Smooth Read online

  “I’m gonna sit this one out,” I said.

  “Just here for the free snacks? I like it. Smart strategy. Help yourself, since Mrs. Rossi made enough food for the navy. Then get in there with the guys and we’ll take some pictures.”

  I nodded at the guys and they waved back at me. Patrick gave me a salute, and I think he did it unironically. What a jackass.

  Mrs. Rossi was taking pictures with the flash on; plus it was bright outside; plus they had all the lights on in the house for some reason.

  Nobody saw me walk down into the basement, where I went into the bathroom and closed the door. I looked at my face in the mirror for the first time in a while. Once I’d realized my face wouldn’t be immediately healed by Accutane, I’d started closing my eyes when I brushed my teeth and walking straight into the shower to avoid looking at myself in the mirror. But now there were cameras firing off from every angle upstairs, so I figured I might as well bite the bullet and see what I looked like.

  It was bad. Even apart from all the shaving cuts. I don’t know if it was just a flare-up or stress or if the Accutane was still making it worse, but in addition to my usual epidermal nightmare, I had a bunch of cauliflower-looking whiteheads sprouting up around my nose. I knew I shouldn’t, but I squeezed them all out. It was so satisfying to drain every last bit of white goo out of them. Once I started I couldn’t stop, in the zone like a pro athlete, focusing entirely on cleaning out every pore. They all bled, and I dabbed my face with toilet paper until the wounds congealed and I looked like I’d been stung by forty bees.

  The guys and those girls were laughing upstairs. I didn’t want to go back. I went over to Mr. Rossi’s DVD library and looked through for stuff that Alex and I might like. I found a couple of the other movies I wanted to see — The Virgin Suicides and Girl, Interrupted. I was sure Alex liked them, or if she’d never seen them, I could recommend them to her after I watched and analyzed them.

  “Kevin? Yo, Kevin?” called Luke.

  “Yeah?”

  “Get up here. You need to get in the pictures.”

  I brought the movies upstairs and stared at the floor, feeling and looking like a complete idiot. I was wearing a white T-shirt and khaki shorts beside a row of girls in colorful dresses and guys in suits. I looked like a little brother no one wanted around.

  “Perfect,” said Mrs. Rossi, taking a picture every second. “Now the gang’s all there.”

  I tried to smile, but I kept looking over at the guys and the flower thing pinned to their jackets that matched the color of their dates’ dresses. In the same spot I had little dots of blood on my T-shirt that matched the color of my molten face.

  It was like wandering through a dream, like there was a force field between them and me. Sam put his arm around my shoulder and smiled for the camera and gave a big thumbs-up. I made a confused face at him and thought, Why is Sam putting his arm around me like we’re friends?

  Jen Evans said, “Hey, Luke, did you hear Emma’s going with Kyle Hornchuck?”

  “Yeah, it’s cool. I’m going to the dance with Haley, you know?”

  He put his arm on Haley Jackson’s shoulder. Everyone laughed. I watched them the way a scientist observes spores in a petri dish.

  “Kyle’s, like, such a dick,” said Veronica Wesson, smacking gum.

  “If he’s mean to Emma, we’ll beat the shit out of him!” shouted Patrick. He’s the kind of cocky asshole who thinks he can cuss in front of adults.

  They all cheered and laughed. Veronica said, “Dunk his head in a toilet for me.” She stood on her tiptoes to grab the back of Sam’s head and mimic drowning him in a toilet. Everyone went wild.

  I moved over beside Will and tapped his arm. “Want to ditch this and watch movies at my house?” I whispered.

  “No?” he said. “The dance is in twenty minutes. I already asked Lauren to go with me, bought the tickets, got this suit, and took all the pictures. I can’t . . . I can’t even tell if you’re serious.”

  I shrugged. He walked out the front door to get into the cars with everyone else. Sam and Patrick had their licenses already and were driving. Once they’d all left, Mr. Rossi gave me a grocery bag to carry the movies in and I took it outside, dangled it over my handlebars, and pedaled my tiny bike out of their neighborhood and toward mine, the sack of DVDs knocking my knee.

  While I rode, I thought about how Mr. Rossi had looked at me. It felt off, like he thought something was wrong with me. He didn’t ask why I wasn’t going to the dance. I kept wondering what Mr. Rossi thought about me, if he’d kept watch of me out the corner of his eye, worried I was some unhinged freak who might go nuts.

  When I made it home, I tossed my bike into the wall of the garage, went up to my room, lay down, and thought about what Alex and I would do for homecoming if we went to the same school. We wouldn’t go. We’d have a night in for ourselves. We’d be such an established couple there’d be no need to perform for anyone, to put on a stupid public show of our relationship for our classmates. We’d have nothing to prove and we wouldn’t care about impressing anyone. We’d stay in my room wearing pajamas, building a fort, laughing at inside jokes we’d never tell anyone else.

  Alex probably had plans to be at home in her room that night, too. Listening to introspective music and reading important novels, being quiet and thoughtful and alone, instead of at a school dance straining to hear some kid from chemistry scream over blaring pop music about which kid had been seen with a visible boner crease in his khakis and trying to avoid the sight of random kids from the cafeteria grinding their penises and butts together.

  Her phone must have been right next to her. Mine was charging on my nightstand. All I needed was a ten-digit code to bring her voice into my room. It was like I was standing on the bank of a river and could just barely make out her shape across the water. I knew she was right there, and I knew she could see me, but not having her phone number — plus being fifteen and not having a license in a suburb where you have to drive everywhere — kept us apart. Next appointment, I’d ask her for her phone number. I’d get my act together. I had to.

  I went to sleep wondering if she was thinking about me.

  My parents never have guests over, and Dad seemed stressed out the Saturday afternoon when he heard that his friend Tom from college and his wife, whose name I was 55 percent sure was Karen, would be staying at our house that night. I guess Tom was into monster trucks and there was some monster truck show downtown in the afternoon, and Tom figured it would be fun for them all to get together at our house afterward.

  I dislike Tom and have for years. This is the guy who once called me out in front of our entire families at a restaurant because my jacket didn’t have something called a “polar thermal matrix.” He was talking about his new jacket’s technology for a half hour, and apparently I was worthless because my jacket didn’t have this bullshit thing some idiot made up and lied to him about on the Home Shopping Channel. He’s a man who believes advertisements, and that’s a man I want nothing to do with. Honestly, what had that guy ever done in his life to earn anyone’s respect? I can’t wait to be old enough that people assume I’ve accomplished things without any evidence.

  When Mom got off the phone with Karen and explained what was happening, Dad said, “You know what would also be fun? Them staying in a hotel and we could stop by for an hour’s worth of drinks and call it a night around eight.”

  Mom said, “Paul,” in the tone of voice she usually reserved for “Kevin . . .”

  I was upstairs in my room when Tom and Karen rang the doorbell around seven. It’s kind of embarrassing to admit this, but I army-crawled into the hallway where I could peer over the edge down into the foyer. Tom and Karen hugged Mom and seemed excited to be there. Dad stepped in a second later and, oddly, was all smiles and hugs, too. “Tom!” he said. “Cynthia!”

  Cynthia? Where the hell had I gotten Karen?

  He kept saying how great it was to see them. It was like he was running for may
or all of a sudden and became the friendliest guy around. They went into the family room and Tom sat down in Dad’s spot on the couch, but Dad didn’t say anything.

  I could see the backs of all their heads from my perch upstairs. Only my eyes and forehead were poking out around the wall, so they’d never notice I was up there watching them. I felt safe and comfortable, like I had some superpower.

  Dad seemed to have been suddenly struck by radiation, too. He was asking questions, smiling, laughing, looking Tom and Cynthia straight in the eye. He was like a talk show host. What happened to the dad who dreaded Tom and his wife coming over? Where was the shy, socially awkward guy who prefers email? He was fascinated by every uninteresting thing Tom said — how his job was going, what their kids were up to, how long it took to drive into town.

  Kate walked in from the kitchen and they all said hi to her and talked about how they remembered her from when she was a baby. No one mentioned me at all, and it felt wonderful to be practically dead for a night.

  I barrel-rolled across the carpet back into my room and watched The Virgin Suicides and wondered what Alex’s bedroom was like and what she wore to sleep.

  Hours passed and I could still hear them talking downstairs when I got up to take my pill. Dad hadn’t stopped hosting the conversation, firing off questions. They eventually went to sleep, and I did, too, confused about where my real dad had gone and who that new guy was.

  It was impressive. I wished I could just flip myself on the way Dad had. He was clear and direct, the opposite of my stuttering strangeness. If I could do that at school, I’d probably be the president of all the clubs and captain of all the sports teams, an all-around great guy who gets carried out of school on everyone’s shoulders at the end of each day.

  Or at least I could be slightly more normal. Just confident enough to talk to people without regretting every word the moment it trickled down my bumpy chin. I could be better around Alex. Ask her questions instead of nervously rambling movie quotes. Pass the ball back and forth instead of being a conversational ball hog. We’d be two normal teenagers bonding while exchanging information. I could find out where she went to school and who she hated. I could get her phone number. We could talk about face moisturizer and books and movies. There was so much for us to talk about if only I could get out of my head when I was with her. If I could lead a conversation like Dad just had, I would have known everything about Alex at our first appointment and by now she’d officially be my girlfriend.

  I woke up to the sound of Tom and Cynthia leaving the house. As soon as the front door shut, Dad let out a huge sigh. “Aaaaaaaand that’s over. Whew.”

  I knocked on Dad’s office door that afternoon and asked if he had a second. He seemed stunned. I bet it’s alarming to parents when you rarely talk to them and then, out of nowhere on a Sunday afternoon, formally ask them for some time to talk. I mean, yeah, from his point of view there was probably a 90 percent chance I was about to come out of the closet, so I got his surprise.

  “Sure,” he said. “What, uh, what’s up?”

  I sat on the filing cabinet beside his chair. “When Mom said Tom was coming over yesterday, I thought . . . I don’t know. Like, you didn’t want him to come over.”

  “I was just giving Mom a hard time. I don’t always feel like entertaining.”

  “Yeah. But when they were here, you were the life of the party. You seemed really happy. How can you just, like . . . do that?”

  “How do I host people?”

  “Yeah.” My throat felt tight and dry. I don’t know if I was scared or embarrassed or what. At my age I probably should have been asking Dad how to have sex with my dream girl in the back of a convertible with an empty driver’s seat and a brick on the gas pedal, howling through the desert 130 miles an hour. “How do you just force yourself to, like, be all social and outgoing?”

  He leaned back in his chair. “Ask a lot of questions. When you meet someone new, or when you’re stuck talking to someone you have nothing in common with, just keep asking them questions. You can always lead a conversation if you don’t stop asking questions.”

  “What if there’s nothing you want to ask them?”

  “Oh, you probably won’t care about their responses. That’s not the point. You just need to keep them talking. People like people who seem interested in them. Repeat their answers to them to prove you were listening. Ask questions where the answer is just a number. There’s always an answer when you ask, ‘How long did it take to get here?’ or ‘How much does the new baby weigh?’ or ‘How far do you guys live from the stadium?’ People get tripped up if you start asking them to tell you stories or about how they feel. Stick with questions about logistics. You won’t surprise or offend anyone, and you’ll keep them talking.”

  Huh. I nodded slowly, thinking it all over. He seemed calculated, robotic, and almost psychotic, but I figured he was right. Dad never asked me anything about how I was doing or to tell him a story about something that happened in school that day. All he ever wanted to know was how long a class period was or how old Luke’s car was. And I always had an answer for him.

  I said, “How did you figure this out?”

  “I talk to strangers all day when I show them houses. I learned to ask a bunch of numbers questions up top and they think I’m fascinated by them. It always helps to have a plan, you know? Some people like to make it up as they go, and that’s a mistake,” Dad said. “You and I appreciate a plan.”

  “Right, thanks. That helps.”

  “Anytime,” he said. And then, when I was walking out, he added, “How many more months do you have of school?”

  “Um, well, it ends in May, and it’s October, so I guess, like . . . seven?”

  He nodded, and I left. I don’t think he was aware that he just asked me a logistical question immediately after telling me that he often asks logistical questions when he doesn’t care about the answer. Oh, well. Maybe he could use the information.

  Dad’s advice would work. I’d go to my next appointment with an arsenal of quantitative questions so specific they were guaranteed an answer. Dad had minimized the risk of stilted pauses and nervous stammering and maximized the chance of a clear response. I made a list of questions I’d ask Alex at our next appointment. I had a plan. I wouldn’t have to worry about feeling weird or awkward or panicking if I forgot the script I wrote in a daydream. I’d fire off number-based questions and Alex would be on a roll answering them, chanting responses out like she was in a trance, and when I got to the most important one, What’s your phone number?, she wouldn’t hesitate.

  “I’m so sorry to have to tell you,” Mom said Monday night, right after she got off the phone with Mrs. Rossi. “Luke and Will both got hurt at football practice. A sprained ankle and fractured collarbone. Luke tackled Will, or Will tackled Luke, or . . . Either way, the coach said it was one of the hardest hits he’d ever seen, like how the pros tackle. Truly. Like two eighteen-wheelers crashing headfirst. None of the damage is permanent, thank god, but they won’t be able to play the rest of the season.”

  “Oh . . .” I said, trying to not smile.

  I invited Luke and Will over that Friday to catch them up on all the work I’d done on the movie outline and schedule and get them excited and eager to dive back in. They’d be impressed that I’d actually kept up with the work while their stupid football plan exploded in their faces.

  They both walked in looking completely fine and uninjured. They didn’t even have casts, just soft fabric braces on Luke’s ankle and Will’s shoulder. We went to my basement and they sat on the couch in front of the fresh notebooks and sharpened pencils I’d set out for them. I stood with my printed-out sheets of notes and told them the movie is about this guitar player who’s a genius, but no one knows how tortured his life is, and he dies, but this girl who loved him helps get everything he’d written out into the world. I mentioned how the structure would be nonlinear and incorporate some elements of memory and time-hopping from Eternal
Sunshine and some parts of the doomed romance from Anna Karenina. And I’d read a lot about this French movie Breathless, so I said we’d use some of that, too.

  “Wait, what are you talking about?” Luke said. “How is any of that a horror movie? We’re making a slasher movie. Right?”

  “It’s . . . I mean . . . I don’t . . . It’s just a story. We don’t need to put some genre or label on it.”

  “I’m kind of scared to ask this,” Luke said, “but, like, the guitar player? The undiscovered genius some girl loves . . . ?” His face soured. “Is that, like, supposed to be you?”

  “What? No. Come on. I don’t play an instrument or anything. It’s fiction.”

  “Because if this is, like, some weird fantasy of yours, it might be the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever heard of.”

  “Well, it’s not, so . . .”

  Luke rolled his eyes. “All right. Well, what parts of Breathless do you want to steal?”

  “Just, like, the way it’s edited,” I said.

  “You’ve seen Breathless?” he said.

  “I mean, I read a lot about it. I haven’t watched it yet. I have it downloaded.”

  “I don’t think you can just, like, take stuff from a movie you haven’t seen,” he said. “And what do any of us know about being a singer? Shouldn’t this thing be about something we know about? So we don’t seem like morons when someone who knows more about it watches it?”

  Will, eating some of the Bagel Bites Mom had prepared, said, “He’s got a point.”

  “It should be a slasher movie about a high-school football team,” Luke said. “You’ve got, like, tons of weapons and tons of victims and suspects.” He started jumping up and down on the sofa. “Dude, dude, dude, this would be sweet. Like, it could start with a receiver catching this huge pass and right as he gets to the end zone” — he ran across the floor, then stopped suddenly, stuck his tongue out, and fell down — “fwoosh, and someone throws, like, a knife into his neck.”