My Heart Insists that I’m Good Enough
“Do you think you’re good enough for her?”
I hear the voice before I see where it’s coming from. I’m halfway up the climbing wall, focused on my next move rather than the random voices in the student recreation center, so I ignore it at first. It probably has nothing to do with me anyway, since I don’t know many people. I contemplate the blue jug-hold higher than where I am that will require me to push off from the wall, using my leg strength to leap up to it. I know I could pick a closer hold, but I want the challenge.
“Hey. I’m talking to you.”
I glance down at the insistent voice and the tone which carries the sharp edges of animosity, wondering who’s about to get into a fight. Then I realize, the words were directed at me. It’s Sebastian. He’s standing on the ground, hands holding the strap of his duffle, looking up in my direction. I refrain from rolling my eyes.
“Me?” I ask anyway, just to be sure.
“Yeah.”
I turn my head, focusing once more on my climb, dismissing him. “I’m kind of busy.” I bend my knees and push, knowing the harness and rope will catch me if I miss. But I don’t miss, my hand catching the blue handhold just like I pictured. I’m relieved I didn’t fall in front of the guy braying at me like a jackass down below.
“Do you think you’re good enough for her?”
I know he’s referencing Hannah, and I know for sure I’m not. I don’t think anyone is. Not me, any more than this caricature throwing shade in a very public way. I also don’t think I need to walk into his noxious exchange to reinforce his dumbassery or my own. I don’t need to add fuel to any of my own errant emotions that might make me meet his stupidity with my own idiocy. It’s an unwinnable poker game. So I don’t respond.
“Hannah’s mine.”
With a sigh, I close my eyes to center myself. Dr. Bethany is fond of saying “you choose how to respond when faced with your emotions.” This guy is pushing my buttons with the same energy as my father way-back-when. Hannah telling me he’d come over to her house uninvited, trying to get her back, was worrisome enough. Knowing she’d sent him on his way compounded by the fact he’s claiming her like she’s a piece of property, I can feel the dragon inside me, the one that’s never far, huffing an angry breath in my chest. Now that I also know she’s interested in me—which has kept me smiling the last twelve or so hours—I know it would be easy to rise to his bait. The better response is to determine how I want to approach it.
I’m not a stranger to anger.
My body is a walking testament to it. Though my father’s a recovering alcoholic, and I’m a recovering victim of his abuse, I wrestle with demons constantly. Managing my emotions and insecurities are always on the center of the mat.
“You’re nobody to her.”
This guy isn’t going to stop. I know the kind. I lived with someone just like him. His words hit my bullseye.
I push off the wall, and the ropes lower me gently until my feet connect with the mat. I unclip the harness from the rope and walk toward the other guy with as much calm as I can muster. “Is this your usual MO?”
His thick brows bunch together on his face. “What?”
I tip my chin up a touch to look him in the face. “Bully people to get what you want?”
“Fuck you.” He takes a step toward me, arms now at his sides, and looks me up and down with derision. I see my father in his action—the father I grew up with, because he’s different now—except Sebastian doesn’t have the same power position as my father had over me. If this were happening in the past, I would have already been on the ground with a foot in my gut. Now, I don’t have to attack or cower or prove anything to this person.
“Is that what you’ve done with Hannah?”
He’s pissed and jerks toward me, but someone—a teammate, I guess—grabs him and keeps him from closing the distance. The teammate mutters something like, “the draft, dude.”
I continue to hold my ground. This guy has no idea what I’ve been through. “Look, Sebastian, right? Right.” I nod before he can say anything. “Hannah’s a grown woman with a mind of her own. She’s not yours any more than she’s mine. She’s hers, so let’s cut the bullshit.”
“The bullshit, bro, is that you’re encroaching.”
“On what?”
“You’ve climbed over my fence.”
I turn and look around as if I might find common sense sitting somewhere nearby so I can hand it to this dude. People float past, watching the interaction, pretending to be engrossed in their phones. “Am I really having this conversation?” I ask no one in particular, then look back at Sebastian.
“You don’t want to fuck with me.”
I narrow my eyes at this cartoon character. “How am I doing that exactly?”
“By talking to Hannah.”
“You know who’s missing from this conversation?”
“Who?”
“Hannah.”
He swipes a hand over his face with frustration and takes a step back. His teammates retreat with him, two guys, tall and built like him. I get the sense they’re there to make sure Sebastian doesn’t do something to mess up his draft stock, but this is something they couldn’t keep him from trying. Sebastian is all emotion, and none of them harnessed in viable ways. Rather, he’s trying to hold himself together by some standard he thinks he’s supposed to be exuding to the rest of us.
I watch him deflate, sort of, and he crosses his arms. When he looks up, the set of his features isn’t as hostile, but there’s still a knife in his gaze. “I just want a chance to fix things with her. I’m asking you, from one guy to another, to back off so I can.”
I see Abby in my mind’s eye when I thought I was in love with her. While I did love and respect her friendship, what I’d been in love with was the idea of her, all the ways she represented truth, kindness, love. All the things I wanted and didn’t have. My ideas about what it meant to love someone else were stitched together with the volatile world I grew up in that had been tightened into an ugly, mismatched tapestry. The last four years, I’ve been unraveling those threads. When I look at Sebastian, I’m reminded of the scraps of past me. I hear his entitlement, his fear, his insecurity, but it doesn’t keep me from being real.
“Again, Hannah’s decision.” I loosen the harness.
“You’re saying ‘no’?” He seems surprised.
I step from the harness. “I’m saying that as long as Hannah wants me in her life, I’ll be there, but that’s her choice. My choice is to work to deserve her attention. Maybe that’s what you should be thinking about instead of threatening me.”
I can see he wants to come at me. He’s breathing a little like a bull. I’m sort of waiting for him to paw the ground with his foot, but he doesn’t. Instead, he narrows his eyes and stares at me, then he says, “Watch your back, bro.” He says bro like it’s a disgusting thing.
I refuse to respond and dismiss him by turning away to hang the harness, offering him my back. It’s a risk, but if he tries anything, he’ll have instigated it. I don’t think he wants to put his football career in jeopardy. When I turn back around, he’s pushing through the entry doors, and I’m wondering when I signed up to star in an 80’s movie.
Rap music blasts on the speakers when I get home to the apartment. “Hey,” I shout over the cadence and bass as I close the door behind me.
The music volume lowers, and Trace appears in the doorway to the kitchen. He’s got on an apron that reads kiss the cook and holds a spatula. “Dude, what the fuck did you say to Sebastian?”
I roll my eyes. “You heard already? What is this? Middle school?”
“We’re on a team, dude. If someone farts across town, we all smell it.” He disappears into the kitchen.
“What’s with that guy? Are his roid rages constant?” I toe my feet out of my shoes and tuck them neatly by the door.
Trace laughs and calls out, “Dude isn’t on roids. He’s a badass defensive end though. Led the league in sacks. What did you say to him?”
“Jack shit, bro. He’s the one who came at me.” I walk a path into the kitchen where I get a glass of water, then lean against the counter while Trace cooks. “I was just getting in a workout. He showed up at the rec center throwing words instead of hands.”
“Why?”
“Hannah.”
Trace hums a note and continues to stir whatever he’s frying. “The dude doesn’t like losing. You should see him on the field. He’s an animal.”
“What does that have to do with Hannah? She’s a person, not a contest. His words–” I lower my voice into a Sebastian growl– “‘she’s mine.’ Like I’m all for going after what you want and shit, but he’s taking it to an extra caveman level.”
Trace looks at me over his shoulder. “He’s in the wrong here. I mean he dumped her. At least that’s what he told everyone.”
I take another sip of water. It matches what Hannah told me. “Well, whatever. I just told him it was up to Hannah.”
“You not wrong.” Trace’s eyebrow quirks along with the tilt of his head to the side. “What’s up with you and her, anyway?”
“Told you. We’re friends.”
“For real? Marco said Sebastian was all butthurt at the game because she was with you. And by with you, I mean, into you. All cozy and shit.”
I try to keep my face noncommittal, but then can’t because I’m so happy. I glance at Trace over the rim of my glass; his back is to me so he hasn’t seen my response, but I decide that I think I can trust him. He hasn’t given me a reason not to. Besides, trust is one of my struggles, and as Dr. Bethany has said, “If you withhold trust, you will withhold yourself from living. It’s a requirement.”
“I do like her,” I admit.
He turns and looks at me, his brown eyes wide and his lips quirked again in one of those I knew it shapes. Then he grins. “She’s into you?”
I avoid his question and say, “I liked her when we were seniors in high school.”
“Did you two hook up back then?”
I shake my head. “Not really. Kissed once. She didn’t know how into her I was.”
“And now, you think you’ve got the game to make that play?”
I can’t keep the smile from my face.
Trace laughs and does a little dance in the kitchen to whatever he’s cooking. “You got this. You got this,” he chants, then holds out his hand for a couple of palm taps. He straightens and removes his meal from the stove top. “That’s what’s got Bash’s panties in a wad then.”
I wash my cup and set it in the strainer. “His problem. Time for some homework.” I leave the kitchen, shower, and sit down on my bed, my mind drifting to Hannah. I don’t reach out. I know she’s spending time with her family celebrating her father’s life.
The next day, however, I’m impatient because all I want is to see her.
I study and then study some more. I play a video game tournament with Trace, Marco, and a couple of other guys from the football team. I work out. Then, because I’ve got nostalgia on my mind, I Facetime Gabe. I doubt he’ll answer, because he’s in season, but am surprised when he does.
“Yo! Scrub,” he says, his face too close to the screen so all I see is his forehead and curly black hair. When he leans back, he’s smiling. “What’s up?”
“Just checking in. Game today?”
“Practice. Game on Thursday.”
“How’s the season so far?”
“Are you admitting you haven’t been watching?”
I smile. “You know we don’t get all the games. But I’ve been keeping track. You can give me the inside scoop.”
He glances around and leans in. “Not sure. We’ll be lucky to make the tournament.” He leans back. “You know I’mma give it my all though?”
“You always do.”
“So, you don’t usually call. You got an emergency?”
He’s right. I don’t. Usually, he reaches out. “No emergency. Just checking in. Guess who goes to school with me here. I ran into her.”
“Western?” His blue eyes look up as he thinks. “No guess.”
“Hannah.”
“What? Shit!” He smiles. “Bro. Remember that crush you had on her senior year, and you freaking wouldn’t ask her to the prom?” He shakes his head and makes an airy noise with his mouth. “I told you.”
I grin. “You did, and yes, I remember.”
“How is she?”
“Good. She called me out.”
One of his eyebrows draws up over an eye. “Better and better. I love when people call you out, Peters. On what this time?”
“Not keeping in contact.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Avoiding the past.” I realize I avoid everyone, because it reminds me of how much I hated me then, and that’s a me I don’t like to remember.
“And now Hannah’s in your face.” He smiles.
“Yeah.”
“But? Sounds like there’s a but in there.”
“She’s got this ex, and he’s been badgering her. He showed up to warn me away.”
Gabe’s lips curl in distaste. “Bad news. What did you say?”
“That I’d be in Hannah’s life as long as she wanted me there.”
His grin spreads, and he nods. “My boy. You going to pursue it?”
“Yeah.” I nod. “Fuck yeah. It feels like a second chance.”
“Nice.” He high fives the screen. “Oh shit. Is that the time? Hey, I want to hear this, but I gotta jet to practice. Coach is a tyrant when we’re late. I’mma holler back.”
“Talk then.”
The call disconnects. I move from my desk to my bed and flop onto my back. I study the ceiling though I’m not really looking at it. There’s a lot of crap between Gabe and me, and yet somehow, we found our way through it, even if it’s still a lot of thick underbrush we hack away at sometimes. He forgave me. Lots of my insecurities are wrapped up in my relationship with him, though I know he was just the scapegoat for my fucked-up relationship with my dad and my jealousy of Gabe’s amazing adoptive dad. Most of the time, I don’t know why he forgave me, but he did. We made it through senior year and through the last few years still checking in.
Guilt climbs around between my skin and muscles picking at weakness, knowing I received forgiveness from Gabe for what I’d done but haven’t been able to extend it to my father. Some, maybe, but not completely. How does one extend complete forgiveness to someone who treated me like a punching bag?
Irritated now, with myself, with my father, I flip open my laptop with a little more force than necessary and find the document I need for the paper due next week for my Sociology class. Mentally resetting myself with schoolwork helps most of the time, providing distance between my emotion and my body, but as I attempt to focus, my eyes grow heavy. Maybe I just need a second to rest my eyes, so I lean forward, my head on my arm draped over my desk, shut my eyes, and drift to sleep.
There’s a white door washed in blue light. It’s the door to my childhood bedroom in Cantos, and I’m sitting on my bed staring at the bright outline seeping through the spaces between it and the floor, the frame, and the ceiling. Fear sits inside me, slithering through and around me my gaze fixed on that door. It is as if it’s breathing, a monster on the other side waiting for me to step through. I don’t need to open it to know it.
Though I haven’t moved, it unlatches with a loud click.
My heart jolts with terror, then sprints as if looking for the nearest exit. The air wheezing in and out of my constricted lungs isn’t enough to keep me alive.
The door creaks open, a slow and deliberate swing of the wood, a great penetrative darkness beyond it rather than the light that seemed to be there before.
I look for a monster’s hand pushing it open, but instead, in that maw of darkness, I find glowing red eyes piercing my fear and pumping it fuller so that it might rip me apart.
I want to jump from my bed and run, but I’m frozen with fright, a helpless hare, weak and insignificant. Only I can’t look away. Afraid that if I do move, do look for an escape, whatever is waiting in that darkness will consume me whole.
Except the clock is ticking. I can hear it. Only it isn’t a clock; it’s a jack-in-the-box toy, the warbled music of Pop Goes the Weasel clicking down to the end. Dah dum dah dum dah dum dum dum dum…
There’s a rush of movement, a growl, and the creature pops from the darkness, only it’s my father’s face, then Sebastian’s, and then mine.
My eyes fly open as my phone blurts out an alert.
I sit up with a start, realizing I’ve fallen asleep, my heart pounding a staccato in my ears with the lingering dream. Disoriented, I blink my eyes open, staring at the ceiling above me, and feel around for my phone, nagging me again. I look at the notification.
Hannah.
I smile, my heart regulating with a more pleasant rhythm as I take a deep, settling breath. I click the messaging app open.
Hannah: I’m home. Come over?
I smile and text her back: Send me the address.