I knocked on the locked door from our bathroom into Kate’s room.
“What?” she said from behind it.
“It’s me,” I said.
“Why?”
“Do you want to talk?”
“About what?”
“Can you just open the door? This is weird.”
She opened it and stared at me.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“For what?”
“Well, I guess, first for, like, my terrible advice about the birthday card thing. But, also, when I flipped out and yelled at you and Courtney the other day.”
Her face didn’t move. “Oh. Yeah.”
“That was mean. Sorry.”
“Uh . . . okay.”
She was unimpressed. She looked at me like I had the plague, and I cracked up.
“What?” she said.
“It’s just funny. You find me disgusting.”
“Correct.”
I laughed again.
“What are you laughing at?”
“You and me are pretty similar.”
“No.”
“We’ll probably be friends one day.”
“Okay . . . ?”
“Oh, I pulled your Judy Blume books out of your Goodwill bag. You should keep them.”
“Who gave you permission to touch my stuff?”
“It was in the Goodwill bag. It wasn’t yours anymore.”
“It wasn’t at Goodwill yet.”
Normally I would’ve spun around and abandoned her after a comment like that. Instead I said, “Can I sit down?”
She shrugged and I sat on her bed. She stood in front of me with her arms crossed.
“Tell me again what’s going on with you and Courtney and that other girl.”
“Priya?”
“Yeah, sure.”
She frowned. “They’re the worst. Like, since when do they drink beer? I don’t get it. Do I have to drink, too? Is that just what we do now?”
“Yeah, that sounds frustrating,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said, sitting down beside me. “I mean, do they even want to? Or do they just, like, think they’re supposed to?”
“That’s a good question, yeah,” I said.
“I don’t want to drink. I don’t care about beer! Why would I care? But now it’s like I’m some loser if I don’t. What if they go away to camp and drink and, like, do drugs in the woods and stuff while I’m stuck at home?”
“Do you want to do drugs in the woods?”
“No! I don’t think they want to, either. It’s not even peer pressure, since no one is telling them to do it. It’s just, like, pressure pressure. Like some voice whispering to everyone. It’s annoying. I don’t want to do that stuff, but I feel left out when they do it. It doesn’t even matter what it is. If they, like, started playing the saxophone and I didn’t, it’d be the same thing.”
“That’d be very cool if instead of drugs, everyone at your school was pressured into taking up the saxophone.”
“I just feel left out, but I know it’s stupid, since they’re only at camp for two weeks. So I should just find other stuff to do while they’re gone and I’ll be okay, right? Like, they’ll come back and if they’re really my friends we’ll keep being friends and if they’re not, then I don’t want to be their friend anymore.”
I nodded. “Yeah. I think that’s right.” Is that the secret to advice? Just listen to someone until they figure it out themselves? Do we all have the answers lodged inside us like deep-rooted blackheads we have to squeeze out ourselves? “You know, me and Luke and Will had kind of a similar thing this year.”
“No, you didn’t. You guys never have drama.”
“Eh . . . our drama might not be as, uh, obvious, I guess, as the stuff with you and your friends, but just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there. They joined the football team and I got lonely and sad. I felt left out. But it was all me. They never stopped trying to include me and be my friend, but I kind of made it hard for them.”
It all sounded so simple and dumb when I said it out loud. She looked up and smiled at me, like she respected me for the first time in her entire life. “So it’s okay now?”
“Uh, not yet. I still need to, like, talk to them. But it’ll be good. I’ll come clean and be honest and we’ll all feel better.”
She nodded and I stood up and wondered for a second if we should hug or something, but decided that would be too weird. I went back to my room and lay in bed thinking about how I’d always dreamed of having some fantasy older sister who told me how to interact with girls, who gave me all the secrets. But maybe that sister didn’t have to be older. Maybe Kate could be the kind of sister I’d always wanted, if I gave her the chance. And I could be the emotionally available older brother who’d tell her how to talk to boys and get through bad times. She’d get acne and I’d pass on my wisdom about face washes. And she’d remind me to confront my sadness and anger head-on.
The advice I’d been looking for all year had been on Kate’s bookshelf — and in Kate’s head — the whole time.
I picked up the trash bag Dad had left in my room and dumped the Gentleman books into it.
They hadn’t helped me; they’d just added more noise in my head. There weren’t rules and instructions to follow for having conversations and connecting with other people. Why are guys bound to keep repeating this dumb quest to codify everything into lists and brackets and instructions? If I believed in those rules for being a guy and kept ignoring my feelings, suddenly I’d be fifty years old and thinking I’d accomplished something by watching a movie about cancer and not crying.
Saturday morning, Mom walked downstairs while I was eating cereal in front of the family room TV.
“Hey, Mom?”
“Yeah?”
“When I was in middle school, did I, like, yell at you? In seventh grade specifically, was there some time I was really mad?”
She raised her eyebrows. “You’d yell sometimes, but it’s fine. We knew it was hormones.”
“Huh. I’m . . . I’m really sorry.”
She laughed. “It’s fine.”
“No, seriously. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay, bud. It’s normal.”
I laughed a little. She said, “Want to see a movie? Your pick. Anything you want. My treat.”
That was usually my cue to mumble that I was busy and then slump in front of the computer to read online movie trivia with headphones on for six hours. But I said, “Sure, let’s do it.”
She opened the newspaper to the movie listings and I looked through them with her and said, “I’ll see whatever you want. Promise. I’ll honestly be happy with anything.”
“Really?” she said, curling her mouth into a devilish smile.
I smiled back — a living, breathing positive mental attitude.
The movie was bad. On the way out, I told her I had a good time and I was happy we saw it together. I wasn’t lying.
That night Kate had Courtney over and Mom read a romance novel on the couch while Dad watched baseball with his Braves hat on.
“Hey, Dad?” I said after psyching myself up for twenty minutes.
“Yeah?” he said, looking at the TV.
“Why are you, uh, a Braves fan?”
“I’ve lived in Atlanta my whole life. Hometown team.”
“Yeah, I know, but, like, don’t the players change every few years? So isn’t it kind of weird that people are just fans of, like, a team name and logo?”
“It’s the spirit of the team,” he mumbled at the screen. “The hope of being great stays consistent, passes through every new player. The team evolves gradually, always looking for the perfect combination of players.”
Huh. From what I understood, baseball’s primary purpose was to provide metaphors for everything in life. I considered opening up to him, explaining how just like the Atlanta Braves I’d also maintained some hope of becoming better all year while the cells in my body gradually changed. But it wasn’t the right time. Maybe someday I’d explain all that. Instead I said, “How long is a, uh, typical baseball game?”
“Around three hours.”
“Cool.”
I turned to go to the basement, but I stopped and asked Dad if he wanted to play golf next weekend. We hadn’t done that since I was in sixth or seventh grade. That got him to look up from the TV. “Really?” he said. “I’d love that. I didn’t think you wanted to play anymore.”
“It’ll be fun. Good to get outside.”
“Absolutely. Next Saturday at ten?”
There wouldn’t be much conversation between us, but there’s depth when Dad talks logistics. He’s all subtext, a puzzle for me to decipher. To hear him analyze the layout of a parking lot is like watching a French new wave film. I told him ten was perfect.
Late that night, I heard Mom, Dad, and Kate laughing at the TV downstairs. I shut down my computer and sat on the couch beside Kate to watch an unbelievably unfunny sitcom with them. It felt like we were a family again, for the first time in a while.
Sunday night I tried to figure out exactly what to say to everyone at school. I thought about calling Alex and telling her I was sorry I’d been acting so weird and I’d let my emotions and screwed-up hormones get the better of me, and I was going to try to be normal from now on. Then I’d call up Luke and Will and tell them the same thing, and we’d start talking about some hilarious memories from the greatest hits of our friendship and then we’d roll into some new ideas for things to do, and then we’d close with some words of mutual respect for one another. I’d skateboard into school with my hands out for high fives, cruising toward anxiety-free friendship, and we’d wrap up the school year having squirt-gun fights and making sincerely silly faces at the lunch table for the yearbook photographers.
Eh.
Call everyone and tell them I’d try to be normal from now on. That sounded like the kind of thing a psychopath says. Besides, I can’t call my friends just to chat. That’s bizarre. Only our moms do that to talk about us. Luke and Will would have found it weird and creepy and word would spread that I was calling people in the middle of the night and must be standing on the roof of my house about to throw myself to my death. I didn’t need to make any big announcements. I would just go to school tomorrow and stop being an asshole.
I turned on my TV and the idea of calling everyone for heart-to-heart conversations was gradually replaced by footage of a driveway getting pressure-washed on a home renovation show.