for Alison
Andrew reclined against the massive oak tree, slouching just enough to have given his mother or father cause to yell at him if they had seen him. Though the patch of grass on which he sat lay well within the bounds of his family's property, this particular spot had never been the destination of a family picnic, nor even an evening stroll. It was a place which, despite the property deeds and his youth, Andrew had felt in some deep sense that he owned ever since he had discovered it as a bored 5-year-old.
As he looked around, his eyes took in a variety of trees—never pressed so close together that one could consider seriously the possibility that they might ever form a forest, but remaining forever individuals, trees one could get to know personally if one had the time and the dedication. Beyond in one direction was the stream, about ten feet wide, just deep enough that one not knowing how to swim could have drowned in it and rapidly accelerating in the early spring thaw. The other way was the hill, sloping upward so that in the old days, when his mother had called him to dinner, he had gotten winded trying to traverse it as quickly as he could, not because he was anxious for food, but only for the challenge. At the top of the hill sat his house, as it had ever since he could remember, small and white and yet dignified in a way he could never quite describe.
A few feet from him, in such a position that Andrew could make out little of her except her brown, slightly unruly hair which she blew upwards every once in a while in a futile attempt to keep it out of her eyes, lay Laura. They had been friends so long that neither one could remember how they had met. Their parents had been friends—their fathers had both worked at the same company—so it was natural that they would meet each other, as their parents exchanged nights of child care rather than resorting to a babysitter. But their friendship had been a bit slow in developing.
When they first met, Andrew had simply thought nothing of Laura. She was another person in the house, she occupied space, she rarely wanted to play with anything Andrew wanted to play with at the same time as he did, so she was tolerated.
Laura, on the other hand, had been terrified of Andrew. He was a threat to her identity as the child when they were in her house, always taking at least some of her parents' attention away from her. And in his house she had been miserable—she felt that the alien environment was somehow a personal jab at her humanity, and she never learned to understand Andrew's parents, though she did learn to tolerate them years later.
Then one day, Andrew changed. It was such a dramatic change that although he seemed perfectly natural both before and after that day, some might say he became a different person then. Laura was visiting, and as she timidly traversed the play room on her way to the dinner table, she stepped on a metal toy fire truck that Andrew had carelessly left in the middle of the floor. She began to wail, and Andrew's mother came running and picked her up. Andrew walked calmly over to them, held Laura's shoulder, and said to her softly and with great gravity “I'm sorry.”
Andrew's parents were stunned. Andrew had always been completely unwilling to apologize for any action he took, no matter how obviously incorrect and no matter what punishments were threatened. And this trait did not leave him that day. But something did change. Though neither he nor anyone else could have put it into words, what Andrew had gained was an ability to understand others as human beings, to know at a gut level that their pain was like his pain, only felt by them—that there were others who were the same inside as he was. It was an ability which, unlike most people, Andrew was always to apply selectively. He was never able to think of just anyone as equivalent to himself. But certain events, certain circumstances, could break through his self-protective wall and then he could do nothing but try to protect those whose pain he felt and apologize to them for doing so little.
In the years since then Andrew had protected Laura in ways of which she never even knew. One day stood out in Andrew's mind in particular. It was the day when Laura had worn a beautiful new dress to school and Andrew had overheard three boys of whom he vaguely knew discussing plans to ambush her and throw her into the mud while she waited for the bus. After class Andrew steeled himself, grabbed a pile of rocks, and headed out. He threw first the rocks and then his own body at them, kicking and biting and clawing, fighting with no technique but with fierce devotion to his one goal of delaying them so Laura would be all right.
He succeeded, but at the cost of a broken nose. It hurt, but worse than the physical pain was having to lie to everyone and say he had fallen and broken it. His parents were skeptical but eventually accepted his statement. The teasing from the other children was merciless. And when Laura looked at him, eyes wide with confusion and alarm, he could do nothing but smile back, not a grin but a soft, mute smile one might have missed if one didn't know to look for it.
As he sat there, as these and other thoughts drifted through his mind, Andrew could not help but to try to make some larger picture out of them, to see them as part of a whole of some kind. He knew that he differed from other people, but he had never been able to put into words how. An idea came to him now; his actions were more childlike than those of others. True, he had many, many layers of armor, both protecting and imprisoning him, that had been built up over the course of years—yet at the core there was something authentic, something genuine, that he rarely saw in others. Others were so concerned with appearances. Andrew barely managed to feign concern with the appearance of appearances—paying what he still knew to be too much homage to a system whose goals meant nothing to him and whose means repelled him at a level he could not control if he wanted to.
He saw it most in his simple devotion to Laura. He had gone out, eager to learn what this emotion meant, and had been stunned to discover that most believed it to be a symptom of something sick, perverted, the “stalker's mindset,” an “unhealthy obsession.” So he never spoke of it in explicit terms, least of all to Laura.
“Laura, have you ever loved anyone?” he asked pensively, without nervousness.
“Nah,” she said.
“What about those guys you went out with?”
“Some of them were okay… Steve was all right… but I wouldn't say I loved any of them.”
“Your parents?”
“They mean well, but when you get down to it, they're psychopathic freaks. I'm lucky they haven't thrown me to the wolves yet.”
Andrew dropped the point and silently tossed the word around in his mind. People said that word in such hushed tones—and then used it to talk about their feelings for double chocolate ice cream. He recognized that these were very different uses, but even within one context he was never able to figure out quite what people meant by it. Reflecting it back on himself—telling himself that he loved anyone or that anyone loved him—would have been impossible.
Averting his eyes from Laura in what he realized was probably a hopeless attempt to get his mind to follow, Andrew looked up at the sky. The sun's edge had just passed into the gap between two clouds and the beams, fully visible from that point until they softly played over the ground, gave a somewhat surreal effect. The purple of the clouds and the yellow of the sunbeams, in opposing each other so violently, each created the condition necessary to fully recognize the other. The green around them gave the impression of a tiny piece of the Garden of Eden. The air was clean but thick with the dying day's breath.
Andrew found his gaze once again returning to Laura involuntarily, as if his eyes at some level beyond his conscious control wanted to take in the most beautiful object they could find for the brief period of their existence. And then the bombs dropped, the chorus sang, as these simple words escaped his lips: “Laura, will you go out with me?”
“Hmm.” She pursed her lips in apparent contemplation for a moment, then spoke. “Sure, why not? Not like you could possibly be any worse than a lot of those dorks.” She stood up slowly, brushing herself off, gently flipping her hair out of her eyes. “Now, I've gotta get going. My parents are going to kill me. See you later.” She leaned over and kissed him almost without touching him at all on the cheek, then walked away up the hill.
Andrew sat there in stunned silence,unable to speak, to move, or even to think. That lasted for a couple of minutes. Then one thought entered his head—I didn't mean to say that. With that the floodgates of his mind opened and words circled around in his head, fighting each other, longing for that foremost spot in his skull. There was exhilaration, as there always is when one discovers oneself capable of something one had never known one could do—but there was also fear, terror really, a phantom no one else believed in that came to suck out your soul in the middle of the night, and Andrew was in no doubt as to which of these emotions gripped his mind.
He understood perfectly that which was happening inside of him—that clarity had not been drained but had in fact been made more substantial. Before he could have lost her to one of her boyfriends, to her family's moving away, to her leaving for college—and he had feared. But only now could he lose her through the deficiency of his own person. Only on this path could he say he'd let go the greatest opportunity of his life not through tragic necessity,but by simple unworthiness—and he was terrified.
He would have unasked the question,gone back to their simple, trusting friendship in a second. No thought would have been required. But that door was locked and the key thrown away. No matter what happens, things will never be the same—he knew that. And he knew it not only in some abstract, preconscious sense—he actually said the words to himself, then and there, sitting in the deepening sunset. The insects mercifully left him alone, and he hardly noticed the chills he was developing for hours. Eventually the pull toward sleep reached an equilibrium point with the voices mumbling inside his head, and he dragged himself back to the house, collapsing into bed without bothering to change or brush his teeth.
Andrew awoke spontaneously, needing neither an alarm nor a prompt from his parents, and glanced over at his clock. 5:02, it announced in its softly shimmering red LEDs. It had been a dreamless sleep. He was thankful for that, at least—he had no need of any more to think about at the moment. He sat up in bed and stared ahead, not really looking at anything. Any normal desire he would have had to get a bit more sleep, to prevent the grogginess that would otherwise inevitably overtake him by afternoon, was absent today. With that little bit of himself that was abstracted away from the rest of his thoughts and feelings, he observed how time seemed both infinitely long, as the words raced through his head, and terribly short, as the minutes already inched toward six, the effects combining to make him feel detached from his body and the objects around him.
Snapping out of his reverie long enough to notice the impossible digits 6:42 glaring at him from the clock, Andrew finally draped his legs over the side of his bed and with not a little effort pushed himself to his feet. He stumbled through his morning routine, shower then dress then eat, noting with mild amusement and wonder that he could still function. Standing out on the corner waiting for the school bus to arrive, he watched the cars go by, his eyes picking them out with unusual clarity, time reduced to the pace of stop-action commercials. When the bus did arrive and he boarded it and fell into his habitual, solitary seat in the front, the jeers of the other children did not even penetrate his consciousness. All thoughts were of Laura or of himself—or of both in one breath.
The bus came to a halt, and Andrew looked out the window. The morning sun sparkled on the glass and he squinted, but did not look away. The school would have looked imposing if it had not been cut off at only two stories, and not especially tall ones at that. As it was it seemed foolish, tragically stunted. It's just a school, he reminded himself, trying to shut off the overly keen, invasive perception, trying to focus on the happiness that should be his. But he saw the leaves swaying in the gentle wind, the shadows following suit on the asphalt, and as he looked up, he noticed the heads of children disappearing into the door and he realized that the bus driver had been staring at him for several minutes now. He awkwardly collected his things and scurried after them.
The same school which attempted to look dignified on the outside sheepishly gave in to trite homeliness within. Andrew shuffled toward his locker without noticing the other children bickering and trading gossip, the teachers getting their cups of coffee, the murals and finger paintings and essays that adorned the walls. He was unlikely to see Laura until third period—English class. Their paths were sufficiently far apart until then that he could still at least attempt to breathe.
First period was homeroom, so he stashed a few books he wouldn't need for a while, grabbed a few he would, and quietly ducked into the classroom. The students gossiped in somewhat more hushed tones in here, but Andrew just sat down and pressed one ear against the cold material of the desk. He closed his eyes and tried not to focus, but as always such attempts were unsuccessful. It would not have gained him much in any case —a few minutes later Mrs. Hunt marched in. Her normally severe appearance seemed a tiny bit warmer today, although not so much that one would actually think of approaching her. Perhaps it was the brown dress —a little more playful than her normal attire, although hardly eyebrow-raising. Andrew struggled not to notice such irrelevant detail, to keep his mind on what really mattered, but succeeded only in taking an exhaustive inventory of Mrs. Hunt's makeup as well.
Andrew took a piece of looseleaf paper out of his backpack and scribbled something vaguely algebraic on it. Mrs. Hunt's phobia of all things mathematical would keep her from noticing that the quintic formula Andrew's scribblings purported to solve actually has no solution in general terms. Between long experience killing these periods when he was expected to do work he had already completed and his preoccupation, Andrew noticed almost nothing until the bell.
On the way from homeroom to math, Andrew ran into Laura, figuratively and almost literally. “Hey, watch where you're…” Her voice trailed off as she saw who it was. “Hi, Andrew. In a bit of a rush?”
“N—no rush. What's up?”
She pulled him to the side of the hall and leaned against the wall. He leaned next to her, almost out of breath from the sudden shock of running into her unexpectedly.
“Well, I was just thinking, you want to go to the movies tonight? If you're not busy and you can get there—”
“I'm—not busy and I'm sure—my parents can take me&…” Andrew stuttered. His mind was racing over the syllables “oh my god” in rapid succession, drowning out all other thought.
“Okay, then I'll see you at six?”
“That sounds good.”
“See ya.” She squeezed his hand and was gone before he even realized what had just happened.
The bus rattled back and forth relentlessly. Andrew sat by the window in the middle, feeling very small and vaguely worried that one of the other passengers might turn out to be a mugger—or just plain crazy. “I should have asked my parents to drive me,” he thought—but he knew they would have refused. The shaking of the bus was slowly giving him a headache he barely noticed. When it finally reached the mall and stopped with a screech, Andrew stood up, took a deep breath, made sure he could actually walk without falling, and then very gingerly stepped off the bus.
Both his legs and his mind were like jelly. He had the feeling that you get when you are called upon to do something that you don't really believe you can do and that you've never tried before, but you have to try. His eyes darted from left to right looking for Laura, more glad not to find her than they would have been to see her face. It wasn't that he didn't want to see her; it was just that he wanted it to be on his terms. He didn't want to just run into her with no time to mentally prepare himself. He wanted to have the advantage of a second to steel himself; he wanted to see her first.
He jumped when she tapped his shoulder. Not only did he not get the advantage of seeing her first, he had to make the transition from worrying about finding her and whether she would show up to actually dealing with her in under a second. But he turned toward her and saw her smile and his body, while remaining jelly, warmed noticeably.
“Hey,” she said in a soft, warm tone.
“Hey,” Andrew replied in a near-whisper.
“You ready to head over to the theater?”
Andrew glanced at his watch. “Okay.”
Laura somewhat clumsily grabbed his hand and walked toward the teller, half-dragging Andrew until he realized that he had to walk too. Nevertheless, he managed to recover enough of his wits to get out his wallet and request “Two for Armageddon, please.”
Andrew walked more slowly and more deliberately than it seemed to him he had ever walked before toward the man who took his ticket (really just a boy, a few years older than Andrew at most, but Andrew didn't notice that) with Laura on his arm. They both breathed more slowly than normal, slow enough for both of them to make out each individual breath. Though the speed did confer a certain sense of dignity and importance, Andrew walked as slowly as he did mainly to avoid falling down. He handed the tickets over and assimilated the instructions “second door on your left” only in some vague subconscious manner.
As they headed toward the theater, Andrew noticed the attire of his companion for the first time. Black high heels (but not too high), a mid-length red skirt, a red sweater, and a white blouse that he could just see at her neckline. He wondered if this was standard for a first date with Laura or if anything was different. He was far too nervous to ask.
Inside the theater it was dark—very dark, except for the screen itself. They were not so late as to have missed any of the movie, but the previews had already started. The one in progress looked to be for an action movie, with a full-blown fight scene in progress. Andrew reminded himself to ignore the irrelevant and proceeded toward the back of the theater. It was not too tightly packed, and he managed to find a pair of seats well separated from the closest other moviegoer.
Andrew's eyes watered as the movie began. He timidly reached over to put his right arm around Laura's back and she scooted forward a little to help him out. She felt warm and yielding in his arm. It took a great deal of self-control for Andrew to suppress a shudder and a tear that had been trying to escape his eyes for some minutes now. He had never imagined that something so simple and pure could make him so happy.
The movie progressed with little desire on Andrew's part for anything to change. Laura seemed as contented as a cat by a radiator. Then came a scene full of explosions and loud noises. Andrew looked over at Laura at the exact second she looked over at him. Their eyes locked, looking through each other into something deeper and hard to describe. They both leaned forward. Andrew closed his eyes and tilted his head to the side. He put his other arm around Laura and she put hers around him. They kissed.
After the movie, Andrew and Laura left the mall hand in hand. Andrew was totally oblivious to anyone who might have been looking at him, which as it turned out was no one in particular. When Andrew turned toward the bus stop, Laura pulled his hand and asked “What are you doing?”
Andrew responded “Waiting for the bus to take me home.”
She poked him. “You said your parents wouldn't mind…”
He shrugged sheepishly.
“You don't need to do that—Why don't you just come home with us? I'm sure my parents won't mind giving you a ride.”
“Okay,” Andrew responded meekly. So they stood there hand in hand as the sunset in gorgeous hues of purple and gold, little puffy clouds slowly floating across the sky without a care in the world. Andrew's smile was the kind you couldn't buy for a million dollars. It felt to him that they stood there forever, but finally the red car that in Andrew's mind became a stretch limousine pulled up to the curb and Andrew held the door open for Laura as she stepped gingerly inside.
The next day at school, Laura pulled Andrew aside as he waddled toward homeroom, still in a daze. He could immediately tell by the look on her face that something was not right. He mumbled “What's wrong?” but she refused to say anything until they were in a corner of the hall with no one else around.
“Andrew, I've been thinking and this—you … me … it's just not right. You know, we were best friends and that was something special … and I don't think we should just ruin it like this, by going out and all. It can cause a lot of problems. We won't get along like we did before. There will be so much more tension—and … it doesn't feel the same. You know, it's not like when I went out with the other guys … with you it's so intense I worry about losing myself … I have goals too, you know, dreams … ”
She sighed and looked upward. Andrew tried to say something but it came out only as an “umm … ” which he choked on and which ended up sounding more like a cough. His eyes were wide like those of a cornered mouse who knows it's about to become the cat's next meal. His palms were sweaty and his heart rate had shot up even beyond what it had reached one time when he had tried to run a mile with no preparation.
“So, I think we should just be friends …” she continued. “We fit better that way, you know—It's not that I don't like you or anything,it's just that I think of you more as a brother than a boyfriend. So I hope you won't take this too harshly. You should ask out some of the other girls, you know—I'm sure you'll find one who you'll get along with …”
“Anyway, I have to get to class, and so do you. Sorry for springing this on you so suddenly, but I think it would have been even worse if I'd tried to keep it secret …” With that she turned and walked briskly away.
Andrew turned to face the wall and allowed one single tear to form, quickly wiping it away. Then he turned and marched toward his own class. It would have taken someone very observant and very well acquainted with Andrew's habits to notice the tremble in his step or the despair in his eyes.
Andrew stood facing the bridge. It towered above him, too big for him to believe that human beings could have possibly built it. It had been a long walk, but the sun still glared in his eyes and glistened off the highest points of the bridge. Cars occasionally rushed by, seeming to Andrew to have far too much speed and far too little purpose. Exhaustion fought tension in his stomach, causing a sickly feeling which he could neither spit out nor swallow.
A human life is such a complicated thing, yet so transparent to the person living it, Andrew thought. He remembered stupid mistakes he had made on his homework in grade school, all the times he had wanted to say something and had been too fearful, and his failure, despite aspirations, to achieve anything grand. At one time he had been sure that the whole world would come to be within his grasp, that there would be nothing he could not do. He remembered that the way one remembers a dream—a foggy, secondary memory that he could not be quite sure really belonged to him and not some phantom who had implanted it into his mind.
Andrew took the first step onto the sidewalk, watched nervously as the cars streaked past, and then began to very slowly put one foot in front of the other. He tried to think of happy memories, but whatever he came up with, it always ended in sadness if he traced it forward far enough. Nothing had really changed, he knew. Everything was as it would have been if he'd never said a word to Laura. Except that wasn't exactly true. Something was lost—that one chance that somehow, some day, he and Laura would end up together. Andrew froze his thoughts, trying not to realize, not to admit, how much that one tiny speck of hope had meant to him.
The more Andrew told his mind to stay still, the more frantically it jumped around the same tiny things over and over, replaying the events of the last few days more faithfully than any tape or video or photograph could have reproduced them. Over and over he saw the colors and the shapes and smelled the scents. Over and over he closed his eyes and leaned forward to kiss Laura. Over and over she pulled him aside and repeated those words that had stunned him so much, that hurt like thorns piercing his heart. They were just physical sensations now, all of them, the emotion drained away, replaced by one single lump of dread in his throat.
It takes a certain amount of courage to do what Andrew had done, to put everything on the line that way. It takes a certain amount of sobriety to realize that a relationship—like almost anything worthwhile—is not forged in seconds, but in weeks, months, or even years. Andrew had had a lot of courage that day, but he had become drunk on it and forgotten common sense.
He reached the middle of the bridge and peered over the edge. It was a couple of hundred feet from the bridge to the water. A slight breeze made Andrew's hair get in his eyes. Tiny ripples traveled from shore to shore on the water, mirroring the tiny wisps of cloud above. He gripped the fence tightly and pulled himself up onto it, sitting on it with his legs toward the water.
Andrew cautiously stood up. For a moment he was unsure of his footing and a tiny smile crossed his lips as he considered how unimportant that was. He leaned back and prepared to throw himself forward—
—and the sun caught his eye just right, reflecting off the water, and instead of jumping forward he stumbled backward onto the sidewalk. He felt as if a bomb blast had gone off inside of his head. There was too much left undone and untried, too much that he hadn't yet had a chance to say to Laura. He blinked a few times and began the long walk home at a very brisk pace.
When Andrew finally arrived back home slightly out of breath, he saw a familiar but unexpected car in the driveway. He wondered what Laura's parents could possibly be doing over at his house. It was quite dark by now and the crickets were chirping. Objects had begun to seem a little hazy to Andrew's eyes, but a tiny sliver of moon peered out at him from just above the trees.
He arrived at the door and prepared to try to sneak into his room unnoticed, but as soon as he opened the door he was greeted by his mother asking “Where have you been for so long?” Andrew closed his eyes for a moment and then hung his coat up, kicked his shoes off and walked inside, not so much ignoring the question as failing ever to integrate it into his mind in the first place. His mother shrugged, sighed and followed him.
Inside, some kind of smell hit Andrew's half-dead nostrils, slowly bringing them back to life. It was a full ten seconds before he recognized it as freshly baked cookies. Tension finally began to leave his joints and stomach, only slightly returning when he rounded the corner and saw Laura, her parents, and his father at the dining room table with cups of milk in front of them and a large bowl of cookies in the middle.
“Laura brought us cookies. Wasn't that thoughtful, Andrew?” his father asked. Then, under his breath as Andrew got closer, “You really should thank her.”
Andrew smiled, not a broad, beaming smile but a smile tinged with sadness. “Thank you, Laura.”
“You're welcome. It's your mom's recipe, y'know.” She pulled out a chair next to herself and Andrew half-sat, half-collapsed into it. She leaned over and whispered in his ear “Don't you dare scare me like that again.” Andrew put his face in his hands and sobbed silently a few times. Then he looked up, poured himself a glass of milk, and grabbed a couple of cookies.
The objects in the dining room through Andrew's half-blurred gaze looked like an Impressionist painting. Laura wore a little red bow in her hair and a dress to rival anything Andrew had ever seen in elegance. The wood finish of all the antique furniture in the room that Andrew had always thought looked more outmoded than anything else now seemed warm and inviting. Andrew was so engrossed in the attempt to simultaneously interpret the images in front of him and the thoughts in his head that he did not notice his mother enter the room until she had already snapped a couple of quick pictures of the scene.
Finally remembering to actually take a bite of one of the cookies he was holding, Andrew felt the last of the tension fall out of his toes. He turned toward Laura and gave her a long, puzzled, slightly sad stare, to which she responded with nothing but a deep, warm smile. As Andrew leaned back, a single phrase passed idly to the top of his mind. It was a phrase he would often repeat in the years to come. Time to show the world what I'm made of.
Kenn Hamm
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Last modified: 21 December 2001