictitiously high-spirited sea captain. He was reminding me of being in a story, just like Erik, but a story from the farthest end of the library. I just reached for his hand before I could plan to be stubborn.
"You just wait for the drink I get. It's like an iced chai tea with whipped cream in the entire thing.”
“Tea? Since when are you drinking tea?”
“Only this tea!”
“You drink beverages?!” Jeffrey chimed in.