Honestly Ben Read online

  A giggle came out of my mouth and I covered my mouth with my hand, a little embarrassed to have made such a small-person noise. I knew he was referring to the time he told me about frolicking, which he apparently used to do with Claire Olivia, which should have been a major clue that Rafe was gay. Cindy and I never frolicked, which apparently meant putting on cheesy music and dancing like a crazy person, letting it all fly free, as he said. We did it in my dorm room one night, and it was fun, just to let go a bit. He was right; I was a terrible dancer. We Carvers are not a dance-y people.

  “And you had clearly never, ever played a game of football in your life,” I said. “You catch like you think you have flypaper on your hands and the ball will simply stick to it.”

  “You had monkey breath that night we—you know,” he said.

  I turned beet red in the face. “What?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I scanned my memory for signs that I could have had bad breath with Hannah. How embarrassing.

  “Are you kidding me? You think I cared about that?”

  “I would have,” I said, and I studied the white sheet on my bed. It was crumpled, and I ironed it out with my palm.

  “It was fine, Ben,” he said. “Really. I was interested in you, not your breath. It wasn’t that bad, anyway. Just a tiny bit monkeyish.”

  “Maybe we should withhold some things,” I said, continuing to iron out the sheets with both hands.

  “I’m really okay if we don’t,” he said. “You’re Ben. The greatest person in the universe.”

  “Um. Hi, Jeff?”

  He shook his head. “This is different than that,” he said. “This is—us, Ben. We’re friends. And Jeff and I are really just friends too.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “And admit it. You’re the greatest person in the universe.”

  “Yeah, right.” He didn’t answer right away, so when I was ready, I looked up.

  He was looking at me in this unnervingly close way, and again, the vacuum pull from inside my throat seemed to close up my windpipe.

  “You don’t really get how great you are, do you?”

  “Okay,” I said, looking down again. “Let’s—”

  “Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll keep knowing you’re the world’s most awesome person, but I won’t say it. Or maybe I’ll, like, say another word, just so I don’t WITHHOLD anything from you.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “Porcelain.”

  “Huh?”

  “I’ll say porcelain.”

  “Why porcelain?”

  “First thing that came into my mind?”

  “Because of the time I was sick? No, thanks. Next word.”

  He laughed.

  “I think it should be an adjective, at least,” I said.

  “So you’re okay hearing how great you are, so long as I simply use an adjective?”

  “An unrelated adjective,” I said. “And yes.”

  Rafe smirked. “Magenta.”

  “Magenta? Isn’t that a noun? And could you pick something less gay?”

  Rafe shook his head, the smirk still on his face. “It can be both. And nope.”

  “Fair enough,” I said, feeling more at peace than I had in over a month. “Magenta is acceptable.”

  The next night, Hannah asked if I wanted to go to a movie over the weekend, and at first I said yes, and then I called her back and said maybe we should just take a walk again.

  “Ben, is this, like, a money thing?”

  I didn’t answer right away. My dad gave me a hundred dollars as spending money for the semester, which was fine because I rarely needed to buy anything. But a single movie could cost me 15 percent of my cash supply, which would have to last until June.

  “It’s really okay, Ben. I can pay. It’s the twenty-first century, my parents are loaded, and I would rather not spend two hours out in the bitter cold, okay?”

  I exhaled slowly. “I hate this.”

  “You need to stop worrying about that. I don’t care, okay? You’re not some asshole who’s putting one over on me; you’re this nice guy I’m getting to know, and I want that.”

  “It’s gonna take me a while to get used to that,” I said. “Thanks.”

  On Saturday afternoon, we saw some French film at the West Newton Cinema about a man who lives alone by the sea and befriends a young, fatherless boy. I found it interesting, but Hannah all-out sobbed at the last scene, when the boy’s mother takes him away and the man stands, staring out at the ocean on a cloudy day. I grasped her small hand and she squeezed mine, and when her crying continued, I turned and gave her a light kiss on the side of her neck. She didn’t turn her head or react in any way, and then I spent five minutes telling myself how stupid I was for assuming she wanted me to kiss her neck while she was in the midst of an emotional moment. I should have let her have some time. I shouldn’t have brought attention to the fact that here she was, crying, and here I was, not crying.

  When the movie ended and the credits rolled and people got up all around us and headed for the exit, we sat there, holding hands. At first I didn’t dare glance over at her, afraid. Then, when the not looking got to be too much, I turned my head.

  Her profile was so beautiful. I wanted to protect her from whatever it was that was making her cry, from whatever this movie brought up in her about being alone or being abandoned. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew I wanted to fix it.

  She turned toward me. Her eyes were still glassy and red, and she sucked in her upper lip. I sucked mine in too, and I held my breath, trying to figure out what I was supposed to do next.

  I didn’t have to, as it turned out. She leaned in and kissed me, and her lips parted so I separated mine too, and the tip of her tongue found mine. Electricity ran from the bottom of my feet to the top of my scalp, and I couldn’t hold the feelings in my body anymore, so I put my arms around her and cradled the back of her head in my hand as I pulled her face into mine. She gasped when I did it, and she opened up her mouth wider, and I felt like I could devour her, and I did, there in the movie theater. I kissed her and kissed her until my mouth was tired and the guy walked into our row with a broom and dustpan.

  I pulled away and we held each other’s gaze.

  “Where can we go?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you want to?”

  She nodded, hard, and I resisted the urge to kiss her some more.

  “Is my car too much of a cliché?”

  “It’s a cliché for a reason. It works.”

  “I wish I could bring you back to my room, but—”

  “No, I totally get it. Expulsion isn’t worth it.”

  “It almost is, though.”

  We walked, arm in arm, down the empty street in the wintry night. I wanted to warm her up with my body. I wanted to make everything perfect for her.

  When we got to Gretchen, we paused and had an awkward moment as we lingered between the front door and the back. She looked at me and I laughed a little, and she laughed back some.

  “C’mon. Let’s warm you up,” I said, and I opened the passenger’s side front door.

  I turned the heat all the way up, and we sat there bundled in our coats, waiting for the air to warm.

  “When you said, ‘Let’s warm you up,’ I thought you were going to open the back door,” she said.

  “That felt too … something.”

  “I get it.”

  “Yeah. Plus, I can warm you up here too.” I reached over and took her gloved hand in mine and squeezed. She squeezed back. “What made you cry so much in the movie?”

  Hannah didn’t say anything for a bit. “You’re a different sort of guy,” she finally said.

  The word “magenta” entered my head. Ever since Rafe had given me that word five nights ago, it was kind of hard not to think about it.

  “Am I?”

  “You are. You actually want to know who I am, for one.”

/>   “Is that so weird?”

  “In the world of creepy Natick boys, in my limited experience? Yes.”

  I laughed. “Sorry to hear that.”

  “Well, there’s something to be said for purely physical, but I like that you ask questions.”

  “Cool.”

  “So to answer—are you sure you want to hear this?”

  “I really do,” I said.

  “One summer when I was about nine, we spent the whole time in Truro. It’s on the Cape. It was a great summer. We would go to the beach during the days and my dad and I would do this thing we called ‘Walk and talk,’ which I guess isn’t that unusual, but for me it was. I’d never had alone time with my dad, and we talked about everything. This was pre-Marnie bullshit, of course. We’d walk, hand in hand, and he’d tell me about all the different kinds of birds we’d see, and we’d look for perfectly smooth rocks, and I’d tell him all about what happened last year in school with my best friend at the time, Lacey Walker, who was the first girl to get breasts and her period, not that it matters in this story. Every day, Dad would stand up next to the blanket while we three were lying there, me and my mom and him, and he’d say, ‘Walk and talk?’ And I’d jump up and grab his hand and we’d go.

  “That’s about the happiest memory I have, those lazy, long days on the beach with my dad. And then the end of the summer came, and his vacation ended—I guess he took August off, maybe?—and I pleaded with him not to go, because I wanted more, you know? More time with him, because all he did-slash-does is work, like eighty hours a week, sometimes more, and I remember crying and screaming, ‘Dad, don’t go, Dad, don’t go.’

  “And he shook his head and got in his car and drove away, and I remember screaming my head off, and my mom, I think it hurt her feelings, because she just went into the kitchen and clammed up, and I remember sitting on this picnic table on the beach, which was like fifty feet from the house, and just sitting there for hours, looking at the ocean and wondering what it would be like to have a father who was around more.

  “I guess that’s first-world problems, eh?”

  I turned toward her. “Aren’t you the one who said ‘boo’ to me when I said my problems didn’t amount to much because they were small compared to other problems?”

  She fought off a grin. “Nailed,” she said. “Nicely done. It’s just … It makes me feel bad to whine to you about my summer-long beach vacation.”

  “We went to the Cape once.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. We stayed at a motel. I was eight and my brother was five. We were supposed to stay three days, but on day two, my dad got antsy and said we should go back and check on the farm. It was the first time we ever put our toes in a swimming pool, and we actually sang Peter, Paul, and Mary songs in the car on the way home. Mom did. Dad’s not a singer.”

  She laughed. “I have no idea who Peter, Paul, and Mary are.”

  “I love that memory.”

  “That’s what’s amazing about you. Do you know about vulnerability?”

  I automatically crossed my arms over my chest. “Um, what?”

  “I’ve been doing some reading. This woman talks about vulnerability, and she says that it’s basically the key to everything. Vulnerability is allowing people to see you exactly as you are, which is really hard, because when you’re vulnerable you can get hurt. Most people armor up with bravado or something, but those people are missing out, because without allowing yourself to be vulnerable, it’s tough to have, like, any emotional experience at all. Letting people in is really vulnerable, and most people—especially introverts—have trouble. But you just let me in.”

  I didn’t know what to say. What she was saying felt a little weird and New Agey to me, but I didn’t want to hurt her feelings.

  “Guys especially struggle with it. You’re all taught that men don’t show weakness. But the thing is, this woman says, vulnerability is not a choice. Either you do vulnerability, or it does you.”

  “It does you?”

  “Yeah. Like, you hold in all your feelings, and then you drink, or you do drugs, or whatever it is, instead of feeling stuff.”

  I thought about that. It was like how I’d gone directly to my plastic screwdriver when I was feeling pissed at Rafe. Was that what she meant? I really couldn’t ask.

  “Interesting,” I said.

  She laughed. “You’re just saying that.”

  I wasn’t sure, actually. It was kind of interesting, and it kind of made me want to run away and drink orange Gatorade and vodka. Instead, I leaned in and kissed her gently on the lips, and she put her arms around me and pulled me toward her, and my stomach wrenched up against the middle console but I didn’t mind because being pulled toward Hannah was a feeling I wanted to, needed to, have more of, immediately.

  I read the sentence four straight times: Instead of moving horizontally and vertically from the origin to get to the point in two-dimensional space, we could instead go straight out of the origin until we hit that point, and then determine the angle this line makes with the positive x-axis.

  My eyes went over it again and again. Shit. Why was this stuff so boring to me, and why was it just slightly beyond my grasp? I’d diligently taken notes. I’d studied those notes. I had tried, with varying levels of success, to memorize formulas without understanding what they really meant. We’d have our first calc test in the morning, and I felt totally unprepared.

  Earlier that day, I’d gone to Ms. Dyson after class. She’d given back our pop quiz from the week before. I’d gotten an eighty-three, and I asked her if other students were having the same problems with the subject or if it was just me.

  “It’s all in your mind,” she said, arranging homework in a pile and putting the papers in her briefcase. “You did well, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah, but the night before I was up ’til three studying.”

  She clicked her briefcase closed. “That’s what high school is about. You study hard. You’ll need to get used to it for college. There you study harder.”

  “It’s not the studying hard that I’m concerned about. It’s my lack of understanding. I feel like the beginning of calculus made logical sense to me, but ever since we moved into three variables and some of the other stuff, it’s been like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Maybe I should transfer into an easier math class.”

  She looked up at me as if she was annoyed with me.

  “Ben, aren’t you the Pappas Award winner?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “I think you should push harder. Students who are far less talented than you get through this class. You don’t want to have a lesser math class on your transcript. It won’t read well to the top colleges. Maybe you’re not applying yourself fully.”

  “Maybe,” I said. I didn’t want to whine about it, but I wasn’t sure it was supposed to be this hard.

  When I didn’t walk away, she closed the book in front of her. “Look. Why don’t you try the math lab? Get a tutor? A lot of students use tutors. If you want to work something out, I do some tutoring.”

  I looked down at her desk and sucked in my lips. Carvers didn’t need extra help. It just wasn’t done. And we couldn’t afford tutoring. I knew if I asked my dad, he’d tell me to buck up and work harder.

  “Just put everything away this evening, take out your book, and start from the beginning. It makes sense, Ben. You just have to see where you lost your way, and build from there. It’s not beyond you. I promise.”

  I hadn’t thought of that. I wasn’t going to let laziness get the best of me. If my award and scholarship counted on it, I’d prevail.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I can do that.”

  She smiled at me, and as I left, I imagined that “Let’s Get Ready to Rumble” song playing, and a montage of me successfully kicking calculus’s butt. I laughed. It would not make for scintillating viewing.

  Now it was night, and I sat and read and re-read the text until my eyes blurred. Finally, I slammed the bo
ok shut and went into the hallway, looking for a break.

  I knocked on Rafe’s door. Albie opened it. He was wearing pajama bottoms with various tropical fruits on them. I wasn’t sure if this was some ironic hipster thing or not.

  “Benjamin,” he said, staring at the ground. Rafe wasn’t there.

  “Hey,” I said, also staring down. We had really never spent time alone together before. I was pretty sure that even if he liked me, he considered me a jock, and Albie didn’t trust jocks. “Where’s Rafe?”

  “Study group. Philosophy.”

  “Ah. What are you, um, up to?”

  “Oh, uh. You know. Studying hard.”

  I looked at his desk. On it, next to his police scanner, was what appeared to be a bunch of Matchbox cars.

  “Sure,” I said. I looked over at him and I could tell he’d seen me see the cars, but something told me not to push the matter.

  We just stood there, and I was trying to figure out a nonawkward exit strategy when he said, “Okay. Maybe I’m not studying. I’m—you’re going to make fun of me.”

  “I won’t, Albie. I promise.”

  He stepped aside, and the floor behind him was littered with pieces of notebook paper that had drawings on them.

  “I’m making a town,” he said.

  “Oh,” I said, rubbing my bottom lip.

  “It’s this thing I’ve done, like, all my life. I create a town and then these cars … ” He points at his desk. “These cars are like the people, I guess.”

  I walked inside. “Huh,” I said. One of the pieces of paper said, “Rosita’s Fruit Stand,” and on it was a crude pencil drawing of a table with lots of pieces of fruit on it.

  “You think I’m a dork.”

  “We all have weird things.” I was racking my brain for something similar about me, but beyond liking to go to World War II museums by myself, there wasn’t that much to compare to this.

  “I guess,” he said. “I think I like creating the world, and then—why am I telling you this?”

  I smiled at him. “Because we’re friends, I hope.”

  He averted his eyes from mine, but I could sense that he was glad I’d said it. “I guess I like the stories that I make up about the people-cars.”