The Half-Life of Planets (9 page)

“You're lucky you're an only child.” Then Hank looks sorry he said it. “Actually, I take that back. I really take it back.” He wipes his palms on his legs. “Chase is…important.”

I swallow and stare at the wood paneling on the wall. The paneling has fake knots woven into it, making it look sadder than it already is. Let a room look like a room and leave the woods outside where it belongs. “I had one,” I tell him.

“One what?”

I sigh and inch forward to the bed's edge, so my feet are resting on the floor. “I wasn't an only child.” Hank pauses to do what is really very simple math. His face is blank. I go on. “She was older than me, like Chase is to you, but even older. She was seven and I was three.”

“And she died?” Hank's mouth is a straight line, not happy, not sad, something undefined and in between.

I nod. My breath is fast but I have no tears. “It's okay,” I tell him. “You can be all upset for me and say how awful it is. Usually people gasp and most even get watery eyes.” I grimace. “Dead children, dead siblings, it's all horrific.”

But Hank just shrugs. “Is it sad for you?” His voice is placid, monotone, not entirely dissimilar from when I've heard my mother give advice on the phone to parents who are worried their kids are doing drugs or are anorexic or generally falling apart. She is kind but distant.

“No,” I say softly, and then for the first time ever, loudly. “No. It's not sad. That's the thing. I don't even remember her, really. Jenny. That was her name.” I look at Hank and cut him off at the pass. “I know, okay? There's like a million catchy songs with her name in it. Believe me, I know. Every time they come on the radio, my parents flinch. But I don't. Do you have songs like that?”

Hank thinks. “Everyone probably has a song like that.” He breathes in deeply. “‘Jennifer oh Jenny.' ‘Jenny Say You'll Be Mine.'” Then he picks at the fray on the pocket of his jeans, not chording for once.

“So you're not all sorry for me?” The relief laps at my toes, creeps up my calves, and washes over me. There is nothing worse than not feeling the same thing as someone else. So when you open up and say something that makes them sad but makes you nothing, it sucks.

Hank scoots closer to me until we are side by side on the bed, our thighs just an inch away from touching. He hasn't even tried to hug me to comfort me, which is a good thing on two accounts. “Well, I am sorry for you because”—he looks at Chase's wall—“even though Chase isn't perfect, he's still…here.”

“They knew she was going to die anyway. My parents. She had this neurodegenerative disorder.…” The smallest fragment of despair pokes into my chest. I poke at my tattoo, push the pad of my thumb into the planets. “Well, I didn't even know her, so…”

Hank goes on. “‘Jenny Don't Be Hasty,' ‘Jen My Friend.' ‘867-5309/Jenny.'” He lets his leg go slack so it touches mine. He turns his head so we're looking at each other in this really weird way from the side of our faces. “Lots of Jennies but no Lianas.”

Footsteps in the hall make me jump up off the bed like we've been caught doing something. “Nope. No Lianas.”

“Hey, bud.” Chase swipes his hand through his surfer locks and waves to Hank from the doorway.

“Hi.” Hank stands up and flips his hand back in a wave. “We were feeding Lyle.”

Chase grins at us. “Lyle digs his Charms, man. Gotta give him that.” We stand there for a few seconds, us and the turtle and Chase, the box of Lucky Charms bright red against the green walls.

“I should go,” I announce. “Got to get to the lab early tomorrow. Planets and stars are waiting.”

Hank nods and scuffs out the door wordlessly, past Chase. I make to the doorway, right near the sign. Chase's eyes scan me from toe to top, stopping right at my mouth.

“Chase has planets and stars on his ceiling,” Hank says from the hallway, and lopes off downstairs.

I'll bet he does
, I think about saying, but reel it in. I've said enough for one night. “Bye,” I say to Chase before I go.

“Maybe you'll see them sometime,” Chase says. He's in his room now. He looks at me but doesn't meet my gaze. “See the sign?” He points to where I'm standing, at the sign behind my head. “‘Enter at your own risk,' right?”

Liana leaves, and I feel horribly disappointed.
And not because I didn't kiss her. Well, yes, okay, partially because I didn't kiss her. I know nothing about girls, but I have seen enough movies to know that sitting on a bed thigh to thigh is the kind of situation that often leads to kissing.

Chase makes me feel stupid too, when he passes by my room later. “Dude,” he says. “Your girlfriend has a killer rack. You've gotta hit that.”

I don't know how to respond to this. I kind of want to tell him that while I've certainly noticed the killer rack, it's ridiculous to sum Liana up as a body part. I kind of want to tell him that the use of “hit that” as a euphemism for intercourse seems creepily violent to me. Most of all, though, I want to punch him in the face for talking about Liana like that, for looking at Liana like that.

But that wouldn't end well. It never has in the past.

Instead I just say, “Thanks, Chase.”

He stops for a moment and says, “Dude, seriously. I'm proud of you.”

And suddenly I don't want to punch him in the face anymore. I kind of want to hug him. But that wouldn't go over well either. “Thank you. Really,” I say.

“All right,” he says. Just then the phone on his hip buzzes. He flips it open, rolls his eyes, frantically thumbs the keys for a few seconds, and replaces it. “One good thing about your weird stone-age thing with the phone is that she can't hassle you with a hundred text messages a day. God, did I ever make a mistake with Patti. I mean, I thought, you know, naughty nurse, right? I mean, I'm a guy, right?”

I'm not really following. I've started thinking about music, but I know Chase has just asked me if he's a guy. “Right,” I say.

“But God, it's like she stalks me twenty-four/seven with this thing.”

“Mmm,” I say. It's important to develop a few stock responses to pull out in conversations where you're not paying attention, or it would be awkward to tell the truth. I'm a big fan of “Mmm.”

“Well, see ya,” he says, and he's off to wherever he goes.

And I'm left alone in my room wondering not only why I didn't kiss her, but also why I didn't tell her. She shared two confidences with me. Does this mean I owe her at least one in return? This is where I wish I had the rule book. It occurs to me that in semi-romantic situations, or whatever, there may be rules that don't apply to normal conversational situations. I feel lost. I know that in normal conversations, words are working on two levels, but I can only follow one. Now I feel like there may be at least one more level, making me two levels behind.

There are so many things I don't understand. Like why she is so upset that somebody called her a slut. They didn't even do it to her face. Here, in no particular order, is a partial list of things I've been called to my face in school: freak, geek, loser, retard, dickwad, gaywad, freakazoid, dipshit, dickweed, shit-for-brains, ass clown, asshat, gaylord, homo…I could go on. I've heard less and less of this since the ninth grade, but still. I heard enough to figure out a) that I'm not normal, and b) what people say about you doesn't define you. I've certainly been called variations of homosexual enough times, but I'm not attracted to men at all.

Even still, it was a big deal to her. And she told me. I owe her one.

I suppose I owe her two, since it seemed like a big deal to her that she told me about her dead sister that she doesn't remember. I have learned the stock responses people expect in these situations, but I refuse to use them, because I think so many of them are presumptuous. If you say to someone “That must be so hard for you,” or “You must be really sad,” it sounds like a command. You must be sad. Well, perhaps they're not. Who am I to tell them they should be sad? I know Allie went over it with me a hundred times: it's not a command, really; whatever the words say, it's just a way of people expressing sympathy. I don't care. I won't do it.

What I will do is tell Liana. I will tell her the next time we have coffee.

I get a sudden pang of terror. The last time we had coffee, she ran out for reasons I still don't understand. Today we didn't have coffee. Does this mean we've changed what had been our standing coffee date?

It occurs to me to ask Chase, but then I don't want him mocking me for how far I am from “hitting that.”

It may be time for me to reconsider my position with regards to cell phones. Despite Chase's mockery, I've never really felt the need to own one. Primarily because I don't have anyone to call. I can call in to work from my home phone if I am sick, and I'm beyond the age where I need to call Mother to pick me up from soccer practice or something. Not that I actually play soccer.

But now a cell phone would be handy. It would allow me to call Liana and ask “Are we having coffee tomorrow?” As it stands, I could be sitting alone at Espresso Love. Which is what I always used to do happily. But now it seems intolerable.

The songs don't mention this much. They talk about the way love or infatuation, or whatever it is I feel for Liana, makes you happy, or it makes you sad when you lose it, but they don't really talk much about the way it creates discontent; the way it makes the life you had before seem pathetic in a way you never realized. Someone should write
that
song.

The following day I'm consumed with worry about whether Liana is meeting me or not. Unable to sleep at five a.m., I go to the basement and plug in the Gibson and plug headphones into the amp. I've been thinking about The Smiths a great deal lately, and the Gibson was Johnny Marr's choice when playing live, though of course in the studio he used a variety of instruments and effects.

I boot up the laptop I bought last year from a college student who worked as a lifeguard in the summer. I found her on Craigslist. She seemed to feel I was doing her a favor by paying her fifty dollars for a two-year-old computer.

An hour later I have an MP3 of a serviceable cover of The Smiths' “You Just Haven't Earned It Yet, Baby.” I like this song because it allows me to play soft on the verses and hard on the chorus, which I'm hoping will show the people choosing the acts that I have enough range to be interesting. I also like the song because it suggests that suffering is a prerequisite for happiness. I e-mail it to the concert organizers and hope for the best.

I go to work, and hours pass, but I don't really notice anything that happens during them. I ask Stan if I can leave work half an hour early. He tells me to go ahead and make it a full hour. I will have to make up this hour at some point if I'm going to stay on my Jazzmaster money-saving schedule.

But for today it's worth the financial hit to be able to get some peace of mind. I walk over to the lab, where I hope Liana is working. I find a comfortable tree outside and wish I had a guitar with me. Not that I could plug in out here, so I'd have to go with an acoustic guitar anyway, but it would still give me something to do with my hands, with my mind.

I want to pace and run my hands through my hair very badly, but I'm afraid of looking like freak when she emerges from the lab. If she emerges from the lab. Finally I have to do something, so I close my eyes and picture my Gibson in my hands. I start playing the chords to The Smiths' “Ask,” but my brain keeps trying to worry about Liana. So I sing along. Quietly.

And I find that the world goes away, which is a relief. There's nothing but my hands on the (imaginary) guitar and the words coming out of my mouth.

I'm nearly through the song, still singing, when I hear a voice besides my own.

“Hank?” It's Liana. I open my eyes and see her smiling at me. I look down at my hands and get embarrassed. “What are you doing here? Aren't we having coffee?”

“Well, I didn't know if we were or not because last time you had to leave, and then last night we went to the beach and I didn't know which place to meet you, so I figured I'd meet you here. I suppose if I had a cell phone I could have just called you. If I had your number. I'm thinking about buying a cell phone.” I'm babbling. She's staring at me. “I'm sorry. The singing, the air guitar—I guess it looks pretty weird.”

She smiles. I want to fall into her smile. “It might be weirder if you couldn't sing. You're really good.”

“Oh. Thank you. I…My MP3 player is on the fritz and—can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“If I were to get a cell phone, would it be all right if I sent you a message from time to time? I find myself thinking of things I want to tell you during the day, but they're little things, you know, not really enough to hang an entire conversation on. I thought it might be cool if I could just send you something like that—kind of like a
nice
note. Even though it wouldn't be anonymous.”

She smiles and laughs. “That kind of note sounds good.”

“Oh good, because Nurse Patti texts Chase all the time, and he complains about it a lot. Do you have any idea what kinds of phones are good? What kind do you have?”

“Hank. Do you want to go look at phones instead of having coffee?” Liana stands with her hands facing up.

“Oh. Well, yeah, that would be great. Where do…I don't even know where one goes for such a thing.”

She smiles at me, twinkly. “One goes to Atlantic Wireless. It's a block from the beach.”

“Oh. Cool.” We start walking. I'm so relieved that she's here and we're together that I just feel exhausted from all the worrying I did.

I want to tell her. I really do. It's actually all I can think about. Except that she's talking about her project and her work in the lab while I rehearse my speech in my mind, and I guess I'm swinging my arms a lot, which I guess is something I do when I walk.

She's swinging her hands a little bit, and my hand on the backswing catches her hand on the front swing, and suddenly we're holding hands. This has the effect of wiping all the data from the hard drive of my brain.

“I. Um,” I say. “I wasn't. I mean.” I am trying to tell her that I didn't just bump into her hand as a dishonest, or perhaps underhanded, ha-ha way of holding her hand. I am also not letting her hand go.

“I know. It's totally fine,” she says. We don't talk for a block or two, and this time I understand. It's not a failure of conversation. It's just chilling out for a second.

We arrive at Atlantic Wireless. Why are we here again? Oh yeah. The phone. Liana lets my hand drop as we head into the store.

Thirty-five minutes later I emerge with what Liana assures me is a sweet phone. It has a full QWERTY keyboard for ease of text messaging, and with the optional memory card that I opted for, it will hold four hundred songs in MP3 format. Which is a pretty paltry number of songs, but since my other MP3 player has been showing an unhappy face on the screen for the last month or so, it's an upgrade.

The only problem is that it's put me back by more than a few days in my Jazzmaster savings plan. I can no longer afford the Jazzmaster by the end of summer. But if it doesn't sell by the end of summer, I should be able to scrape up enough by late September. Depending on how many hours Stan gives me. Business falls off after the summer people leave.

Liana and I don't hold hands when we get out of the store. I don't know what this means. I'm afraid to ask. We walk down to the beach. Families are starting to pack up for the day, college girls are trying to squeeze the last few bits of melanin out of their skin, and out on the pier, guys with long poles are fishing. I see the spot where the second stage will take place, and I remember something I can say to Liana.

“So I sent in my entry for the music fest today.”

“Beachfest? That's so cool. I really can't believe you've never played it before.”

“Yeah. I guess I just never…I haven't felt really comfortable sharing that part of myself with a lot of people. People from school, you know.”

“Mmm,” she says, which probably indicates she's not really listening. Is she wondering why we're not holding hands? Is she wondering what the hand-holding implies? Well, she probably knows what it implies. I, however, am at a loss. And I don't want her to think I know what it means, that I've read the signs and am acting accordingly, when I'm just standing there staring at the signs having no idea which way to go.

“So I have Asperger's syndrome,” I say.

Liana stops and looks at me. “That doesn't sound good. What is it?”

“It's an autism spectrum disorder. What it means is that I don't…What they say is that I have difficulty reading social cues. Like right now, I have no idea how you're reacting to what I'm saying. Whereas someone else might be able to look at your face or your posture or something and understand what this means to you, I have no idea. I know that I don't know, which I guess is helpful, but I still don't know. You know?”

“Uh, not exactly. And if it makes you feel any better, I don't know how I'm reacting to this either.” She tucks her hair behind her ears, but the wind doesn't accept that.