Honestly Ben Page 3

  “Sure,” Rafe said, his voice soft, and I had to turn away because I couldn’t stand anyone looking at me when I felt the way that voice made me feel. All mixed up inside and not in control and not like a Pappas Award winner, not in the least.

  The voice was coming from my closet.

  It was hours after the Blizzard Bowl, and in the deep winter night, the radiator rattled and hissed. The wind whistled against the windows, and the muffled voice wafted through the frigid, lonely darkness.

  Ben.

  Even in that strange, disorienting place between sleeping and waking, my brain recognized the irony of hearing my name whispered from a closet. Still, I could not discern whether I was in the midst of a recurring nightmare, or if the idea that this had happened before was simply part of my current dream.

  Ben.

  The hoarse, gravelly whisper made my hair stand on end, and in my dream state, the voice became dissonant musical notes hovering around my head. Then they chased me across Natick School’s quad. The voice, saying just one word, but meaning so much more. Telling me the thing I least wanted to hear. Telling me this thing with Rafe wasn’t over, and it wasn’t going to go away. It was inside me still, and it was very much alive. It was like Frankenstein’s monster, following me, pursuing me, taunting me. Damned AP literature. Mary Shelley wouldn’t let me sleep.

  In the dream my body picked up speed and sprinted across the quad, yet the voice just got louder and more insistent. And then I was back in my bed, and the voice was saying words, more words than just my name. Words I could understand. Words that pissed me off.

  Come out, Ben. Come out.

  I thrashed in my bed, buried my head under my pillow, held my breath, and tried to squeeze the thoughts from my brain.

  But the damn voice.

  Ben, come out. Come out, Ben.

  “Fuck!” I muttered, aware I was talking in my sleep.

  I’m in the closet. Um. You’re in the closet.

  My eyes flashed open. I sat up. There was no way I had created those words. Was there? I looked out the window. Still not morning. Checked the clock. 4:15. I’d been asleep maybe an hour. A sliver of light from the moon cast a purple glow on my desolate room. I listened. Nothing.

  The radiator clattered like it was clearing its throat. Could that have sounded like words? Was my brain so crazy that it could make up phrases out of sounds?

  I sunk back under the sheets and turned onto my side, curling my legs under the red wool blanket my mom had knitted for me and allowing its heat to sink into my still-chilled bones. My heart was pounding from the strange nightmare.

  The world was quiet again, aside from the wind. I lay there staring at what was left of the moon, feeling uneasy about everything. If I had been back on the farm, all this snow would mean plowing. Here that wasn’t my problem, yet that didn’t really make me feel much better. I had other concerns, and I kept my eyes open and watched the night slowly fade into morning.

  And then the silence was broken.

  “Come out, Ben. It’s an option. Consider your options, Ben.”

  This was no radiator talking. These were words, and they were definitely coming from my closet. I leapt up and grabbed the first object I could find, a history textbook that had lived on my desk all break long. It was large and heavy with the history of the world. I poised myself outside the shut closet door, hefting the book over my head as if it were a weapon. My voice trembled.

  “What the hell? Who the hell is in there?”

  “Um, go back to sleep, Ben. Never mind—”

  I yanked the door open. A skinny boy with spiked hair was sitting on the floor in the center of the closet, cradling his head as if to protect it.

  “What the fuck, Toby?” I said. I yanked him up, half by his hair, half by his shoulder.

  “Ow. Sorry,” Toby stammered as I threw him onto the floor in the center of the room.

  “Are you out of your skull? What the hell are you thinking?”

  “Sorry,” Toby said, raising himself up onto his elbows and flipping over. He rubbed his knees. “I saw you going to the bathroom.” I looked at him funny. “I mean, I saw you heading to the john, so I just took that as an opportunity to explore your closet.”

  I sat down on my bed and rubbed my eyes, incredulous. “Did you really just … What the … ? And did you really tell me to—”

  Toby put his hand up like a stop sign. “Relax. I’m the only person Rafe told about your gayness. I swear. He needed someone to talk to.”

  I punched my mattress, and it took everything in me not to roar. “I’m gonna kill Rafe. I’m not gay, by the way. Not gay. Got it?”

  Toby flinched. “This is really not going the way I had hoped.”

  I looked at him and saw a scrawny idiot, and I remembered, just for a moment, that he was Toby. Who did stuff without thinking, all the time. Who’d never mean to hurt a fly. “Just so I know. How exactly did you expect this would go?”

  “I’m subliminalizing. I did it with Albie before break. I’m pretty sure I got him to stop eating Cocoa Puffs. I just figured, like, I’d offer you some suggestions while you slept, and then sneak out, and, um, subliminally, you’d, like, get the message.”

  “As I said, I’m not gay. Not that it’s any of your business.” I couldn’t help it. I said the gay part quieter than the rest.

  “Oh, okay. Right. I, um.”

  “I’m not, okay? That was a one-time thing. Never, ever again. Because, apparently, if you make a stupid, moronic mistake once, you wake up with a psychopath whispering, ‘Come out, come out’ from your closet.”

  “As I said, in retrospect, I might have made a different choice.”

  I laughed despite myself. “You think? Do you promise to never, ever do that again?”

  “Scout’s honor.”

  I lay down and looked at the ceiling. “Shit.”

  “Sorry again.” Toby stood up. “We miss you, by the way.”

  I shrugged. “That’ll happen.”

  “It’s not the same without you. You have to forgive Rafe. You have to. We want you back.”

  I shrugged again. A lot of people wanted a lot of things. Didn’t mean they got them.

  Toby spoke again. “You feel like talking about it?”

  I laughed. “Um. It’s four thirty in the morning.”

  He repeated his inflection exactly. “You feel like talking about it? Because, I mean, I kinda need to talk to someone too.”

  And you chose me? What about Albie? What about Rafe? Why would Toby pick me out, of all people?

  I stared up at the ceiling, and I thought about what it would have been like, over break, to talk to a friend. A family member. If Uncle Max had still been alive, and I could have unburdened myself without ruining my life.

  That was the biggest difference since Rafe. The lack of talking about stuff. I missed it.

  But on the other hand, look at what all the talking had got me. What good had any of it done? My brain felt like it was getting squeezed in a vise, and my chest felt like it could pop.

  So the idea of talking to Toby at four thirty in the morning about my feelings?

  “Get out of here,” I mumbled, putting my hands over my face. “Go away.”

  It was the first Thursday night of the second semester and I was doing my homework at my absolute favorite Natick getaway: the Bacon Free Library. Bryce and I used to joke about it being a library free of bacon, and he’d do commercial voice-overs for me (“All the same great library taste, now ninety-nine percent pork-free”), but truthfully it was one of the only places in the world where I felt at home. When I really wanted to be alone, I drove here and climbed a rickety old staircase up to the quiet loft area. I always had it all to myself.

  I started with calculus, because now the stakes were high if I wanted to keep my scholarship. I was curious to know how lost I’d feel.

  Very, it turned out.

  L’Hopital Rule

  If

  has a finite value or i
f the limit is ±∞, then

  I found myself reading the rule over and over. Using derivatives to determine limits. Okay. But what did that mean? I tried to break it down, working hard to stop focusing on the fact that this rule was named after a French hospital, until my brain felt like it was melting. Was it possible that I couldn’t process this kind of abstract material? And worse, a lot of future engineers in the class were probably not having as much of a problem as I was.

  After I trudged through calculus homework, I prepared for the next day’s English lit class. We were reading Tennyson’s “All Things Must Die.”

  The stream will cease to flow;

  The wind will cease to blow;

  The clouds will cease to fleet;

  The heart will cease to beat;

  For all things must die.

  It was amazing how something so somber could make me feel uplifted. All things must die. The finite, to me, was a thing of beauty. There was a start and an end. Someday we’d all be history, and if I was going to be history then, it meant I existed now.

  Sometimes I wasn’t so sure of that.

  I was focusing on re-reading that section when I heard what sounded like muttering coming from around the corner. When it continued, I exhaled loudly, hoping the sound would make the person stop. But every few seconds, the noise was there, and then there was shuffling, as if someone couldn’t quite find a comfortable position. It started to annoy me, so I crept around the corner for a peek.

  A girl, maybe about my age, sat in a chair facing away from me, with one leg kicked up on the desk in front of her. Her head was splayed back so that I could see the rise of her forehead and her brown hair flowing behind her. She wore a black jacket, and a large, black scarf had fallen on the floor behind her. The black-booted foot that was still on the floor tapped away, and once in a while she’d bounce her whole leg and wiggle her torso like a fish on the floor of a boat. The movement suggested agitation, and finally she kicked up her other leg and rested both on the desk in front of her.

  “You’re not even … ” she muttered.

  At first I thought she was talking to me, but then I realized she was muttering to herself still. I didn’t want to get involved, so I backed away toward my seat. My coat rubbed against a shelf of books.

  She sat very still. “Is that a person?” she asked.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Just investigating the noise.”

  She kicked her legs off the table and spun to face me. Her face looked to me like maple syrup tasted. Not the color. Just the sweetness of syrup. Her eyes were large, wide, and a pretty shade of green. Her long, narrow mouth curved up at both ends. She looked more curious than defensive.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  She laughed, not meanly. “Well, I’m alone in a library loft talking to myself, so I suppose I’m not stellar.”

  The lilt in her voice intrigued me. She seemed like the kind of girl you’d meet in a loft in a barely used Massachusetts library while reading Tennyson poems about the finite nature of man. If that wasn’t a type before, now it was.

  When I didn’t say anything back, she said, “I’ll be okay, thanks.”

  “Good,” I said, frozen in my tracks.

  “Normally I’m intrigued by awestruck boys, but I’m just not there right now,” she said, and her voice was so earnest that immediately all my butterflies fluttered away. “What’s your name?”

  “Ben,” I said. “Ben Carver.”

  “Hannah,” she said. “And good girls don’t give their last names out to boys who might cyberstalk them on Facebook. Good boys might want to avoid that too.” She smiled a bit, and when she did it was amazing how still the rest of her face stayed. It was like a Mona Lisa smile.

  “Not on Facebook,” I said.

  “You still in high school?”

  I nodded.

  “Where?”

  “Natick.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Oh, wonderful.”

  “Sorry.”

  “You don’t look like one of them.”

  “I’m basically not,” I said. “I’m here, aren’t I? You see a lot of other Natick boys skulking around the stacks reading Tennyson?”

  She laughed. “I do not. I know Natick boys. One in particular, and he was a highly regrettable person.”

  It was my turn to laugh now. “Many of my classmates are indeed highly regrettable.”

  She wiped a wisp of brown hair from her eyes. “Mine too.”

  “Ah. Lonna Grace, I assume,” I said.

  Lonna Grace was our sister school in Wellesley, about five miles away from Natick. The jock guys referred to the school as Lonna Dyke—which was not clever—and basically viewed it as a breeding ground for lesbian feminists, but I knew the truth: It was another rich kid school. The lesbian population was likely about the same size as the gay population at Natick.

  She nodded. “Girls can be so awful,” she said.

  “Boys can be awful too.”

  “Yes, but this is like a special brand of awful reserved for teenage prep school girls. Someone who shall remain nameless named Rhonda Peterson wrote, ‘Hannah munches rugs’ on my door in indelible pink magic marker. Very original, no?”

  “Yikes,” I said, thinking, Please don’t be a lesbian. Please don’t be a lesbian. In all the dances I’d been to in my two-plus years at Natick—and we had two a year—I’d never had a single connection as good as this one was already.

  “I mean, it’s not even the rug munching thing that gets me; I can handle that. It’s that Rhonda actively took the time to stand there and write her malicious thoughts on my door. Exactly what kind of issues does a girl like that have, and why is it that I constantly get shit on by people with issues?”

  Wind out of sails. Oh, well. My posture relaxed. “Do girls make fun of you for being a lesbian all the time over there?”

  She ran her hand through her wavy hair. “Oh, I’m not a lesbian. I wish! Men are so fucking lame. Present company excluded. I think.”

  I stood there, beginning to feel awkward.

  “You wanna sit?” she asked.

  “Um. Okay.” She pointed to the ground in front of her. It was weird, but I sat down there anyway, at her feet. “So, Hannah. Do you come here a lot?”

  “Ugh,” she said. “Bad pickup line from the last century.”

  “Sorry. I’m not used to this.”

  She smiled that Mona Lisa smile again, and I had to look away because she was so—raw, maybe? She seemed to wear everything right there on her face. I was not used to it.

  “This?”

  “Um. Meeting girls—um. Pretty girls—at the Bacon Free Library.”

  She pursed her lips. “Are you used to meeting ugly girls here?”

  “I’m not used to meeting girls, period. I mean, I’d like to, but. Not girls, like, multiple, but it would be nice to—oh God. Stop talking, Ben,” I said.

  She laughed, and her laugh was melodic and childlike, which was funny because she didn’t talk like she was young, exactly. She seemed a little bit like an old soul, which I liked. But I liked the young laugh too. “Oh, good, you’re quirky,” she said.

  I looked at the ground. “I don’t think I’ve ever been called quirky before.”

  “Well, there’s a first time for everything. I like you. Maybe you could be my manic pixie dream boy.”

  I swallowed. “Um. I actually have no idea what that means.”

  “That’s like a boy in the movies who is quirky and kind and makes the female heroine feel better, then disappears.”

  I crossed my arms over my chest and quickly uncrossed them. “You want me to disappear?”

  She bit her lip in a slightly flirtatious way. “I don’t know yet.”

  “Um. Okay,” I said.

  “Okay,” she answered, and she smiled at me, and I looked away again because she was so beautiful.

  “I don’t want to disappear,” I said softly.

  Her face flushed a little pink. “Duly noted.” />
  I felt my face heat up too. Was this really happening? A girl who was interesting, smart, beautiful, easyish to talk to, and possibly interested in me? I could be okay with that. And then I thought about my grades, and how I had promised myself not to get involved in anything that would get in the way of studying.

  But was man supposed to live by studying alone?

  “This is my favorite time of year,” I said. “When you have to bundle up in lots of clothing. I love the cold.”

  “You are talking about weather,” she observed.

  “I grew up on a farm. We tend to be a little weather-obsessed.”

  “You grew up on a farm and you go to Natick? You must feel like a misfit.”

  “Yes. Exactly. Um. Thank you for getting that,” I said.

  “You’re welcome.”

  “You feel like taking a walk sometime, and not talking about the fact that it’s cold?” I asked.

  “What would we talk about instead?”

  Your eyes, I thought, and I’m so glad I didn’t say it. “You.”

  She smiled. “I’m in.”

  “Yeah? Good. I’m glad. Can I call you?” I asked.

  “You can,” she said. “Let me text you my number.”

  “I don’t text,” I said.

  “What decade are you from, Ben Carver?”

  I shrugged, not wanting to explain to her that on our cell phone plan, texting costs money, so it’s understood that we won’t do it. “The nineteen fifties,” I said.

  She pulled out a pen, wrote her number on a piece of paper, and handed it to me. I carefully tore the paper in two, wrote my number on the empty piece, and gave it to her.

  “Cool. I could get into knowing a guy from the fifties. Maybe we can go to a sock hop.”

  “Sock hop it is,” I said.

  I wish dinners at Natick were more formal.

  It’s true. There’s something delightful about the idea of dressing up for dinner and sitting in assigned seats in the dining hall, like back in the days of yore, or at Hogwarts. We’d sit in neat rows in high-backed wooden chairs, we’d speak in low, polite voices about the day’s doings while proctors walked by taking attendance, and everyone would dab the corners of their mouths with cloth napkins. That would be perfect. Even better if everyone spoke with a proper English accent. We’d be like people in history.