She laughed and rested her head against the seat so that she was staring up at the ceiling. “We go through this every year,” she says, echoing my thoughts. “We just don’t know enough drug slang to make it work for the different seasons.”
“Valentine’s Valium?” I countered. “Spring Speed?”
She shook her head. “Nope,” she stated firmly. “Neither of those has the same meaning as crack. Face it, Hannah, there’s only one.”
With the kind of synchronicity that can only be achieved through years of practice, we both shut down the jokes and settled in for our binge watching session. I had the remote because Marley chose the first movie last year, and I was feeling torn between two of my favorite cheesy films: Holiday in Handcuffs or Santa Baby. Still mad at Jenny McCarthy for her effect on vaccination, I went with the former and settled in to watch two nineties heart throbs fall in love over a festive kidnapping. We got about ten minutes into the movie, when I started to feel eyeballs on me. Marley was staring at me.
“What?” I asked, pausing the movie, despite knowing it so well I could act it out.
She shook her head at me. “I don’t know. There’s something weird about you. You have things on your mind and you haven’t mentioned them.”
I glued my eyes to the screen in the hope that Marley would just give up, but she just kept on with her staring, totally comfortable with the kind of silence that made me itch like an army blanket.
“You know how so many of these movies revolve around this insane familial pressure to get married?” I asked her without making any eye contact. She was completely silent, waiting for me to get to some sort of point. She reminded me of Ms. Preston when she asked everyone a question that she knew we could answer, but no one spoke. Just staring and waiting like a game of verbal chicken. With a silent curse of her stubborn nature, I continued: “Sometimes I wonder if it’s just an excuse they make. Like maybe they don’t care what their families think at all, but they don’t want to admit how lonely they are.”
I thought about my mom at Christmas. Since Ari and I had been getting older, she had to be lonely during the time at home, and I imagined her doing all the Christmas shopping, meal planning, and event preparation, everything that goes into the holidays, all by herself. For the last two years, Mom had spent so much of her holiday in a ball on the couch with a hot drink that she had basically become a human marshmallow while Ari and I were off doing stuff with friends. She wore all these sweaters with big, droopy sleeves and pulled the woolen mess down over her hands like it was just going to swallow her whole and I have had the thought that on some deep psychological level, it’s probably a substitute for human touch.
Marley moved closer to me and leaned her head against my shoulder. I reciprocated the gesture, resting my head down against hers. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
I know that most people would explain Marley’s knowledge about my troubles as empathy or highly tuned social awareness, or even just write it off to a long lasting friendship, but she has always been able to see something in other people that I can’t. She knows when someone has a crush on someone else at school. She knows when people have parents who are splitting up. It’s not gossip, either; she’s kind of above listening to people talk about each other. It’s almost like she is a little psychic. For a minute, I thought about just shrugging off her concerns because I wasn’t really in the mood to get into the whole thing about Lennox again. Not fixating on her and her sexuality had been a pretty serious goal I had set for myself. I also didn’t feel right about spilling someone else’s maybe-not-even-real secrets, especially if it sort of outed them, but Marley was my best friend and she was giving me that knowing, I-am-not-going-to-let-you-push-play-until-you-spill-the-tea look. Plus . . . I really did need to get everything off my chest.
That was all it took. For the next twenty minutes, we sat facing each other with our knees almost touching as I recounted every second that I’d spent with Lennox since the last time I’d talked to Marley. I described the looks, the absence of looks, the way she stared into the distance, the way she clammed up about certain things, but seemed to want me around. For every comment, Marley sat nodding me on, her eyes rapt with attention as she took mental notes.
“She just said she won’t be gay and then shut it down? Just like that?” Marley asked, taken with the whole forbidden love at first sight vibe of my story.
Hesitant, I paused before answering. Is that what she’d done? Had she really just shut the whole thing down? Picturing her sullen stare at the floor, I realized that was a pretty trademark Lennox move: shutting down anything that wasn’t pleasant. I remembered what she’d said about her mom always just taking her dad’s lead and refusing to face anything unpleasant head on and it kind of made sense that she was like that. I knew Marley was going to encourage me to push it like I could force Lennox to open up to me and honestly, life probably worked like that for Marley, but it didn’t work like that for me. Just because I had some sort of crush at first sight fixation on Lennox that had started pretty much Day One didn’t mean I had a right to force my way into her inner thoughts.
The sudden acceptance that my crush had been so instantaneous kind of floored me. Had I really liked her that first day? It wasn’t like I went home and wrote her name over and over in some secret notebook with little hearts between the L and the X. Thoughts had been there, sure. Some of those thoughts even of the tingly, fluttery stomach variety. Maybe more than a crush, though, it had been a curiosity about this new girl in town who had appeared on the day when I so desperately needed anything to be different. Maybe I saw her as this sign that I was on the right path with my mission to spice up my life. Or maybe I was kidding myself. Because no matter how much I tried to argue that I had just been curious about her or wanted to get to know her, her face had left a residue in my mind that hovered until we saw each other again.
“I guess she did,” I said, picking at a loose string attached to my couch’s cushion. “She’s kind of hard to get to know.”
Marley grabbed my hand so suddenly that I kind of flinched back in surprise and her eyes were wide as they bore into mine. “But you want to get to know her, right? So you just have to keep trying.”
Marley had such a way of getting straight to the root of a thing. Like for her, it was simple: if I wanted to know the girl, I couldn’t give up until I knew the girl. If she was hard to get to know, it was almost like she saw it as that much more worthwhile. For me, it was totally different. For me, pushing to get to know someone who seemed resistant would mean a constant inner monologue of questioning and self-doubt. It would mean practicing conversations before she picked up the phone so that I didn’t say something dumb, typing out texts just to delete them. It would be work. And for what? Was it even worth it?
But I knew that my own hesitance was just me kidding myself. Of course Lennox was worth it.
After Marley left, I sprawled out across my bed staring at my ceiling and thinking about the letter I’d written my dad. There were probably things in it that I would want to omit if I read it now, but my impulse was to resist looking it over before sending it. Whatever was in that letter—and I remembered most of it, just not all—was the truth of that little ten year old, that girl who had been Ari’s age when she felt the need to pour out her soul to her absent dad, and I wasn’t going to edit that truth now.